Chandra Alexandre

This dissertation posits that humanity is now experiencing a shift in evolutionary consciousness facilitated by Dark Goddesses who have a variety of guises, forms, and names. In this work they are particularized by Kali and the Black Madonna, two forms that while concretized in culture-specific ways nevertheless are gathering worldwide appeal in today's climate of globalization. Based upon interviews with westerners and thirteen months of participatory research in India, France, and other locations, this work confirms that these goddesses are transformational powers awakening humanity to new potentials for breaking patriarchy from both inside and outside. Kali and the Black Madonna, through their direct confrontation of life's realities, are taking us to a hieros unios, a sacred union visioned in this work as a multiplex reality. This means a partnership that frees opposites from a charged, pathological, and hierarchical patriarchal rendering while expanding into a radically non-dual awareness. Whether invoking through spiritual, alchemical, psychological or other metaphors, this union is expressed in the day-to-day workings of individual lives. It is also a multiplicitous coming among of ail graces of divine spirit within the immanent realm , and of all graces of divine spirit as a tension of opposites within the transcendent realm that suggests something appliciable to the condition of Creation. This dissertation therefore evokes and invokes the unitary and the multiplex interrelationships beyond and between all dualistic metaphors using the vehicle of these Dark Goddesses to give rise to the motion of personal and planetary healing