The Winter Solstice gates have opened, as the Full Moon is waning , She moves over my skylight in easy motion, when I awake at about 5:00 am, Her light beams into my house as She slowly slips to the horizon line. Yesterday’s Winter Solstice brought a calm to my thinking and jazzed up my creative vision.

I am troubled and disquieted with the energies of change, grief, polarization, etc…I cannot pretend otherwise, Spiritually, I am tested.

My meditation with my Madonna’s has become a very regular practice which brings inner solace to my heart, I wish to bring this feeling of Peace to my art groups, so, I have created a Winter Course called Devotion.

A circle for us to gather together with the frequencies of Devotion. We begin this Sunday, December 26th, 2:00 pm MST sign up here. I realize that this is short notice, but living in the Now has a way of adding spontaneous events !

This course will expand and continue into January, February, March. Full Series of 4 sign up here

For artistic reference, we will be visually dipping into the Virgins of the Andes ~ read more .

Over time I have been able to gather books of the School of Cusco. (The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, also known as the Conquest of Mexico or the Spanish-Aztec War (1519–21),^[7] was one of the primary events in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. ( wikipedia)

This photo is from the Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe ~ this is the gallery where I first discovered the School of Cusco, Christmas 2011 an abundance of Madonna’s ~ Virgins, Angels and Saints… everywhere. I was mesmerized by the mystery of all this imagery.

Excerpt from The Virgin of the Andes:

CHAPTER Thirteen VIRGIN OF THE ANDES: INKA QUEEN AND CHRISTIAN GODDESS by Carol Damian

In1532, the Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his army of 62 horsemen and 102 foot soldiers conquered the Inka empire called Tawantinsuyu, the “Center of the Four Quarters,” with its cap-ital at Cuzco, Peru. The Spanish Conquest ended more than one hundred years of Inka domination over the indigenous Andean pop-ulation.

The Inka dynasty began, according to Inka legend, with eight brothers and sisters. After achieving the dominant position of leadership and to guarantee the purity of the ruling family, the Inka Manco Ccapac, who called himself the son of the Sun God, Inti, married his sister Mama Ocllo. Inti instructed Manco Ccapac and Mama Ocllo to teach the people of the earth to worship the Sun and the Moon (Quilla) and thus prosper. Mama Ocllo, the Coya (orqueen), was the woman most venerated among the Indians. She was a goddess, the descendant of the Moon. She was the queen, the wife/sister of the Inka king. They ruled in parallel duality.

The Coya wore and displayed her particular attributes and insignia, as did the Inka, and was associated with the symbols of her role (Fig. 3.1).Among these were weaving implements, feathers, birds, flowers, tipipins, and other ornaments.

When the Spaniards conquered the Inka Empire, the reverence to the Inka Coya would persist in Christian images of the Virgin Mary, the Catholic Queen (Fig. 3.2).For centuries, people throughout the world have revered the Virgin Mary.

But nowhere is she more beautiful and more mysterious than in Cuzco, Peru, where she is portrayed as a distinctive image that fuses Christian and Andean concepts. Around this image, the indigenous artists of Cuzco created a school of painting, the first in these so-called New World and known as the Cuzco School, where they could portray her in multiple ways, with many titles and identifying attributes, few of which are Spanish in inspiration. By the seventeenth century, these artists earned commercial fame for their paintings and their devotion to the Virgin Mary endures to this day.