Retainer: Collections manager, Denver Museum of Art and Science

The bloody Arabic coup of 1962 forced the Abrassarts, after the death of Solange’s father in a riot, to flee the country for France. Settling in Paris, she attended the Paris Sorbonne University during the height of the cultural revolution of the 1960s; majoring in art history, with the intent of doing comfortable work in a museum somewhere.

She never intended to take her knowledge and run halfway around the world again. It might have just been the zeitgeist of the era: the desire to break loose from convention and seek something meaningful. Somewhere, an appreciation for art with religious themes led her to seek a deeper appreciation of religion. Not abandoning the Catholicism she’d been raised with as much as broadening it, she found herself hunting down statues of Black Madonnas in obscure German villages and the Bas-Pyrenees of southern France. For a time, she collected medieval chess queens with Marian images before selling the collection to fund a trip tagging along with archaeologists seeking the palace of the famed Dido of Carthage in Tunisia.

It was usually feminine legends she chased, but as her interests moved east across the desert, to the brother-sister unions of Geb and Nut, Isis and Osiris, the sacred marriage of Babylon, she began to appreciate a divine masculine as well. For Mary of Magdala cannot marvel at the empty tomb of Christ if it had never been full, and the King of Sumer could not rule without Ishtar’s blessing. And she herself might not have been set on this path if she had not seen her own father’s lifeless body trampled beneath that roiling mob when she was a teenager. His face became graven in her mind onto the serious faces of medieval Kings and Babylonian judges in tribute.

She had often gotten the notion that every once in awhile, she might have been looking at smaller pieces of a larger puzzle. Driven to study the masks humanity put both on itself and the Divine, she often found herself contemplating how the images seemed more lifelike whenever the masks slipped a little. Like the faint line between a Japanese geisha’s hair and her white makeup.

Her travels through their ancestral lands and a few of the papers she’d published drew the notice of a Follower of Set calling himself, at least among his brethren, Sety-meren-ptah. Sensing the young historian at the cusp of some revelation, he secured her for induction into a Temple in Algiers as she was trying to quietly cross the country en route to Morocco.

The official story was that a former participant in the 1962 Algerian rebellion recognized her as her father’s daughter and murdered her. Her Embrace was a grand funereal rite the dynastic priests of Anubis would have been proud of. She was given the funeral named Meresankh,’ translating roughly, and most ironically, as ‘lover of life’. Among non-Setites, she answers to the name 'Madeleine,' after the most poingant Black Maria int he iconography - the much-defamed Mary of Magdala.

Madeleine and her Sire seldom got on well; she found the undead faith in Set to be unsettlingly comfortable after adjusting to the horror of her state, but somehow too narrow to satisfy her. Impressed by her studious nature, but eventually weary of her endless probing, he arranged her departure into the custody of a Temple Priestess kalos en-Hilel, in the innocuous American city of Hartford, CT.

She spent several decades there, arranging volumes in the Priestess’ library and letting the Setites drag her through sometimes humiliating ‘Revelations’ in an attempt to understand the true nature of the God. It was also in the US she discovered a small following of female Setites trying to reconcile feminine divine images into the faith.

Madeleine took to the notion of Sekhmet as a female counterpart to Set wholeheartedly; adding the lioness-goddess’ face seemed to balance out the equation of faith - at least partially. Learning her lesson from her mistakes in Algeria, however, she kept her theories quiet and subdued. Still eternally playing with the puzzle pieces, rather than taking a blind leap.