La madre o-scura

by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum

Chapter one
african origin of humans
african dark mother - oldest divinity
we know

African and african american scholarship on the african origins of civilization, as noted in the prologue, is the ground on which this study stands. (1)  At the beginning of the third millennium, world scientists are in agreement on the african origin of modern humans - homo sapiens sapiens. (2)  Although not adequately disseminated in popular understanding, there is almost no resistance in the scholarly world to acknowledging african origins of humans. Resistance to accepting a dark african woman as the oldest mother we know remains, however, in the scholarly world. In this chapter, and the next, we shall present the evidence of science for african origins of humans and african origins of the oldest divinity we know. Subsequent chapters will buttress the evidence of science for the origin of the black mother in all cultures - with the evidence of cultural history for persistence of her memory to the present.
L. Luca Cavalli -Sforza, major world geneticist, has summarized recent scientific findings. Specimens dated 3 and 4 million years ago, including Lucy, have been found in different locations in east Africa. Homo habilis has been found with certainty "only in Africa". Homo erectus expanded first from Africa, then from west and south Asia, then from Europe, then from east Asia. Three or four million years ago, african migrants walked into the west asian area of the Levant (contemporary Israel and Palestine), then into southeast Asia, Java, and eastern Asia.  (3)  Bones and stone tools recently found in the Longport Cave in central China offer evidence that humans migrated out of Africa into China "at least 1.9 million years ago".  (4)  Our species, homo sapiens sapiens, appeared in east and south Africa around 100,000 years ago, long before appearing elsewhere. Cavalli-Sforza concludes that modern humans, replacing earlier human types, originated in Africa, and that after 50,000 BCE, africans expanded into Asia, Europe, Australia, and North and South America.  (5)
African inheritance, for Cavalli-Sforza , has bequeathed a legacy to all peoples of peaceful, festive, technologically inventive, and co-operative democracy. When modern humans appeared 100,000 years ago, they lived like their ancestors in small groups, without hierarchy or leaders, and with a social life grounded on reciprocal respect.  (6)  Contemporary african pygmies, who have retained characteristics of the paleolithic forebears of all humans, were co-operative then, and remain the most peaceful people Cavalli-Sforza has ever encountered.  (7)  In his reconstruction of human society of two to three million years ago, the geneticist describes small nomadic or semi-nomadic men who hunted, women who gathered fruit and vegetables, peoples who seasonally gathered together for festivals with dancing and rituals. As homo habilis, our african ancestors walked upright and formed stone instruments for hunting and preparing food. Stone tools dated 2,600,000 and 2,520,000 years ago have been found in Ethiopia's Gona River, tools that are "the oldest in the world by at least 120,000 years".  (8)
Homo sapiens, our species, dates from 500,000-300,000 years ago, a species with individual differences but without difference between males and females. Lack of difference lasted a long time. In 40,000 BCE, africans migrated to Har Karkom in the Sinai and incised megalith figures shaped like humans without distinct gender characteristics. (See next chapter). The 26,000-18,000 BGE figure of the paleolithic mother found at Savignano in Italy has both female and male characteristics. Pregnant, her head is shaped like a phallus.  (9) One difference between women and men is the mitochondria in the DNA, cellular structures that supply energy, inherited "solely through the mother's line". (10)  Because of this DNA inheritance, Cavalli-Sforza holds that deep religious and political beliefs of offspring tend to resemble beliefs of the mother. (11)
DNA research demonstrates that homo sapiens sapiens emerged in Africa 100,000 years ago (overlapping and replacing neanderthals). After 50,000 BCE, african migrants walked or sailed to every continent of the world. DNA research also reveals that large migrations out of Africa were as recent as 20,000 years ago. From Africa, homo sapiens sapiens walked first to west Asia 40,000-50,000 years ago, then walked or sailed to western and eastern Europe, then to east Asia and Siberia, whence they crossed the ice over the Bering Strait, reaching the Americas between 30,000 and 15,00 years ago. (See map of african migrations)
Figurines of corpulent women with large breasts, called "Venuses" or goddesses, have been found along paths of african migrations into Italy, the spanish and french Pyrenees, the Dordogne area of France, and central and eastern Europe, notably in Austria, Germany, the czech and slovak republics, Bulgaria, and Romania. In the 1880s, at Monaco, near the present border of France and Italy, several of these figurines were found. Although most of have disappeared to antique hunters, seven figurines may be seen in the Musee des Antiquites Nationales at St. Germain-en- Laye outside Paris.
In October 1995 Wally And I visited a place of these figurines, Balzi Rossi in Italy (called Grimaldi Caves by the fench), located between Menton in France and Ventimiglia in Italy. Along this italian/french mediterranean coast, I was startled by signs of the african mother. Bluffs are the color red ochre, grottoes are shaped like wombs. Shells on the beach have been identified as those of Senegal in Africa. At Balzi Rossi I imagined africans landing on beaches sheltered by the dramatic red ochre bluffs, entering the grottoes, and sculpting by firelight figurines of the dark mother.
Nude women, the figurines are one to six inches tall with large breasts and hips. Pregnancy of many of the figures suggests the dark mother's generation of life. Ample breasts convey nurturance. Imagination is set to flight by featureless faces and pendulous breasts. Some male theorists find "sexual parts often exaggerated". Sites of these figurines of the dark mother on paths of prehisoric african migrants along the mediterranean littoral of Europe often became, in the historic epoch, sanctuaries of black madonnas.
Scholars of the Frauen Museum in Wiesbaden, Germany were among the first (in our time) to acknowledge that other woman divinities existed besides the european images studied by lithuanian archeologist Marija Gimbutas. Oya Kala Dao, the 1996 exhibit of this women's museum, exhibited global icons of the dark mother - of Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Oceania.
African origin of modern humans hase been confirmed by geneticists, archeologists, and paleontologists. Among geneticists, three different groups working on mitochondrial DNA confirm the origin of humanity in Africa. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, geneticist, has also documented that africans demonstrate maximum genetic differences among themselves, and exhibit the greatest heterogeneity of any human group, on any continent. "The population that has had the longest time to differentiate itself shows the most diversity".  (12)  Evidence of genetics suggests that our african ancestors are older than dates confirmed by archeology. (13) The harmony of ancient mother-centered civilization is shown in that in paleolithic Africa there was no division between sacred and profane and no division of self and other - the mother and her nurture of all life were one. The concept of the other seems to have emerged in Europe with invasions of indo-european speakers after 4300 BCE.  (14)
Emmanuel Anati, italian archeologist, thinking on the origin of modern humans in central and south Africa, whence they migrated all over the world 60,000-50,000 BCE, implicitly credits africans, the first modern humans, with the origins of world civilization. Primordial africans held the huge curiosity from which all knowledge stems, as well as the ability to create art, express themselves with an articulated language, and the capacity for abstraction, synthesis, and conceptualization… bases of religion, reasoning, and philosophy.
The matristic nature of this original world civilization is suggested in Anati's finding that the color red ochre was perseasive in african cave and cliff drawings 60,000-50,000 BCE when africans carried this sign of the dark mother with them when they migrated to all continents.  (15)   In South Africa, very near a cave drawing sketched in red ochre, a footstep in the sand dated 115,000 BCE has been described as very possibly that of a woman "in the lineage of our hypothetical common ancestor".  (16)
Africa south of the Sahara, where modern humans emerged, is the region of the world with the world's richest rock art. Red ochre is the predominant color of the cave art in the region between Tassili n'Ajjer and Tadrart Acacus (about 300 walls painted with 2700 figures). Figures dancing, singing, playing musical instruments, engaging in initiation rituals, with body decoration and masks, characterize the art of the entire heterogeneous african continent, according to archeologist Umberto Sansoni. Ancient art of africans south of the Sahara suggests that they venerated their ancestors, considered animals and all life sacred, and that they lived without violence. Ancient african art abounding with fantastic creatures evokes contemporary surrealist art, notably that of Marc Chagall. (17)
African migration to all continents is confirmed in DNA evidence, in rock art, and in similarity of body type of prehistoric figurines of Africa, Old Europe, and Asia. Steatopygy is the awkward world for this body type, "as among the Hottentots, Bushmen, and certain other south African peoples".  (18)  Skeletons (e.g., of an old woman and a young man kneeling, found in Liguria in northern Italy) are described by anthropologists as having "Negroid features". Prehistoric african skeletons in the Bardo museum in Africa and sicilian skeletons in the Museo Paolo Orsi at Syracuse, Sicily are similar.  (19)
African cave paintings of animals dated 30,000 BCE are sketched in red ochre, charcoal, and hematite. Stunning in their grace and beauty, art historians consider that the artistic level of these ancient cave paintings has never since been equaled. Specialists in rock art adjudge techniques of paleolithic art to be very sophisticated: the head of a bison "is drawn on the curve of a rock and is turned to obtain a double effect of perspective. Shading is used to give shape to the figures, some of them staggered, one behind the other, to obtain greater perspective".  (20)
Among evidence in Sicily of african migrants, is the 10,000 BCE painting in the Grotta dell'Addaura outside Palermo of men and animals in a ritual scene, considered the oldest cave scene of humans in Europe.  (21)  On the italian peninsula, paleolithic mother figurines, notably the "Venus" of Savignano, 26,000-18,000 BCE,  (22)  resemble other representation of the dark mother found along later african migration paths into Europe, at Laussel Dordogne, France (22,000-18,000 BCE); Lespugue Haut-Garonne, France (20,000-18,000 BCE); Willendorf, Austria (20,000-18,000 BCE); Dolni Vestonice, Czechoslovakia (20,000 BCE); and Petersfels, Germany (14,000 BCE). These figurines of the dark mother mark african migration paths into Europe - first Sicily, then Italy, France, Austria, the former Czechoslovakia, and Germany. Hair of the figurine of Willendorf, Austria is arranged in cornrows, african style still used by african american women. Later african migrations are suggested in figurines of full-bodied neolithic mothers, including the Lady of Pazardzik in Central Bulgaria (4500 BCE), and the pregnant woman with a phallic head of Cernavoda, Romania (5000 BCE).
Independently, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, geneticist, and Emmanuel Anati, archeologist, have confirmed Marija Gimbutas' finding that the civilization of Old Europe before 4000 BCE was harmonious, that beliefs evident in cave and cliff art circled a woman as the progenitor of life and metaphor of the fecundity of the earth, and that prehistoric peoples lived co-operatively without wars, fortresses, or slavery.  (23) According to Gimbutas' thesis, (confirmed by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza), after 4000 BCE violent warriors from the eurasian steppes overtook this peaceful mother-centered civilization. These indo-european speakers, called kurgans after their burial mounds, are also known are aryans.  (24)
Scribes of dominant cultures, who have posited aryan, or indo-european, origin of western civilization, have ignored the probability that before the ice thawed, the peninsula of Asia that the greeks called Europe was probably contiguous in places with Africa, thereby facilitating primordial african migration into the region later called Europe. There is also evidence that africans sailed west to the new world. Ivan Van Sertima, in this hypothesis, has pointed to african figures in the olmec civilization of Mexico.  (25)  Westward migrations from eastern Asia to Europe have been continuous from prehistory to the present, accounting for the genetic composition (by continent) of contemporary europeans - 65% asian and 35% african.  (26)
Evidence of the african origin of world civilization mounts daily. In November 1999, african origin of the alphabet, hitherto credited to canaanites of west Asia, has been located in the desert west of the Nile. "Carved in the cliffs of soft stone, the writing, in a Semitic script with Egyptian influences, has been dated to between 1900 and 1800 B.C., two or three centuries earlier than previously recognized uses of a nascent alphabet. The first exeperiments with alphabet thus appeared to be the work of Semitic people living deep in Egypt, not in their homelands in the Syria-Palestine region, as had been thought".  (27) This finding also converges with scholarship (discussed in chapter two) documenting complex (back and forth) migrations from Africa to west Asia and return migrations from west Asia to Africa.
The polycentric, or multiregionalist, thesis, that acknowledged african genesis but held that peoples developed differently in different areas of the earth, was early discounted by Cavalli-Sforza, who considers the evidence to be scant for polycentric or multiregional hypotheses. He points to Africa's peoples as the most diverse of the world.  (28) At the beginning of the third millennium, both the neanderthal and polycentric theses (critical for theories of european origin) have been decisively refuted by world scientists. A requiem has also been sounded on the theory of multiregionalism - used in the past to defend the notion of a white race. In 2001 scientists hold that modern man evolved only once - in Africa. From Africa, ancestors of modern humans migrated all over the world, without mixing with older branches of humanity.
Rebecca Cann, professor of molecular anthropology of the University of Hawaii, wonders why the idea of separate races has held such power. Why did some scientists, as well as other scholars, resist DNA evidence attesting to african origins of all humanity? The DNA theory - which confirms inheritance through the mother - Cann concluded, was not palatable to some male scientists.  (29)
In 2000, Cavalli-Sforza's Genes, Peoples, and Language,  (30) affirms his belief in interdisciplinary research and acknowledges his passion to make known that scientific data has estabilished that the main differences among humans are between individuals, not between populations, "or so-called 'races' ". Whatever differences exist, he argues, may be attributed to climate. Cavalli-Sforza also offers an answer to the question - if there was an african Eve, was there an african Adam?
Yes, the geneticist states, there was an african Adam, adding enigmatically, "but processes of paternal and maternal transmission took place independently". According to recent genetics research on the male Y-chromosome, which supplements work on the DNA, our primordial ancestors whom the public likes to call Adam and Eve both lived in Africa, although not necessarily in the same region. Both Eve and Adam were born about 144,000 years ago. A surprising finding emerged from research on the male Y-chromosome- in prehistory, women, conventionally regarded as sedentary, traveled greater distances than did men.
The new human tree, rooted in the male Y-chromosome as well as in DNA inheritance from the mother, corroborates earlier findings of genetics. First expansion from Africa was from east Africa to Asia, probably via Suez and the Red Sea. African migrations into west Asia continued along the south coast of Asia. Northeast Asia was probably reached from southeast and central Asia. From southeast Asia, expansion continued farther south to nearby New Guinea and Australia. Expansion into Europe was relatively late, beginning about 40,000 years ago, coming from east, west, and central Africa. (31)
It has taken a couple of decades for the matter of DNA inheritance through the mother to be acknowledged. Massive resistance existed among male scientists who frowned on discussion of the spiritual implications of goddes figurines. Now that due deference has been given to the Y-male chromosome, substantiating that there was an Adam as well as many Eves, male scientists, hitherto hostile to spiritual theorizing based on the DNA transmitted through the mother, are now discussing spiritual implications of the male Y-chromosome.
Edward O. Wilson, in a interview with the Wall Street Journal, vouchsafed that a new basis for spiritual values might be found, not "in the usual religious sources", but in what he calls "the inspiring story of human origins and history". We need, states Wilson, "to create a new epic based on the origins of humanity… Homo sapiens have had one hell of a history! And I am speaking both of deep history… evolutionary, genetic history… and then, added on to that and interfacing with it, the cultural history recorded for the past 1,000 years or so".  (32)  Another male scientist, meditating on recent work on the male Y-chromosome , was moved to declare, "We are all Africans at the Y chromosome level and we are really all brothers".  (33)  Although the conclusion of scientists that "we are really all brothers" is good news, Wilson did not mention that everyone has an african black mother.
For an african american woman ethnographer, Necia Desiree Harkless, all of this is not news- our african origins, african migrations to all continents, and ancient and contemporary beliefs in the dark mother. These truths, states Harkless, are not yet appreciated by dominant world cultures, but they "will undoubtedly have a great impact on the twenty-first century".  (34)

An image of the bird-headed african snake goddes in the orant position (arms upraised in celebration) dated 4,000 BCE, has been called an image of our creatrix. Angeleen Campra's doctoral study of Sophia has taught me that generatrix is the more appropriate term. The images is held in Department of Egyptian Antiquities of the British Museum. Preceding this anthromorphic image were her sign - the color ochre red and the public V. Her characteristics are those of a bird and a snake, yet she is a woman, With legs firmly planted in the earth, her arms celebrate the universe, and her breasts offer nurturance to all life. Why hasn't she been acknowledged?
Slave traders, slaveholders, and imperialist (european, arab, and north american) enslaved Africa's peoples. African resources were stolen, african treasures sacked, icons and other art objects were looted and taken away. African traditions were appropriated, destroyed, distorted, or suppressed. What remain in Africa today is what could not be stolen: the memory of the dark mother in rock engravings, cave paintings, other art, and rituals.
Along with her early signs connoting generation of all life, african prehistoric art associates the dark mother with the earth's fruitfulness; she is depicted with corn showering down between cow's horns. Women are often depicted dancing. Men are painted running with antelopes, elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, and giraffes. In regions of the Hoggar, Tadrart Acacus, and above all in the Tassili, "we have some twelve thousand paintings done between the fifth and first millennia, which include the most beautiful renderings of the human form that prehistory can show".  (35)
In the neolothic era, a black-topped red polished ware appeared in Nubia and elsewhere. "These vessels (nearly all open bowls) have a dark red exterior and a shiny black interior, the black extendig also to the outside for half inch to an inch below the rim. The red was achieved by painting the surface with red ochre before firing, while the black seems to have been imparted by placing the vessel, directly after firing, rim downward, in a mass of densely smoking material such as leaves or straws."  (36) This technique, characteristic of the pottery of northeastern Africa, was subsequently know as far away as India.  (37)
During the millenium before Jesus, continuing into the first five hundred years thereafter, the major divinity of the mediterranean world appears to have been Isis of Africa, dark mother of many names. Great mother of the mediterranean, Isis inherited a long matristic tradition of Africa whose signs were the color red ochre and the pubic V, as well as spirals and circles, and human identification with animals. Scholarship since the 1960s has recovered what the ancient knew: Isis was an african deity, whose origins were in Nubia, or upper Egypt. Nubia, at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, was an african region whose civilization flourished for "more than five hundred years before the building of the great pyramidis of Egypt". (38)
In her sanctuary at at Philae in Africa, Isis was black. Metaphor of the dark mother of humanity and precursor of black, as well as church-whintened, madonnas of christian Europe,  (39)  her civilization at Meroe, Nubia from 100 BCE to 400 BCE conveys her values. Region of inner Africa best known to the ancient, it was called Ethiopia, a name given in antiquity to "all parts of Africa occupied by dark-skinned peoples". Egyptian artists utilized a "red-brown paint for the skin color of Egyptian men, yellow for Egyptian women, and a dark brown or black for all Nubians". Greeks and romans called Ethiopia (the area south of Egypt) the "Land of the Burnt faces", and called the Sudan "Land of the Blacks". (40)  Ethiopia today comprises Nubia. (41)  Although nubians resemble other peoples of the Sudan, they are unique in speaking an ancient group of languages unrelated to the arabic of their neighbors. (42)  Egypt built some of its massive monuments in Nubia, notably the great rock temples of Abu Simbel, but Nubia gave the dark mother Isis to Egypt, and the rest of the world. (43)
The little island of Philae in Nubia was known as "Holy Island", as well as "Interior of Heaven", and "City of Isis"  (44)  In the 1960s, William Y. Adams, leading nubiologist, anthropologist, archaeologist, and UNESCO expert, supervised the salvaging of Nile artifacts and treasures during the construction of the Aswan dam. Adam considers veneration of Isis to be "one of history's most important ideological transformations". Within the microcosm of Nile lands, worship of Isis became "the first truly international and supra-national religion, no longer claimed as the proprietary cult of any one ruler but sanctioned by and conferring its blessings upon several. Philae became a holy city and place of pilgrimage alike for all classes and all nationalities: Meroites, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and desert nomads".  (45)  Worship "of the age-old fertility goddess of Egypt", for Adams, anticipated the role of "Christianity and Islam on the larger stage of the Middle Ages".  (46)
The city of Meroe, site of the kushite royal court, was the center of an empire "that included not only much of Nubia, but also regions far south of modern-day Khartoum. Meroitic culture was strongly connected to central African traditions although it made use of Egyptian styles, to which it added graeco-roman elements"  (47) Study of nubian archeology and history has estabished the centrality of the dark mother Isis, who is considered to have exemplified african matrilineal traditions. "It was only through the royal women that Nubian rulers inherited the throne. All kings and queens had to be born to queen, usuallyu the ruler's sister".  (48) The seamless fit between religion and daily life in Africa is suggested by the fact that an african woman, as priestess of the dark mother, was "Mistress of Haven", as well as "Mistress of the House".  (49)
Eyes of Isis inside tombs of egyptian pharaohs looked to eternity; e.g., that of khnumnakht (100-100 BCE), whose sarcophagus is now in New York's Metropolian Museum of Art. Her eyes can be seen on the many amulets worn to this day by mediterranean peoples to ward off the "evil eye". The ubiquity if the belief in the "evil eye" may convey the widespread popular appeal of the dark mother, as well as patriarchal anxiety before the mother's riveting gaze.  (50)
Veneration of Isis, according to R.E. Witt, spread from her center in Nubia to Afghanistan, the Black Sea, and Portugal, to northern England.  (51)  By the first century of the common era, one of her largest temples outside Africa was located in Rome, while others were located at Ostia and Pompeii. At Philae in Nubia, Isis is invoked: "Hail Queen, mother of god". At Ostia, outside Rome, Italy, she was celebrated on the 5th of March, when sailors returned to the sea, naming their boats and ships for her. Women of Rome, after immersing themselves in the icy Tiber, proceeded on their knees all along the river edge to the Pantheon, today a gathering place for feminists.
The image of Isis most popular at the height of the roman empire appears to have been that of Isis nursing her child, Hours. Besides queen of the sea, Isis was considered queen of heaven and of earth, and was easily transmuted into the christian holy mother. Legions of the roman empire, whose ranks were drawn from subordinated dark peoples of three continents, carried images of african Isis, as well as images of Isis melded together with west asian divinities Cybele, Inanna, and Astarte all over the known world, from Africa to Asia, to Rome, France, England, to the Danube.  (52) At Benevento, where a great iseo flourished in the roman epoch, her followers were later called witches.  (53)
In October 1999, when Wally and I visited the sanctuary of Isis at Philae, I remembered Lucius Apuleius' description. Roman citizen of Athens who studied at Carthage and lived in the interior of Marocco, Lucius said he was awakened by "all the perfumes of Arabia", when Isis appeared and said, "I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are".
Worshipped by many names throughout Africa, Asia, and greek and roman empires, she was known as Isis, Hathor, Ma'at, Artemis, Demeter-Persephone, Hera, Mother of Corn, Juno, and Hecate. She was Lilith of west Asia and Kali of India. Hymns invoked her as "the one who rises and dispels darkness", solar ruler who "smites enemy", whose radiance "fills the earth with gold-dust".  (54)
The memory of the ancient african mother is recalled today in the poetry of Luisah Teish, african american poet and writer who traces her heritage to Egypt, which she calls the "mystical cradle of civilization" and finds Isis in yoruba goddess Yemonja, mother goddess who "nurtures us through the cycles of Life". She also finds Isis in yoruba's Oshun, goddess of love, art, and sensuality who "represents the Erotic in Nature". Africa, for Teish, is a continent where "deities walk among human beings and dance is worship". Acknowledging african diasporas, Teish finds reverence for the earth in african ibo beliefs and in native american "need to walk in balance". Teish' poems praise yoruba Yemonja as "mother of the night, the great dark depth, the bringer of light" who is related to Isis an Hathor. She considers the implications of the many manifestations of the dark mother: "The Horned Cow, the many-teated Sow, the queen bee, the Mothertree, the Pregnant Womb, the Grain-seed broom, the candle's wick, the matrix, and woman, you are my daughter".  (55)
The civilization of the dark mother of Africa is glimpsed at Meroe in Nubia, region of upper Egypt in the area called Ethiopia. Egypt, despite eurocentric misconceptions aligning the country with the "Orient" or the "Near East",  (56)  is an african country shaped by the Nile, river that carries african peoples and products back and forth along a north-south axis, particularly between Egypt and Nubia. In the ancient civilization of nubian Meroe, matrilineal succession was the custom, yet genders co-existed peacefully. Some queen mothers ruled alone, many ruled with husbands or sons. In mother-centered cultures of Africa, religions also co-existed peaceably. At Meroe, the religion of Isis honored the religion of the lion-headed god called Apedemek as well as that of Amun. Priests and priestesses of each religion shared in the political and economic administration of Meroe.
An egalitarian civilization that nurtured all life, Meroe was a noted center of learning and commerce that spread its prosperity to all peoples. Every day, in the temple called Table of Sun dedicated to goddesses and gods, africans offered food and other life-sustaining goods. "Those in need could come at any time and take freely of the offerings".  (57)  This ancient african tradition, persisting over millennia, is recalled today in San Francisco in the vibrant community services of Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church.
The Table of the Sun at Meroe was the precursor of roman temples to Cerere (Ceres), grain goddess of Rome, where the poor would come for free wheat. This ultimately african celebration of wheat is kept to this day in Italy in mid-August at the christian festival of the assumption of the virgin into heaven. On August 15, 200, when we were in Sicily, we went to her festival at Gangi, in the mountains of northwest Sicily when many hundreds of emigrant workers come with their family on this date every year. We brought home a triple cluster of wheat from this festival, that celebrates pagan wheat goddesses, and put it on the front door of our Berkeley home.
In Rome, the temple of wheat goddess Ceres became the church of Santa Maria di Cosmedin, a church with a black madonna. In the early historic epoch, a sculpture that connotes roman male appropriation of Isis was placed at the entrance to this church. The legend of this sculpture (called Bocca della verità, or Mouth of truth) has it that the mouth of truth will bite the hand of anyone who tells a lie. Contemporary italian feminist, enacting the dark mother's legacy of truth and justice, have placed replicas of the Bocca della verità in theaters where people can deposit written denunciations of corrupt mafia chiefs and political officials.
Italian evidence of veneration of the african dark mother may be found in icons of Isis in the national museum at Naples, and icons at Pompeii, Benevento, Palestrina, Aquileia, Verona, and in Rome. Much of the evidence of the widerspread veneration of african Isis in the roman epoch was destroyed by the volcanic eruption that laid waste to Pompeii.  (58)  In 1997 the Isis exhibit at Milan documented the vast arc of veneration of Isis in late antiquity and early christianity, an arc that extended from Africa to Europe, to the Ukraine, to India.
After christianity was estabilished in 323 CE, church fathers, aiming to obliterate pagan beliefs, destroyed Meroe in 450 CE. What was it they found so threatening in this african civilization that identified so strongly with nature, particulary the Nile? "Every year the land arose from the watery flood richer and more full of life; every year the migratory birds swooped down into the marshes for food and rest. A great order, ancient and ever renewing, sustained Egypt while nations rose and fell all around it… Nature worked patiently, bore richly, and sustained continually. The human order which grew out of that great original natural magic was as unique as its setting". (59)
This grounding in a constant and sustaining earth may help us understand why egyptians attained an extraordinary level of artistic, architectural, and moral excellence. "The 'gods' and 'goddesses' of Egypt literally sprang from the soil and the water of the river, and literally were one with the air and the creatures which flew through it, all interweaving into the phenomenon of the country itself". Everything, and every creature, was imbuded with the force of line: "The hieroglyphic word for beetle means 'to be'. The beetle and sun are both analogs of the same force, not symbols". For the earth-bonded person, in Africa, Sicily, and elsewhere, "The name of the thing and the thing itself are the same". (60)
Earth-bonded theology is not ponderous. In one egyptian creation story, the creator Amun runs around honking after laying an egg. Africans, who regard their deities familiarly, call Amun the "Great Cackler". Similarly, africans attributed animal characteristics to humans, and human characteristics to animals, identifying divinity with animal and human forms.  (61)  Sometimes the goddess was a cow named Hathor, other times she was a woman with a Hathor headdress. Horus, son of Isis, could be a hawk, sometimes a man with a hawk's head, or a child in the arms of his mother.  (62) Harmony between humans and animals characterized ancied Africa, as did harmony between men and women, a contentment visible in many depictions of embracing couples. Seeing life as a spiral, africans believed new came life came from death.
Isis melded with Ma'at, african goddess whose name connotes mother,  (63)  and with Sekhmet, whose name means "powerful one". Ma'at had a feather on her head that signified justice. Many representations of Isis (as well as of Ma'at) have feathers. Feathers, an egyptian guide advised us, connote equality, since they are the same, back and front. When a person died, his or her heart, the seat of intelligence, would be weighed on a scale balanced by the feather of Ma'at. If the heart was not as light as the feather, the soul would be lost to Apet, the devourer.
Ma'at, or mother, embodied truth, ethics, justice, and righteous behavior.  (64)  Sekhmet, the fierce aspect of the african dark mother, was a woman with a lion's head. Hundreds of statues of Sekhmet were found in the temple of Mut in Karnak. Like Isis, Sekhmet originally carried a sun disk on her head and an ankh, signifying life, in her hand. The ankh is said to prefigure the christian cross, although the christian symbol has no female oval.  (65)
African Isis melded with anatolian Cybele, sumerian Inanna, canaanite Astarte, and roman Diana. Isis' distinguishing images were a throne, a boat, sails, and the annual flooding of the Nile. Often depicted with outstretched wings, Isis harks back to the paleolithic bird and snake goddess of Africa. Attesting to african migrations' carrying african beliefs to all continents, a contemporary native american figurine is that of a venerated woman with wings. A 20th century sicilian artist depicted comari, women who bonded together in memory of the mother, sheltered by protective wings of Isis.
In antiquity, at Byblos in west Asia, african Isis was identified with the canaanite goddess Astarte. With hellenization, Isis became the great mother; her consort Osiris, or "the great black", became zeus, Pluto, and Dionysus. The enduring truth of Isis, whose civilization centered in nubian Meroe, may be that she embodied veneration of all life… trees are sacred, so are birds, crocodiles, the dung beetle, the hooded cobra, and all living creatures.
R.E. Witt, historian, following the transformation of a "purely African faith into a world religion", points out that african veneration of Isis became greek, then graeco-roman"  (66)  as greek and roman empires swept through Africa, Europe, and Asia. After 332 BCE, when Alexander of Macedonia conquered Egypt, Alexandria in Africa became the capitol of an empire that stretched from the Nile to the Danube, city where africans, asians, europeans, jews, and greeks mingled, where Osiris became Aesculapius, or Serapis, healing god of Greece and Rome, and Isis, blending with anatolian Cybele, canaanite Astarte, and graeco-roman goddesses, became great mother of the Mediterranean.  (67)
All over the known world in the first centuries of the common era, slaves and noble women venerated african Isis as a divinity who "prevailed through the force of love, pity, compassion, and her personal concern for sorrows".  (68)  Before christianity did so, the religion of Isis promised life after death. Isis centeres have been found throughout the roman empire; in Gaul, Portugal, Spain, Britain, Germany, and Italy, particularly in places that later became sanctuaries of black madonnas (See chapter 4).
In Italy, Isis was a mother divinity associated with healing; the 6th century BCE temple to Isis at Pompeii is located next to a temple of Aesculapius, or Serapis.  (69) A significant characteristic of Isis, one later associated with the christian madonna, was that she was a compassionate mother. In the christian epoch her son Horus was represented as a christ figure. Isis is often depicted with a laurel wreath and two prominent ears, symbolizing that she listened with both ears to the prayers of all those who came to her, an image that can be found to this day in italian folklore.
Water, always associated whit Isis, held a sacred quality: holy water, holy rivers, and holy sea. The serpent, identified whit Isis; was always sacred. Hathor, was associated with regeneration. The cow, another image of Isis, became sacred in India. Music, associated with Isis, was conveyed by the image of isis carrying a sistrum, rattle still heard in african music today. Isis and wheat, in the roman epoch, became Ceres and wheat. In the christian epoch Isis became santa Lucia, whose images always carry a sheaf of wheat. The olive tree, associated with Isis, has today become symbol of nonviolent transformation. Italy's contemporary nonviolent left political coalition is named L'Ulivo, or the olive tree.  (70)
Mistress of religion in Egypt, Isis was god the mother, yet in Isis there was no division between feminine and masculine. She was beloved by women and men, young and old, and all social classes. Her statue at Philae, created between the second and first centuries before Jesus, carries the sistrum in one hand the ankh in the other. In her 600 BCE image in the Museum of Cairo, Isis is figured as a black nursing mother, who bears a startling resemblance to christian images of the nursing madonna.
Veneration of Isis, her spouse Osiris, and son Horus persisted in all the pharaonic dynasties, a 3,000 year old history when belief in Isis spread from Meroe and Alexandria to "the whole Mediterranean basin".  (71)  In Italy and other latin countries where the holy family is a focus of devotion, the trinity of Isis and her husband and child became the popular christian trinity of Maria, Joseph, and Jesus, popular trinity that differs from the motherless trinity -father, son, and holy ghost- of canonical christianity.
At african Memphis, hymns praised Isis as a civilizing, universal divinity who had ended cannibalism, instituted good laws, and given birth to agriculture, arts and letters, moral principle, good customs, and justice. Mistress of medicine, hearler of human maladies, sovereign of earth and seas, protectress from navigational perils and war, Isis was "Dea della salvezza per eccellenza…veglia anche sulla morte", divinity of salvation par excellence, who also watches over the dead.  (72)
The signal relevance of the dark mother Isis to our own time may be that she signifies nonviolent transformation. The cosmology and psychology of this value of nonviolence may be realized if we understand that in Isis, who gave "light to the sun", there was no division of female from male, and no separation of one female from another. Her sister Ma'at, with whom she melded, was goddess of truth. Isis and Ma'at epitomized order in nature, a principle carried forward by Pythagoras and his followers in the greek period, and by scientists thereafter. In the african civilization of Isis, human beings and social justice were joined. Each human was judged at death by Ma'at's feather of justice, and by the negative confession: "I have not committed iniquity.… I have not oppressed the poor.… I have not defaulted…. I have not caused the slave to be ill-treated.… I have not murdered…. I have not made any to weep.… I have not falsified the beam of the balancs".  (73)  Values of the isiac negative confession suggest why, in the 20th century, Simone Weil held that hebrew scriptures were indebted to egyptian sacred writings.  (74)
Isis was appropriated by Greece and Rome in cults of Hera, Demeter, Fortuna, Ceres, and Juno, and by christianity in cults of saints - notably Lucia (see chapter five). Roman emperors and christian fathers destroyed her temples, but the legacy of the african dark mother, despite attempted obliteration and suppression, has persisted in art. The memory may be glimpsed in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, african in appearance, who bear a startling resemblance to Isis and to the many black madonnas in this region of France (See chapter four).  (75)
For Jean Leclant, egyptologist at the Academy of France, "Isis, mother of Horus, triumphant, but at the same time broken-hearted, prefigures the Madonna col Bambino of the christian religion".  (76) Black madonnas of Europe, and other dark female divinities of the world, may be the most tangible evidence we have of the deep and persistent memory of the african dark mother. Her continuing legacy is marked by passionate identification with the oppressed and with values of justice with compassion, equality, and transformation. In the christian epoch, Isis' temple at Pompeii was succeeded by many sanctuaries of black madonnas. At Pomigliano dell'Arco, rituals venerating the black madonna are fervent. At Montevergine, suggesting how her icons carry the history of the subaltern, the black madonna is called black slave mother. At Foggia, where peasant communists would come in pilgrimage to her, the black image is called l'Immacolata.  (77) Black madonnas may be found throughout Italy, as documented in my book, Black Madonnas, and throughout the world, as illustrations in this book suggest.
In Sicily, on first migration paths from Africa, the memory of Isis is everywhere. Dozens of icons of Isis along with Bastet, her cat familiar, may be seen in sicilian museums. At carnival time, throughout the christian epoch to the present, figures of Isis and her cat express the laughter of subalterne peoples at church and state.
In Africa in the fifth century of common era, nubians and their neighbors took up arms to prevent forced dedication to christianity of temples of Isis at Philae. Yet by the middle of the sixth century, byzantine emperors had imposed a patriarchal version of christianity as state religion on Nubia. When, less than a century later, islamic invaders took Egypt, nubians resisted but finally negotiated a treaty in which they kept christianity and political sovereignty. In the 15th century when Nubia fell to arab nomads, islam became the state religion. Yet, in Africa, underneath patriarchal religions of christianity and islam, the memory persists to this day of the ancient dark mother.  (78)
Glimpsed in daily and festival rituals, the memory may be closer to bodily resonance than to cognitive remembrance. They memory has persisted in Africa in contemporary rituals, as well as in rituals in all lands reached by african migrants, which is to say all continents of the world. Victor Turner, in the fieldwork among the ndembu, a mother-centered culture of northwest Zambia, describes a girls' puberty ritual when a young woman is separated from her mother and her childhood dies. The ritual is enacted under a milk tree that exudes milky white latex. Echoes of this ritual of the separation of mother and daughter may be found in many of the world's myths, notably the myth of Demetra and Proserpina. For the ndembu, the milk tree is said to be, not symbolize, milk, loctation, breasts, and nubility. It is also the place "where the ancestress slept", where the novice's grandmother, mother, and all ndembu women, were initiated into womanhood, and where the tribe began. For the ndembu, the milk tree is the principle of matrilineage, mother-centeredness, and is the whole ndembu nation.
The memory of the dark mother also persists in contemporary african popular beliefs. For the yoruba of Africa, the spiral, sign of the mother, determines life. Everything is constantly moving in a spiraling motion. "The whole life span of a man or a woman is a journey. That is our belief…All movements are journeys. We are progressing, we are moving".  (79)  In this movement, yoruba women have a strong sense of their own power, enabling them to accommodate to male insecurities. For example, two wives wrap the hair of a transvestite priest of Agemo in female style.  (80) Yoruba women are economically indipendent, and became dramatically so when they reach menopause, or when they become grandmothers, at which time they declare indipendence from domestic work.
The civilization of Isis has bequeathed to contemporary africans, and to other earth-bonded peoples, a "high degree of tolerance towards the gods and the religious practices of those they encountered". It as been common practice in Africa simply to incorporate the gods of others into their own pantheon "with an all-inclusiveness that saw all deities as one more manifestation of the same overarching principle".  (81)

What are the implications of the ancient african dark mother for contemporary feminist theology? Today, western feminist theologians are venturing near to what has been the suppressed subject of the african dark mother. Delores Williams, african american womanist theologian, considers Hagar, dark mother of Ishmael sent into the desert by Abraham and Sarah, to be protected by god, and the most significant biblical figure for african american women. For Williams, patriarchy is an inadequate concept because "it is silent about white men and white women working together to maintain white supremacy and white privilege".  (82)  Williams' womanist theology is informed by "concern for poor black women, children and men immersed in a fierce struggle for physical, spiritual and emotional survival and for positive quality of life formation…."  (83)  In Williams' theology, Hagar is the figure who embodies the mothering, nurtring, caring, enduring, resisting capacities that form the center of african american women's spirituality.  (84)
Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, latina, has written a majerista theology that bypasses the term feminist, which she considers to have white middle class connotations. A cuban in exile in the United States, Isasi-Diaz is concerned about racism and ethnic prejudice; her mujerista perspective emphasizes everyday life, love of neighbor, and Justice.
A sicilian/american woman, I resonate with africana and latina theologians who stress the importance of everyday religious beliefs and rituals in challenging injustice.  (85)  Married to a jew (our sons consider themselves jews), I relate to feminist redactions of judaism, particulary that of Asphodel P. Long, british feminist who was brought up an orthodox jew. Long regards her work as a midrash, or commentary, on Hochama and on Asherah, "divine principles in the Hebrew religion and in later Judaism"  (86) Drawn to the "divine female figure of Wisdom, called Hochma in Hebrew and Sophia in Greek, who pervades Hebrew and Christian scriptures",  (87)  she departs from conventional judaism wherein the figure of Wisdom is identified with the torah. She also differs from christianity wherein the female figure called Wisdom" became part of the male Jesus and thence the Church, while for many other Christians she became an aspect of the Virgin Mary".  (88)
Long points to the frequency with which representatives of jewish orthodoxy railed against popular practices, considering this evidence that everyday jewish beliefs differed from official jewish doctrines. "What is called the popular religion continued to be widespread, no matter how stringent the persecution against its partecipants".  (89)  Official judaism demonized the "Hebrew goddes", as Raphael Patai calls her, but she was never, apparently, obliterated in jewish popular culture.  (90)  An extraordinary number of african and west asian dark mother images have been excavated in Israel.  (91)
Christian theologian, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, who uncovers biblical texs to find the hidden woman of hebrew and christian scriptures, considers that "By naming Jesus as the child of Miriam and the prophet of Divine Sophia, I seek to create a 'women' defined feminist theoretical space that makes it possible to dislodge christological discourses from their malestream frame of reference".  (92)  Sophia's children, according to Fiorenza, included John the Baptist as well as Jesus; both were "emissaries of Divine Wisdom", and both were killed.
Critical of conservative political forces that use religion as a cover for their own economic interests, as well as of right wing religious movements around the world who reject progressive social measures and human rights for women, Schussler Fiorenza regards her role as that of a "trouble-maker". Reflecting on the patriarchal dogma that women must be submissive, Fiorenza points out that subordination of women originated, not in christianity, but in the vaunted greek city state where one could exercize democracy only if one were "free born, propertied, educated and a male head of household, excluding all others".  (93)  Catholicism and protestantism, for Schussler Fiorenza, are equally patriarchal, but the protestant reformation, by eliminating women religious figures, deepened the patriarchalization of theology.  (94) Although an iconoclast, Fiorenza does not venture into the controversial area of religion before jkudaism and christianity. She refers to, but does not discuss, the theological implications of a "black divine woman" found in egyptian wisdom literature.  (95)
This study may be regarded as part of the enterprise in which Delores Williams, Ada Isasi-Diaz, Asphodel Long, and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza are engaged. With considerable respect for everyday judaism, christianity, islam, and buddhism, it seems to me that the next step toward religious understanding, and a just world, is to bring the dark mother of prehistory and popular history to consciousness and to public knowledge. We need to bring her to consciousness in light of genetic and archeological evidence that verifies that all of us descend from an african dark mother, that we are all peoples of colors of many tribes, many climates, and many diasporas. Knowledge of african origins may help dispel bigotries grounded on ignorance which may be our largest obstacle to social jusice. In our violent time, we need to bring the dark mother to consciousness because she connotes justice with compassion.
Acknowledging the dark african mother who preceded pathriarchal world religions does not, to this sicilian/american woman, seem all that iconoclastic.  (96)  It may be a matter of how we think. Erik Hornung, egyptologist of the University at Basel, refers to the complementarity of egyptian logic, which resembles complementarity in physics. "For the Egyptians two times two is always four, never anything else. But the sky is a number of things - cow, baldachin, water, woman - it is the goddess Nut and the goddess Hathor, and in syncretism a deity a is at the same time another, not-a".  (97)  For Hornung, "the nature of a god becomes accessible though a 'multiplicity of approaches', [and] only when these are taken together can the whole be comprehended".  (98) Sicilians, as Justin Vitiello reminds us, know this intuitively.  (99)  So do artists, craftsmen, poets, and peasants of the world. In the 1970's, when I began to research my italian godmothers/grandmothers, I came across a tile with a blue-black star with thirty-two points in a blue green sea. The tile was named Iside, italian for Isis.
Necia Desiree Harkless, ethnographer of Nubia, Meroe, Kush, and Nigeria, and authority on the sacred art of north Africa, may have caught the a central meaning of our african dark mother in her poem, Evolution

Ageless I stepped out of th sky
Touched down into the sea
Saw my image/ In the reflection of the Sun…
Built temples and streets emblazoned
With my totem from Tyre to Timbuctoo
Angeless I spun back into the sky
Touched the moon dust and proclaimed
We are One!  (100)

Notes

1. A good bibliography of african history may be found in Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina, African History. From earliest times to indipendence. 2end edition. (London and New York, Longman, 1995). Cheikh Anta Diop's masterpiece is Civilization or Barbarism. An Authentic Anthropology (Paris, Presence Africaine, 1981; Brooklyn, N.Y., Lawrence Hill Books, 1991).

2. See for example the large agreement among papers presented by scholars from Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Austria, U.S.A, France, Greece, Namibia, and Marocco at "Arte preistorica e tribale. Decifrare le immagini", the XVII Valcamonica Symposium, September 21 to 26 1999 Darfo Boario Terme, Italia, My paper for the symposium, "Converging Interpretations of Prehistoric Signs for Woman", formed the basis of the first two chapters of this book. African origin of world civilization remains a controversial topic for many europeans, and more americans. The taboo was visible at the Milan conference "Le radici prime dell'Europa. Stratificazione, processi diffusi, scontri e incontri di culture", Banca Popolare di Milano, October 27,28,1999. Organizers of this conference on the roots of Europe did not invite one african-american, scholar to partecipate.

3. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1993). See also Louise Levathes, "A Geneticist Maps Ancient Migrations", New York Times, Science Times, July 27, 1993.

4. John Noble Wilford, "Bones in China Casting New Light on Human Ancestors", The New York Times, November 16, 1995.

5. History and Geography, Loc. Cit. Chapter 2. Genetic History of World Populations, 60-64.

6. Luca e Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, Chi Siamo. La storia dela diversità umana. (Milano, Arnoldo Mondadori, 1993), 38.

7. Ibid., Chapter II.

8. "Archaeology", Encyclopedia Britannica Year Book, 1997.

9. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas. Feminism, religion, and politics in Italy (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1993; iUniverse edition, 2000),8.

10. Louise Levathes, "A Geneticist Maps…" Loc. Cit..

11. Conversation with author, 1994.

12. Cavalli-Sforza, Chi Siamo, Loc. Cit., 107.

13. Ibid., 104-5

14. See also Morris Berman, Coming to our senses. Body and spirit in the hidden history of the west (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1989).

15. Emmanuel Anati, Il Museo Immaginario della Preisoria. L'Arte Rupestre nel Mundo (Milano, Editoriale Jaca Book Spa, 1995), 217-218.

16. "Tracking the First of Our Kind", National Geographic, September 1997, 95. Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut, Journey though the Ice Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1988, 1997).

17. See Umberto Sansoni, Le Più Antiche pitture del Sahara. L'Arte delle Teste Rotonde. Prefazione di Emmanuel Anati (Milano, Jaca Book, spa, 1994).

18. Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (New York, Gramercy Books, 1989).

19. See Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, "The Long Historis of Sicilians", Loc. Cit.

20. "Dawn of Art: A New View", The New York Times, June 8, 1995.

21. See L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, History, Loc. Cit. Also Binbaum, Black Madonnas, Loc. Cit.

22. A good analysis of paleolithic goddesses can be found in Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess. Evolution of Image (Arkana Penguin, London, 1991, 1993). See chapter 1, "In the Beginning: The Paleolithic Mother Goddess". The authors do not acknowledge african origin of paleolithic goddesses of Old Europe.

23. See Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess, ed., Joan Marler (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991). Also, The Language of the Goddess ( HarperSanFrancisco, 1989). Elionor W. Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess. A symbol for our time (HarperSanFrancisco, 1989). Gimbutas made an enormous contribution to feminist cultural history, but she did not acknowledge african origins of the goddess. Her work on invasions of aryan speakers has been corroborated by Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Ph. D., "Genetic Evidence Supporting Marija Gimbutas' Work on the Origins of Indo-European People", From the Realm of the Ancestors. An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas (Manchester, Ct., Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, Inc., 1997. See also, Emmanuel Anati, Il Museo Immaginario della Preistoria. L'Arte rupestre nel mondo (Milano, Editoriale Jaca Book, Spa, 1995), 13, 186 - 235, passim.

24. For a good analysis of the aryan conquest and replacement of earlier mother-centered cultures with sky gods, slavery,and subordination of women, see Riane Eisler, Sacred Pleasure. Sex, myth, and the politics of the body. New paths to power and love (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 88 ff. The standard study is J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Language, Archaology and Myth (London, Thames and Hudson, 1989).

25. See Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus. The African Presence in Ancient America (New York, Random House, 1976). Also, Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism. A Authentic Anthropology (Presence africaine, Paris, 1981); The African Origin of Civilization Myth or Reality. Edited and translated by Mercer Cook (Chicago, Ill, Lawrence Hill Books, 1974). Also, Basil Davidson, African Civilization Revisited. From Antiquity to Modern Times (Trenton, N. J., Africa World Press, Inc., 1991).

26. See Cavalli-Sforza, Human Diasporas (Addison-Wesley, 1995). Levathes, "A Geneticist Maps Ancient Migrations", Loc. Cit.

27. John Noble Wilford, "Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet in Earlier Era", The New York Times, Nov. 1, 1999.

28. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Chi Siamo. Loc. Cit. 103.

29. See "La Riscossa dell'Eva Africana", il manifesto, giovedì, 30 marzo 2000. Gianfranco Biondi e Olga Rickards. Also, same issue, Rebecca Cann, "la madre della nostra madre", Paleologia, Loc. Cit. See also", The Human Family Tree: 10 Adams and 18 Eves. Tracing Human History through Genetic Mutations, "Science Times, The New York Times, Tuesday, May 2, 2000. The Y-chromosome, male counterpart of the DNA (inherited solely through the mother), has been incorporated into a human family tree by Dr. Douglas C. Wallace and colleagues of Emory Univerity, School of Medicine in Atlanta.

30. Chapter 3, "Of Adam and Eve", Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages, Loc. Cit.

31. Ibid., 90-91.

32. Ibid., See also, "Human Family Tree: 10 Adams and 18 Eves" Loc. Cit.

33. Ibid.

34. Necia Harkless Harkless, Poems & Heart Images (Lexington, Kentucky, Heart to Heart Associates, 1995). Passim.

35. Burchard Brentjes, African Rock Art, Tr. Anthony Dent (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. Publisher, 1965), . 71

36. William Y. Adams, "Ceramics", Africa in Antiquity, Loc. Cit., 127. The priority of africans in making tools was underlined in the recent discovery of a 2.3 million year old " tool factory" in Kenya. See "Ancient tool 'factory' linked to pre-humans", The Vancouver Sun, May 6,1999.

37. Ibid.

38. See "Foreword" by Michael Botwinick, Africa in Antiquity. The Arts of Ancient Nubia and the Sudan (New York, The Brooklyn Museum, 1978). See Jocelyn Gohary, Guide to the Nubian Monuments on Lake Nasser (The American Unniversity in Cairo Press, 1998). See page 14 for Meroe, where women held high stauts. On our 1999 visit to Nubia in Upper Egypt, we noted that in the small temple to the queen at Abu Simbel, she is of equal stature with the king. She wears the Hathor head dress of cow horns surmounted by a sun disk with the two plumes (connoting equality), and holds the sistrum against her breast.

39. See Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas., Loc. Cit.

40. Ibid. 13.

41. William Y. Adams, "Geography and Population of the Nile Valley", Africa in Antiquity, Loc. Cit. 17.

42. Ibid. 20.

43. See "Goddess", in Mistrees of the house. Mistress of Heaven. Women in Ancient Egypt, ed., Ann K. Capel and Glenn Markoe (New York, Hudson Hills Press in association with Cincinnati Art Museum, 1996). 121 ff.

44. See Jhon H. Taylor, Egypt and Nubia (London, The British Museum Press, 1991).

45. William Y. Adams, Nubia, Loc. Cit., 338.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid. 23.

48. Ibid. 25.

49. Mistress of House. Mistress of Heaven. Loc. Cit. 9

50. See Lawrence DiStasi, Mal'Occhio. The Underside of Vision (Berkeley, Ca., North Point Press, 1981.

51. R. E. Witt, Isis in the Ancient World. Aspects of Greek and Roman Life (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1971; Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins University Press paperback, 1997). For the higher respect given to women in ancient Egypt than to women in the high culture of Greece, see Gay Robins, Women in Ancient Egypt (Cambridge, Ma., Harvard University Press, 1993).

52. The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt, edited by Stephen Quirke and Jeffrey Spencer (London, British Museum Press, 1992). 196.

53. "Guardate bene Iside sembra una Madonna" La Curiosità, la Repubblica, 29 agosto 2000.

54. Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass. A new translation by Robert Graves, (New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951). 264-266.

55. See Luisah Teish, Carnival of the Spirit. Season Celebrations and Rites of Passage (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), Introduction, 22. Also, Drewal Thompson, Yoruba Ritual. Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1992) 22.

56. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism. (New York, Vintage Books, 1979).

57. D. Jean Collins, "The Message of Meroe", Gnosis Magazine, Spring 1990. No. 15.

58. Stefania Adamo Muscettola, "La decorazione architettonica e l'arredo", Soprintendenza Archeologica per le Province di Napoli e Caserta, Alla ricerca di Iside. Analisi, studi e restauri dell'Iseo pompeiano nel Museo di Napoli (Napoli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, 1992).

59. Michael Crisp, "The Spirit of Egypt", Gnosis Magazine, Spring 1990. No. 15

60. Ibid.

61. See "Votive Figurines", Egyptian Art in Munich, edited by Sylvia Schoske (Munchen, Staatliche Sammlung Agyptischer Kunst Muchen, 1993), 4

62. Ibid.

63. "Figure of the goddess Mut, " Egyptian Art in Munich (Loc. Cit. ) 52.

64. Ibid.

65. "Standing statue of Sakhmet", Ibid., Loc. Cit. 38.

66. E. E. Witt, Isis in the Graeco-Roman world. Aspects of Greek and Roman life. Loc. Cit. Also, Alla ricerca di Iside. Analisi, studi e restauri dell'Iseo pompeiano nel Museo di Napoli (Roma, Arti S.p.a., 1992).

67. Witt, Isis, p. 69. Although Witt echoes some eurocentric notions ("Our western World's Greco-Roman and Christian civilization has emerged and taken shape out of the cultural melting pot of the Near East".), he presents a great deal of evidence for the theme of this book that Africa was the origin of modern humans whose demic migrations left a significant african legacy to world civilization; e.g., "From Memphis and Alexandria the cult of Isis and her Temple Associates shed an incalculable influence on other rival faiths, including even Christianity". (preface). Witt, a lecturer in Classics at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he specializes in greek and roman religion, has written an indispensable book, first published in 1971, for the education of contemporary classicists and others who denounce "afro-centrism". A Witt sampling: "Egypt for its inhabitants was the Black Land". (14). "Throughout the 4,000 years of Egyptian history every Pharoah was the incarnation of the younthful Hours, and therefore was the son of Isis, the Goddess Mother who had suckled and reared him" (15)."Herodotus, [who] had earlier stayed in Egypt and had written about its religion…concluded that its gods had been appropriated by the cities of Greece". (16). "Later antiquity could think of Isis as the Egyptian soil which the Nile commingles with and fructifies". (19). "Already in the Ptolemaic age she was know at Philae as Isis of the Innumerable Names. Now, however, she was identified with all the purely anthropomorphic goddesses of the Graeco-Roman Pantheon… Demeter and her daughter Persephone… Pallas Athena…Aphrodite and Venus…Hera…Artemis…Wisdom (Sophia) …" (20). "In Italy itself the Egyptian faith was a dominant force. At Pompeii, as the archaeological evidence reveals…Isis played a major role. In the capitol, temples were built in her honor…obelisks were set up, and emperors bowed to her name. Harbours of Isis were to be found on the Arabian Gulf and Black Sea. Inscriptions show that she found faithful followers in Gaul and Spain, in Pannonia and Germany. She held sway from Arabia and Asia Minor in the east to Portugal and Britain in the west and shrines were hallowed to her in cities large and small… Beneventum, the Piraeus, London". (21). "The friend of slaves and sinners, of the artisans and the downtrodden, at the same time she heard the prayers of the wealthy… " (23). "The cult of Isis had its cradle in north-east Africa, in Egypt and Ethiopia". (23).
"To understand ancient Egyptian religion at all, and especially the religion of Isis, we must recognize the sacredness of life in all its forms for thw whole Nile civilization". (25) "…the cult of animals doubtless followed after the worship of sacred tree…" (26). "Animals were generally symbols of divinity". (28). "…the ankh…a case of an Isiac symbol prefiguring a characteristically Christian token, the cross". (32). "Throughout the long history of Egyptian religion Isis and her brother-husband remained complementary deities". (36). "…Byblos in Phoenicia…where Egyptian antiquities have been unearthed was a point of economic and religious contact between Phoenicia and the Nile country. It was there that Osiris was assimilated to Adonis (Thammuz) and Isis herself into Astarte (Istar, Ashtaroth)". (43). "…rites of Dionysus and Demeter bore the closest resemblance to those of Osiris and Isis". (67). "…in the Cyclades Isis was blended with Artemis…" (68). "But Isis on Delos is even more than an Egyptian turned Greek. For besides her identification with Aphrodite, Tyche, Nike, Hygieia… and Artemis, she is also invoked as Astarte of Phoenicia, as the Mother of the gods, and as the Great Mother". (68-69). "The obelisks formerly belonging to the Iseum Campestre are now in the Squares called Pantheon, Dogali, Minerva, and Navona [in Rome]". (87). Among the holy servants of Isis, "The Synod of the Wearers of Black …paid particular devotion to Isis as 'the black-robed queen". (97). "Isis and her companion gods from Egypt gained a foothold in Italian cities by a readiness to take a comparatively low rank…friend of the masses…her home hard by the business and trading center dear to the common man". (136-137).
"Herodotus states that the first people to institute festivals, processions, and religious presentations were the Egyptians…'and the Greeks have got their knowledge from them' ". (165). "Isis was an insidiously dangerous foe for Christian theologians because she was believed to give her worshippers their daily bread". (180). "The ritual of the Christian Church owes a considerable and unacknowledged debt to the Egyptian religion that preceded it in the Graeco-Roman world". (184). "In the theology and art of Gnosticism Horus and Christ could easily be blended". (218). "In the middle of the first century AD Isiacism, far from being dead, was in the ascendant". (259).
"The evidence is unimpeachable that the places where Paul preached cultivated the faith of Isis". (261). "Augustine…remarks that no idolatry is more profound and more superstitious than that of Egypt". (262). "…agape ia a cult name foe Isis, who in Egyptian tradition as old as the Pyramid Texts personifies tenderness, compassion and divine love". (266) "Clearly the Pauline view of Isiacism was penetratingly critical. Paul's world was a patriarchy, his religion was Christological and monotheistic, and God was found in fashion as a man. Isis was female, Isis was the champion of idolatry, and Isis was the lover of the Nile menagerie. And yet the Pauline and the Isiac faith had at least one common characteristic. Each swept aside racial and social distinctions. 'There is neither Greek nor Jew… Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all'. Change Christ to Isis…and the words are still true". (268). "Giordano Bruno…was conviced that the wisdom and magic-born religion of ancient Egypt excelled the fanatical theology that burnt dissident thinkers as heretics…the unfrocked monk, perished on 1 february 1600 for his intransigent denial that Christianity was unique". (269)

68. Egyptian Art in Munich, Loc. Cit., 60.

69. Superintendenza Archeologica per le Province di Napoli e Caserta, Alla ricerca di Iside. Analisi, Loc. Cit., 7.

70. Ibid., 16

71. "Iside. Mito Mistero Magia", Archeologia Viva, marzo-april 3 1997.

72. Ibid., 43.

73. Quoted in Asphodel P. Long, In a Chariot Drawn by Lions. The Search for the Female in Deity (Freedom, Ca., Crossing Press, 1993), 85. See also David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses. Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 1968).

74. For Weil, see chapter two, this work.

75. See Ladislas Segy, African Sculpture Speaks. 4th edition, enlarged (New York, Da Capo Press, Inc., a subsidiary of Plenum Publishing Corporation, 1969, 1975), 7.

76. "Iside in Mostra a Milano. Un'inedita rassegna a Palazzo Reale", Archeologia Viva, marzo-april 1997. In the hostile protestant environment of the United States, it is remarkable that memory of Isis can be found at all; one significant source for the memory in the United States is Hilda Doolittle's (H.D.) Helen in Egypt. I am indebted to Clare Fisher for presenting this theme to our women's group.

77. See Birnbaum, Black Madonnas., Loc. Cit.

78. The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt, Loc. Cit. For Egyptian interchange with sub-Saharan Nubia, see 39-41, 202-19.

79. See Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Daughters of Anowa. African Women & Patriarchy (Maryknoll, N. Y., Orbis Books, 1995). 32.

80. Thompson, Loc. Cit. See 72, 130.

81. See Anna Joyce, "Dark Mother as Symbol of Resistance in Haiti. A Historical Overview",term paper for class, Dark Mother, California Institute of Integral Studies, Spring, 2000.

82. Dolores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness. The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 1994). See 185 ff.

83. Ibid. 196.

84. Ibid. 235.

85. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Mujerista Theology. A Theology for the Twenty-first Century (Orbis books, 1996).

86. Asphoel Long, In a Chairot Drawn by Lions. The Search for the Female in Deity (Freedom, Ca., The Crossing Press, 1993). 15.

87. Ibid. 14, 15.

88. Ibid. 16.

89. Ibid. 131.

90. Ibid. chapter 9.

91. Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible. 1,000-586 B. C. E. Center for Judaic-Christian Studies (New York, et al., Doubleday, 1992). See 77-78 passim.

92. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus. Miriam's Child. Sophia's Prophet. Critical Issues in Feminist Christology (New York, Continuum, 1994). 3,8.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid. 168.

95. Ibid. 162.

96. Luigi L. Cavalli- Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, "Demic Expansions and Human Evolution", Science, 29 January 1993, Volume 259, 639-646.

97. Erik Hornung, Conception of God in Ancient Egypt. The One and the Many. Translated from the German by John Baines /Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 171). 241.

98. Ibid. 252.

99. See Justin Vitiello, Poetics and Literature of the Sicilian Diaspora. Studies in Oral History and Story-Telling (San Francisco, Mellen Research University Press, 1993).

100. Necia Desiree Harkless, Poems and Heart Images, Loc. Cit., "Evolution".

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