Madre Oscura - Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum - Prologue Premises and methodologies

Prologue
premises and methodologies

In my sicilian/american childhood in Kansas City, Missouri, the favorite exclamation of my mother, grandmothers, and aunts was "bedda matri!"
Origins of this invocation to beautiful mother - expressing wonder, astonishment, gratitude - did not become clear to me for a long time, not until the 1990s, when my research on italian feminists and black madonnas (1) coincided with rereading african scholars and studying western geneticists and archeologists (2).
The hypothesis of this book is that everyone's genetic "beautiful mother" is african and dark, and that she is the oldest divinity we know. At the beginning of the third millennium, the consensus among world scientists is that Africa is "the cradle of the most ancient living beings that paleo- anthropologists are willing to call Homo," and that Africa is the place of origin of modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens. In the paleolithic epoch, signs of our oldest mother were the color ochre red (signifying blood of childbirth and mestruation) and the pubic V painted in African caves (3). After 50,000 BCE, migrating africans took these signs to all continents, where they may be seen today in the caves and cliffs of the world.
This study is an intercultural and interdisciplinary exploration of the african origin of the dark mother, and her continuing memory to the present. The first part presents contemporary findings of geneticists and archeologists. The rest of the book documents, in my research, and that of other cultural historians, the persistence of the belief in our oldest mother and in values associated with her - justice with compassion, equality, and transformation.
Belief in the african origin of world civilization, a civilization centered on a dark mother, was widely held in the ancient world, up until the first centuries of the common epoch when clerical and secular authorities destroyed her images and attempted to suppress her memory. Despite this campaign, her memory and values stayed alive in everyday and festival rituals of subaltern cultures of the world. In the late 20th century, the memory of the dark mother surfaced in writings of african and africanist scholars, in research of western scientists, and in women's movements of the world - particularly in that stream, becoming a river, called women's spirituality.
In the enterprise of rescuing the ancient belief in african origins of world civilization, the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop  (4) in the 1980s are foundational, but many african, african american, asian, and other world scholars have participated, notably W.E.B. DuBois earlier and Asa Hilliard, Molefi Asante, Robert Thompson, Ivan Van Sertima, Runoko Rashidi, Danita Redd, Henry Louis Gates, and Cornel West in our time. The memory has inspired the writings of african american women, e.g., Audrey Lorde, Alice Walker, Toni Morison, and bell hooks. Luisah Teish has been pivotal in recalling the charms, rituals, and seasonal celebrations of african civilization, as well as the nuanced nature of gender in african understanding  (5), a theme evident in contemporary flowering of lesbian and gay scholarship.
Two african american women who have been significant in rescuing the evidence of the african origin of world civilization are Drusilla Dunjee Houston earlier, and Matomah Alesha today. Their works exemplify african oral and nonverbal traditions, traditions that become powerful when complemented, as they are by Houston and Alesha, with other ways of knowing. In 1926 Houston wrote Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, exploring what scientists today confirm - the centrality and geographical breadth of early african civilization. In February 2001, as this book was being prepared for publication, Mara Keller referred me to a notice of the publication of Matomah Alesha's The First Book of the Black Goddess. Grounded in african oral and nonverbal traditions, as well as other ways of knowing, Alesha's book aims for wholeness.
In this spirit of wholeness, Matomah Alesha's book and this one - and hundreds of similar studies yet to be written grounded on african origins and african diasporas - may be considered complementary. Matomah Alesha writes in african oral and nonverbal traditions that are still alive. I am a sicilian/american woman recovering my suppressed sicilian ancestry, a journey that has taken me, via a circuitous route, to Africa  (6).   A primary aim of this book is to inspire others to track their origins and their diasporas, which, in the hypothesis of this book, will lead them to Africa. The corollary to this hypothesis is that all humans carry the memory (often preconscious) of the dark mother and her values.
In the spring of 1988 I was a resident scholar at the American Academy in Rome, when I thought to go to Sicily to observe rituals of easter week. I took my professional attitude, my notebook, camera, and tape recorder to Trapani, where on Thursday of holy week I watched the procession of the black madonna. And was changed forever.
Trapani is located on migration and trade routes of what is called the "african coast" of western Sicily. As the sirocco, the hot wind that comes up from the african desert, sent my senses reeling, I watched the mesmerizing spiral dance of the procession of the black madonna. Looking about me I noticed that everyone along the route of the procession was in tears…and that I was in tears. In retrospect, this experience seems to me an overwhelming bodily memory of the ancient african dark mother.
When I returned to Rome, I dreamed of my mother as a black madonna - and the next day learned she was dying. In the next year and a half, while she was dying, I wrote Black Madonnas. That moment on the african coast of Sicily, and the dream of my mother as a black madonna, have motivated my research ever since, deepening my training in intellectual history with what we are coming to recognize as many ways of knowing.
In his 1963 study of prehistory to the conquest of Canaan, Emmanuel Anati, italian archeologist, and today premier authority on the rock art of the world, stated that the oldest religion we know centers on a woman. "A developed religion with all beliefs, rules and conventional rites appeared for the first time only thirthy thousand years ago, as attested by repeated finds of mother goddess figurines and by the art in sanctuary caves".  (7)   In his 1995 book on the rock art of the world, Anati concluded, "All of us derive from this common ancestor."  (8)
In the 1970s and 80s, Marija Gimbutas, lithuanian/american archeologist, gathered evidence in archeology and mythology that the earliest divinity of Old Europe was a woman.  (9)   In the anxious male blacklash against feminism of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Gimbutas' work aroused hostile male response, as well as a following among women scholars, some of whom developed the academic study of women's spirituality.  (10) In 1993 Elinor Gadon, art historian and scholar of the hindu goddess, founded the program in women's spirituality at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
In 1995, in a covergence of african, asian, and western women and men scholars, the Journal of African Civilizations stated, "modern humanity originated in Africa, African people are the world's original people". Further, "the light of Sumerian civilization can only be attributed to the arrival of Black migrants from Africa's Nile Valley."  (11) In their book that same year on early african presence in Asia, Ivan Van Sertima and Runoko Rashidi concluded that earlier studies of african origins had now been confirmed by geneticists, that matrilineality characterized early african cultures, and that geneticists' confirmation in the DNA of african migrations to all continents was supported by material evidence of african presence in southeast Asia, on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, and the "jewel in the lotus," ethiopian presence in the civilization of the Indus Valley.  (12)
Perhaps the greatest casualty of cultural and academic wars in the west of the last quarter century was a defensive turning inward that prevented beleaguered cultural groups challenging the dominant paradigm - white male supremacy - from seeing that there were allies across the lines. Women scholars did not realize that men scientists were confirming the presence in prehistory of a woman divinity who preceded a male divinity. The reluctance of some woman scholars to acknowledge that the earliest woman divinity was african and dark may be attributed to the institutionalized racism of the west, as well as to unexamined premises of the now discredited multiregional theory of human origins.  (13)
African origin of the mother divinity of prehistory was obvious to Cheikh Anta Diop. In his 1981 study, Civilization or Barbarism. An Authentic Anthropology, the senegalese scholar placed a photo of a contemporary south african woman alongside a figurine of a goddess found on a 25,000 BCE path of african migrants into Europe. Similarity of body type in striking. (14)
In 2001, many scholars across the world are recovering the evidence of a woman divinity in prehistory and history - joining a large grassroots movement of people who find the theory compelling. The hypothesis of a prehistoric woman divinity has stimulated new thinking, generated new questions, and may be the most fuitful research thesis of our time. The theme may also offer a unifying metaphor for the peoples of our troubled world.
In the south and east of the world, images of a venerated dark woman of a thousand names are commonplaces. What may be new today  (15) is women's scholarly interest in the subject, a good deal of it by western women who have lived in a dominant motherless culture for a long time. Women of the north and west of the world, struck by the implications of a woman divinity whose civilization preceded patriarchal world religions, pose questions which are not news to women of the south and the east of the globe. The subject takes on a momentum of its own. Women of the south and east, a little irritated by women of the north and the west "discovering" the subject, take a fresh look at what they consider everyday knowledge.
Interest in the woman divinity - whom "new age" and other theorists call "goddess", third world scholars call "mother," and I call "dark mother" - is particularly vibrant in the San Francisco Bay area. This is not to understate wide interest in this subject throughout the United States, and the world, but to offer a specific case. On the west coast of the United States, among those studying prehistory from a feminist perspective are Joan Marler, presently writing a life and times of Marija Gimbutas, Betty Meador, jungian scholar and therapist who has published a study of Inanna of Sumer, China Galland, who has written a highly popular study of Tara and the black madonna. The Serpentina series created by Dianne Jenett and Judith Grahn brings together grassroots as well as academic researchers, as does the Lilith series founded by Deborah Grenn-Scott, and books and workshops of Vicki Noble, Starhawk, Z. Budapest, and others. Elinor Gadon has followed her widely read Once and Future Goddess with research on the hindu goddess, and a study of the sacred male.
My own indipendent research, which began at the end of the 60s as a search for my sicilian grandmothers, has become a journey on which I encountered italian feminists, and wrote a book about them, then the experience on the african coast of Sicily impelled me to write a book on black madonnas. At the beginning of the third millennium, I am sending this book, dark mother, to the publisher, knowing that the questions she evokes are endless.
My research, and similar research by others, seem to me to tap an underground stream of submerged wisdom that is rapidly rising throughout the world. The nature of this phenomenon defies early definition, but its contours may be suggested in subjects of doctoral dissertations on women's spirituality. Some that I helped guide in Elinor Gadon's cohort of students at the California Institute of Integral Studies include Valerie Kack Brice on dolmens and menhirs: older women and veneration of saint Anne in Brittany; Margaret Grove on gender motifs in north australian aboriginal rock art; Miri Haruach on the ancient african queendom and contemporary relevance of the Queen of Sheba; Dianne Jenett on Pongala menstrual rituals of Kerala, South India; Judith Grahn on metaformic theory and menstrual rituals of Kerala; Holly Reed on the psychological implication of Inanna's descent; Katarzyna Rolzinski on daughters as caregivers of dying mothers; Michele Radford on the heart in hindu mysticism; Tricia Grame on spiritual autobiography inferred from her sculptures and paintings, Jennifer Colby on Tonantzin/Guadalupe and transformational art. Dissertations in progress include Jean Demas on Pele of Hawaii, the U.S. constitution, and land rights; Louise Paré on bodily movement as transformative spiritual practice; Leah Taylor on spiritual authobiography as performance art of a jewish daughter; and Jan Marijac on the "end poverty now" initiative of an internet company.
Since 1999 I have been teaching in the California Institute of Integral Studies' women's spirituality program directed by Mara Keller, who has written a poetic and definitive scholarly study of the greater mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, and designed a challenging course of study for graduate scholars. The faculty of this program includes Arisika Razak who brings the african american oral tradition, the ancient wisdom of midwifery and the bodily wisdom of the dance to her classes in women's sacred arts, integral visions, and contemporary women's spirituality; I bring to my classes research on the dark mother, theories and methodologies of many ways of knowing, Sicily as a case of subaltern cultures venerating a dark mother, the dark mother as an emerging issue in the humanities, and the dark mother as symbol of transformation of the third millennium.
Also in this program, Joan Marler, intellectual heiress of Marija Gimbutas, brings this legacy to her classes in archeomythology; Eahr Joan has created Regenesis, a CD-Rom encyclopedia of women's myths and symbols; Charlene Spretnak teaches Mary and modernity and ecofeminism; Angana Chatterji's anthropology classes study postcolonial themes and cross-cultural issues in social and environmental justice; Rina Sircar teaches spiritual transformation in buddhist psychology; Tanya Wilkinson, the psychology of women; and Jennifer Berezan, women's sacred liturgy. Workshop presenters at CIIS place the academic study of women's spirituality in the company of acclaimed writers, painters, and scholars, notably Alice Walker, Mayumi Oda, Riane Eisler, Susan Griffin, and Elinor Gadon.
In 2001, theses and dissertations I have, or am mentoring, suggest the reach (often into other programs) of the study of women's spirituality; e.g., Angeleen Campra on "persistent and insistent" Sophia; Susan Carter on the japanese sun goddess Amaterasu; Donna Erickson on the history and contemporary relevance of trance healing; Jayne DeMente on a gender and diversity balanced curriculum for our youth, Marguerite Rigoglioso on Demetra and Proserpina and the Lago di Pergusa in Sicily; Gail Williams on her spiritual journey and transformative art; Chandra Alexandre on Kali and black madonnas, and Deborah Grenn-Scott on the lemba, african tribe who keep jewish traditions.
In the program in women's spirituality at New College in San Francisco, Judith Grahn, Ani Mander, Dianne Janett, Elinor Gadon, Margaret Grove and others teach archeomythology, art, poetry, metaformic theory, et al. At Sonoma State University, Dianne Jenett directs a weekend cohort in women's spirituality. At these schools as well as at CIIS, african americans and other scholars bring a double consciousness (ethnic and spiritual) to the subject; e.g., Ida Dunson documents the racism on U.S. census forms, and records voices of african/american women's spirituality. Ethnic consciousness, informed by knowledge of prehistory has spread from african/american women to other ethnic groups. This double consciousness, a concept first articulated by W.E.B.Du Bois, is evident in the contemporary work of many scholars who bring an ethnic perspective, as well as awareness of multiple ways of knowing, to their research in women's spirituality.
Looking to my own italian/american ethnic group, a spiritual and ethnic double consciousness was early present in the Beat poetry of Diane Di Prima, later in her La Loba series. A triple consciousness may be glimpsed today in the writings of Rose Romano, poet and novelist, who searches for her great grandmothers in Africa, her grandmothers in Sicily, and her mother in America. A many-faceted consciousness is apparent in the research of Marguerite Rigoglioso, who participates in archeological digs in Sicily and wrote an M.A. thesis at CIIS on Lake Pergusa at Enna in Sicily, relating world mithology to contemporary ecology issues. Louisa Calio's epic poem of her journey finds the "heart waters" of all humans in Africa. The dark mother informs Chickie Farella's plays, Giovanna Capone's poetry, Francesca Roccaforte's photography and writing, Diane Marto's performance art, and Joie Mellenbruch's biography of her sicilian/american mother. A double consciousness of african and sicilian inheritance has motivated Patrizia Tavormina to change her name to Nzula Angelina Ciatu. Not confined by gender boundaries, the dark mother has inspired the plays of Tommi Avicolli Mecca, paintings and poetry of Gian Banchero, poetry and scholarship of Justin Vitiello, and memoirs of Louis G. Chiavola. Louisa Calio suggests how the study of women's spirituality has deepened the social science mantra of race/gender/culture into profound understanding: "When love calls one past time, past place, gender or race/unto itself, we find our true self/our oneness again".  (16)
We have learned to study women's spirituality, not with universal abstractions, but with attention to class, age, and beliefs, as well as variables of race, gender, and culture, coming to a deeper understanding of race as one human race, while keeping in mind the enormous importance of difference in "racial" experience, gender as largely socially constructed, and culture as many-layered, requiring the study of subaltern as well as dominant cultures. We have come to understand that class takes many shapes, that age and generational group inform experience, and that beliefs, including those not conscious, are central to understanding one's self, other people, one's culture, other peoples' cultures, and work for a better world.
Personal journeys, sometimes unexpectedly, lead to wider implication. Elaine Soto, artist and thealogian  (17) (who has loaned her paintings of black madonnas to this book) searched in Puerto Rico for the black madonna for whom she is named; now she paints dark woman divinities of the world. I wrote a study of black madonnas of Italy, then was drawn to their origins in Africa and to research the theme of this book: prehistoric african migrants took signs of the belief in the dark mother to all continents, where the belief has persisted to the present in the art, folklore, and political hopes of subaltern cultures of the world…and perhaps in the submerged memory of all humans. Lydia Ruyle finds dark women divinities everywhere, sews their images onto banners, and takes the banners to enthusiastic audiences all over the globe.
Women's spirituality, a field of study with ancient roots, is changing the way we look at everything. Karen Smith, trained in women's spirituality at California Institute of Integral Studies, wrote a doctoral dissertation at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley on the pagan underpinning of veneration of saint Margaret. In Italy I am sometimes called a teologa, or woman thealogian, a startling term to me for my work as a historian tracking the african dark mother from prehistory, through history, to the present.  (18)
At the beginning of the third millennium, violence may cloud our vision, but I am heartened that men as well as women scholars of many cultural groups are embarked on similar journeys.  (19) Stewart Brand, a leader of the whole earth movement of the 1960s, encourages us to think, as do many scholars of women's spirituality (and peasants the world over) in the perspective of the "long now", simultaneously embracing prehistory, history, the present, and responsability for the future.  (20)
Before separation into male, female, ethnic, and other academic enclaves of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, as mentioned above, Emmanuel Anati, italian archeologist (whose name recalls the canaanite goddess Anat), confirmed in archeological evidence that the oldest divinity we know is a woman. In the 1980s and 90s, italian/american geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and international colleagues, tracked the DNA of select populations of the world and confirmed origins of modern humans in sub-saharan Africa, the several "Eves" of Africa, and african migrations of homo sapiens sapiens to all continents after 50,000 BCE.  (21)

N° 1.

Indipendently, in his archive of rock art of the world, Centro Camuno Studi Preistorici at Capo di Ponte in Italy, Anati confirmed Cavalli-Sforza's findings and documented that the richest prehistoric cliff art of the world is found in sub-saharan Africa, where modern humans emerged. Anati's scholarship also converged with scholars of women's spirituality, for whom the color red ochre is a sign of a venerated woman. Anati, a jungian, calls the color ochre red "the most ancient evidence of artistic creation in the world".  (22)
Cathedrals of tribal peoples, for Anati, are not the massive monuments constructed by autocratic governments, like the acropolis of Athens and pyramids of Egypt, but rock paintings found in central and south Africa with a predominance of the color red or purple, and characterized by spirals, straight or wavy lines, petals, and concentric circles in series  (23)  - signs, according to Marija Gimbutas, of the woman divinity of prehistory. Holding the concept of archetypes, Anati points out that primordial art has "almost identical characteristics in the entire world", thereby implicitly confirming geneticist Cavalli-Sforza's concept of demic migrations, wherein people take their beliefs with them when they migrate.  (24)
The boundary between religion and art, for Anati, is not clear. His timeline of the path of creative art in caves and cliffs of the world begins 40,000 years ago in central and south Africa, then into other parts of Africa; 35,000 years ago from Africa into Asia; 34,000 years ago from Africa into Europe; 22,000 years ago from Africa and Asia into the Americas (the oldest drawing is in Brazil); and 22,000 years ago from Africa and Asia into Australia. The dates closely follow those of african migrations in the world confirmed in DNA evidence. (see map). Primordial art has different expressions, but the "common matrix", for Anati, is Africa.  (25)
The centrality of a venerated woman in folklore of Old Europe was uncovered in the 1980s by Marija Gimbutas in work linking archeology and mithology, a field she called archeomythology. Independently, Carlo Ginzburg confirmed the centrality of a woman in the folklore of the world. My work, and that of the others, on the many images of black madonnas, points to the centrality of a dark woman in european folklore, converging with research of others on black madonnas and other dark women divinities of Africa, Asia, Europe, north and south America, and Oceania.  (26)
The scholarship of these and other scholars provides the themes of this book - that in prehistory symbols of the african dark mother were carried across the earth by african migrants, then carried by migatory farmers from west Asia, and then in late antiquity by canaanite traders. In the common epoch, the memory was transmitted in stories and rituals associated with icons of black madonnas and of other dark women divinities. Yet, as we shall see, the story is very complex. Similar to a polyphonic melody, riffs sound notes of different cultures while the continuing bass resonance of the main melody carries the memory of everyone's dark african mother.
In this study, her memory is explored in everyday and festival rituals of dark others of Europe and the United States - women, jews, muslims, heretics, witches - in songs, stories, foods, vendor songs, literature, and art and today in graffiti, bumper stickers exclamations, and banners of political uprisings. In the late 1960s, inaugurating the contemporary cycle of feminism, women of the world formed the hands gesture of the pubic V and remembered the primordial mother's values in their work for justice, equality, and respect for the earth and all its creatures. (27) In 2001, from different places, different fields of scholarship - and with different concerns - women and men scholars may be converging in a consensus that may already exist in the unarticulated knowledges of peoples of the earth. Noam Chomsky, authority in semiotics, holds that "the genetic endowment constitutes what we 'remember from an earlier existence' ".  (28)
This book is one historian's attempt to bring together scientific documentation of african origins of the dark mother with evidence of cultural history for the hypothesis that the memory of the dark mother and her values have persisted for millennia, not only among women but among men - a memory that has acted as a subversive undertow to more than 2,000 years of the dominant violent civilization of the west.
Today her memory may be considered a metaphor of healing, as well as a metaphor of becoming. The mitochrondial energy in the DNA that we inherit from our mothers is shaped in the form of two embracing serpents, or a double helix, which Cavalli-Sforza calls "symbol of the evolution of the universe...the unlimited possibilities of becoming."  (29) The caduceus, helix symbol of healing and becoming, may be considered a symbol of this book.
Aware of the partiality of all knowledge, I have looked to sources in science and in cultural history for check and balance. Science and cultural history both affirm african origins and the continuing memory of the dark mother. In this old/new understanding, I include my own story - the deep education of a sicilian/american woman. In the 1960s, coinciding with completion of study for the doctorate in U.S. and European history, I was swept into that decade's passionate activism against racism and imperialism. In 1969, feeling I had been educated away from my roots, I went to Italy in search of my sicilian grandmothers. In the first stage of the journey I found italian feminists, whose groundedness implied they knew something that I did not know. Motivated to go beyond my training as a historian, wherein research used to be fastened solely to documents written by men supporting the dominant patriarchal culture, I embarked, along with a generation of women scholars, on the journey of helping to recover the unrecorded history of women.
My feminism is close to the womanism articulated by Alice Walker and other african-american women,  (30) joining concern for women with concern for all the subordinated others whose stories have been left out of dominant histories. This may be considered vernacular history; vernaculus, in latin, means slave.  (31)   For women historians, vernacular history means excavating the subordinated, or negated, cultures of women of the world. Antonio Gramsci, major marxist theorist of Italy - and major contemporary theorist of the third world - emphasized the difference of beliefs of subaltern cultures (visible in folklore) from beliefs of the dominant culture. Gramsci's insight has helped me understand women's cultures, and to realize that my errand is to recover the deep histories of men as well as of women-people who, in addition to being exploited economically, had their cultures negated by white male elites, a term somewhat more precise than patriarchy.
Contemporary thealogian Karen Smith reminds us that women's civilization is submerged knowledge. It is "history we don't have, civilization that we don't remember, and traditions that did not get passed down to us."  (32)   This submerged knowledge is expressed by the body, according to Luce Irigaray,  (33) and requires attention, as Simone Weil pointed out.  (34)
After publication in 1986 of my Liberazione della donna. Feminism in Italy in 1986, I wandered around Italy watching people act out deep beliefs in everyday religious and political rituals, deep beliefs, I discovered, that circle a dark mother.
In Italy she is called la dea madre, or god the mother. In the common epoch her memory and values were transmitted by comari, or godmothers, women who bonded with each other in her memory, helped one another birthing, caring for children, the sick, the eldery, the dying, while remembering and envisioning a better world. Nurturing all life, traditional peasant godmothers/grandmothers of Italy, and their sisters elsewhere, are similar to contemporary womanists and earth-bonded feminists. My grandmothers, comari of Sicily, and their sisters in other countries, nonviolently resisted violent patriarchy in everyday rituals, satirized injustice during carnevale, hearthened one another in adversity, and inspired their men and children to work for a better life - for everyone.
In the late 1980s while observing everyday and festival rituals of Italy, I read the books of Marija Gimbutas. In Italy, archeological ruins of the many images of our ancient mother are often located underneath or near sanctuaries of black madonnas. In the common epoch these were places of religious heresy, persecution of witches, and sites of popular uprisings of dark others for justice. Images of black madonnas, and of other dark women divinities, I came to realize, may be considered signs of resistance to the dominant culture of church and state, as well as signs of the dark mother's values - justice with compassion, and equality.   (35)
Search for my sicilian godmothers/grandmothers led me first to Sicily, then to Africa, then to west Asia where in 40,000 BCE african migrants created the "oldest sanctuary in the world." Later, this african sanctuary became the site of Mount Sinai, foundation place of judaism, christianity, and islam (see chapter two, this work). On migratory routes of paleolithic africans, then on paths of neolithic west asian farmers, then on trade routes of semitic canaanites, people looked to a dark woman divinity, to whom they built, in the common epoch, sancturaries of black madonnas (see my Black Madonnas as well as chapter four of this work).
Returning to my specific case of this very large story, in my ancestral regions on the african coast of western and northwestern Sicily, and in the southeastern iblean mountains named for the dark anatolian mother Cybele, people have historically risen up against injustice, from the Sicilian Vespers in the 13th century to the encampment of women of the world at Comiso in 1983, where they denounced Nato nuclear missiles and declared their vision of a radically democratic and green world.
Methodologically, I am both traditional and postmodern. The long and deep story of the dark mother of prehistory, whose memory has persisted underneath the dominant history of the historical epoch, may be studied, in my view, with traditional methods of researching and writing history; i.e., with empirical verification in specific place and time.  (36)   Yet studied with imagination about sources,  (37)   with the epistemological maturity for which postmodernism reaches, and with the wisdom that there are many ways of knowing.   (38) Science and religion are both myths, said George Santayana, but myths are far from signifying nothing.  (39)   In sicilian culture we say stories rather than myths.
In this study, scientific findings and stories and rituals of popular cultural history have been related to my particular story, that of a mediterranean, specifically sicilian/american woman, whose ancestors, like the ancestors of every person on earth, originated in Africa. African migrations are the basic threads in my genetic tapestry, as they are in the genetic weave of all humans. My sicilian genetic tapestry is a ground pattern of african migrants, crossed by returning threads of west asian migrants and traders from Anatolia and semitic Canaan, with a warp of greek and roman invaders, more semitic strands of israelites in diaspora, a horizontal and circular weft of african/semitic moors expanding into Europe, and a woof of northern european adventurers and conquerors of Sicily from places later called Germany, Scandinavia, France, Spain, Austria, and northern Italy.
My present world view - that may have always been present in deep layers of my unconscious - surfaced in the 1960s during the african american civil rights movement and subsequent movements of ethnic and gender consciousness that converged with the tidal movements against racism and imperialism that characterized that decade.  (40)
In the contemporary controversy over aryan versus african/semitic origins of world civilization, I respect, and largely agree with, Martin Bernal's documentation of african and levantine origins of high greek culture.  (41)   But I bring a woman's perspective to the subject, a view influenced by Simone Weil, who admired the greeks, but considered the Iliad a document of male violence. Whatever its glories, the high culture of Greece reflected the violence of indo-european/aryan speakers who invaded Macedonia and Dalmatia in the millennium before the common era, masculinized and distorted the image of the dark mother, tortured and overworked slaves, and subordinated women. Although the memory of the dark mother pulsed beneath the myths, rituals, art, and drama of high greek culture,  (42)   it was, despite the accolades of 19th and 20th century western theorists, characterized by violence and hierarchical subordination of people. As Martin Bernal has documented, the high culture of Greece became the aryan icon of european/american racists and imperialists of the late 19th century, and of nazis, white supremists, and people who transmit racism, often unknowingly, in our time.
Sicily is my base point of reference, not only because it is my ancestral place, but because ancients called this island crossroad of Africa, Asia and Europe, "the middle of the earth". Like other mediterranean islands, Sicily was early reached by paleolithic african migrants, then by neolithic migrants from Anatolia, later by west asian canaanite traders, and, in the common epoch, by moors from Africa. After 4000 BCE, indo-european aryan speakers, embodied later in dominant elites of Greece and Rome, introduced violence into Sicily, a violence that included slavery and other hierarchical oppression. In the common epoch, sicilians were subjected to greek, roman, byzantine, and then northern european rule, culminating in the miseria (miserable poverty) of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The miseria propelled sicilians to find work in northern Europe and to immigrate to north and south America, where they experienced, along with other dark others of the world, racism, exploitation, and negation of their culture. (see chapter 8).
I have put african origins, godmothers, and our oldest mother's memory/promise into a story based on empirical data. At this juncture of world history, Noam Chomsky points out, a story may be a narrative reaching for a time when all of us look at ourselves, and others, differently. For Chomsky, scholars of semiotics, the potential for transformation exists in the core part of human language in mechanisms relating sound and meaning, "an innate grammar" not only "largely universal, but. virtually optimal".  (43) Chomsky's view is similar to that of Gramsci who held that a sense of justice (buon senso) exists in all peoples, evident in stories everyday and festival rituals, and in celebratory moments of politics. Chomsky's and Gramsci's views are close to Emmanuel Anati's jungian belief that mythology is a mirror of our collective memory, a memory that has maintained itself, "almost astonishingly," from prehistoric rock art to the renaissance art of Giotto, to the 20th century genius of Joan Miro and Marc Chagall.   (44)
This book takes the form of the spiral view of history - before going forward, we must make a swing backward. I begin with the dark mother of Africa, Canaan, Sicily, and Malta, then focus on santa Lucia, black madonnas of Europe, my sicilian godmothers/grandmothers who, along with other dark others of Europe, looked to the dark mother. The story is placed in comparative perspective with the migration of my grandparents - with their belief in "bedda matri" - to the United States where they met offshoots of patriarchy - racism, social control of dark others, and education/inculcation for americanization. In counterpoint, I study the italian women's movement, and women's alliances with nonviolent men and students as a case of the continuing live memory of the values of the ancient mother. World possibility is suggested in the vibrant memory of the dark mother at the Beijing women's conference in 1995. and in contemporary signs of transformation.
For this study, I am grateful, above all, to my sicilian godmothers/grandmothers who kept the memory and vision of the dark mother. And to my sicilian grandfathers who learned justice and equality in stories their mothers told them. Analogously I am indebted to womanist/feminist scholars and also to male theorists and scientists who implicitly hold our oldest mother's value of transformation. Among male theorists, perhaps my largest dept is to Antonio Gramsci, and other scholars with a dynamic view of history - among them the great neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico. In La Scienza Nuova (1744) Vico said that the city of god is made by god, but humans make societies, that humans will make good societies insofar as they look to "common wisdom", or popular beliefs conveying the "poetic wisdom" of our oldest ancestors.
This book may be considered an attempt to retrieve this poetic wisdom - expressed in science, popular beliefs, and many other ways of knowing - for the generation anew of a just and green world.

Notes

1. See note on style.

2. The first partof this prologue is a shortened version of my invited paper for the XVYI International Valcamonica Symposium of Archeologists, "Prehistoric and tribal art. Deciphering the Image", Centro Camuno Studi Preistorici; Icoms International Committee on Rock Art, Darfo Boario Terme, Italia, September 21-26, 1999, a paper that formed the ground of chapters one and two of this book.

3. See writings of Judith Grahn, notably her Ph.D. dissertation, for the significance of the color ochre red; see writings of Elinor Gadon for significance of the public V.

4. Cheikh Anta Diop's works are those of a medical scientist of America who carried the memory. Drusilla Dunjee Houston, in her Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, first published in 1926, carried the memory of african origins of world civilization and buttressed the memory with wide research.( Baltimore, Maryland, Black Classic Press, 1985). A good deal of Houston's research was later confirmed by Cheikh Anta Diop in Civilization or Barbarism. An Authentic Anthropology (Presence Africaine, Paris, 1981, Brooklyn, N.Y., Lawrence Hill Books, 1991) Diop pointed out, before feminist scholares did so, that the oldest divinity we know was an african women.

5. Luisah Teish, Jambalaya. The Natural Woman's of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (San Francisco, HarperCollins, 1985); Carnival of the Spirit. Seasonal Celebrations and Rites of Passage ( HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).

6. See footnote 3 above.

7. Emmanuel Anati, Palestine before the Hebrews. A History from the Earliest Arrival of Man to the Conquest of Canaan (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 38.

8. Anati, Il museo Immaginario della Preistoria. L'arte Rupestre nel mondo (Milano, Editoriale Jaca Book SpA, 1995) 309.

9. Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess, ed., Joan Marler (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991). Marija Gimbutas, The Languaue of the Goddess, Foreword, Joseph Campbell (HarperSanFrancisco, 1980).

10. For a eurocentric male view, see Colin Renfrew's writings; e.g., "Archaeology, Genetics and Linguistic Diversity: Towards a New Synthesis", the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures, University of California, Berkeley, April 15, 1997.

11. See volumes and papers of the Journal of African Civilizations, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

12. Ibid. 25, 30.

13. Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor intuited african origins of the dark mother in The Great Cosmic Mother. Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (HarperSanFrancisco, 1987, 1988.). Merlin Stone was early aware of the racism, as well as sexism, that surrounds the subject of the goddess; see When God was a Woman (New York, Harcout Brace Jovanovich, 1978).

14. Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism. An Authentic Anthropology. First published by Presence Africaine, Paris 1981; (Brooklyn, N. Y., Lawrence Hill Books, 1991). 48

15. Not entirely new. The scholarship of Bachhoven and other 19th century male scholars preceded contemporary scholarly work in women's spirituality. See Susan Gail Carter's Ph.D dissertation on Amaterasu (CIIS, 2001) which has an excellent synthesis of this literature.

16. Louisa Calio, Journey to the Heart Waters ( unpublished mss., 1999). 71.

17. Theaologian, for many feminists, is the preferred spelling.

18. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Liberazione della donna. Feminism in Italy (Middletown, Ct., Wesleyan university Press, 1986, 1988); Black Madonnas. Feminism, religion, and politics in Italy (Boston, Ma., Northeastern University Press, 1993; Black Madonnas. Femminismo e Politica in Italia (Bari, Italia, Palomar Editrice, 1997; iUniverse reprint edition, 2000).

19. See Randy Conner, et al. Cassell's Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit. Gay, Lesbian Bisexual, and Transgender Lore (London, Cassell, 1997). Carolyn McVickar Edwards, Sun Stories (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995). Hey Paesan! Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent, Edited by Giovanna (Janet) Capone, Denise Nico Leto, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca (Oakland, Ca.,Three Guineas Press, 1999).

20. Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now. Time and Responsibility. The ideas behind the world's slowest computer (New York, Basic Books, 1999).

21. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, et al. History and Geography of Human Genes, (Princeton University Press, 1994). Louise Levathes,"A Geneticist Maps Ancient Migrations", New York Times, Science Times, Jule 27, 1993.

22. Anati, Arte Rupestre. Il linguaggio dei primordi. Vol. XII, Edizione Italiana, 1994 (Edizioni del Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici, Capo di Ponte -BS- Italia, pp.23,59).

23. Anati, Il Museo Immaginario, Loc. Cit., 221.

24. Ibid, 217-18

25. Ibidem.

26. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (Originally Published in Italy as Storia Notturna, 1989; Penguin Books, 1991).

27. Lucia C. Birnbaum, Liberazione della Donna. Feminism in Italy (Wesleyan University Press, 1986, 1988). Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare. Interviews with David Barsamian (Monroe, Maine, Common Courage Press, 1996). 2.

28. Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare. Loc. Cit., 2.

29. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, History and Geography of Human Genes. Loc. Cit.

30. Alice Walker, In Search of our Mother's Gardens (New York, Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1983).

31. Karen Smith, "Neither Here nor There. The Epistemology of the In-Between", unpublished paper, 1996.

32. Ibidem.

33. A good introduction to Irigaray, is the Irigaray Reader, edited with an introduction by Margaret Whitford (Cambridge, Ma., Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1991).

34. See Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, "Simone Weil and Transformation in Italy", Conference on Simone Weil, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, April 27, 1996.

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

36. See Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, "Marija Gimbutas and the Change of Paradigm", From the Realm of the Ancestors. An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas (Manchester, Ct., Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, Inc., 1997).

37. An excellent study that is very imaginative about sources is Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women's Work. The First 20,000 Years. Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times (New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company, 1994). I thank Yana Womack for giving me this book.

38. See Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real. Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (Reading, Ma. Addison Wesley Pubblishing Company, Inc. 1997).

39. George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith. An Introduction to a System of Philosophy. In Phylosophy of Santayana, edited by Irwin Edman (New York, Modern Library, 1942).

40. See Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Jesus. Miriam's Child. Sophia's Prophet. Issues in feminist Christology (New York, Continuum, 1994).

41. Martin Bernal, Black Athena. The AfroAsiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press). Volume I The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, 1987. Volume II The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence, 1991).

42. Robert Bellah proposed this musical metaphor in his essay, "The Five Religions of Modern Italy". In Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1980).

43. Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare. Loc. Cit., 2.

44. See Chapter two, this work.