Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, paper for session, "Our African Black Mother and a Just, not Violent World," conference of the American Italian Historical Association, on Folklore, Los Angeles November 4-6, 2005. This paper is chapter one of my book in progress, the future has an ancient heart, Sardinia, Sicily, Tuscany in Italy, Andalucia in Spain, and the south of France (2006). The essay was first written in the days circling summer solstice 2003 and revisited summer solstice 2005.

dark wheat and red poppies

Notes of a sicilian/american woman's journey to knowing the african origins and inherent spirituality of all humans, knowledge that has the possibility of non-violently eliminating racism, sexism, imperialism, and war[1]

I have the odd habit of rereading what I have written to find out what I mean, as well as rereading my books to find out what motivated me to undertake the research and writing. My underlying motivation, as far as I can tell, for the three books I've written in the last decade and a half is revulsion against the violence of racism and its analogous manifestations - - sexism, imperialism, and the wholesale murder of people called war.

In retrospect I am also astonished at the ocean of submerged knowledge underneath what we think we know. In this essay I shall explore my path from 1969 when I was an assistant professor of U. S. history at San Francisco State supporting the student/professor strike against racism and imperialism and was fired -- to the present when I am a professor of Philosophy and Religion in the Women's Spiritual program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. CIIS, a graduate university whose educational mission is integrating mind, body, and spirit, honors many ways of knowing, and encourages the responsibility of scholars to speak truth to power.

It was not until after I finished the dissertation in 1964 that I realized that I had uncovered racist premises of the dominant protestant culture in the U. S, and racist origins of the social sciences in the U. S. (and elsewhere), as well as the manipulation of knowledge by dominant elites. The myopias of my doctoral training in history may be suggested in that I wrote a dissertation on the behaviorist controversy in the U.S. and did not notice that there were no women in the discussion.

In 1964 when the african/american civil rights movement sparked into flame, and subsequently ignited the consciousness of other cultural groups, I graduated with a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, became an assistant professor of U. S. history at San Francisco State, and helped to found the radically democratic Peace and Freedom party. At San Francisco State, I supported the student/professor strike against racism and imperialism and was fired late in 1968 . Enfervored by a left political perspective and an emerging ethnic and gender consciousness,I went to Italy in 1969 to search for my grandmothers. .

I stepped off the plane into a revolutionary situation: five million italians (I like to downcase)[2] were in the streets and feminists carried banners, "There is no revolution without women's liberation. There is no women's liberation without revolution." Italian women, I thought, know something that italian/american women do not know.

Looking for beliefs underneath slogans, I studied the graffiti in women's centers, listened to silences, and was drawn to peasant pilgrimages, where I encountered the passion evoked by black madonnas. My book on italian feminists was published [3] Thinking about Liberazione della donna later, I have the sense that this powerful women's movement was grounded on what italian women call an "unedited" interpretation of judeo/christian gospels, beliefs whose metaphor, for me, is black madonnas and other dark women divinities of earth. This spiritual perspective joined with an "unedited" interpretation of marxism, tapping folklore beliefs in justice and equality, held revolutionary implications in Italy then, and now - - when transformation connotes nonviolent revolution. Theoretically, this is close to the marxism of Antonio Gramsci.

Easter week in 1988 at Trapani, Sicily, this knowledge was conveyed to me in a bodily understanding of ritual when I watched the procession of the black madonna on Thursday. Everyone along the procession route was in tears. . . and I, too, was crying.. .for reasons not known to me cognitively but that I was to pursue for the rest of my life. . A defining moment, .I returned to Rome , dreamed of my mother as a black madonna, and the next day learned she was dying. In the next eighteen months while she was dying of cancer, I wrote Black Madonnas. Feminism, religion, and politics in Italy.[4]

After 1987, an affiliated scholar of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University, I met L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, premier world geneticist, who confirmed in the DNA the african origins of all humans, african migrations to all continents after 50,000 BCE, and the significant datum: there is one human race ands it began in Africa. [5] In Italy in this same period, I met Emmanuel Anati, italian archeologist who found that migrating africans in 40,000 BCE created the earliest sanctuary in the world at Har Karkom in the Sinai peninsula, a sanctuary marked by dolmens and menhirs incised with human features. Also known as Mount Sinai, this african sanctuary is the origin place of judaism, christianity, and islam. The implications of this took a while to sink in.

Anatis study of cave and cliff art of the world complemented Cavalli-Sforza's findings in genetics with evidence in rock art that africans in migration to all continents took with them signs, notably the color ochre red and the pubic V, pointing to women's generation of all life. Genetics research of Cavalli-Sforza and archeological research of Anati converged with my study of feminist scholars, notably Marija Gimbutas, who documented in archeology and mythology the veneration of a woman divinity in Old Europe, a veneration that preceded- -by eons- - worship of the male god of judaism/christianity/islam.[6] Elinor Gadon's research in art history pointed to the ubiquity of the pubic V;[7] Judith Grahn's metaformic theory analyzed ochre red (color of menstrual blood) as a metaform of the goddess experienced by every woman [8], and my own journey to find my sicilian grandmothers/godmothers came together- - leading me to write dark mother. african origins and godmothers, published late in 2001.[9] .

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Thinking about my beliefs, books, and continuing activism , it seems to me that my radical activism in the 1960s, that decade when white anglo-saxon protestant cultural and political hegemony in the United States was irrevocably dented by dark outsiders, has shaped the beliefs underlying my subsequent professional and personal life. These beliefs were given another dimension in 1970 when I saw Mt. Erice, in my sicilian homeland,. This is the region of my maternal ancestors at Erice near Palermo. off what my 19th century map of Sicily calls the African Sea, where primordial africans sailed or walked.. This vision in 1970, at the outset of researching and writing three books, was of the mountain at Erice - - a mountain that looks like a sleeping woman- - with a mantle of dark wheat and red poppies. In my 2001 study tour of Sicily the vision recurred , this time in a field of dark wheat and red poppies at Enna, setting of the major mother/daughter myth of Demetra and Proserpina at the Lago di Pergusa which Marguerite Rigoglioso has pointed out, is a lake that periodically turns red.[10]

Studying ancient history and mythology, I learned that dark wheat was associated with the african dark mother Isis and that red poppies were associated with the african dark mother Tanit, who was brought to Erice by semitic canaanites (phoenicians) of west Asia who were based after 800 BCE in Carthage, Africa, the same date they founded Palermo, place of my maternal ancestors in Sicily.

Canaanites in western Sicily, in the century and a half before Jesus, retraced prehistoric african migration paths, founding outposts and entrepots at Mozia off Trapani, at Palermo and nearby Erice, as well as in southeastern Sicily at Ragusa Ibla, my ancestral paternal town, and at Syracuse, where santa Lucia (for whom I am named) lived and was martyred. At Erice in the 1500 years before Mary and Jesus, canaanites built a temple to african Tanit and semitic Astarte. Here greeks worshipped Aphrodite , romans venerated Venus, and sailors, from time immemorial, climbed the mountain to Erice carrying wine for priestesses of the dark mother of many names. In the common epoch, christians built a church on the slopes of Erice to the black madonna of Custonaci. Always a sacred place, every springtime, from this mountain top, sicilians release doves to return to Africa.[11]

Vision preceded the word. Before I studied genetics, archeology, ancient history, mythology and identified my research with feminist cultural history, the vision at Erice of a dark woman divinity as mountain with a mantle of dark wheat and red poppies non-cognitively conveyed (I would realize later) that my ancient ancestors were africans who venerated a dark mother, that my heritage was ultimately african, then crossed by several west asian manifestations: first anatolians, and then semites- - canaanites, israelites, moors, as well as european manifestations: greek, roman, and christian. This was a genetic tree identified with a dark woman divinity.

After the vision at Erice, I studied the history of italian women and the subaltern cultures of Europe who looked to black madonnas, but the folk meaning of black madonnas - - death and regeneration - -did not arrive until 1988 when a dream of a black madonna was an omen of my mother's death. The regenerative meaning of black madonnas, and of all dark women divinities of earth, would thereafter pull me . . . personally and professionally.

All this has led me to a fascination with submerged beliefs, how we know, and when knowing becomes compelling. Preparing for a study trip to Spain in March 2003, I knew about the inquisition from my doctoral studies in european history. With eyes that now had studied folklore, I realized that the inquisition was intent on destroying our grandmothers' (and grandfathers') everyday ways of knowing- - ways of knowing ultimately grounded on a mother-centered universe.

It has become my continuing hypothesis that despite father-centered doctrines in jewish, christian, and islamic scriptures, despite religious and secular attempts to destroy heresies and heretics that transmitted ancient, ultimately african, beliefs, common people, in rituals, icons, and other folklore, have kept their ancient belief in the dark mother as well as her values of justice with compassion/nurturance/ healing, equality of all her creatures,, and transformation. Or, nonviolent cultural and political revolution.

In the modern epoch, heresies and womens everyday rituals so threatened hegemonic aims of vatican and state that dominant religious/secular elites persecuted and killed tens of thousands (some say millions) of dark others - - moors, jews, dissenting christians, and other heretics, notably women. The inquisition pattern of dominant elites, who considered themselves white, killing dark others was to have a long life. . . lasting to our time . . . notably in the attempt of the Bush administration of the United States to establish world hegemony with a pre-emptive war on dark others in Iraq.

In the United States in the early twentieth century, earlier strategies of killing, enslaving, exploiting dark others (native americans, african americans, latin americans, asian americans) were replaced by subtler methods of destruction. Institutionalized racism perpetuated the subordination of dark others (african slaves, native americans, mexican americans, irish americans, asian Americans). Now "new immigrants" to the United States from southern and eastern Europe (southern italians, jews, greeks, slavs, et al.), as well as earlier dark others, were subjected to a public education that banished as "superstition" their ancestral ways of knowing. Underlying this was the early 20th century protestant effort for "social control" which developed into the behaviorist movement to make psychology (and all social studies) a science; an effort that in "enlightened behaviorism" became a method, in effect, of establishing science as the only correct way of knowing. Although later accompanied by the realization that the scientific method was a fair way of establishing truth in a multicultural society , in effect (by accepting the ethnic pyramid of culturally skewed results of intelligence tests) this became a method for enabling "white" male elites to inculcate in the dark "masses" whatever beliefs were needed for "social control", or the hegemony of a small cultural and political male elite who considered themselves entitled and white.[12]

In the last quarter of the 20th century, along with disillusionment with science and a dawning awareness of the manipulation of knowledge by white elites, a revival of interest in traditional (or, our grandmothers' ways of knowing) arose. . . notably in the women's movement and its offshoot, womens spirituality. For example, as I write, Kalli Halvorson has just explained the astrological implications of my name. A stellar product of U. S. public education, I would not, earlier, have been open to astrology, an everyday way of knowing of our grandparents,. Now I listened to Kalli telling me that Lucia"refers to the light of the sun. This is the light of spirit, of God/Goddess, of the crown chakra. Because the Light of the sun is precisely what returns to the northern hemisphere in winter [Santa Lucia's day is December 13, the old calendar date of the winter solstice]. . Patriarchy, Kalli advised, made the Sun into the Son, with Christ as the male solar child and sacred king with Jesus considered to be born at the winter solstice." [13] Only very recently, this summer in France, did I realize that glorious fields of sunflowers held a particular meaning for me (see below).

Submerged knowledge, I have discovered, may hide in names. My mother's maiden name, Cipolla, in folklore means onion. Its metaformic meaning is vulva -- sign of the african dark mother found on the walls of caves and cliffs of all continents- - sign first carried by primordial african migrants and then remembered by return (ultimately african) migrants.

Submerged knowledge may also hide in science; e.g. contemporary genetics and archeology have helped me trace my spiritual biography from the time primordial africans sailed or walked up the western coast of Sicily to Trapani, Palermo, and Erice, region of my maternal ancestors. Scientists have also tracked the later major diaspora into Sicily after10,000 BCE when west asians (originally african) from Anatolia brought images of the dark mother Cybele to southeast Sicily, place of my paternal ancestors. My grandmothers in this region, I have learned from reading volumes of folklore, bonded with the earth with bared breasts. Southeastern Sicily, at Syracuse, was the site of the story of the christian virgin martyr Lucia. The church appropriated santa Lucia for its purposes , but people venerated her as a santone or "great saint" (as was Maria) whose gifts are very similar to those of african Isis- -vision, nurturance, and wisdom,[14] values I have taken as my own.

Animals may offer signs; e.g., black cats and a black bird. Sicily's many images in museums and carnivals of Bastet, black cat familiar of Isis, have intrigued me, particularly since a black cat is not only associated with the early dark mother Isis, but later with witches, feminists, T.S.Eliot, and with my own sister, Joie, for whom cats have been a life-long passion. In my experience, it is a black bird, whose word in italian is ciavola- - my father's original name that was changed by french invaders to Chiavola. A black bird is associated with Isis. In its sicilian manifestion, this black bird is streaked with red and yellow. At critical junctures in my research looking for the dark mother in Sicily, this black bird has perched on a nearby bush or electrical wire to look at me until I paid attention. According to a theorist of animal spirituality, the black bird is a manifestation of the dark mother.[15]

History sometimes hides inside names: In Sicily the diminutive affectionate name for Cybele, anatolian image of the african dark mother, was Ibla nera, or black Ibla. Greeks changed her name to Ibla Herae, thereby subordinating the dark mother to Hera, jealous wife of Zeus. . . as well as obliterating the significant datum that the woman divinity was black and ultimately african.

Serendipity sometimes intervenes. In our 2001 study tour of Sicily while looking for greek ruins in southeast Sicily, Mary Beth Moser insisted we go down a cow path where we found a church under reconstruction, and closed. Chickie Farella used her womanly wiles on workmen who got us into the closed church. . . where we discovered the oldest madonna in christendom, a black madonna. Brucoli on the sea, located on a prehistoric african navigation path, later became a canaanite entrepot, and thereafter a refuge for jews fleeing roman persecution. At Brucoli, in the third century of the common era, christians built a church to a black madonna, calling her Madonna dell'Adonai, hebrew name for god. The name of this oldest black madonna in christendom suggests the fluidity between beliefs of judaism and christianity in the first centuries of the common epoch, and, perhaps, the submerged shared l belief of judaism and christianity in a dark mother.[16]

On-site observation helps us realize that the same image can persist over centuries of time in different places. In southeast Sicily, students examined ancient stone images of Cybele. I realized how similar the 6800 BCE anatolian statue of Cybele at Catal Hoyuk is to the 600 BCE statue of Cybele found at Megara Hyblaea in southeast Sicily. The anatolian statue of Cybele is of a mother giving birth; the sicilian icon at Megara Hyblaea is a statue of a mother suckling two babies. Both images of the dark mother symbolize nurturance ; both mothers are protected by big cats, or lions.

Sometimes there is a time delay between what one knows intellectually and what one knows in a deep bodily way later. Intellectually I earlier knew that Cybele was venerated in Sicily as Ibla Nera, or black Ibla. Knowing this in my body did not happen until I walked inside the Chiavola dwelling in Ragusa Ibla where my ancestors , as well as my immediate grandparents, and their children including my father lived. My ancestral paternal family home is dug into the flanks of the Iblean mountains named for the dark mother Cybele, mountains that embrace Ragusa Ibla and look toward Africa. Not until I was inside my family's ancient cave home did Ibodily understand the continuum between the ancient dark mother of Africa, her version as Cybele of west Asia, and the miracle-working black madonna of Chiaramonte Gulfi in the iblean mountains near Ragusa Ibla .

Both my maternal and paternal ancestors lived on paths of prehistoric african migrations. Later these ancestral sites were on paths of return migrations of peoples originally african -- first of west asian anatolians after 10,000 BCE, then of semitic canaanites after 1500 BCE, then of israelites after the destruction of the temple, and then of the expansion of other semites, notably muslims, or moors from west Asia and Africa into Sicily and elsewhere in Europe after 600 CE.

Blending of early african and later return semitic migrations is evident in my family names. My mother's ancestral place in Sicily was in the region of primordial african migrations, and later of west asian migrations (Palermo was founded by canaanites in 800 BCE). . In Sicily, there was a confluence of african and return migrations from west Asia.. My mother's maiden name, Cipolla, was a variant of the name of the west asian dark mother, Cybele. My father's name, Chiavola, on another african path in southeastern Sicily, recalls the black bird of african Isis. The presence of canaanites and israelites in my ancestral paternal region of Sicily is apparent in an ancient synagogue very close to my ancestral home, as well as in the spontaneous identification my nonna Lucia expressed when I introduced my husband Wally to her. She exclaimed, "Isidoro!" - - name that sicilians popularly gave to jews. Isidore means gift of Isis.

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Knowing, in my case, may have a probable genetic genesis that came to consciousness in 1970 in my vision of dark wheat and red poppies at Mt. Erice. This knowledge was then understood cognitively by studying prehistory, history, folklore, genetics, archeology, et al. The point is that bodily knowledge (the vision) preceded cognitive knowledge. Because bodily experience (including an image, or a vision) is so powerful, I insist that my students understand issues of epistemology- - , notably, that all knowledge is partial.I recommend that they follow their passionate questions, but that, methodologically, they check and balance what they know with many ways of knowing. The compelling image of signs of the dark mother - - in my case, dark wheat and red poppies- - and then a dream of a black madonna on the eve of learning my mother was dying - -have been checked and balanced by cognitive knowledge (science: genetics, archeology, anthropology, and history, including biographical All these ways of knowing have been deepened by knowledge of folklore, notably rituals, dreams, bodily exclamations and gestures, et al. Folklore (including heresies) may be our surest path to deeply submerged beliefs; challenging to the hegemony of the dominant male-centered culture. For example, in sicilian folklore redaction of christianity, it is the mother, not the father, who sends her son to do her errands. The significance of contemporary movements is challenging established beliefs is suggested that in the italian feminist movement, the daughter insists on carrying out her values of justice, with nurturance, equality, and transformation, or nonviolent revolution.

Timing, I have learned, is everything. You may think you know something, but not really know it until you are ready to know it. In 1987 my mother, sister, brother and I took a little vacation in Eureka Springs, Missouri, where we came upon a franciscan shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Czestochowa, Poland's black madonna, venerated in Eureka Springs, Missouri as queen of peace and mercy. We loved the peacefulness of the grotto built by a franciscan friar , but that she was a black madonna did not, then, register.

Being in your ancestral place helps you know. Not until the next year, easter week in Sicily, when, at Trapani off the African Sea, I saw a procession of the black madonna , dreamed of my mother as a black madonna, and the next day learned she was dying, did black madonnas as a sign of our ancestral african mother begin to emerge from my unconscious.

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All of this has convinced me of the inherently spiritual knowledge accessible to all of us. It is my considered conclusion that our grandmothers everyday spiritual ways of knowing are central in knowing who we are, as well as crucial to our understanding of history, and critically important in sustaining us in our work for a world without racism, sexism, imperialism, and war.

My quest has led me to the african dark mother of everyone, mother who generates all life and loves all her creatures equally. I cannot help but think that everyone's search for our ancestral mother (whom latest scientific reports in 2003 confirm again, as I write, that she is african)[17] will help tear down fences that separate people who think they are white from those whom they demonize as dark others. Just imagine, wonders Corinne Innis, "what would happen if everyone really knew that their oldest mother is African and black?"[18]

In 2003 I ended this essay with this paragraph. "We are now in a time of reflection on the consequences of the U. S. invasion of Iraq, violence that assaulted us on our return to the United States from study tour in Spain on March 12, 2003. The ensuing period, for some of us, has become a period of knowing ( in a bodily way as well as cognitively) the human implications of Bush doctrines of pre-emptive war and world hegemony. In this liminal time, many, many people in the United States, and elsewhere, are shedding blinders of cultural conditioning of what dominant elites want us to know. In womens spirituality, we call this transformation."

In 2005, rereading this I am struck not only by the long duration of ancient beliefs, but what may be the long duration of the process of transforming ourselves and transforming violent hegemonic cultures into a just and harmonious world.

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum
Summer solstice, 2003 andsummer solstice, 2005
Berkeley, California

[1] I am indebted to Jodi Platner for the concept of "inherent spirituality". See her article in She is Everywhere. Anthology of writing in womanist/ feminist spirituality (New York, Chicago, Lincoln, and Shanghai, iUniverse, 2005).

[2] See: Note on Style, dark mother. african origins and godmothers. (New York, Chicago, Lincoln, Shanghai, I Universe, 2001, italian edition, Cosenza, Italia, Media Mediterranea, 2004; see also the extensive bibliography in dark mother.

[3] Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Liberazione della donna. Feminism in Italy (Middletown, Ct., Wesleyan University Press, 1986, American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation, 1987, paperback 1988).

[4] Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas. Feminism, religion, and politics in Italy (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1993, italian edition, Bari, Italia, Palomar Editrice, 1997, Premio Internazionale di Saggistica, S. Valitutti, Salerno, 1998; reprint edition, New York, Chicago, Lincoln, and Shanghai, iUniverse, 2000; Enheduanna Award for Excellence in women-Centered Literature, Oakland, Ca., 2002.

[5] L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and Paola Menozzi, Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton Unviersty Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1994).

[6] Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess (HarperSanFrancisco, 1989).

[7] Elinor Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess. A Symbol for Our Time. A Sweeping Chronicle of the Sacred Female and Her Reemergence in the Cultural Mythology of Our Time (HarperSanFrancisco, 1989).

[8] Judy Grahn, Metaformic theory and menstrual rituals of Kerala (Doctoral Disserrtation, CIIS, 1999).

[9] New York, Chicago, Lincoln, and Shanghai, iUnivere, 1001); Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Woman-centered literature, 2002. italian edition, La madre o-scura, Cosenza, Italia, Media Mediterranea, 2004.

[10] Marguerite Rigoglioso, M.A. thesis, California Institute of IntegralStudies.

[11] Sabatino Moscati, Direzione scientifica, I Fenici (Milano, Bompiani, 1988).

[12] Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, dark mother, Loc. Cit., Chapter 8, "United States - - white elites and dark others. Case of sicilian/americans."

[13] Communication to author, December 28, 2002.

[14] Birnbaum, dark mother, chapter 5. "santa Lucia. Dark mother's wisdom and nurturance as saint of light. Dark and light in sicilian history".

[15] Blackbird. Keynote: Understanding the Energies of Mother Nature, AnimalSpeak. The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great & Small. (St. Paul, Minnesota, Llewellyn Publications, 1996).

[16] See Mary Beth Moser, Honoring Darkness. Exploring the Power of Black Madonnas of Italy. M. A. thesis, New College, 2002.

[17] John Noble Wilford, "Skulls Offer First Glimpse of Early Human Faces", The New York Times, June 11, 2003.

[18] Communication to author, February 2002.