Feminist cultural historian Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum caps her previous work with The Future has an Ancient Heart, a scholarly study of the transformative legacy of African origins and values of caring, sharing, healing, and vision carried by African migrants throughout the world. Birnbaum focuses on the long endurance of these values from the first human communities in south and central Africa, ones that Africans manifested in the region of the African mediterranean landmass that later separated Africa from Europe and Asia when the ice melted and waters rose. These migrants reached every continent and later became spiritual as well as geograpical migrations back to Africa, from ancient times to the transformative present. Using the same methods as her teaching, Birnbaum employs a mutual learning process in her work to help us think about our own ancestral story, adding to the wisdom we need to surmount contemporary crises and give us the energy to help bring a more equal and just world into being. Her methodologies are grounded on empirical techniques of science and the social sciences and yet leave openings for the liminal knowledge that resides underneath and beyond boundaries of established religions, secular ideologies, and conventional science. A true work of transformation, The Future has an Ancient Heart opens the door to new possibilities within our world.

THE FUTURE HAS AN ANCIENT HEART

LEGACY OF CARING, SHARING, HEALING, AND VISION FROM THE PRIMORDIAL AFRICAN MEDITERRANEAN TO OCCUPY EVERYWHEREBy LUCIA CHIAVOLA BIRNBAUM

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-3260-7

Contents

prologue......................................................................................................................................................................................xinote on style.................................................................................................................................................................................xxiiidedications...................................................................................................................................................................................xxviikudos.........................................................................................................................................................................................xxxiiichapter one story. methodologies of many ways of knowing, scholarly integrity and world justice and peace....................................................................................1chapter two biography and genealogy..........................................................................................................................................................33chapter three african wisdom. views of diverse others........................................................................................................................................74chapter four greek/european suppression of african origins; surfacing of submerged beliefs...................................................................................................90chapter five Spain. primordial dark mothers and killing dark others..........................................................................................................................119chapter six France: primordial african signs of dark mothers in cave art, healing water rituals, heresies, and an unfinished revolution. enduring legacy of the cathars......................130chapter seven mediterranean migrant women's conference, Rome, Italy..........................................................................................................................148chapter eight the gift economy...............................................................................................................................................................161chapter nine "Another world is Possible" world Social Forum, January 20-25, 2007, Nairobi, Kenya.............................................................................................172chapter ten cells, stories, time, forgiveness and healing. feminist conference, 2008, Palermo, Sicily........................................................................................184chapter eleven Sicily and the south of Italy in the african mediterranean mothers of all lands...............................................................................................192chapter twelve shores of god the mother. mothers of all lands................................................................................................................................207appendix......................................................................................................................................................................................239select bibliography...........................................................................................................................................................................275

Chapter One

story. methodologies of many ways of knowing, scholarly integrity and world justice and peace.

liminal insights, scientific evidence, personal standpoint, and gifts.

In the period 2001 to 2011, the chronological span of this book, a tempest gathered of natural and man-made catastrophes converging with mounting scientific evidence of african origins of the human species but of possibilities for a better civilization. An intensifying debate in the academy on ways of knowing is the backdrop of my story structured on my participation in international conferences and teaching in the US while trying to figure out who I am and what I am doing as a feminist cultural historian. An image arises of a woman trying to ride a torrential wave emerging from the depths of my unconscious and preconscious.

A sicilian american woman, my story begins in a childhood and youth in a south italian neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri, followed by marriage to a soldier from New York. While bringing up three sons, both of us went to graduate school, receiving doctorates from the University of California in Berkeley, his in physics (1954), mine in the cultural history of the United States and Europe (1964). I have written books on sicilian women (1981), italian feminists (1986), black madonnas (1993), dark african mothers of everyone (2001), and this one (2012) on the transformative legacy of african origins and values of caring, sharing, healing, and vision carried by african migrants throughout the world. These values have surfaced, in my hypothesis, in today's world uprisings in the primordial region of the african mediterranean sea and in occupy movements of the west.

In this book I emphasize the long endurance of values from first human communities in south and central Africa, values that africans manifested in the region of the african mediterranean, landmass later separating Africa from Europe and Asia when the ice melted and waters rose. Migrants out of Africa reached every continent of the world by 60,000 BCE bringing values of caring, sharing, healing, and vision with them. Geographical migrations out of Africa later became spiritual as well as geograpical migrations back to Africa, from ancient times to the transformative present.

A feminist teaching in the women's spirituality program of California Institute of Integral Studies from the 1990s to 2011, I am concerned about truthful history. That is to say, my story tries to be holistic, including my personal as well as professional values, trying to be transparent as to how I know I know, open to many ways of knowing, and spiraling beyond established ethnocentric western assumptions and hierarchical ways of knowing toward an egalitarian, green, and just future.

In this introductory chapter, I emphasize what I believe needs foregrounding in 2012, starting with stories and including the liminal, or all the ways we know that go beyond conventional rationality—cellular memory, intuition, the collective unconscious, dreams, visions, the mutuality of knowing in gifts, and so on. Liminal knowing in the humanities may evoke a glimpse of truth increasingly confirmed in science. To liminal knowing, I have added my personal standpoint referring to my life experience and my spiral view of story wherein steps backward can hearten us to go forward.

liminal experiences

Preceding and during my research and writing on sicilian women, italian feminists, black madonnas, african dark mothers, and their gifts of caring, sharing, healing, and vision, I have had liminal experiences circling women who are called grandmothers or mothers in the south of the world, and goddesses or priestesses in the west. The word liminal, as I am using it, refers to a threshold to a deeper way of knowing. My work is based on empirical methods of science and the social sciences, yet like theorists of the 18th century south italian enlightenment, notably Giambattista Vico, I leave openings for the liminal knowledge that simmers underneath and beyond boundaries of established religions, secular ideologies, and conventional scientific ways of knowing.

In 1969, in my ancestral maternal region of the african mediterranean in Sicily at Erice outside Palermo, the mountain seemed to me a sleeping pregnant woman covered by a blanket of dark wheat and red poppies. Dark wheat, I learned later, connotes african Isis; red poppies evoke semitic/canaanite/phoenician Astarte blended with carthaginian Tanit.

At some point I also learned that Sicily, before the rising of the sea 10,000 BCE, was part of the continent of Africa where african amazons fought off invaders (see chapter twelve). In the christian epoch a sanctuary was built—on a site where african amazons aarrowed invaders—for the black madonna of Tindari, Italy, whose values, inscribed on the pedestals of statues of women guarding her sanctuary, seem to me the enduring legacy of dark mothers of primeval Africa: equality and justice. In today's disordered world, I have taken these values as my ancestral legacy. They sustain my hope and work for transformation of myself concurrent with continuing cultural, social, and political transformations toward a more equal and just world.

personal standpoint

From my standpoint as a feminist cultural historian, my aim is to dismantle untrue cultural and political assumptions by offering truthful historical knowledge that will accelerate the end of wars and other violence, and the creation of equal and just societies. Violent patriarchy, a relatively recent phenomenon in the story of humans, arrived at the end of eons of a mothering cosmology, in the handful of centuries before the year one of the common epoch, formerly called the christian epoch.

Studying the genetic evidence of human origins in Africa, I have learned that our species, homo sapiens sapiens, emerged in south and central Africa 100,000 BCE. Building on the genetics confirmation of this in the DNA, as well as the approximate 60,000 BCE date when africans in migration reached all continents, I have also been gifted by Luca Cavalli-Sforza's hypothesis that africans took their beliefs with them in their world migrations. (See Cavalli-Sforza, Chi Siamo), Adopting the optic of my training as a cultural historian, and my standpoint as a feminist trying to recover the whole truth, this is my attempt to tell my story as part of the large enterprise of everyone uncovering and telling their stories, a necessary step, in my view, for transforming the world.

My story has been deepened by Giuseppe Goffredo's understanding that a significant metaphor of this story may be maternal energies. My research for Black Madonnas and Dark mother suggests that maternal energies may be transmitted inchoately in the DNA but evidence of the transmission of caring, sharing, healing, and vision may be tracked in everyday and celebratory rituals of mothers, first to daughters, then to sons and lovers, then to extended families of communities. Adopting a spiral view of history, my ways of knowing also sweep the past and the future into a now characterized by instantaneous and contagious knowing.

This passionate knowing, recognized in the west in the cultural revolution of the 1960s as gut knowledge, is so persuasive it must be checked and balanced, first by self-knowledge, then by many ways of knowing, and always with the recognition that there are different spiritualities—a recognition that may keep us from damaging or killing other people for our beliefs. Diverse spiritualities, notably subaltern suppressed beliefs have lived for centuries underneath dominant ethnic, religious, and secular institutions of the western and may be glimpsed today in indigenous non-western beliefs of the preponderance of the world's peoples and in rising values from below that ignite today's transformative world movements.

My aim to be as honest as possible about what I am doing requires that as a woman cultural historian, I know dominant western history (which I taught for many years), as well as the knowledge that has come from my later identification as a subaltern or suppressed woman, a knowledge that emerged, for me and many others, during the 1960s civil rights struggle of african americans. Self-knowledge necessitates knowing my ancestors—all of them. In chapter two, I track my ancestral beginnings in the primordial african mediterranean to my ethnic, feminist, and human awareness today.

My previous books, as well as the front matter of this book, suggest my respect for the arts and humanities as well as for science. My standpoint is that of a woman telling or writing a story located simultaneously in primordial as well as in contemporary geographical places, focusing on migrations of peoples out of and back to Africa, a story that adopts oral as well as written sources. Oral traditions in stories and everyday rituals as well as signs (for example, rock and other art) are indispensable for catching the everyday stories of suppressed classes, notably women and colonized dark others.

The submerged story of humans carries the painful memory of traumas as well as hopes and visions of a better time. Using many ways of knowing insures checks and balances on dominant ways of knowing that are often projected violently in power over vulnerable others. The cultural implication of this is that we need every everyone's stories in order to release the energies and imaginations that will accelerate our passages to an equal and just world.

In the six hundred years before the common epoch, the nurturing legacy of a mothering cosmology was changed to a violent cosmology and institutionalized by dominant cultures in war, slavery, and hierarchy. This inequality was marked by violent power over, notably the power of males over females, of conquerors over the conquered, and since the beginning of the modern epoch in 1492, the power of whites over blacks and other peoples of color, and the dominant culture's power over people with different beliefs. In this shift from a mothering universe to patriarchy, enslaving, exploiting, and force or cruelty by dominant classes replaced caring, sharing, healing, and envisioning.

In the autumn of 2011, stuck on the last chapters of this story, I was struck by the lightning of radically egalitarian occupy demonstrations. Occupy movements have a long story in subaltern cultures, some of them touched on in this book, notably the civil rights, antiwar, and ethnic and gender liberation movements before and after the 1960s. Yet the inclusiveness and revulsion against killing that characterize contemporary occupy movements may be different in the insistence on hearing every single voice, similar to the african belief that the wisdom of every single person is important. (see chapter three this book).

Stories have open-ended consequences, enlarging the customary view of the history of western civilization written by scribes of the dominant culture who date the beginning of western civilization to fifth century BCE classical greeks of Athens. In my telling, the story is pushed back to the beginnings of the present human race, homo sapiens sapiens, (Luca Cavalli Sforza, History and geography of the human race) in south and central Africa, and to the spread of life-giving, originally african, values via migrations that reached everywhere by about 60,000 BCE. (see Spencer Wells, Journey of Man)

Considering the mediterranean region, notably Sicily and south Italy, France, and Spain as parts of the african continent before the rising of the sea around 10,000 BCE changes our stories of Africa and Europe ... and opens the largely untold story of Asia and the west. Considering the african mediterranean region as first paths of paleolithic african migrants, who, with as yet undamaged DNA, transmitted african values all over the earth, and taking into account the very long endurance of beliefs, changes the stories of Europe and Asia as well as the United States.

This optic shifts the ground of the story of the United States in that first migration routes of africans were geographically the region from which most italians, including all four of my grandparents and my father, came when they migrated to the US in the last decade of the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries (see chapter two).

Writing this book has changed the way I regard the story of the world. For example, after I wrote Dark mother, I carefully reread writings of Luca Cavalli-Sforza (notably Chi Siamo) and realized that we may continue telling the story of one archetypal mother but genetics, geography, and depth psychology document that she is many women. The spiritual journey of this book has also changed the view I was trained in, and my experience, first at the University of California at Berkeley during the Free Speech movement, then at San Francisco State College (later a university), where I participated in the longest student/professor strike, now called a Third World Strike, in US history. This strike, opposing the Vietnam war and demanding the creation of a department of black studies (the first in the world) was immediately followed by my being fired and given the opportunity to travel the world with my emerging view of the african mediterranean. Later my travel and study tours of the world were concurrent with my teaching (late 1990's to 2011) in the women's spirituality program of California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where I am now professor emerita.

Informing this story has been my hope that, in trying to tell or write a truthful story in a world manipulated into violence by untruths, I am working toward a more equal and therefore more just world. Being truthful is often disruptive, to self as well as to institutions. It is my hope that truth eventually leads to healing, to just institutions, and to a green and equal world.

* * *

Spiraling as bodily movement may be regarded as steps backward before steps forward. For this study, steps backward refer to the 1990s, when my manuscript, Dark mother: african origins and godmothers, was rejected by dominant white male publishers in the United States, including two cases when the manuscript was accepted by women editors of university presses, acceptances subsequently cancelled by incoming white male editors.

This rejection was not a matter of competence, since in the preceding period I had published books and received awards in the United States and internationally, and was teaching in the innovative women's spirituality program founded by Elinor Gadon, feminist art historian, in the cutting-edge graduate university, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), in San Francisco.

After early acceptance by women, then rejection by US mainstream publishers, Dark mother was published by the alternative press iUniverse late in 2001, and launched with an art exhibit by the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in the spring of 2002.

Publication of dark mother was followed by a continuation of the invitations I'd been receiving since the publication of liberazione della donna: feminism in Italy (1986) and Black Madonnas (1993). These invitations to speak on my work to international and national afrocentrist and feminist conferences gave me international recognition accompanied by awards and honors. The italian edition of dark mother was published as La Madre O-scura (the dark or hidden mother) in 2004 by the feminist press Mediterranea Media, at Cosenza in south Italy. The french african caribbean edition, La Mere Noire, was published in Paris, France, by Editions Menaibuc in 2007, with distribution in Africa and the Caribbean. The first volume of She is Everywhere, an anthology of feminist writings, which I gathered, was published by iUniverse in 2004.

These positive experiences, in retrospect, were also the beginning for me, as a feminist cultural historian of the United States, of a slow spiral downward. The general response to dark mother after 2003 by custodians of dominant american white and male culture, including feminists who implicitly considered themselves white, was silence, a silence that deepened as the decade unrolled. Recently, a friendly independent scholar advised that I would have had smooth sailing if I had not brought up the matter of everyone's black mothers. Another feminist, perhaps expressing her anxiety, said I was "obsessed" by african dark mothers.

Thinking about this in 2011, it occurs to me that I was scarcely likely to be given kudos by custodians of dominant american white male culture and their acolytes, increasingly including women (publishers, journal editors, program directors), who have, like almost everyone else, been painfully pushed into denial of the truthful story of the United States.

Since the 1960s, the truthful story of white male elites persecuting and killing dark others, at least from 1492, has always been an everyday reality for dark others, a truth that percolated close to the consciouness of all sentient persons in the United States, Yet small elites of the dominant culture, perhaps sustained by the need to quell pangs of conscience, perhaps propelled by a need to perpetuate their own hegemony, a power over tied to the hegemony of corporate capitalists, have continued to mold the knowledge everyone learns from required books and curricula. From kindergarten to doctoral study, these elites have kept everyone from knowing the whole truth, narrowing the "need to know" in security-obsessed government instititutions as well as controlling the slant and omissions of newspapers and other mainstream media beholden to the interests of corporate capitalists.

(Continues...)

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