The Future Has an Ancient Heart: Legacy of Caring, Sharing, Healing, and Vision from the Primordial African Mediterranean to Occupy Everywhere

By Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475932621

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, PhD, is professor emerita of women’s spirituality at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. She is a great-grandmother and the author of several books. Birnbaum and her husband, Dr. Wallace Birnbaum, live in Berkeley, California, near their extended family.

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Copyright © 2012 by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-3260-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3261-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-3262-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012910744

iUniverse rev. date: 10/01/2013

Contents

preface to 2013 edition

prologue

note on style

dedications

kudos

chapter one

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

chapter two

biography and genealogy

chapter three

african wisdom views of diverse others

chapter four

greek/european suppression of african origins;surfacing

of submerged beliefs.

chapter five

Spain. primordial dark mothers and killing dark others

chapter six

France: Primordial african signs of dark mothers in cave art,

healing water rituals healing, heresies, and an unfinished

revolution enduring legacy of the cathars

chapter seven

mediterranean migrant women’s conference, Rome, Italy

chapter eight

the gift economy

chapter nine

Another World is Possible World Social Forum, January 20-25, 2007, Nairobi, Kenya

chapter ten

cells, stories, time, forgiveness, and healing feminist conference, 2008, Palermo, Sicily

chapter eleven

Sicily and the south of Italy in the african mediterranean. mothers of all lands.

chapter twelve

shores of god the mother. mothers of all lands

chapter thirteen

Lucia and Wally met night after thanksgiving November 1945

chapter fourteen

yellow sunflowers and black succulents on our eastern~western deck and other constants

appendix

Select Bibliography

preface to 2013 edition

The first edition of The Future Has an Ancient Heart was published late August 2012 and then life fell on me. Wally Birnbaum, love and light of my life, passed a few days thereafter.

The feeling would not go away that I had not adequately conveyed that Wally was in between every word of this and other books I’ve written. I thought about a new book, then decided to add this preface and new chapters 13 and 14 to the existing 2012 published book for a new 2013 edition of The Future has an Ancient Heart, that I call a love story, a vision, and a prophecy.

In the two additional chapters 13 and 14, I explore what I am learning after Wally passed. For historical integrity, and because they are still true, I have not changed chapters written for the 2012 edition wherein I document scientific evidence of the african origin of everybody, western suppression of african origins, a post-1960s evaluation of african wisdom, evidence on our tours and conferences of the diaspora of peoples of the african mediterreanean everywhere. This 2013 edition more accurately designates the african mediterranean as comprising the continent of Africa, islands of that sea, lands of Africa and west Asia, region that later became european countries of Spain, France and, Italy, and spiral migrations out of Africa throughout the earth… and returning spiral migrations of african migrants into Asia and Europe returning south toward Africa.

My primary motivation in this revised edition is to explore more deeply the beliefs Wally and I held silently in between our words, particularly understanding our mutual african mediterranean ancestors, notably our immediate grandparents and other elders. This new edition also reflects my need to find Wally’s unarticulated views as a physicist. I studied the cultural story of the pythagorean theorem and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Searching for the forms of our beliefs, I look at the garden we planned and planted, and the home we built on the ashes of the old in the trauma~ hope of first days after the great urban fire of Oakland and Berkeley, November 1991. I reach for beliefs we may have transmitted in the lives of our kids, grandkids, and great grandkids—whose own experience in an accelerating time gives different forms to what may be a context of continuing constant beliefs.

Thinking about who I am in 2013, I avoid categories like international feminist and spiritual seeker to look at what I am actually doing right now… looking for human possibilities in a bad time. My connection to contemporary spiritual, political, cultural, and human possibilities is highly personal, academic with a holistic need to look closely at how we know we know, realization that I have several optics: sicilian american woman, great grandmother, grandmother, mother, lover, wife, daughter, sister, teacher, new left political activist, and feminist cultural historian who goes beyond academic boundaries in embracing liminal times of birthing, blossoming, dying, and renewal… realizing that all of my optics are suffused by the liminal experience of falling and staying in love with Wally, with whom I lived, in conventional time, for 66 years.

I have come to realize that the dynamic center of our shared beliefs is the simultaneity of the past~the present~the future. The present tense, for me, and other sicilians, comprises the past~the present~the future. So do names.

Wally’s hebrew name, given to him at birth, is Isaiah, major judeo-christian prophet who denounced injustice, called for feeding the hungry and beating swords into plough shares. Wally hid his prophetic self under the middle initial I and then dropped the initial when he went into the army in 1944. Later, he chose for his internet code name, Horus, son of Isis, whose form in Africa is a black owl. In Sicily, this black bird is called Ciavola, [normans added the h] to my maiden surname Chiavola.

My baptismal name, Lucia, honors our primordial african ancestors who looked at the dark give birth to the light and were astonished. The name Lucia also honors my ancestral sicilian grandmothers and the patron saint of Sicily. Lucia, is interpreted by african mediterraneans to mean light born of darkness.

In reprise of information scattered in previous chapters of this book, which we learned in research and study tours in the african mediterranean, my story begins in my maternal region of Sicily, south of Palermo in the paleolihic Addaura cave, which Wally and I explored on-site, whose african cave painting is dated about the same time as a painting in Australia, modifying scholarly findings discussed in earlier books and earlier chapters of this book: paleolithic migrants out of Africa and the african mediterranean into areas that came to be called Europe. were simultaneous with african migrants walking or sailing out of east Africa into Asia, notably India around the southern littoral, and into the Pacific Ocean… and simultaneous with african migrants taking other routes into west Asia. (This is a hypothesis confirmed in the cultural history we researched on-site, as well as similar hypotheses of others discussed in earlier chapters of this book; see also Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden. The Peopling of the World (London, ROBINSON,2004).

In connection with this hypothesis, we found more evidence of our mutual african ancestors in my father’s ancestral region of Sicily in the 25,000 BCE african settlement around Ragusa Ibla, whose name recalls the slavic city of Ebla in Croatia, on the balkan border of Europe and Asia. The Ibla in the name of my ancestral sicilian paternal town, Ragusa Ibla, is the italian diminutive affectionate for the west asian goddess Cybele whose 6,500 BCE image in west Asia, or Anatolia, suggests the different forms of the great mother of the Mediterranean. Lydia Ruyle’s painting, on the cover of this book, is a black woman, emerging from the sea and the black earth who is all forms of life, whose borders are the red of life, the yellow of harvest passing into the black of renewed life, and the red of perpetual life.

In our travels around the globe Wally and I found her many different images, but the most cogent evidence, for us, of her presence everywhere lives in her values—caring, sharing, healing, vision… many forms of healing and hoping… from herbs and food and music and dancing… to everyday rituals of human decency and envisioning and working beyond the here and now to a better future.

The ground beneath us and the seas are shifting, but our bodies remember. As discussed earlier, when paleolithic glaciers melted in 10,000 BCE the waters rose and the african region of Sicily born of the the mother continent of everyone became my ancestral island of Sicily, today separated by a shallow strait of water from the mother continent of Africa. My blood type is O—african universal donor—accompanied by blood type B-, which is identified with Europe yet in my case and others who are B minus or Rh Negative, this blood type is associated with ancient enclaves of african peoples on migration paths in Europe and elsewhere who have, historically, and to this very moment, resisted and resist violent elites who are destroying primordial life sustaining cultures.

Exploring how Wally’s and my ancestors may have met, our on-site research in the african mediterranean suggests the encounter may have been semitic canaanite~phoenicians who sailed from Lebanon in west Asia in 800 BCE and simultaneously founded hubs for their maritime empire in the region around today’s Palermo in Sicily and in Carthage in Africa.

In days around the summer solstice 2013, the burning relevance of this is that descendents of these canaanite phoenicians live today in the highly inflamed african mediterranean region of Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey, Israel, Gaza Strip, and Syria.

Adopting woman divinities as markers to track this story, I have been led to the significance of Isis, woman divinity of Africa whose many forms I have explored as black madonnas, then as dark mothers, then as dark others, in my books. Isis’ african manifestations include african Sekhmet—fierce feline—and Hathor—horned bovine nurturant goddess of joy who in an ancient egyptian prayer was called Eye of Horus, and his Guide (see Jan Parker’s CIIS doctoral dissertation in progress, 2013). Hathor became Aphrodite of the greeks, Venus of the romans, and love goddesses today. Wally chose Horus as his internet code name, giving me to meditate in this revised FAH on the ancient datum that Hathor was eye of Horus and his Guide.

Isis’ african~semitic images include Inanna and Astarte, brought to Carthage in Africa by canaanite phoenicians who melded her with Tanit, carthaginian african nurturant mother goddess who protects children. Tanit’s legacy has persisted, despite demonization by dominant powers for 2 thousand years, evident today in the branches of western feminism emphasizing the mother’s nurturance as fountain of world civilization and ground of hope for world harmony, manifest as a mother’s freely given gift of life and nurturance. (See Genevieve Vaughan’s writings on the gift economy and Heide Gottner Abendroth’s writings on matriarchies). In 2013 I acknowledge the enormous significance of the nurturance of mothers, but, indebted to african beliefs, I believe the divine spark is in everyone marked by the gift of nurturing, and may be found in all genders and all ages.

In the 4th century CE, when christianity, aligned with the roman empire, was established, the large region encompassed by phoenicians~carthaginians included north Africa linked with Spain at Gibraltar (Cadiz), region around Palermo in Sicily, and other mediterranean islands, notably Sardinia, whose african origins and surreal idols, as well as later benign encounter with canaanite phoenicians is documented in previous chapters of this book.

In our travels together, often with students, Wally and I, unconsciously, then with growing awareness, tracked our mutual african and african mediterranean origins and values, not only to archeological images of a woman divinity, but in other forms of nurturing, and in non-western ways of knowing.

Mentoring doctoral dissertations at California Institute of Integral Studies, I have learned from culturally diverse students who are recovering their own memories and stories. In anthologies I have founded (She is Everywhere, and the contemporary, In Between Every Word), I emphasize empirical methodologies, which to be holistic need to include what has been banished in contemporary social sciences—the personal, magical, and transformational experiences of our lives. I encourage students to research on-site (hermeneutics of place; see scholar of religion, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s writings as well as CIIS dissertation of Marion Dumont, a brilliant example of this). Encouraging (in the sense of giving heart) to students to meditate and adopt many ways of knowing to understand their own experiences, as well as to explore beyond ethnocentric fences to reach for a truthful story of the world.

This preface, and additional chapters 13 and 14 of this 2013 revised edition were written in my trauma and liminal state after Wally passed when I was trying to articulate, in that space in between our words, what we ultimately believed in our life together. These additions to the 2012 edition of FAH were very difficult to write because they exposed what is usually kept private, and what is usually kept (in the words of a contemporary scholar) strangled in academia. Yet I was pushed into this painful writing in the hope it would help everyone to recover their own personal, magical, and transformative stories. An important personal aim is to render human the information (and disinformation) bombarding us daily that engenders confusion, despair, and paralysis… in a time of world crisis when everybody needs to take responsibility to stop the trajectory toward world extinction. In telling this story of Wally and me from 1945 to today’s world on fire, I hope to recover the human beings buried in bureaucratic statistics and apologetics for violent U. S. imperialism.

Our story begins with Lucia’s and Wally’s ancestral origins in Africa and the african mediterranean and their unlikely encounter in November 1945, a love story, and an ethnic and cultural story inside the story of the United States from 1945 to the summer solstice of 2013. A human account of two americans considered among the best and the brightest who lived in the rapid journey of the United States to the most powerful empire in human history and its contemporary geopolitical and spiritual crisis in 2013.

The immediate personal context of our story has been delineated in the earlier edition, both of us from immigrant families to the United States. Sicily, my ancestral island, by the end of the 19th century was in miseria, a miserable condition of economic and spiritual crisis. In the 1990s the hope of christian socialism and sicilian cooperatives sustained the work for change. When these hopes were quashed by the government, in the case of my Uncle George who was a christian socialist studying to be a priest, he migrated to the United States in 1907, went back to Sicily to marry Concettina. They had five daughters, ;owned a grocery store, founded a fraternal association, and he became the president of the grocers association in Kansas City, an immigrant success story.

George came to the U. S. with his sister, Serafina, whose name carries the memory of seraphs of baroque Sicily. She married John Panettiere, a sicilian with a french name that meant bread maker, who worked hard in the rock quarries of Kansas City. Their first born was Andew. They worked and saved and sent him to medical school. In world war 2, Dr. Andrew Panettiere was killed in the south Pacific.

George and his brothers—Joe, Turiddu,(my father) and Jim, and their sister Serafina named their eldest daughters, Lucia, after their own mother, for the numinous Lucia of the primordial african mediterranean, and for the woman of Syracuse, Sicily killed by the romans because she was a heretic, an early christian.

My maternal grandfather, Nannu Joe, came to the U. S. earlier, in the 1890s, an urchin from Palermo, ultimately canaanite phoenician, who went to work in the city market in Kansas City, became horseradish and coconut king, sang the market call on a radio greengrocer program, and married Giuseppina whose antecedents were lombards who came with the normans to christianize Sicily in 1060 (they took Britain in 1066). They named their first born, my mother, Catarina, after Santa Catarina of Alessandria, Africa, whose monastery remains to this day in west Asia at Mt. Sinai, site of the first sanctuary, 40,000 BCE, in the world, later founding place of judaism and christianity.

Wally’s parents, like mine, were ultimately african mediterranean in origin, whose history in the african mediterranean was complex, with markers in Sumer, the continent of Africa, in the Ukraine, region of asian invasions into Poland, evident in the high cheekbones on the maternal side of Wally’s family, and in the common epoch by christian institutional hostility to jews and a wide diaspora of jewish traders who criss-crossed Europe, notably at the hub of Frankfurt, Germany, where the surname Birnbaum, or pear tree, was first found in the 12th century (Stefan Birnbaum’s research).

Wally and I were both born in 1924 in the aftermath of world war one, the war to make the world safe for democracy, war that was followed in 1919 by destruction of the U. S. left and the labor movements, and restrictive U.S. immigration legislation (aimed at dark others) in 1924.

I was born of a sicilian father who came to the U. S. in 1912, whose birth name was Salvatore, in diminutive affectionate, Turiddu, whose genetic memory included the romantic values and love of music of the troubadours in the cathar region of France.(see chapter on France, 2012 edition). And a sicilian~american mother, whose name remembered the african saint Catarina; she americanized her name to Kate.

Covered by a caul (in the folklore of the african mediterranean the caul is a sign of visionary powers) I was born on the kitchen table, delivered by my Aunt Mary, in our home on Bales Street in the North End of Kansas City, Missouri, a few weeks after the winter solstice on January 3rd, 1924.

Wally was born in the family home in New York City of west asian askenazi jews. His father Harry was named Heschel, or deer honoring the custom in vernacular judaism (ultimately african) to name children for natural phenomena; His mother Dora, honoring hellenic judaism, was named Dora—or gift. Wally was born on March 10, 1924 a few weeks before spring equinox celebrations of rebirth and renewal.

Lucia and Wally met in November 1945 at the end of world war 2 when the U. S. was on the cusp of becoming the most powerful empire in history, girded by preponderant military power, a very seductive rhetoric of liberty and justice for all, and owning the button to nuclear weapons that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and beginning to stockpile nuclear weapons that can destroy the world many times over.

O

In the span of our life together from 1945 to 2012, history has rushed blindingly fast, traversing cold war, democratic uprisings of the 1960s, the arab spring when peoples of the african mediterranean rose up against autocratic rulers, people in leaderless occupy movements of the west have successfully broadcast that 2% of the world’s peoples determine the lives of everybody else, and what has been called a human spring in 2013 when unprecedented defiance of clerical and secular authority has kept the revolutionary flame alive… from pussy riots in Russia, hunger strikes at Guantanomo, huge demonstrations in the african mediterranean and places on major sites of african migration paths—from Madrid to England to Brazil—in days around the summer solstice 2013. Armies sent by elites and rebels fight—in african mediterranean places where migrants out of Africa reached every continent ca. 70,000 – 60,000 BCE, as well as in Africa where life and human civilization began.

In summer solstice days of 20l3 western elite desperation is evident in half—knowing that white western male hegemony (power over) may soon be over. Earlier murderous campaigns in Vietnam, and Iraq have been followed by automated killing with drones and tightening control of world political economies with austerity measures… leading to more hunger and desperation on the bottom and more violence against all life and the environment from the top. Despair crosses fences of class, gender, privilege everywhere, the intense heat wave in China is a palpably felt portent of global heating… and warriors sent by elites clash by night while automated drones kill innocents.

My hypothesis is that into everybody’s life there comes a moment, often at liminal times of birthing and dying, sometimes when a person is beyond despair or hope, when a sudden sensation of the true envelops the way we feel and moves us to resist dominant destructive ways of life. To major liminal experiences of birthing and dying, I have added falling and living in love… any gender.

For the family memorial of Wally’s passing November 4 2012 to which daughters in love, Nancy Kimura brought kasha varnishkas, and Barbara Thieme Birnbaum, whom Wally called B squared, asked me to tell the story of how we met. This has become chapter 13 of this 2013 edition of the future has an ancient heart . . . along with my realization, writing chapter 14, that I am telling a story of the simultaneity of the past~the present~the future.

Queen_of_EarthHeaven_Orig%20(7)2.jpg

Queen of Heaven and Earth, Lydia Ruyle’s goddess icon spirit banner interpreting frescoes at Catal Hoyuk dated to 6500 BCE on an african migration path in Anatolia, today’s Turkey. Lydia states, She is from James Mellart’s original drawings of the frescoes … I used artistic license in making her BLACK and giving her Turkish eyes. Lydia Ruyle’s banner, first exhibited at the Celsus Library in Ephesus, Turkey, in 1995, flies today on the pavilion of Lucia and Wallace Birnbaum’s mediterranean home in Berkeley. In the millennia before the common epoch, she was called Cybele.

Ethiopian%20grandmother%20and%20grandchild%20-%20frontpiece%20A.jpg

Frontispiece A. Ethiopian grandmother and granddaughter. Photograph by Stacy Boorn, pastor, Herchurch, San Francisco, California. Grandmother conveying everyday spiritual values—in this case, sheltering a grandchild.

la%20madriterranee%20GS%20-%20frontpiece%20B.jpg

Frontispiece B. "L’Estate, or Summertime. Painting of Ottavia Monaco, poster of the 2007 conference on cultural disarmament at Alberobello, Italy, whose theme was a play on the words mediterranean and mothers, or Madriterranee, connoting mothers of all lands and le rive della Dea Madre," the african mediterranean. shores of god the mother. The values of god the mother were conveyed on the pregnant body of a south italian woman, half snake and half bird—nurturant breasts, sensual lips, visionary eyes. In a basket on her head, she carries the bounty of the earth and civilization.

prologue

folklore looking for an author looking for a title

(with thanks to Luigi Pirandello, sicilian dramatist,

whose relativism expresses respect for many ways of knowing)

After 2001, when my Dark mother: african origins and godmothers was published in the United States, then in Italy and by an african press in France, a book without a title began to emerge at the margins of my consciousness. I put the title aside while continuing to participate in international and national conferences, teach in the women’s spirituality program of California Institute of Integral Studies, engage in political activities for a peaceful, equal, and just United States and world, and take students on tours to african mediterranean places.

In 2001 and 2002, I took students to my ancestral mediterranean island, Sicily, just as I was beginning to realize the implications that what became the island of Sicily was a part of the continent of Africa up until the time, about 10,000 BCE, when the ice melting and the rising of the ocean’s waters separated the island by a shallow strait from the mother continent.

In a 2003 trip to the other large island in the mediterranean, Sardinia, we found very old, surreal stone images of african mothers, the ultimate genetic mothers of everyone. About the same time, Wally and I revisited France, where I had researched my book, Black Madonnas (1994), this time noticing that african water healing sites were often located near sanctuaries of black madonnas. and that these healing places were also associated with heresies: magdalen heresies challenging the canonical story of Jesus and the omission of the mother from the christian trinity; heretical meanings of the mother manifest as black madonnas; and cathar heresies of women, claiming direct access to the divine, who held one absolute: thou shalt not kill. Whereupon the christian pope declared a domestic crusade on the cathars: Kill them all!

In the United States in the first weeks of March 2003, along with millions across the world, I participated in the largest antiwar demonstrations in human history, and then took a study group to Spain just as the Bush administration invaded Iraq. In Spain, while the US bombed people in Iraq, our tour students came upon evidence of christian inquisitional torture, including waterboarding and the killing of women, jews, and others perceived as dark others, sending students and me into altered states. In a convulsive spiral of knowing, we then visited the most successful cooperatives in the world on a primordial african migration path in the basque lands of Spain. With the basques I share the blood type O (african) and Rh-negative (signifying primordial african migrants in the region of people later called europeans). In Andalusia, Spain, the african~ semitic~christian spiral lashed us in synagogues forcibly turned into churches, followed by another swing of the spiral that took us into caves where we watched defiant flamenco dance.

In 2007, Giuseppe Goffredo, poet and educator, who has created a network of antiwar poets, refugees fleeing war, and international filmmakers and writers in seminars reaching the young and others in south Italy, invited me to speak at a conference whose theme was mothers of all lands: shores of god the mother. The conference brochure featured the painting by Ottavia Monaco (see front matter of this book) conveying how african nurturance and vision were transmitted in women’s bodies everywhere that african migrants and their descendants lived. In this case, she is a woman of south Italy on very first african migration paths.

In counterpoint, an invitation arrived next from a jesuit university whose women professors had organized a conference in Rome on mediterranean migrant women. This turned out to be an emotional upheaval as women speakers denounced religious violence in a catholic university building walled with portraits of torturers of the catholic inquisition. In retrospect, this reminded me that whatever the pronouncements of the patriarchal papacy, maternal energies have been transmitted inside, as well as outside, the church (see Black Madonnas).

In a future coming down fast, in Patti Awen Fey O’Luanaigh’s words from the sestina to her father, I was then invited to a sicilian feminist conference on an inquisition site in my ancestral Palermo, whirling me into another spiral. When I entered the conference building, I was greeted by an older woman, You were burned here as a witch. Reading the conference program on site, I realized that sicilian feminist organizers were extending a hand of reconciliation to male medical doctors, who had been used by agents of dominant church and state in the time of the inquisition to delegitimize women healers. Embodying the truth that healing maternal energies spiral beyond women, medical doctors are today healing women’s breast cancer. In another extended hand of reconciliation, palermitan feminist organizers invited men as well as women to discuss dwelling places of cell and myth, and bodily and other ways of experiencing time.

Now seriously looking for a title for the book rapidly taking form, the mysteries of memory assailed me. A graffito I’d seen in 1977 scratched on a wall of the Casa delle Donne in Rome, at the height of the successful italian feminist campaign for women’s management of their own bodies, a graffito I’d suppressed, I know not why, for thirty years, suddenly surfaced: the future has an ancient heart.

Carlo Levi, great italian antifascist, wrote a book with this title in 1956, with the subtitle, a journey into Soviet Russia. Earlier, he wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli while under house arrest in south Italy for criticizing the fascist regime, a book that left a deep imprint on me of the centrality of a dark woman in italian subaltern culture. Levi and I, different transmitters of ancient truths, both antifascists or resisters of illegitimate authority, had chosen the same aphorism in italian folklore for the title of books written late in our journeys.

In this period, I was drawn to women world theorists in whose international conferences and networks I continue to participate. Catalysts to my thinking, Genevieve Vaughan emphasizes the significance of the mother’s unconditional giving to a child for transition to a just and peaceful world. Heide Goettner-Abendroth’s concept of matriarchy, which she defines as mothers in the beginning and mothers as spiritual centers of families and communities that are portals to peaceful and equal societies, has a feminist institute in Germany. Gen, feminist born in Texas, now lives in Rome, where her daughters live.

I am a sicilian american woman historian, a feminist, who found truth in her ancestral Sicily and ultimately in everyone’s ancestral Africa, particularly in the insights of Bernadette Muthien of South Africa, who has given Gift Economy and Matriarchies networks, as well as my research on the relevance of values of ancient mothers now and in the future, the wisdom of Bernadette’s close inheritance of the values of everyone’s oldest mothers in southern Africa. An unassuming feminist, she helps western feminists shed ethnocentric assumptions, reminding me of the 1960s aphorism in US feminist circles: There is no end to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.

All this while, the folk saying the future has an ancient heart resonated in my depths as a repetitive beat to my research and teaching, a beat I could not silence nor flee. In a process that has formed the way I know, teach, and write, all of a sudden, students and I knew something simultaneously, something old, yet new and true. Finding the title again illuminates my epistemology, my pedagogy, and my spiral theory of history—looking to the past to understand the now, tapping submerged energies that remember~ envision, helping us to work toward a better world.

Tricia Grame, artist and scholar, whose closeness to my work is suggested in paintings and sculptures that have become covers of two of my books and illustrations in all of them, confirmed my realization that the name of the book being born was, as I must have known in the beginning, the future has an ancient heart, a title in the public domain of italian folklore. For Trish, the book title suggests the dynamic spiral of word and image that, in her words, wrap around my soul—and from this energy surfaces my art.(personal comm.)

For Jan Parker, poet and scholar, the title carries my work forward: remembers, reclaims, and revisions a woman’s place in the once upon a time & the here and now simultaneously… With this title you identify what is missing… heart… essential for our survival as a human race… The title is the spiral… the metaphor, the memory, the mirror~recognition… and the hope. This is what all your work is about, is it not? (personal comm.)

For Mary Beth Moser,