Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers

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Summary: Out of Africa -- Our Source Mother
Review: As a young girl I liked to read encyclopedia articles on people or countries or history. Though comprehensive and informative they were always linear, lacking the unexpected and unusual. But here is a book that gives us the meandering trail of the DARK MOTHER, the astounding story of the primordial earth diety first worshipped in Africa and subsequently spread by African people to every continent. It is a new understanding of why so many traditional peoples, especially those who live in rural/agrarian areas, still revere female deities transmogrified into "black" virgins in the Catholic and Eastern churches, adopted by Latin American indigenous cultures, and found widely in Asian religions as well. Lucia Birnbaum provides the evidence for an understanding of the depth and ferver of emotion around what appears to be a deeply unconscious connection with a fecund female earth that has always and still provides for life on earth. Starting from memories of her Sicilian grandmothers' stories and practices, she weaves genetics, archaeology, art, geography into a rich and fascinating story of global religious practices that, surprisingly, makes the whole of humankind one literal family. A great read!!

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Summary: Revolutionary thinking
Review: As early as the 1960s, Africa was posited as the original site of human culture--some 130,000 years ago. Considered revolutionary and dangerous at the time, this theory has now been substantiated by increasingly solid archeological evidence. Building on the foundation of that theory, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum postulates that if blacks were the original people, it follows that any original divinity must also have been black. Then, with an abundance of new research and evidence, Birnbaum demonstrates that that deity was female. Dark Mother offers another revolutionary and dangerous theory, a convincing reason for delving into its amalgam of solid scholarship, family history, feminist tract, and New Age sensibility.

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Summary: A loving symbol of transformation for the third millenium
Review: For those of us who want to build a good society Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers offers a unifying metaphor for humanity of justice, equality and transformation. Author Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum brings together scientific documentation, cultural history, anthropology, art, folklore including her personal journey. Throughout the recurrent them of this spiritual work is: "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."

Dark Mother is truly a loving symbol of transformation for the third millenium.

Rating:
Summary: A loving symbol of transformation for the third millenium
Review: I have read many books on the Black Goddess and have been disappointed that the most obvious fact about the dark Mother the world over is not recognized. People cannot grasp the meaning of any dark Mother until one connects Her to Her original home and perception. When books don't do this, the document is left in endless speculation "on what these icons could possibly mean." They are African women....no mystery there. Lucia Birnbaum's book does not involve itself with speculation or fanciful tales about the dark Mother. She bravely goes to the source;....to Africa, to Kemet, to Carthage, to West Asia, to Sicily, to the folktales and readings of native Southern Italians, to the dreams and theories of dark others and to her own wise knowing. Her book does not just connect the dots clearly to Africa and beyond but she also unites herself with people all over the world who dream of a more humane and just world. This work represents for me the next level. It is not womanism, humanism, environmentalism, new age or anything else. It is the gradual maturity and transcendence of everything. It is the bubbling forth of basic truths laying dormant for generations. Wonderful Wonderful Wonderful work.

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Summary: Simply Courageous!......
Review: I have read many books on the Black Goddess and have been disappointed that the most obvious fact about the dark Mother the world over is not recognized. People cannot grasp the meaning of any dark Mother until one connects Her to Her original home and perception. When books don't do this, the document is left in endless speculation "on what these icons could possibly mean." They are African women....no mystery there. Lucia Birnbaum's book does not involve itself with speculation or fanciful tales about the dark Mother. She bravely goes to the source;....to Africa, to Kemet, to Carthage, to West Asia, to Sicily, to the folktales and readings of native Southern Italians, to the dreams and theories of dark others and to her own wise knowing. Her book does not just connect the dots clearly to Africa and beyond but she also unites herself with people all over the world who dream of a more humane and just world. This work represents for me the next level. It is not womanism, humanism, environmentalism, new age or anything else. It is the gradual maturity and transcendence of everything. It is the bubbling forth of basic truths laying dormant for generations. Wonderful Wonderful Wonderful work.

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Summary: A groundbreaking work of staggering importance?
Review: Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum's most recent book, Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers, carves new passageways into the collective unconscious of human spirituality. Her premise-that the oldest veneration known to humankind was of a divinity both African and female-shatters the dominant paradigm. Drawing on the scholarship of archeologists, geneticists, and cultural historians Birnbaum crafts an intricate thesis and supports it with impeccable research. Her words lead us back to our most ancient origins. She brings an astute awareness and reclamation of her roots as a Sicilian American woman to her analysis. In doing so, Birnbaum takes readers on a serpentine journey through time and place and memory where the essence of the Dark Mother resides-in art, in ritual, and in the stories and the ethos of the subaltern peoples of the world. Dark Mother is deeply moving and provocative. Ultimately it is a book that will transform the way we think about gender, race, class, spirituality and cultural legacy. The Dark Mother's values of justice with compassion, equality, and transformation are as vitally necessary today as they were in 50,000 BCE when migrants out of central and south Africa carried them to the wider world. This book is an important contribution to the scholarship of women's spirituality. It is an equally invaluable record of mother-loss and a treatise on humankind's cellular longing for a reunion with the feminine principle of divinity. As intellectually stimulating as it is emotionally compelling, Birnbaum has written a groundbreaking work that challenges and delights.