Considering the power of matriarchal spirituality, as evidenced by ancient through contemporary African Goddess traditions in attached article, answer the following:
1. How has African Goddess spirituality evolved through time and cultural memory to its present context as another way of knowing the Sacred, Sacred Others, and Self?
2. Provide a visual image of the Dark Mother goddess from either African Diaspora, Latin Diaspora, European, Native American, Polynesian, Mediterranean, Asian, Australian, or another global culture, and then explain the power of the Divine Feminine embedded in those images.
3. What does HerStory reveal about the prominence of women as leaders in religious, political, and other cultural spaces of ancient times to the evolution of their leadership onto sacred and secular stages of contemporary world cultures?
References
Chiavola Birnbaum, L. (2001). African dark mother: Oldest divinity we know. Retrieved from https://rosicrucian.org/publications/digest/digest1_2010/04_web/07_Birnbaum/06_birnbaum.pdf
Williams-Cooper, M. (2014). Divine encounter: The journey of the matriarch (Unpublished paper).
*******PLEASE MAKE SURE TO USE AND CITE THE ASSIGNED SOURCES WITHIN TEXT AND IN A REFERENCE PAGE .
See Article EC..pdf
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Own Words Short Answers Questions based on the done assignment :
What new learning did you acquire from completing this assignment?
How will you apply your new learning to your life?
How will you use your new learning to make the world a better place for yourself and Sacred Others?
African Dark Mother – Oldest
Divinity We Know
Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Ph.D.
From dark mother: african origins and godmothers, originally
published by Authors Choice Press, 2001. © 2001 by the author.
r. Birnbaum is on the core faculty of
the Women’s Spirituality program at
the California Institute of Integral
Studies in San Francisco. She is a Sicilian/
Italian woman and feminist cultural historian
with a focus on the vernacular history of women
and other subaltern classes. In this excerpt,
she links the oldest deity of human culture, the
dark mother of Africa, with Isis and the Black
Madonnas of Europe and elsewhere. In accord
with the latest findings of anthropology, she
emphasizes the African origins of all humans
and the legacy found on African migration
paths—namely, the values of sharing and
caring, justice with compassion, equality, and
transformation—which were transmitted to all
continents from 60,000 BCE to the present, as
part of the primordial tradition. [Editor’s Note:
Dr. Birnbaum deliberately writes in a style
using very few capitals, emphasizing essential
equality.]
Black-topped pottery, fired upside down with the
top buried in sand. Naqada II culture (3500–3200
BCE). This deprived the clay of oxygen and resulted
in the distinctive coloration. Excavated from a grave
at Badari, probably used to hold grain. An image of
a hunting dog attacking an ibex was scratched onto
the vessel in ancient times. From the Collection of
the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.
An image of the bird-headed african snake
goddess in the orant position (arms upraised in
celebration) dated 4,000 BCE, has been called
an image of our creatrix. Angeleen Campra’s
doctoral study of Sophia has taught me that
generatrix is the more appropriate term. The
image is held in the Department of Egyptian
Antiquities of the British Museum. Preceding
this anthropomorphic image were her signs—
the color ochre red and the pubic V. Her
characteristics are those of a bird and a snake,
yet she is a woman. With legs firmly planted in
the earth, her arms celebrate the universe, and
her breasts offer nurturance to all life. Why
hasn’t she been acknowledged?
Slave traders, slaveholders, and
imperialists (european, arab, and north
american) enslaved Africa’s peoples. African
resources were stolen, african treasures
sacked, icons and other art objects were
looted and taken away. African traditions
were appropriated, destroyed, distorted,
or suppressed. What remains in Africa
today is what could not be stolen:
the memory of the dark mother
in rock engravings, cave paintings, other
art, and rituals.
Along with her early signs connoting
generation of all life, african prehistoric
art associates the dark mother with the
D
Page 33
Detail from a Neolithic carving from the Tassili (Algeria). Photo ©2006 Gruban / Wikimedia Commons.
earth’s fruitfulness; she is depicted with
corn showering down between cow’s horns.
Women are often depicted dancing. Men are
painted running with antelopes, elephants,
rhinoceroses, lions, and giraffes. In regions of
the Hoggar, Tadrart Acacus, and above all in
the Tassili, “we have some twelve thousand
paintings done between the fifth and first
millennia, which includes the most beautiful
renderings of the human form that prehistory
can show.”1
In the neolithic era, a black-topped
red polished ware appeared in Nubia and
elsewhere. “These vessels (nearly all open
bowls) have a dark red exterior and a shiny
black interior, the black extending also to the
outside for half inch to an inch below the rim.
The red was achieved by painting the surface
with red ochre before firing, while the black
seems to have been imparted by placing the
vessel, directly after firing, rim downward, in
a mass of densely smoking material such as
leaves or straws.”2This technique, characteristic
of the pottery of northeastern Africa, was
subsequently known as far away as India.3
Rosicrucian
Digest
No. 1
2010
During the millennium before Jesus,
continuing into the first five hundred
years thereafter, the major divinity of the
mediterranean world appears to have been Isis
of Africa, dark mother of many names. Great
mother of the mediterranean, Isis inherited
a long matristic tradition of Africa whose
Page 34
signs were the color red ochre and the pubic
V, as well as spirals and circles, and human
identification with animals. Scholarship since
the 1960s has recovered what the ancients
knew: Isis was an african deity, whose origins
were in Nubia, or upper Egypt. Nubia, at the
confluence of the Blue and White Niles, was
an african region whose civilization flourished
for “more than five hundred years before the
building of the great pyramids of Egypt.”4
In her sanctuary at Philae in Africa, Isis
was black. Metaphor of the dark mother of
humanity and precursor of black, as well as
church-whitened, madonnas of christian
Europe,5 her civilization at Meroe, Nubia,
from 100 BCE to 400 CE conveys her
values. Region of inner Africa best known
to the ancients, it was called Ethiopia, a
name given in antiquity to “all parts of
Africa occupied by dark-skinned peoples.”
Egyptian artists utilized a “red-brown paint
for the skin color of Egyptian men, yellow
for Egyptian women, and a dark brown or
black for all Nubians.” Greeks and romans
called Ethiopia (the area south of Egypt)
the “Land of the Burnt Faces,” and called
the Sudan “Land of the Blacks.”6 Ethiopia
today comprises Nubia.7 Although nubians
resemble other peoples of the Sudan, they
are unique in speaking an ancient group of
languages unrelated to the arabic of their
neighbors.8 Egypt built some of its massive
monuments in Nubia, notably the great rock
temples of Abu Simbel, but Nubia gave the
dark mother Isis to Egypt, and the rest of
the world. 9
The little island of Philae in Nubia was
known as “Holy Island,” as well as “Interior of
Heaven,” and “City of Isis.”10 In the 1960s,
William Y. Adams, leading nubiologist,
anthropologist, archaeologist, and UNESCO
expert, supervised the salvaging of Nile
artifacts and treasures during the construction
of the Aswan dam. Adams considers
veneration of Isis to be “one of history’s most
important ideological transformations.”
Within the microcosm of Nile lands, worship
of Isis became “the first truly international
and supra-national religion, no longer
claimed as the proprietary cult of any one
ruler but sanctioned by and conferring its
blessings upon several. Philae became a
holy city and place of pilgrimage alike for
all classes and all nationalities: Meroites,
Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and desert
nomads.”11 Worship “of the age-old fertility
goddess of Egypt,” for Adams, anticipated the
role of “Christianity and Islam on the larger
stage of the Middle Ages.”12
The city of Meroe, site of the kushite
royal court, was the center of an empire “that
included not only much of Nubia, but also
regions far south of modern-day Khartoum.
Meroitic culture was strongly connected
with central African traditions although
it made use of Egyptian styles, to which it
added graeco-roman elements.”13 Study of
nubian archeology and history has established
the centrality of the dark mother Isis, who
is considered to have exemplified african
matrilineal traditions. “It was only through
the royal women that Nubian rulers inherited
the throne. All kings and queens had to be
born to a queen, usually the ruler’s sister.”14
The seamless fit between religion and daily
life in Africa is suggested by the fact that
an african woman, as priestess of the dark
mother, was “Mistress of Heaven,” as well as
“Mistress of the House.”15
Saite Coffin of Tahure (Twenty-sixth Dynasty). The eyes look
toward the East, and the rising sun. From the collection of
the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.
Eyes of Isis inside tombs of egyptian
pharaohs looked to eternity; e.g., that of
Khnumnakht (100-100 BCE), whose
sarcophagus is now in New York’s
Metropolian Museum of Art. Her eyes can
be seen on the many amulets worn to this
day by mediterranean peoples to ward off
the “evil eye.” The ubiquity of the belief in
the “evil eye” may convey the wide-spread
popular appeal of the dark mother, as well
as patriarchal anxiety before the mother’s
riveting gaze.16
Veneration of Isis, according to R. E.
Witt, spread from her center in Nubia to
Afghanistan, the Black Sea, and Portugal, to
northern England.17 By the first century of
the common era, one of her largest temples
outside Africa was located in Rome, while
others were located at Ostia and Pompeii. At
Philae in Nubia, Isis is invoked: “Hail Queen,
mother of god.” At Ostia, outside Rome,
Italy, she was celebrated on the 5th of March,
when sailors returned to the sea, naming their
boats and ships for her. Women of Rome,
after immersing themselves in the icy Tiber,
proceeded on their knees all along the river
Page 35
edge to the Pantheon, today a gathering place
for feminists.
The image of Isis most popular at the
height of the roman empire appears to have
been that of Isis nursing her child, Horus.
Besides queen of the sea, Isis was considered
queen of heaven and of earth, and was easily
transmuted into the christian holy mother.
Legions of the roman empire, whose ranks
were drawn from subordinated dark peoples
of three continents, carried images of african
Isis, as well as images of Isis melded together
with west asian divinities Cybele, manna, and
Astarte all over the known world, from Africa
to Asia, to Rome, France, England, to the
Danube.18 At Benevento, where a great iseo
flourished in the roman epoch, her followers
were later called witches.19
In October 1999, when Wally [ed: the
author’s husband] and I visited the sanctuary
of Isis at Philae, I remembered Lucius
Apuleius’ description. Roman citizen of
Athens who studied at Carthage and lived in
the interior of Morocco, Lucius said he was
awakened by “all the perfumes of Arabia,”
when Isis appeared and said, “I am Nature, the
universal Mother, mistress of all the elements,
primordial child of time, sovereign of all
things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also
of the immortals, the single manifestation of
all gods and goddesses that are.”
Rosicrucian
Digest
No. 1
2010
Worshipped by many names throughout
Africa, Asia, and greek and roman empires,
she was known as Isis, Hathor, Ma’at,
Artemis, Demeter-Persephone, Hera, Mother
of Corn, Juno, and Hecate. She was Lilith of
west Asia and Kali of India. Hymns invoked
her as “the one who rises and dispels darkness,”
solar ruler who “smites her enemy,” whose
radiance “fills the earth with gold-dust.”20
The memory of the ancient african
mother is recalled today in the poetry of
Luisah Teish, african american poet and
writer who traces her heritage to Egypt, which
she calls the “mystical cradle of civilization”
and finds Isis in yoruba goddess Yemonja,
mother goddess who “nurtures us through the
cycles of Life.” She also finds Isis in yoruba’s
Oshun, goddess of love, art, and sensuality
who “represents the Erotic in Nature.” Africa,
for Teish, is a continent where “deities walk
among human beings and dance is worship.”
Acknowledging african diasporas, Teish finds
reverence for the earth in african ibo beliefs
and in native american “need to walk in
balance.” Teish’s poems praise yoruba Yemonja
as “mother of the night, the great dark depth,
the bringer of light” who is related to Isis and
Hathor. She considers the implications of
the many manifestations of the dark mother:
“The Horned Cow, the many-teated Sow,
the queen bee, the Mothertree, the Pregnant
David Roberts (1796–1864),
View of the Island of Philae,
Nubia, 1838.
Page 36
Womb, the Grain-seed broom, the candle’s
wick, the matrix, and woman, you are
my daughter.”21
The civilization of the dark mother of
Africa is glimpsed at Meroe in Nubia, region
of upper Egypt in the area called Ethiopia.
Egypt, despite eurocentric misconceptions
aligning the country with the “Orient” or
the “Near East,”22 is an african country
shaped by the Nile, river that carries african
peoples and products back and forth along
a north-south axis, particularly between
Egypt and Nubia. In the ancient civilization
of nubian Meroe, matrilineal succession was
the custom, yet genders co-existed peacefully.
Some queen mothers ruled alone, many ruled
with husbands or sons. In mother-centered
cultures of Africa, religions also co-existed
peaceably. At Meroe, the religion of Isis
honored the religion of the lion-headed god
called Apedemek as well as that of Amun.
Priests and priestesses of each religion shared
in the political and economic administration
of Meroe.
An egalitarian civilization that nurtured
all life, Meroe was a noted center of learning
and commerce that spread its prosperity to
all peoples. Every day, in the temple called
Table of the Sun dedicated to goddesses and
gods, africans offered food and other lifesustaining goods. “Those in need could come
at any time and take freely of the offerings.”23
This ancient african tradition, persisting over
millennia, is recalled today in San Francisco
in the vibrant community services of Rev.
Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church.
The Table of the Sun at Meroe was the
precursor of roman temples to Cerere (Ceres),
grain goddess of Rome, where the poor would
come for free wheat. This ultimately african
celebration of wheat is kept to this day in
Italy in mid-August at the christian festival of
the assumption of the virgin into heaven. On
August 15, when we were in Sicily, we went
to her festival at Gangi, in the mountains
of northwest Sicily when many hundreds
of emigrant workers come with their family
on this date every year. We brought home a
triple cluster of wheat from this festival, that
celebrates pagan wheat goddesses, and put it
on the front door of our Berkeley home.
In Rome, the temple of wheat goddess
Ceres became the church of Santa Maria di
Cosmedin, a church with a black madonna.
In the early historic epoch, a sculpture that
connotes roman male appropriation of Isis
was placed at the entrance to this church.
The legend of this sculpture (called Bocca
della verità, or Mouth of truth) has it that
the mouth of truth will bite the hand of
anyone who tells a lie. Contemporary italian
feminists, enacting the dark mother’s legacy
of truth and justice, have placed replicas of
the Bocca della verità in theaters where people
can deposit written denunciations of corrupt
mafia chiefs and political officials.
The interior of Santa Maria di Cosmedin (Rome),
prepared for the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. The
ancient temple dating from the sixth century, was
originally part of the Greek community of Rome,
and is shared today by the Roman Catholic Church
and the Greek-Melkite Catholic Church. The
Greek-Byzantine Churches inherited much from
the Mystery Schools and the Egyptian-Hermetic
Tradition, and continue the Isis-like veneration
of Mary. The title “Cosmedin” comes from the
Greek Kosmos, meaning both “the Cosmos,” and
“beautiful adornment.” Photo © 2007 by Till
Niermann/Wikimedia Commons.
Page 37
Italian evidence of veneration of the
african dark mother may be found in icons
of Isis in the national museum at Naples,
and icons at Pompeii, Benevento, Palestrina,
Aquileia, Verona, and in Rome. Much of
the evidence of the widespread veneration of
african Isis in the roman epoch was destroyed
by the volcanic eruption that laid waste to
Pompeii.24 In 1997 the Isis exhibit at Milan
documented the vast arc of veneration of Isis
in late antiquity and early christianity, an arc
that extended from Africa to Europe, to the
Ukraine, to India.
After christianity was established in 323
CE, church fathers, aiming to obliterate
pagan beliefs, destroyed Meroe in 450 CE.
What was it they found so threatening in this
african civilization that identified so strongly
with nature, particularly the Nile? “Every year
the land arose from the watery flood richer
and more full of life; every year the migratory
birds swooped down into the marshes
for food and rest. A great order, ancient
and ever renewing, sustained Egypt while
nations rose and fell all around it…. Nature
worked patiently, bore richly, and sustained
continually. The human order which grew
out of that great original natural magic was as
unique as its setting.”25
Rosicrucian
Digest
No. 1
2010
This grounding in a constant and
sustaining earth may help us understand
why egyptians attained an extraordinary
level of artistic, architectural, and moral
excellence. “The ‘gods’ and ‘goddesses’ of
Egypt literally sprang from the soil and the
water of the river, and literally were one with
the air and the creatures which flew through
it, all interweaving into the phenomenon of
the country itself.” Everything, and every
creature, was imbued with the force of life:
“The hieroglyphic word for beetle means
‘to be.’ The beetle and sun are both analogs
of the same force, not symbols.” For the
earth-bonded person, in Africa, Sicily, and
elsewhere, “The name of the thing and the
thing itself are the same.”26
Page 38
Earth-bonded theology is not ponderous.
In one egyptian creation story, the creator
Amun runs around honking after laying
an egg. Africans, who regard their deities
familiarly, call Amun the “Great Cackler.”
Similarly, africans attributed animal
characteristics to humans, and human
characteristics to animals, identifying
divinity with animal and human forms.27
Sometimes the goddess was a cow named
Hathor, other times she was a woman with
a Hathor headdress. Horus, son of Isis, could
be a hawk, sometimes a man with a hawk’s
head, or a child in the arms of his mother.28
Harmony between humans and animals
characterized ancient Africa, as did harmony
between men and women, a contentment
visible in many depictions of embracing
couples. Seeing life as a spiral, africans
believed new life came from death.
The Black Madonna at Santa Maria de Montserrat
Benedictine Monastery in the Montserrat
Mountains in Catalonia. In the fifteenth century,
the Basque soldier Iñigo de Loyola hung up his
military equipment before this image and began
the pursuit of mysticism, founding a religious order
which followed a policy of practical mysticism
(“Contemplatives in Action”), deeply devoted to
Mary. The evening hymn sung each night before
this Black Madonna begins, “Rose of April, Dark
Lady of the Mountain Chain….”
Isis melded with Ma’at, african goddess
whose name connotes mother,29 and with
Sekhmet, whose name means “powerful one.”
Ma’at had a feather on her head that signified
justice. Many representations of Isis (as well as
of Ma’at) have feathers. Feathers, an egyptian
guide advised us, connote equality, since they
are the same, back and front. When a person
died, his or her heart, the seat of intelligence,
would be weighed on a scale balanced by the
feather of Ma’at. If the heart was not as light
as the feather, the soul would be lost to Apet,
the devourer.
Ma’at, or mother, embodied truth,
ethics, justice, and righteous behavior.30
Sekhmet, the fierce aspect of the african
dark mother, was a woman with a lion’s
head. Hundreds of statues of Sekhmet were
found in the temple of Mut in Karnak.
Like Isis, Sekhmet originally carried a sun
disk on her head and an ankh, signifying
Goddess on a coffin fragment, Twenty-second Dynasty
(1064-717 BCE). Many aspects of different Goddesses are
combined in this protective image: the headdress of Isis, the
face of Sekhmet, the color of Wadjet, and the wings of Mut.
From the collection of the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.
life, in her hand. The ankh is said to
prefigure the christian cross, although the
christian symbol has no female oval.31
African Isis melded with anatolian
Cybele, sumerian Inanna, canaanite Astarte,
and roman Diana. Isis’ distinguishing
images were a throne, a boat, sails, and the
annual flooding of the Nile. Often depicted
with outstretched wings, Isis harks back
to the paleolithic bird and snake goddess
of Africa. Attesting to african migrations’
carrying african beliefs to all continents, a
contemporary native american figurine is
that of a venerated woman with wings. A
20th century sicilian artist depicted comari,
women who bonded together in memory
of the mother, sheltered by protective
wings of Isis.
In antiquity, at Byblos in west Asia,
african Isis was identified with the canaanite
goddess Astarte. With hellenization, Isis
became the great mother; her consort Osiris,
or “the great black,” became Zeus, Pluto,
and Dionysus. The enduring truth of Isis,
whose civilization centered in nubian Meroe,
may be that she embodied veneration of all
life…trees are sacred, so are birds, crocodiles,
the dung beetle, the hooded cobra, and all
living creatures.
R.E. Witt, historian, following the
transformation of a “purely African faith
into a world religion,” points out that
african veneration of Isis became greek,
then graeco-roman32 as greek and roman
empires swept through Africa, Europe, and
Asia. After 332 BCE, when Alexander of
Macedonia conquered Egypt, Alexandria in
Africa became the capitol of an empire that
stretched from the Nile to the Danube, a
city where africans, asians, europeans, jews,
and greeks mingled, where Osiris became
Aesculapius, or Serapis, healing god of Greece
and Rome, and Isis, blending with anatolian
Cybele, canaanite Astarte, and graecoroman goddesses, became great mother of
the Mediterranean.33
Page 39
All over the known world in the first
centuries of the common era, slaves and noble
women venerated african Isis as a divinity
who “prevailed through the force of love,
pity, compassion, and her personal concern
for sorrows.”34 Before christianity did so,
the religion of Isis promised life after death.
Isis centers have been found throughout the
roman empire; in Gaul, Portugal, Spain,
Britain, Germany, and Italy, particularly in
places that later became sanctuaries of black
madonnas.35
In Italy, Isis was a mother divinity
associated with healing; the 6th century
BCE temple to Isis at Pompeii is located
next to a temple of Aesculapius, or Serapis.36
A significant characteristic of Isis, one later
associated with the christian madonna,
was that she was a compassionate mother.
In the christian epoch her son Horus was
represented as a christ figure. Isis is often
depicted with a laurel wreath and two
prominent ears, symbolizing that she listened
with both ears to the prayers of all those who
came to her, an image that can be found to
this day in italian folklore.
Water, always associated with Isis, held
a sacred quality: holy water, holy rivers, and
holy sea. The serpent, identified with Isis; was
always sacred. Hathor, was associated with
regeneration. The cow, another image of Isis,
became sacred in India. Music, associated
with Isis, was conveyed by the image of
Isis carrying a sistrum, a rattle still heard in
african music today. Isis and wheat, in the
roman epoch, became Ceres and wheat. In
the christian epoch Isis became santa Lucia,
whose images always carry a sheaf of wheat.
The olive tree, associated with Isis, has today
become symbol of nonviolent transformation.
Italy’s contemporary nonviolent left political
coalition is named: L’Ulivo, or the olive tree.37
Rosicrucian
Digest
No. 1
2010
Mistress of religion in Egypt, Isis was god
the mother, yet in Isis there was no division
between feminine and masculine. She was
beloved by women and men, young and old,
Page 40
Isis giving milk, the favorite image of the Goddess for the
Roman world. Collection of the Louvre. Photo © 2007,
Rama/Wikimedia Commons.
and all social classes. Her statue at Philae,
created between the second and first centuries
before Jesus, carries the sistrum in one hand
and the ankh in the other. In her 600 BCE
image in the Museum of Cairo, Isis is figured
as a black nursing mother, who bears a startling
resemblance to christian images of the nursing
madonna.
Veneration of Isis, her spouse Osiris,
and son Horus persisted in all the pharaonic
dynasties, a 3,000 year old history when belief
in Isis spread from Meroe and Alexandria to
“the whole Mediterranean basin.”38 In Italy
and other latin countries where the holy family
is a focus of devotion, the trinity of Isis and
her husband and child became the popular
christian trinity of Maria, Joseph, and Jesus,
popular trinity that differs from the motherless
trinity—father, son, and holy ghost—of
canonical christianity.
At african Memphis, hymns praised Isis as
a civilizing, universal divinity who had ended
cannibalism, instituted good laws, and given
birth to agriculture, arts and letters, moral
principle, good customs, and justice. Mistress
of medicine, healer of human maladies,
sovereign of earth and seas, protectress from
navigational perils and war, Isis was “Dea
della salvezza per eccellenza…veglia anche sulla
morte,” divinity of salvation par excellence,
who also watches over the dead.39
Amulet bearing the name of Vizier Paser, with Isis and Hathor;
gold, gold leaf and amazonite, New Kingdom. Excavated from
the Serapaeum of Memphis. Collection of the Louvre. Phot..
