Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers

Book goes far beyond scope of title rambling into behavioral psychology and white supremacy. Can’t imagine why author includes an unpublished college paper. Book needs serious editing. Over use of words such as “hegemonic”. I have found other books far more helpful and insightful in understanding the black Madonna and the earth mother origins and archetype.

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.

Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers has brought to light many questions that I have had. Many years ago I was introduced to African Madonnas and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum's discoveries and scholarship has reawaked what I have always believed. When I relocate to Sicily in January 2014, I will explore some of the Black Madonna sites that are written about in her book. Wonderful!

Enjoyed reading real information.

It is an invitation to go and look into your ancesterline. To go and visit the places. To 'walk' the old paths of our formothers.

Well written and documented, very academically correct. I would like to see more balance with the heart and intellect, more stories that integrate all the incredibly beautiful and bountiful historic facts with some narrative theology that would help me integrate all of this.

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.

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!!