In 2016 Anna Marceddu, a refined Sardinian photographer, published a book dedicated to the Mother Goddess, an invisible presence that has permeated nature and the human landscape, the wind, and the thoughts of the islanders, since time immemorial. This text of mine, which I propose again today to those who follow Prehistory in Italy, accompanied the images of women captured in the daily life of the present, attempting to suggest—in a non-native language—the infinite symbolic and historical references of a culture that today finds itself too narrowly categorized.
From Mother to Mother. Matriarchy and Matrilineality in Sardinia, by Anna Marceddu.
The legacy of the mythical "giants," daughters and sons of Gaia, and their millennia-old matriarchal culture, typical of the earliest stages of Mediterranean and European history, is still alive in the faces, gazes, bearing, and silent wisdom of the women photographed by Anna Marceddu.
Here the word matriarchy does not mean, sounding parallel to patriarchy, "domination of mothers" but, drawing on the other meaning of the Greek word Arch (beginning), indicates "at the beginning the Mothers". At the beginning of life, at the beginning of history, another vision of the world.
By combining the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who has reconstructed the features of the peaceful and egalitarian civilization of Neolithic Europe, with modern anthropological studies of surviving matriarchal societies, we are finally able to restore these women as living witnesses to a civilization that was colonized and erased, yet never disappeared. A civilization that was common to all peoples on Earth for long millennia, in a remote period when humanity was anything but "primitive," living in vast settlements, without a trace of war or social or gender inequality, dedicating themselves to the arts as well as the production of goods necessary for survival, and developing a refined system of religious beliefs, in harmony with the cycles of nature and centered on the female figure.
As a mythical ancestor, she was a woman who founded the lineage through which the practical and symbolic knowledge that stabilized the organization of life within and outside the family was passed down and transmitted. As a mother or grandmother, a woman was the center of the clan or extended family in which blood relatives lived. As a young woman, she shared the care of newborns with her sisters, aunts, and uncles—male figures of reference and affection—and was always welcomed. This type of social organization generally involved a sharing, or sometimes a rotation, of primary goods, such as land, fields, woods, and water—as still happens in some matriarchal cultures today; the talents unique to each clan were utilized with a view to maintaining a harmonious distribution of wealth.
The Pelasgian peoples, or peoples of the sea, of which the sons and daughters of Gaia were a part, experienced great development and lasting continuity in Sardinian soil, from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (6.000 – 1.500 BC). Even in subsequent periods, the sacredness of the feminine principle typical of this civilization managed to maintain itself, intertwining with the cult of the Phoenician goddess Tanit and during the Punic-Roman colonization with the cult of Demeter/Ceres. Subsequently, despite the Christian persecutions and the 767 trials brought by the Inquisition between 1562 and 1688 – 80% of which concerned “witches and sorceress” – it has been passed down to the present day by a magical network of women from outside which, especially in the inland areas, contributed to the "anthropological phenomenon" of the Barbagia matriarchy.
The prehistoric sites prior to the Nuragic phase are characterised by dolmens, circles of large stones, betyls and menhirs with breasts or with engraved goddesses and double spirals, and by surface settlements or hypogeal necropolises dug into the limestone rock: the domus de Janas, or “fairy houses” carved into the shape of a womb, egg, or female body.
The word Jana, common throughout the Mediterranean, is related to the Basque goddess Jaune, the Etruscan Uni, the Roman Juno and Diana, the Cretan Iune, and the Asian Ioni. In many domus de Janas From the 5th and 4th millennia BC, figurines of female deities have been found in a variety of materials. The oldest are the rounded ones from the cultures of Bonu Ighinu, Su Cungiau de Marcu, Cuccurru S'Arriu, Su Anzu, and Polu. The large-hipped statuette from S'Adde is similar to those found in Anatolia and Northern Europe. Meanwhile, in the Ozieri culture, the figurines are flat and stylized, T-shaped, with a conical lower part. Among the "Cycladic" goddesses, the statuette of the "White Lady" from Senorbì stands out.
Le deinas they are included in the genealogy of the janas, as heirs of a vision of the world in which everything is living and sacred and there are no rigid boundaries between one "kingdom" and another (human, animal, plant, of the living and the dead, of heaven and earth, above and below): they continued to be "seers" and videmortos, for their ability to communicate with the deceased. Their equipment included a mirror, a sieve, a veil, weaving tools; and of course herbs, ointments and substances that aided healing. trance, such as henbane, belladonna, datura, juniper oil,Orrosa 'e cogas (Witches' Rose), the peony and the Amanita muscaria mushroom ('hallucinated' as it is still said today) muscau). Their powers were firebending, contact with spirits, oracle-telling, remote viewing and healing, ecstasy, and magical flight.
In popular legends there is also the Jovian, a female guardian spirit who appears in homes on Thursday night when women linger at spinning, to help them; the vampiric catch o surbile, fruit of the Christian transformation which together with lamia, anguane, krivapete, melusine and morrigan in other parts of Italy and Europe he transformed them into witches; hot o pantamas, spirits of women who died in childbirth who go along the waterways during the night; the Wise Sibyl who lives with other Janas in the Carmelo cave near Ozieri, and to which oral tradition attributes the secret of bread leavening and the invention of lactic ferments; fairies who live in the nuraghi and weave good and bad fortune with a golden loom.
Figures that are not only found in legendary tales, but as custodians of an ancient tradition that was supposed to be interrupted, they have instead constituted a widespread presence and reality among the Sardinian population. They did not accept money, only natural products. Skilled herbalists, the orassionarjas They also healed with magic formulas called verbs and they used three grains of salt to ward off the evil eye. The old women accabadòras (from the Phoenician hacab, to put an end) accompanied in the transition of death and shortened the painful agonies, or after the funeral they went to the cemetery to "lock the house", turning the tip of a large key on the tomb three times.
I am indebted to Rosanna Fiocchetto of these testimonies collected in his 2003 essay entitled “Journey into Matriarchal Sardinia”, which can be consulted for the rich bibliography it offers and published in Women's University.
For her, as for Anna Marceddu, the island holds these treasures, buried in the earth, in faces, in language, and in unexamined customs, which reveal themselves to those who seek and recognize them with love and passion. Manifestations of a vision rooted in the deepest meaning of life, that which several millennia of war, domination, exploitation, and destruction have tried in vain to wrest: the civilization of care, of joy, of accompaniment at the turning points of life in all its forms. Because giving life rather than taking it is the principle of civilization.
The gaze of these women has seen deaths, rapes, injustices, blood, power struggles pass by but it still knows how to look at them as one witnesses a storm or an earthquake, which leaves behind much damage and yet will pass and the sun will shine again, and the moon rising from the mountain will remind everyone of the cyclical nature of becoming, made up of birth, maturation, death and regeneration.
Luciana Percovich – October 2016
