I have the honor of staying connected with Luciana Percovich, an Italian feminist advocate, writer, and researcher, for almost the last three decades. Details are fading in my memory on when exactly we first got connected. What cannot be forgotten is that our deeply felt influence by Mary Daly’s radical feminist thought brought us together. Rather, Luciana reached out to me when I was just beginning my scholarly career as a returning graduate student in the Women’s Studies in Religion program at Claremont Graduate University. One day out of the blue I was contacted by Luciana from Italy telling me that she had invited Mary Daly for the feminist event. Luciana was one of my serendipitous allies when I was very isolated but fully surrounded by my research tasks. I was comforted by Luciana’s interest in the topic of gynocentric-cosmogony and my work on The Magoist Cosmogony. I am thankful that you have agreed on doing an E-Interview with me and answered my questions that I thought important to introduce you to our RTM readers and beyond.
Hwang Tell us about your Goddessian research. How did it begin? What made you take it up as a topic for your scholarship?
Percovich My research began after I had spent many years within the Women’s Movement in Milano, where I arrived in 1967 to attend university. These were the years of the students’ movement, when a whole generation began questioning the core of the social economic and political structure. Very soon I encountered the first women’s consciousness-raising groups and engaged in some pioneering projects (women’s health centers, bookshops, brand new women’s only independent publishers). At that time, the first American and English feminist authors were being translated. Some books arouse my attention: Patriarchal Attitudes (1970) by Eva Figes, Witches, Midwives and Nurses by B. Ehrenreich and D. English, A Literature of One’s own by E. Showalter and, a little bit later, A Feeling for the Organism, by E. Fox Keller on Nobel Prize Barbara McClintock. It was then that my commitment to translating/publishing began as editor-in-chief for a series of books by women. I was exploring different paths to find answers to the reasons why we as women were always treated as second class citizens.
In the 1990s, with a friend of mine and our two children, we decided to travel to Australia (to attend the 6th International Feminist Book Fair in Melbourne, July 1994), which was destined to open a new horizon in my search. All of a sudden, while visiting a small museum in Alice Springs that housed a collection of the work of T.G.H. Strehlow on the Aranda culture of central Australia, I discovered the indigenous vision of life/nature/religion.
What most touched me was their vision of life centred on female and male complexes of myths, traditions, and rituals, both of equal importance and handed down by separate lines of transmission. More so, “creation” was not something that happened once at the beginning of time, but something that needs to be re-created, day after day. No transcendent God the Father, no dogmas to believe in. I embarked on the path of the Sacred Feminine, that is a radically different vision of the terrain occupied by monotheistic male religions in Europe and elsewhere. Another cosmos-vision (or cosmic-vision), another set of values, another place for women, conceived from the ancient past, were possible! I had found the spiritual dimension which I had missed as I was becoming an adult, the dimension where the basic questions about the sense of life can be posed and answered, and which informs the social, economic, cultural, and religious assets of a people. The dimension that had been refused by my materialistic generation as it sought to launch a Marxist revolution.
When I returned to small and crowded Europe, I began investigating shamanic practices, while devouring books written by the pioneer women anthropologists and theologians of the 1970s and, eventually, The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas.
The focus of my research became reconstructing Her-story (or History before the advent of patriarchy), reclaiming a cosmos-biological vision of the “divine in nature” (or “inclusive transcendence” in the words of the radical feminist Mary Daly), investigating myths and symbols of societies with “women at the centre”.
In perfect synchronicity, I read Mary Daly’s Quintessence, got in touch with her and she came to Italy twice (invited to conferences in Milano, 2002, and Bologna, 2004). The translation of her book opened a new series of books dedicated to women’s history and spirituality, that still endures, Le Civette Saggi, for the independent publisher Venexia Editrice, in Roma.
In the following years, the works of many women authors, including Merlin Stone, Vicki Noble, Marija Gimbutas, Starhawk, Tsultrim Allione, Phyllis Currott, Kathy Jones, Genevieve Vaughan, Heide Goettner-Abendroth—and many others—I apologize for not quoting here—have been made available to Italian readers.
In more recent years, with the Laima Association, the International Indigenous Cultures of Peace conferences have been organized in Torino (2012, 2013, 2015) and in Rome (in honor of Marija Gimbutas, 20 years after her death, 2014) and now and then I’m invited to speak at international conferences, as in 2015 to the Parliament of World Religions, in Salt Lake City, USA or in 2016 to the Goddess Conference in Glastonbury, Great Britain.
Hwang How and why do you study the topics of Creatrix and matricentric/gynocentric cosmogony? What are your insights?
Percovich The twentieth century has been a crucial century for the re-emergence of the Goddess, and our generation was the first to become fully educated, which means that we finally had access to all the fields that, until that moment in time, had been reserved only to men. Just these two factors, the “unexpected in history” (Carla Lonzi), are proving to be an explosive mixture, able to re-open questions that the patriarchies of the West had vainly thought to have eliminated forever during the centuries in which the Burning Times occurred in Europe.
Thousands of statuettes, paintings, and symbols have literally re-emerged after millennia of hiding in the dark of earth and caves, the majority of which were not found as a result of planned excavations, but “by chance”, throughout the Eurasian continent. And a woman, fleeing the invasions and the horrors of the second world war to the States “with her daughter in one hand and her thesis in the other”, I was there, ready to “see” them and decode their meaning. An array of women archaeologists, anthropologists, historians of art, and competent in all the necessary disciplines were similarly ready to heed and reclaim the millenarian oral traditions preserved along separate lines of transmission, to focus their eyes on the rich material dug up in context that narrate a forgotten (or better damned) beginning of human civilizations.
Mythology in particular, everywhere, prior to the advent of patriarchies, tells us that She was the Creatrix: She who didn’t create humans and animals, plants and elements ex nihilo, but as a re-generation of a new beginning. She who gives life and also the rules to carry on Creation—which didn’t occur just once, at the beginning of time, but needs to be carried on again and again, day after day, by males and females.
Hwang What is the role of your Goddess scholarship in your feminist advocacies?
Percovich While writing about the “goddess”, I felt the inadequacy of this term to indicate the Sacredness of the Source of Life and Love. The word comes from an Indo-European root, which indicates both lightness of skin and a hierarchical male order and, in the Western cultures, it has been turned into the concept of transcendence (= external/superior to matter/mother), i.e., the theological culmination of the “monotheistic male religions”. An Italian scholar, Momolina Marconi, re-discovered the term potnia (= she who can/the Powerful)—another IE root, which translated a concept belonging to a preceding cultural layer, indicating the ancestral vision of the female generative capacity and power (the Generatrix/Rigeneratrix), signaling quite a different vision of life on Earth.
In Oscure Madri Splendenti (2005), drawing from the women’s literature produced since the 1970s by authors, such as Rita M. Gross, Elaine Morgan, Carol Christ, Merlin Stone, and many others, I started investigating the sense of loss produced in women by the denied access to the divine, and in She who gives Life. She who gives form (2009), I collected a particular set of myths, the cosmogonies, from all the continents.
At present, I’m deeply involved in the imagery of Paleolithic and Neolithic times and in reconstructing how the first social aggregations were founded around mothers-grandmothers-children, generating the basic social cell still existing in the matriarchal societies of the present. I’m also working on Crones and liminal figures, who stand at the thresholds of worlds. All these feminine archetypes help us to reconnect with the Wise Women of the matriarchal traditions and with Mother Earth, practicing in the present other forms of kinship and economy, weaving, conjuring, and bridging the ancestral legacy to the Sisters of the Future (Daly).
Another topic I’m involved in is the relationship between Religion, the Divine, and the Sacred. Historical religions were born from the reversal and removal of the place of origin. All these religions, distinct from previous conceptions and practices of the Sacred, have disconnected people from the experience of the Sacred, inventing skills and imposing roles strongly institutionalized and hierarchical, opening the way to free exploitation of the Earth and of all the creatures living on her: God created the world through will and word; Wealth is the reward for pious men.
Similarly, with the term “goddess”, we need to revise terms such as “sacred” and “divine”. The notion of “sacred” was born from observing the ever-changing female body in synchronicity with the moon, the cyclicity of time, the connection between humans, nature, and the cosmos in an inner, intimate way. Female ancient wisdom was linked to a way of understanding and acting that is close to the term sofia, a spiritual knowledge connected to experience, which passes through the complexity of body perceptions and the activation of energies that are subtler than those of the mind alone. The word, “divine” arises in the presence of a male body, after the theft of the functions connected to the sacred; from the perception of a separation (of the son from the mother, of the mind from matter) and from the rationalization of the lack of the ability to generate directly. It is always connected with hierarchical personifications and with human and historical events of heroes or semi-gods; philosophically, it conceptualizes itself as logos, characterized by being abstract intellectual knowledge.
Spirituality as consciousness, as cellular memory of the oneness of living matter and of the subtler plans of Being has been transformed by patriarchy into theology, which is a “theology of separation”, a “discourse” on the divine, interrupted here and there by the irruptions of the removed in the form of “mysticism”.
Now is the time to recover the abundance and richness of life we have lost and to re-enact the process of creation, interrupted by the last patriarchal millennia—which is a very short span of time, when compared with the eons of creation time, but immeasurably destructive for Life as we have known it.
Archives
“Fondo Percovich” presso Archivi Fondazione Badaracco, Milano
http://www.fondazionebadaracco.it/