On the Edge of Dream: Culture, Collective Psyche, and Re-Storying in the Anthropocene

I’m spending the year in Italy carrying out fieldwork for my doctoral research. I invite you to follow along! By way of introduction to the project, here is the proposal that made me a Fulbright semi-finalist, connected me with amazing collaborators, and shaped the container for the research. The project is multi-layered and also includes an autoethnographic component that I’ll introduce in another post.

I propose to trace a continuous thread of indigenous and women’s wisdom from its origins in the Paleolithic, through ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times to the present. My research will delve deeply into the biographies and legacies of a set of extraordinary women leaders from the medieval and Renaissance eras in what is now northern Italy. It will include inquiry at cultural heritage and archaeological sites related to these women as well as to sites pertaining to their tribal predecessors in ancient and prehistoric times. I will trace, in the ecopsychological sense, the spirit and essence of the land itself and how it has informed the expression and preservation of that wisdom through apparent loss, as well as ways it supports its emergence now: how ecological complexes[1] offer entry into a regenerative and autochthonous story of the Anthropocene.

            Visionary thinkers emphasize the importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge and women’s wisdom with the Western scholarly and scientific traditions from which they were so long excluded. This integration will contribute to a “transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner”[2]. Drawing on philosophy, cultural history, and eco- and archetypal psychologies, this interdisciplinary consensus aligns with what Indigenous practitioners and scholars[3] have repeatedly asked of people of Western descent: to seek and reconnect with the wisdom of their own ancestral lineages and lands, toward the same end. My project is inspired by these exhortations.

            Working with local archaeologists, anthropologists, and geologists will deepen access and insight to the prehistoric era and Italian geology, and learning from historians will support my understanding of Christian women in the Medieval era in particular and the arc of Italian relationship to land and cultural development from late antiquity to modernity in general. Their expertise and native insight, combined with resources available through cultural custodians and archivists at my research sites, will ensure the rigor and clarity of the project. The passionate connection of people at these sites to the subjects I am researching will continue, as in my initial explorations, to deepen its soul.

            The design of the study ensures both soul and rigor and is a hybrid of Terrapsychological Inquiry and Ethnoautobiography: groundbreaking methodologies for “restorying our relationship with nature, place, and planet” and “unlearning whiteness, decolonization, (and) uncovering ethnicities,” respectively. Building on three years of theoretical and historical literature review, it will include transcultural ceremony, dreamwork, and pilgrimage as well as extensive fieldwork and documentation. The research goal is to trace and document earth-based wisdom encoded in the cultural record through acts of resilience by the ancestral figures I am studying, with particular attention paid to sites where that wisdom is already re-emergent in local cultural initiatives. Research will concentrate on the regions of Lombardy and Piedmont and include sites throughout Italy.

Italy, like the U.S. and the larger global community, is navigating the tension between inclusive and contracted worldviews. This tension is part of the process of healing from the traumas of history* and midwifing a sustainable collective future. At such a time it is all the more important to support initiatives which center on the urgent need to restore balance, wisdom, and a deep sense of connectedness to Western collective consciousness—not “to recreate a long-lost past,” but “to help us build authentic traditions for today”[4] and a story that can carry us forward.

*Addressed in depth elsewhere in my Fulbright application, I want to note here that these traumas include centuries of “longstanding white-on-white practices” (Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, p. 62) having direct impact on black and brown bodies in the U.S. today. My research draws on the work of Menakem and Nell Irvin Painter, among others, to explore the origins of white supremacy and is explicitly anti-racist in intent. European and Euro-American ancestral work is often co-opted by white supremacy. My work stands for liberation, and against oppression.

[1] “thematic knots or junctures where human and ecological wounding combine”- ecopsychologist Craig Chalquist

[2] Thomas Berry, cultural historian, The Great Work

[3]  Dorothy Powless, Apela Colorado, and Pat McCabe, among others

[4] Sharon Blackie, Welsh mythologist

the Women

My research began through the study of six extraordinary women from the Renaissance and medieval eras in northern Italy, identified through genealogical research, ceremonial inquiry, and synchronicity in an ancestral healing project. Their biographies, lands, and legacies inspire through beauty, ferocity, resilience and mystery, and bridge past and future.

top to bottom, L to R: Matilda of Canossa, Matilda of Canossa, Obertenghi family Castle of Arcola in La Spezia,

Adelaide of Susa,

Caterina Sforza,

Bianca Maria Visconti,

Bona of Savoy

Women’s Mystery Traditions

 As elaborated by Michele K. Spike and Selma Sevenhuijesen, Matilda embodied the Frankish/Celtic/Germanic/Indo-European tradition of woman as warrior priestess, a role whose existence was recently proven through advancements in archaeological technology (Davis-Kimball, 2012). All of these women did, and I will investigate the possibility that Matilda and Berta, in particular, also had strong ties to the matriarchal traditions of older tribes on their lands; tribes who were not part of the northern, sky god oriented, warrior cultures but who were a part of what Marija Gimbutas called Old Europe (2007). Several cultures, and possibly multiple lines of women’s mystery traditions—including the tribal warriors, Roman priestess traditions drawing on Greek and Roman oracular practice woven into emergent Christianity, Etruscan, and matriarchal earth-based traditions native to the Italian peninsula since the Paleolithic—came together in these women. Like all priestesses, their power was connected to both heaven and earth.

These women were devotedly spiritual in a transcendental sense. Given their activities and even the artwork they chose for their cathedrals and devotionals, it seems likely their Christian faith was descended from, or at least closer to, Gnostic ideals than the patriarchal Roman Catholicism which would eventually dominate. Research will include coding the imagery I know of and track down any histories of their theological choices and preferred gospels.  Certainly it is known that Matilda wanted women to be allowed to preach in the Church. She argued passionately about it with her close confidant Pope Gregory VII. According to legend he said she could preach after she had built 100 churches, and she died after building 99 (Spike, 2004).

These ancestors were also deeply rooted in the land. They grew up intimately connected to it, hunting, giving and taking life, riding through wild terrain by day and by night on horseback. Researchers at the Heartmath Institute have documented the opening and expansion  effect the magnetic field of the equine heart has on the human field (Baldwin, 2014), and I know from experience how extended time in connection with horses and the land can facilitate mystical experience. I find it difficult to believe that powerful and sensitive women descended from priestess queens would not have had direct spiritual experience with the land in their circumstances, especially given that all of their lands included sites used for women’s ritual continuously since the Paleolithic.

Some of these sites have been in continuous use from prehistory until the present, and are seeing the resurgence of earth-based and women’s wisdom practices which draw on ancient autochthonous wisdom. They offer a source of healing and wisdom with relevance to our current global challenges and crises.

Davis-Kimball, J. (2012). Among our earliest Amazons: Eurasian priestesses and warrior-women. In Labrys, études feministes. July/December 2012. Labrys.net.br/labrys22/archeo/Jeannine_daviskimball.htm