Da Circe a Morgana. Scritti di Momolina Marconi, edited by Anna De Nardis, Edizioni Venexia, Roma, 2009
has recently come out in Italy. It is a rare occasion to read  some of the texts written  by the best Italian scholar on the Mediterranean Pelasgian religion (1912-2006). Her work offers an original contribution in the field on which, in the same years, J. E. Harrison and Marija Gimbutas were working.

From Kirke to Morgana.

An introduction to Momolina Marconi.

Luciana Percovich

“Everlasting is the fascination proceeding from divine feminine beings, wonderfully skilled in magic and medicine arts, who alone know the virtues of certain herbs, of certain flowers they arrange in filters and beverages, giving death and life, disease and health in the vast reign of Nature".
Thus began the long “note” From Kirke to Morgana, published in 1941 by Momolina Marconi and introduced by the following words: ”How Kirke and Morgana can be interpreted pointing out the features linking them to the great goddess of the Mediterranean religion”.

Momolina Marconi is not a well known and frequently quoted author nor in the academic world nor among scholars of the field: personally, I owe my “discovery” of her work to two friends, Anna de Nardis and Luisella Veroli, both deeply involved in the quest of the origins of western patriarchal civilization, while I was keeping a course on Mythologies of the Divine, Images of the sacred feminine at the Free Women’s University of Milan.

And now, when I look back at the century that has just ended – which has brought so many revolutionary changes also in the field of archaeology, forcing a completely new perspective on the past history of the whole planet and making all our school books obsolete – I see three great figures of women, Jane Ellen Harrison, Momolina Marconi and Marija Gimbutas. Each of them worked separately, in different places and contexts, using different methodologies, speaking different languages and joining different opportunities and tools, but their work never contradicts the others’, as if they were moving on a same scenario, each recollecting fragmented sections of the same memory, obeying the same need of bringing to light a buried truth.

M. Marconi was Professor of History of Religions at the Università degli Studi di Milano for a long period, between the 1940s to the 1970s. Her major work, Riflessi Mediterranei nella più antica Religione Laziale, was published in 1939.

In the boiling years while I was attending the same University, between 1967 and 1972, she was badly upset by the rebellion of the Movimento Studentesco, and in one occasion she herself was made object of the protest. She went on in her research in complete isolation, while the rising Feminist Italian Movement was completely disinterested in her work. And still today, strangled between the rejection  of the catholic imprinting of our education and the marxist interpretation of history we used as a weapon to free ourselves from clerical oppression, the themes on women’s spirituality and the rediscovery of the “Goddess” religion of the past have in Italy a narrow path to run along.

No wonder, therefore, that her work has run out of print long ago, completely unconsidered among the main Italian intellectuals of predominantly leftist formation and genetically suspicious of every small echo of Bachofen or Evola, and among the majority of women politically involved in the consciousness raising groups at the beginning and in the academia more recently.

So, this short essay is a first introduction to her work, aiming to point out her original contributions to the reconstruction of the broader Old Europe civilization, which had in the Mediterranean Sea a privileged basin of diffusion westward and eastward.

M. Marconi saw clearly that the area through which her research methodology was bringing her could not be confined within traditional geographical boundaries but stretched from the British Isles to the Indus Valley down to Cape Cormorin. And that the typology of the “Italian goddess” had her own major traits, in a sort of progressive differentiation from the Kolkidian area, which was her place of origin, from where it spread up to the nothwestern coasts of Europe: she was mainly a “Lady of the Vegetable World”, a “Magician” who had in herself the characteristics that turned her into a  fairy and finally into a witch.

A Greek and Latin scholar, she always considered Uberto Pestalozza her main and beloved teacher (his basic work is entitled Eterno Feminino Mediterraneo, 1954).
Her research basis “on the study of the linguistic survivals of a Mediterranean Italy in the Indoeuropean Italy and on the study of religious survivals” that can be still found in the Latin and Roman pantheon, “following and digging more deeply the track traced in these fields by the preceeding scholars”.

In so doing, she displays her vast  knowledge of the classical sources and of the roots of names of places and of the attributes of each divinity, together with a wide and strong memory of toponymies and epithets and her ability to create new connections and discover unexpected analogies, within a wide area she calls “Mediterranean”, more to delineate the common features of a civilization than in the geographical sense: it will be impossible in this essay to give full evidence to the richness of her way of proceeding.

“Special religious analogies and a substantial religious commmunity between the eastern and western Mediterranean coasts outline a cultural unity in the primeval layers of all the Mediterranean countries belonging to the Neolitic and Eneolitic era”1
Moreover, “ we can see how the great Mediterranean civilization, thanks to the study of some female goddesses in the Roman religion, passes through the Black Sea, the Tigri and Eufrate valleys and stretches up to the Indus Valley (here she refers to the publications of G. Childe, 1935 and of E. Mackay, 1936): the foundings in Mohenjo Daro and Harappa reveal unheard links between the Anatolic-Aegean religious world and the Pre-Arian India and make us think of the Dravidians as a western origin population which, mixing with the primitive negroid population, was the vehicle of the Mediterranean civilization in the Gange’s rivermouth and Ceylon.”2

“They were the Pelasgians, a dolicomorphus Mediterranean Pre-Indoeuropean people, who attested their presence since the Upper-Paleolitic westward and eastward the Aegeo-Anatolian area….In Italy, we can find traces of these early populations basically in the North with the Ligures and in the central-southern part (including Sardinia) with the Sicules. Probably they came from Africa, spreading eastward and westward……..
Only in the final part of the Bronze Age and during the beginning of the archaic part of the Iron Age it is possible to find traces of a new coming people….These are the Protovillanovians who, pressed by ethnic upheavals in the Balcanic area, arrived as immigrants some walking up to Veneto, others sailing the sea and the rivers up to the zone surrounding Mantova, others founding two colonies without evolution nerby Ancona and Matera. But the main stream, in subcessive waves,landed in the zone of Rimini: from there, through the Apennines,they penetrated the upper Tiber valley, running along the Tuscan and Latial coasts,without ever landing on the Hadriatic regions of Central Italy, where the descendants of the neolitic peoples remained untouched……
They weren’t sailors nor conquerors, but small groups of people practising agriculture, forced to abandon their lands on the eastern side of the Hadriatic Sea, and looking for new land to plough…..Along the slopes of the Alban hills they built round hut villages…..From the name of the region they established in, they were later called Latins, not having a definite name before. Different from the indigenous Mediterraneans living there since the Neo-Eneolitic times – already Ario-European in  language, who used to inhumate since uncountable time the dead - these new Villanovian immigrated peoples practised cremation as funeral rites.”3

“These Villanovians who migrated into Latium were not a different race from the Mediterraneans, as the anthropologic observations in the Castelli Romani (G. Patroni) prove…..they were Mediterranean too, ethnically differentiated and ‘indoeuropeanized’ in their Balcanic-Danubian zones, fully includeded in the ray of diffusion of the Mediterranean culture in the East of Europe.”4
In these passages, M. Marconi encounters and crosses the studies of Marija Gimbutas she didn’t know. Then, she passes to value the event linguistically:
“The Villanovians also contributed to the increase and spread of Ario-European languages, already present, however,in the southern part of Italy since the Neo-Eneolitic times, not as a consequence of subcessive invasions but through slow and peaceful infiltrations of Mediterranean arianized peoples coming from the East.
But the Villanovians brought a new linguistic ferment, which gave rise to a new language, Latin5, whose birth was parallel to the birth of a new people, because they didn’t exist as such before their arrival along the banks of the river Tiber….where the native spoken languages were the Umbro- Volsco- Osco dialects, which have many internal similitudes”.6

Thus defined in the Introduction of her main book the frame of the geo-historical context of her research, Momolina Marconi in the following chapters supports through an accurate analysis the survival in the Roman pantheon of the most ancient images of the Goddess/God not belonging to the Greek-Indoeuropean layer. In so doing she underlines the continuity between what Italy was before the foundation and rising of Rome as Jane Ellen Harrison does for Greece before the classical Athens and the creation of the Olympians: nor Athens nor Rome rose from nothing nor can they be considered the miracle of a sudden civilization without roots in the land and in the past tradition.
The cult of nature in the Italian peninsula, while testifying an immanent view of the divine, was embodied in innumerable female “goddesses” such as Marica, Feronia, Angizia, Kirke, Pasifae, Mestra, Agamede, Bona Dea, Hygieia, Diana, Flora and others. Each of them represents a local and individualized image of the Great Mediterranean Goddess, as she developed in this geo-historical region of the greater Mediterranean area: as the powerful potnia phytòn and potnia pharmakòn.
This, in fact, is the main trait found in the west Mediterranean area, while in the Greek-Anatolic side it seems that prevailed her image as potnia theròn.
Here, also the general atmosphere seems lighter, there is less tragedy (less conflicts?) than in the Anatolic-Mesopotamic area (epitomized in the later stories of Inanna or Medea, sister of Kirke and Angizia): the woods, the waters, the ground have something fairy, flowery and the goddess appears as an enchanting lady, able to recover and to transform menacing heroes in grunting pets, as shown in the Odyssey.
Her cult is “in the open air, on the green top of a hill, in the radiant, bright raduras in the wood, along the still banks of a lake, in the quiet bandle of a river, where water flows more silently”.7

All these elements can be found again north of the Alps, preserved in the Celtic mythology, from France to the British isles: this is the theme afforded by M. Marconi in her followin publication From Kirke to Morgana in 1941.
Together with this image of the goddess, also the ancient God of Vegetation, her paredros, her mate and her fruit, the Horned God, has survived and their celebrations went on uuntil Modern Age among the “pagan” people, up to the final transformation into the Devil of the Witches in the Burning Times.8

In this long essay, followed the next year by Kirke, 1942, M. Marconi fully supports her thesis: Kirke is much more than one of the female seducers met by Ulysses, she is the archetype of the potnia phytòn, the clearest example of the pharmakides, the Goddess in her full manifestation as Lady of the Wild, healer and sciaman, the most known magician of the Old Mediterranean world strictly related to Medea, the most famous magician of Anatolia, both so popular and deeply rooted in the tradition to survive as definite and powerful figures even in the written narrations of the later patriarchal civilization through  Homer and Euripides.

The genealogy of Kirke (as always happens when a matrilinear genealogy is forced into a patriarchal one) is multiple: daughter of Hecate9 (Hes. Theogonia)) and Helios or of Perseide and Helios or, following another source (Hes. Argon.Orph.) of Asterope – another Oceanine Nymph – and of Hyperion. If daughter of Helios, she is not only  Medea’s sister but also of Pasifae’s and Aietes’. In both cases, she has been generated by the ocean and by the sky.

“The Mediterraneans venerated a great goddess, lady of the herbs the flowers the plants, lady of the beasts and of the herds, lady of the paesants and the mariners, lady of the maidens ready to marriage and of the fertile wives: at this widespread world, including all the living beings on earth, she looks with benevolent and relieving eyes, ready to foster and protect their prodigious continuos growth. This omnipotent divinity is most of all worshipped as a health giver being.

By what means does she fulfill her essential work? Through the knowelwdge of herbs and flowers, from which she is able to obtain juices and ointments that prodigiuosly restore health, youth and life. Consequently, thanks to this everlasting noble labour as potnia phytòn, she is identified with the earth, the fruitful nourishment of life, who restlessly gives birth to tender herbs, abundant fruits and powerful trunks.
To this uninterrupted spinning of life every year renewing in the shadows of the woods as in the open fields thrice ploughed, the masculine power of Helios does collaborate bringing light and heat to the earth, that is fertilizing it. Early was Helios perceived by the Mediterraneans as a life agent, functioning besides the great goddess, the true potnia of the universe, of whom he was the paredros…..Pasifae and the taurus Helios in Crete are the typical example….
The subsequent passage from paredros to pater – also considering the alternation of different roles in the divine couples of the Minoic religion – is not difficult to explain.
With the splitting of the great goddess in many divine personalities, each of them with her well defined name but always holding the particular ability of pharmakides.
Helios was perceived not only as the father of the vegetable world but of themselves, who had such a familiarity with all the plants and were the depositaries of the secret hidden in every corolla, fruit, root…”10

As her mother Hecate, Kirke originally lived in Kolkis, as Homer told us: in the garden in the wood in Kolkis which was already sacred to her mother and was called Aiaia11. But when she meets Ulysses she is living in another prodigious garden, the Tirrenic Aiaia. So we have two Aiaias Kirkedias, the oros Kirkaion polypharmakon in Italy and the Kirkaion pedion Kolkidos, where “the first ray of Helios in the morning awakens life in the secret garden, lightening the wondrous face of the goddess”.12

This double garden is read as one of the proofs of the spreading westward of the Pelasgians: M. Marconi quotes the research of Joseph Karst, 1934, who had found the names Kerketai in the Caucasic zone, to indicate the local population now called Circassian, the Gergithes in Anatolian Troade, the Gergesaias in Palestina, all names indicating “the people of Kirke”.
M. Marconi underlines that the root kirk-, kerk- is also requently found from Kerkyra (Corfù) in the Hadriatic Sea to Kirkesion in Mesopotamia, and from Egypt to Thracia and Illyricum.13
And, following Fozio and Esichio, farther eastward: there were peoples known as Kerkitai (ethnos Indikòn) and Kolkoi Indicoi, among the Indian populations.

Kolkoi (Korkai, Kolkai) was the name of an important commercial and maritime city in the north-eastern part of Cape Cormorin in the south of India: it was the ancient capital of the reign of Pandjas, the cradle of the southern India civilization and home of three mythical brothers, who were said to be the founders of the reigns of Pandja, Khera and Khola.14
There are many other toponyms quoted by M. Marconi, who is reading Giovanni Damasceno, Claudio Tolomeo, Pomponio Mela, Strabo and others to prove the strict relation between the farthest eastern and western diffusion of the Pelasgians, irradiating from the Black Sea area. Once more, it is impossible to follow here all the brooks of her thought, continually opening new perspectives and changing scenaries.

In addition, there are other aspects of Kirke, Medea, Angizia15 that, besides segnalling the peculiar representation of the goddesss as developed in the central-western part of the Mediterranean and of Europe, link them with the main traits of the Goddess: they also are “maiden, mother and crone”, and Kirke has her own dark side as lady of the dead like her mother Hecate. And in the Farmacusse islands, in the Gulf of Saronico (Greece), Kirke was supposed to have her burial place.

In more recent times, Kirke revived in Morgana, as recorded in the medioeval cycles of King Arthur.
After the period of radical change in perception represented by the Classical Greek and Roman civilization, after the falling of the Empire, a new period of revival of “magic”thinking rose again:
“In the Classical Age, modified and altered by new social and intellectual conditions, these attributes of the goddesses were lessened when not completely lost, but this notwithstanding they continued to belong and to be deeply rooted in the religious functions and believes. Undoubtely, the medioeval magic has its source in the Mediterranean substratum which, more or less latent, came to surface in the Celtic world, giving place to particularly signifying relations and coincidences.”16

Referring to the Lady of the Lake and Lancelot, to Viviana and Merlin, to Morgana and King Arthur, M. Marconi ascertains as Kirke had Picus as her paredros17 so Viviana/Diana/Danu had Merlin18:”it is a very common theme in the Celtic mythic literature the supernatural lady who trains a young hero, being at the same time her mother, her teacher, her lover.”19

The medioeval fairy is, therefore, the northern and later version of the Mediterranean magician with whom she shares the most typical elements: the wood, the herbs and the plants, the ability to transform men (into beasts as into warriors), the river or the lake, etc.
“Our fairy, our ‘Lady of the Lake’ also through this mysterious and suggestive name reveals herself as a superior, divine being. She has a predilection for lacustrian basins, guarded by a gorgeous nature, in which to dive and disappear deluding the curious eyes of the profane, just to come back whenever she decides to help somebody with her superior tools….it is as if we could hear in her the nearly lost echo of other divine beings that she prodigiously recalls: they are the far Mediterranean sisters felt and called by their followers –just as herself – ‘Lady’….”20

In fact, the British Isles before the arrival of the Celts, “had been inhabitated by Mediterranean tribes, of matrilineal descent, who built megalithic monuments and adored Danu/Don as their eponimous mother”. In Danu/Don M. Marconi shows up the same root of ‘Diana’ – goddess of the wood and of waters, the ancient root of the name of the medioeval Lady of the Lake, Vi-‘Viana’.

As regard as Morgana, she shares the same nature of Kirke, being a magician/fairy/witch. Her name is connected both with Morrigan – a Celtic warlike version of the mighty goddess, the powerful magician able to transform herself and others in many disguises, to unchain storms of darkness and rains of fire, living in a sidh with a garden and a wood of her own; and with innumerable toponyms back to the primitive Mediterranean world: Morges, ancient king of Italy and Sicily, the Morgetes, an old ligure-siculo tribe of Italy, Morgantine, a town of eastern Sicily, Morgentia, a city in Sannium like Morgana  near Imera in Sicily, Morginum in the Narbonensis Gallia or Morgan (now Belluno, in Veneto) and Morgani (now Pola, in Istria).

So, it won’t sound amazing that the Isle of Avalon – as the Welsh Annwn, where Don/Danu, Viviana and Morgana were said to dwell in a world parallel to that of the “mainland” reality21- in the Middle Ages was recognized in the Isle of Sicily, the insula pomorum quae fortunata vocatur: till today the mirage in the Messina Straits is called “Fata Morgana”22.

On this line, a Sicilian writer of the XVII century, Placido Reina, linked Morgana with the Syrens who were able, as Medea, to inchant the winds.
“Insula pomorum” is nontheless exactly the translation of the name “avalon”: the Breton aval, the Irish abhal, the Gaelic afal, the German appel/apple/apfel23 are the words to indicate the modern English apple, a morphema which has a Mediterranean substratum and is diffused also in southern Italy (Abella, for example, is a town in Campania known for its apple production), and recurs also in the name of the god Abellio in the French district of Garonna whose main cult centre was Aulon, without forgetting that in Crete and Sicily we found the variant Apellon for Apollon.24

Morgana therefore lives in an island of apples, in a luxuriant apple-orchard, as Aphrodite who grew an apple tree in her garden in Tamassos in Cipro. Apple trees are similarly found in the far western garden of the Hesperides or in the Champs Elisees, beyond the borders of the Mediterranean sea. The aiaia of Kolkides has found here her last western shelter.

“In Avalon, the far west island, Morgana lives alone, because so requires her superhuman essence; but she disdains solitude, therefore she attracts on her island the most brave knights or leaves it in search of adventures. Avalon looks like Aiaia. The magician needs a far off land, severed from the humans, who can get there only if favoured by her divine will; there the goddess can operate the most different changes, surrounded by her faithful animals, growing herbs and plants useful to her activities, preparing filters and strange ointments, displaying her secret art. Because even when the goddess doesn’t live on a real island, she needs to dispose of solitary and inacessible places where no man can approach unpunished, if he is not attracted by her desire or by her lively voice”25.

This research has been enlarged and transformed into a book:
Oscure Madri Splendenti. Le origini del sacro e delle religioni, Venexia, Roma, 2007.

NOTE