Della Medicina - Excerpt 3

By Lisa Fazio

The Ancient Mediterranean

     One day when I was standing looking out over the Tyrrhenian Sea on the west coast of Southern Italy, I watched the waves splash up along the edges of the hot, arid landscape and wondered how many of my own ancestors might have stood looking in this exact same place. My eyes now looking at the same place theirs once looked, my feet touching the same sands theirs might have, my body a vessel of DNA that evolved beneath the same Sun, my breath becoming one with the same air, and the gods of place whispering in my ear as they did to my ancient people. Although I have always lived in diaspora and grew in another place, my body remembers times far beyond my own life in all directions, especially when I’m in Italy.

     Southern Italy is a land of volcanoes and hot, dry summers, yet there is something fresh and vibrant all around in the forests grown on volcanic ash and the fields fed by underground aqueducts and mountain washes. Before I had ever traveled to Italy, I asked my nonno how so many delicious foods grew in such a dry place, and he said, “Oh, everything grew!” And it was true; the figs, lemons, olive trees, and all the home gardens were all so lush. There are three active volcanoes in Southern Italy: Mount Vesuvius (Naples), Mount Etna (Sicily), and Mount Stromboli (off the coast of Calabria). Both Vesuvius and Etna are so active that they are under constant surveillance by the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior, or IAVCEI, a project of the United Nations that conducts research and promotes public awareness about the current status and hazards of the world’s volcanoes. There are multiple other dormant and extinct volcanoes formed where the Eurasian and African tectonic plates once collided thirty million years ago. The Italian peninsula is literally made from this collision and exists along the boundary of the two plates.
The soils of Southern Italy have been fed for millennia by volcanic ash, making the land rich in minerals, layered with magma, and fed by underground springs that rise from deep caverns beneath the surface. Italy’s water comes from both these springs and rainfall, although in current times Italy is facing water shortages, like most of the world, as climate change and failing water systems impact availability.

     Southern Italy is itself an element of the greater landscape and ecology that is part of the entire Mediterranean basin. When we are exploring our folk traditions, it’s important to remember that the ecosystem, which includes the entire living field of interacting forces and beings, is an integral part of their formation and dynamism. All cultural systems are defined by seasonal cycles, weather patterns, geological formations, natural disasters, and, according to our ancestors, all interspecies inhabitants including mythological/spiritual gods and otherworldly spirits. Human participation in nature includes our capacity to sensorially alchemize ecological information into dreams, myths, art, and ritual that are the raw materials of cultural traditions. And, in fact, human culture emerges directly from the landscape and geography and, at the same time, becomes part of the ecology.

     The area of the world that we now call Italy has only been considered a nation-state since 1861. When we look at the ancient history of the region we see that it is geographically and culturally part of the much wider region of the Mediterranean basin and beyond. One of the dominant but unproven narratives about the Paleolithic and Neolithic peoples of the Earth is that they lived in separate, isolated bands. Yet based on ethnographic evidence we also know that cross-regional cultural traditions are astoundingly similar. Our ideas about social organization now do not necessarily correspond backward in time. Our ideas around political boundaries do not have supporting evidence from prehistory, nor do our ideas about the way “primitive” people were able to trade and exchange goods and information.
In the book The Dawn of Everything, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow contend that in earlier centuries, forms of regional organization might extend thou- sands of miles. Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel half- way across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages    “Society,” insofar as we can comprehend it at that time, spanned continents.

     In fact, the evidence suggests that the people of the Upper Paleolithic were quite cosmopolitan [as] “from the Swiss Alps to Outer Mongolia, they were often using remarkably similar tools, playing remarkably simi- lar musical instruments, carving similar female figurines, wearing similar ornaments and conducting similar funeral rites.”4
Our general concept of society becoming global and more homogenous is true in a sense, yet our borders and boundaries have become more rigid with passports, checkpoints, and immigration bans.

If we survey what happens over time, the scale on which social relations operate doesn’t get bigger and bigger; it actually gets smaller and smaller    Overall, though, what we observe is not so much
the world as a whole getting smaller, but most peoples’ social worlds growing more parochial, their lives and passions more likely to be circumscribed by boundaries of culture, class, and language.5

The archaeological evidence for this is solid. Artifacts of “primitive trade” have shown us that various types of “currency” such as stones, gems, and other valuable objects traveled great distances: “3000 years ago Baltic amber found its way to the Mediterranean, or shells from the Gulf of Mexico were transported to Ohio.”6

Diversity Hot Spot

The Mediterranean Basin includes portions of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It begins in the west with Cabo Verde and spreads to the east as far as Jordan and Turkey. It includes Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and the Balkan states as well as the entire coast of North Africa and Southern Europe as far north as the Azores.
The Mediterranean Basin is characterized by hot, dry summers but bountiful winter rains. During the Last Glacial Maximum, or LGM, when the glacier was at its greatest extent, Italy was beneath the alpine ice cap, which disconnected it from the rest of Europe and protected it and the entire Mediterranean from the negative impacts of the last Ice Age, allowing the region’s abundant diversity to continue to flourish. It is the second largest hotspot for biodiversity in the world and the third largest hotspot for plant diversity. There are an estimated twenty-five thousand plant species in the Mediterranean, many of which are endemic, meaning they do not exist anywhere else on Earth. The Mediterranean Sea is rich with marine creatures, including three hundred mammal species, and the forests host more diverse tree species than any other forests in Europe.7

The Ancient Peoples

The oldest human remains found in Italy date back one million years and were the ancestors of modern humans. The ancient hominins of Italy include Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis (Ceprano), and Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal). According to archaeological evidence, modern humans inhabited the Italian peninsula forty-five thousand years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic period.8 Italy’s position in the center of the Mediterranean basin made it accessible from many directions for trade, cultural exchange, and migration. Immigration and trade routes intersected Italy from the Balkans, the Black Sea regions, Africa, and the Near East.

During the Neolithic and for thousands of years later, the Mediterranean Sea itself contributed to shortening the distances and making Italy one of the gateways to the European continent: first acting for millennia as a barrier separating the African and the European continents, and then turned into a bridge as the first Bronze Age sea- farers started to travel in open water (Broodbank 2006).9

Many groups and civilizations are known to have inhabited the Italic Peninsula, which has a diverse genetic and cultural history. Countless people have either migrated to or colonized Italy since the Neolithic period including Near Eastern farmers and Italic tribes descended from the Indo-Europeans, Ligurians, Etruscans, Phoenicians, Greeks, Celts, Goths, Lombards, Byzantines, Franks, Normans, Swabians, Arabs, Berbers, Albanians, Austrians, and more. In fact, the Phoenicians colonized Southern Italy and Greece somewhere between the twelfth and eighth centuries BCE,10 before either region became prominent empires, and they have been referred to as the “first rulers of the Mediterranean.”11 There is also much evidence of prehistoric humans in Italy. The infamous goddess figurine known as the Venus of Willendorf is a thirty- thousand-year-old artifact whose origin has been traced to Italy, indicating that ancient peoples had lived there.12 Remains and evidence of the Uluzzian culture, including human bones, shell beads, and natural mineral pigments, were discovered in the Grotta del Cavallo (Cave of the Horse) around the region of what is now Apulia. This group of cave dwellers inhabited the area during the transition from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic periods.13 Uluzzian caves have also been identified in other areas of Italy, including Campania, Basilicata, and Calabria as well
as in Greece.14

The Villbruna hunters and gatherers left evidence of their existence fourteen thousand years ago in the Veneto region. Burial objects such as painted stones, a chunk of ochre, propolis, and a flint knife were discovered. The grave was marked with burial drawings made with ochre.15
Early farmers were thought to have migrated to Italy from the Near East in about 8000 BCE, replacing or displacing the hunter-gatherers. The archaeological evidence uncovered from this early agricultural period was the foundation of the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Southern Italy was part of the region that Gimbutas designated Old Europe.

According to Gimbutas, Old Europe existed during the late Neolithic period (7000–3500 BCE) and included the Adriatic, Aegean, Central Baltic, Middle Danube Basin, East Balkan, and Moldavian-West Ukrainian areas.
What we now know as Southern Italy was a part of the Adriatic region of Old Europe. These were pre-Indo-European indigenous civilizations that had a complex social organization, artistic and healing traditions, and an intricate economic system based on food production. The people of these times had written language that was primarily expressed in symbolic script and many other technologies and tools, including metallurgy and the domestication of plants and animals. It is most important to note here that, according to Gimbutas’s findings, these societies were peaceful and matricentric, and no cultural expressions of war or warlike symbol- ism have been found in any of the archaeological artifacts.

These societies also held prolific cosmological beliefs that were inter- twined with the art, ritual, and social expressions of daily and seasonal existence. Plants were a central focus of life as both food and medicine. Archaeological symbols have been discovered that reference the vegetal life cycle, the seasonal cycles, and the cycle of life, death, and regeneration. Indigenous cultures have always been plant based, which means that plants were not only valued as a food source and means of survival but that they were also an integral component of the social ecology or the social field.
People had emotional and spiritual relationships with plants that involved more than just a physical-needs exchange. Plants were often deified with the personas of gods and goddesses as well as animistic nature spirits and allies. Plant medicines were not only used to treat acute illnesses but were also invoked in ritual preparations such as smoke and used in performative art, as objects of divination, and as entheogenic substances to induce prophetic and healing trances. Healing and the use of plants in healing in the ancient Mediterranean was intricately woven into the human relationship with divine energies, as the sacred and the profane were in a constant dance within the earthly lives of the people.

Around 3200 BCE the Indo-Europeans arrived from the Caucasus Mountains and Pontic Steppe. The archaeological evidence from this invasion shows a regional transition from a peaceable matricentric culture to a more warrior-like patriarchal culture from which the tribal groups of the Bronze Age and forward emerged.

            Bio: Lisa Fazio is a clinical herbalist, plant spirit medicine practitioner, flower essence practitioner, and the founder of “The Root Circle,” a plant medicine educational center. Trained in traditional Western herbalism, Western astrology, and the folk ways of her Italian immigrant family, she has apprenticed with herbalists Kate Gilday, Matthew Wood, and Pam Montgomery. She has an academic background in psychology and ethnobotany and has also done master’s level studies in chemistry, botany, and environmental history. She lives in Newport, New York.
https://therootcircle.com

            Della Medicina by Lisa Fazio © 2024 Healing Arts Press. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International. https://www.InnerTraditions.com

Share this article with friends!