The magic of the Mainarde: on the trail of the Janare and the Deer Man

A visit to Castelnuovo al Volturno, in Molise, allows us to give a face to the characters of local folklore, the Janare and "Gl'Cierv", and to resume some central mythical-traditional aspects of Cosmic-agrarian cults of ancient Eurasia.

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di Maximilian Palmesano
(review by Marco Maculotti)
image: the Deer Man of the Carnival of Castelnuovo al Volturno

 

The last Sunday of Carnival in Castelnuovo al Volturno (Isernia), in Molise, a festival is celebrated that takes us directly back to the mists of time, when such a clear differentiation between humans and animals had not yet occurred and, indeed, the former were able to transform themselves into seconds and the latter were able to communicate with their spirits with men: it is the feast of "Gl'Cierv", or the Deer Man. The celebration, which seems to be a mythical ritualization of the passage from the winter to the spring months with the cyclic awakening of nature, is a pantomime in which, in addition to the Deer Man, other figures also appear such as the Doe, the Hunter, the Molise mask of Martino and among others also le Janare and the Maone, their dark leader.

The presence of the Janare within the pantomime is even more interesting especially because during the rite they appear first and, in addition to the stereotyped negative attributes that accompany them almost everywhere throughout the vast area in which they are present, they also present more connotations. typically shamanic: it seems that the Deer Man is almost evoked by the procession and ecstatic dances of these women dressed in black, masked and with long raffia hair. We therefore decide to go to the Mainarde, on the trail of what at first glance seemed interesting to us "anomaly" to be analyzed along the way, paraphrasing Carlos Ginzburg, of "Deciphering" of the janara, almost completely stripped, in the ritual of the deer, of its demonic and negative prerogatives, prerogatives "obscured" by the magical role of evocators of the ancestral spirit of the deer.

In reality, there are two interesting anomalies: the second is the one that falls within the scope we call the "Geography of the Janara", a fairly broad field of study that deals with the relationships between centers and peripheries, on the one hand, and on the other, that which concerns the boundaries of what we will call the "Janara Nation", that is the whole territory interested in the tradition and superstition by the presence of the janaras. On this last point there is a clarification: among the many stereotypes that accompany the black story of Janara, one of the most widespread is the one that simply wants it as a Benevento "translation" of the figure of the witch (a consideration that is at least a half truth, if not the superficial explanation of a much more complex phenomenon).

The “Nazione Janara” certainly includes all the Benevento area, but its offshoots extend south for a few kilometers below Benevento up to the north of Salerno. In fact, the figure of the "Maciara" or "magara", more akin to the Lucanian magical world studied by Ernesto DeMartino, while if we go north we find its presence almost everywhere in the provinces of Naples and Caserta, in the lower Lazio at least up to Terracina and Fondi (in Formia there is even the toponym "Grotta della Janara"), in almost all of Molise and in some areas of lower Abruzzo and in part of the province of Foggia. A vast area that suggests that it is not enough to justify this diffusion with the sole influence that Benevento had as the capital of Lombardia Minor in the Early Middle Ages, that is, in the period in which, according to some, the figure of the janara was formed.

What does Benevento have to do with all this talk then? It has something to do with it, just as the Lombards and the principality of the Lombardia Minor. When the Lombards arrived in Benevento in the second half of the XNUMXth century AD, led by a warrior chief called Stud (ca. 570-591), which tradition depicts as the founder of the Lombard duchy of Benevento [1], they were already almost all Catholics (with small minorities professing the "Arian heresy") and had officially abandoned their ancient cults for quite a few years. This "conversion" of the Lombard peoples, however, had occurred more for purely political reasons than "spiritual": in fact, it allowed them a wider range of possibilities for comparison (which in reality was almost always rebellious) with the papacy: it was essential for them to make their presence as "alien" as possible from the context they intended to dominate, although the bulk of the work they did it with the sword.

In reality, however, many of those warriors still kept alive the customs and traditions of their ancestors, with ceremonies practiced outdoors, among the trees and perhaps right under a walnut plant, with the presence of goat ritual simulacra [2] similar to many nomadic-warrior peoples from northern and eastern Europe and perhaps also with ritual sacrifices of goats; a cultic corollary that if on the one hand, starting with San Barbato who in his preaching began to talk about gatherings of witches and devils under the walnut tree of Benevento, he easily associated these pagan cults with witchcraft sabbath, on the other hand, almost certainly, these same forms of cultism were immediately recognized as related by women who practiced ancestral cults dating back, in our opinion, to before the Roman period: Italic cults linked to the Mother Goddess with strong affinities with the world Celtic-Germanic. In short, if on the one hand, in the public narrative, it was demonic and pagan stereotype to take over [3], on the other hand, forms of syncretization were also possible, or perhaps only of archetypal-symbolic affinity between the cults of the Janare and those of the Lombard conquerors.

Magnificent and magical Mainarde

But let's go back to the Mainarde. As soon as you arrive in the area, the impression you get is that you are in a "magical" place, where nature virginally preserves all its powers and where time has carved out a space of fixity by ceasing its infinite rhythm. We base on lake of San Vincenzo, an artificial basin built in the middle of the last century to power a hydroelectric plant but which has perfectly integrated into the territory, to stay a couple of days to have a first approach with the world of the Deer and the Janare of Castelnuovo.

But first, let's (to our infinite joy) take a leap toarchaeological area of ​​the Abbey of San Vincenzo a Volturno which is defined by many as the early medieval Pompeii, and in Scapoli, home of bagpipe makers, another element, that of the bagpipes and bagpipers, which shows us a strong cultural resistance in these lands. The first meeting with the Janare and with the Deer we do it right in Scapoli, where, in the workshop of the master Izzi, located inside the walkway of the medieval citadel, among lathes, bagpipes and shawls, some finished others still sketched we take the opportunity to ask some questions and to explain to the locals the reason for our visit.

First of all, we discover that one of the hypotheses that brought us this far needs to be reformulated: the Janare within the Deer pantomime were introduced later and in recent times. Certainly the janara is a central figure in the beliefs of these lands, but our hypothesis regarding her role as evocator of the Deer was discarded. Let's also discover another useful fact: in ancient times the festival of the Deer was practiced throughout the area and was not only a prerogative of Castelnuovo, precisely to emphasize the common archaic cultural substratum of the inhabitants of these areas.

Leaving Scapoli and walking down the narrow streets of the historic center, we notice in two gardens of private houses two luxuriant plants of metella walnut (datura metal), belonging to the Solanaceae family and closely related to the stramonium (datura stramonium): the metella nut is one of the magical plants used by the one we simplify we define the "European witchcraft ". Of course: two plants cannot in any way indicate an ethnological or ethnobotanical datum and we have not had the opportunity to interview the owners of the gardens, but we liked to be influenced by their presence immediately after talking about janare and men who turn into deer. and we collect the characteristic goaded sphere to preserve it and catalog it in our “Herbaria” section.

In the afternoon we finally arrive in Castelnuovo and, under the pretext of asking for information, we stop at the bar in the square where the Deer pantomime takes place; in the car we also have some volumes on whose content we want to discuss with someone from the place as soon as the opportunity arises. Outside the bar there are two smiling elderly people: we stop to ask them for a place where we can buy a bottle of good wine. Despite some initial distrust, we try to break the ice using the dialect: but we do not use the Campania dialect closest to Neapolitan, we use a hybrid dialectal form between northern Campania and Apennine dialects with ending in "or", ancient echo of languages Oscan-Samnite and the expedient helps us a lot. We discover that both have always been bagpipers and have "Traveled the world with bagpipes and ciaramella" and immediately we empathize with one of them, Giuseppe, who after a few minutes of silence invites us to follow him home: he will give us the wine.

We are at first glance disoriented by this nice and vital gentleman over the years, by his energy, by his way of welcoming us, by his smile: on the other hand also music, knowing how to create it, being a vehicle to transmit it to people to infuse them with sensations has always been a shamanic prerogative and we cannot fail to connect the reason for our research with this further cultural resistance linked to the world of bagpipes and bagpipers, in this patch of land. We sit at the table with him and we immediately understand that Peppe will not sell us anything: he will give us the wine, along with tasty tomatoes and chillies from his garden. He talks to us about his life, his children, the countryside and above all his life as a bagpiper, the art inherited from his father, the long rides up and down the boot, and tells us about Charles Moulin, the French painter who decided to retire to live in a cave on the Mainarde after having listened by chance to a bagpiper playing, remaining enchanted.

We tell him about our "search" for the Deer and the Janare and he, with great surprise, tells us that his wife is part of the group of people who stage the Deer ritual every year. Back in the square, she is waiting for us. Let's start talking, we propose again in a fragmented and discursive way the questions of the questionnaire that we are submitting to the natives for research purposes. When we start talking about the festival of the Deer and the Janare, a group forms, and the locals confirm that the latter have been introduced into pantomime in recent times, although they have always populated local beliefs. They tell us how the Janare go out at night "in flight", turn into animals, especially cats and snakes, procure and remove the evil eye.

We also discover that the custom ofrefrain from having sexual intercourse on March 24, because in case of conception there is the possibility that the child will be born at Christmas, and whoever is born on that night becomes janara or werewolf. Always the werewolf and the janara (or the witch) coexist within the mythical and superstitious horizon of agricultural-pastoral communities a little throughout Europe [4]. In a story we collated, dating back to the early 900s, the person who turned into a werewolf walked around on Christmas Eve, terrorizing people. covered with thick fur e covering his face with it.

In this story we immediately found a morphological similarity, in the pages of Mircea Eliade [5] and Carlo Ginzburg [6], with related practices of Central Asian shamanism and European, in which shaman reached ecstasy by covering himself entirely with an animal fur, most often that of his totemic animal, flying away ("in spirit") or transforming himself into an animal to fight with other shamans [7]. The isomorphism between practices that are so distant from each other in space and time make us think of a common archaic substratum or in any case of a cultural affinity, especially here, where in addition to the tale of the werewolf we have another much more important figure that he is no longer completely animal, but neither is he definitively man namely "Gl'Cierv": dressed in goat skins, wearing noisy cowbells and wearing a headdress with two large cervine horns.

The myth of Castelnuovo hands down the vivid memory of (a) an ancestral cult linked to (b) transition from the winter to the vital period of spring; (c) a cult that is above all ecstatic, the man disguised as a deer who descends into the country being distinguished by (d) a superhuman "furor" (he goes down to the village screaming and overwhelming everything in his path, no intervention can tame him, his stage of large deer antlers keeps everyone away), until it comes (e) the hunter who kills him, but only so that (f) may rise again, as every year, the spring season after the winter one.

Ritual death and resurrection of the cycle of the seasons through the magical element of skins (the Deer Man's dress) and bones (his cervine headdress). Seen from this perspective, the myth of the Castelnuovo deer provides us with a complete and clear series of elements of a shamanic nature that suggest its very ancient roots.

The Deer, a Celtic-Italic archetype

«The prestige of the deer in symbolism is not simply connected to its appearance - beauty, grace, agility - but also to the phenomenon of the cycle of growth and regeneration of its antlers. This latter aspect is deeply internalized by the mind of the Neolithic peasants. The cervine antler stage plays an important role […]. The role of the deer in the myth of Ancient Europe is not an invention of the Neolithic peasants. The importance of the pregnant doe must have been inherited from a pre-agricultural era. Norse peoples in the hunting stage still believe that the mother of the universe is a doe-moose or a reindeer-doe. The myths speak of pregnant women who rule the world and have the appearance of deer: covered with fur and with antlers branched on their heads. " [8]

We are faced here with a very ancient "totemic" symbol and above all common throughout Europe. We know that the archetypal figure of the deer remains central even during the Roman era: the animal is sacred to give Diana, protector, among other things, of the woods and wild life. A legend tells that when the Roman army laid siege to the ancient city Capua, this managed to resist until from Mount Tifata, the place on which stood the very important temple of Diana Tifatina, did not get out a white deer, symbol and totem of the goddess, who prostrated himself to the Roman general by being killed.

This mythical, ritualized and sacred killing brings us back to another further morphological similarity between the myth of the Cervo di Castelnuovo and the cult of Diana, that is to say with the story that makes James Fraser neither "The Golden Branch" of the figure of Rex Nemorensis. Rex Nemorensis was a king-priest who lived in the temple of Diana near Lake Nemi (near Rome). The Diana Nemorensis (from nemur > wood or more precisely sacred wood) has precise affinities with Diana Tifatina, in fact also the term "tifat" indicates a forest of holm oaks [9]. Rex Nemorensis guarded and defended the temple in the shadow of a large sacred oak and constantly brandished a sword, because the succession between the old and new priest-king (usually a freed slave) took place with a ritual murder: the new priest-king was able to become such only after killing the old one [10].

These gory implications of death and rebirth are similar to the ritual death and resurrection of the Deer Man in the Castelnuovo pantomime and almost certainly have a common archaic shamanic root: also the Castelnuovo deer it dies only to the extent that the new rebirth is already assured, just like the Rex Nemorensis that dies only by those who will immediately take their place in a continuous, circular and non-linear cycle, according to a vision of time typical of the ancient world [11].

But there is also another sphere of morphological connections and analogies which are even more interesting to compare and analyze, and which lead us directly to the IT world; Celtic-Germanic. On the so-called Cauldron of Gundestrup, an artifact dating back to the second century BC (found in a peat bog of the Himmerland in the north of the Danimaca in 1891), a Deer man wielding a snake, surrounded by wild animals, including a deer: the resemblance to the Castelnuovo deer is striking. The mythical being depicted on the cauldron is the god Cernunnus (or Kernunnos), divinity with cervine horns and covered in animal fur, deputy to wild life, woods and the cycle of the seasons [12].

Also on the Cauldron of Gundestrup we find engraved small tripunted figures that resemble three small mushrooms joined to the stem, from the shape of the hat it is possible to trace similarities with psychoactive mushrooms of the genus psylocibe, which makes us suppose a relationship between the rites linked to the world of the woods and wild nature personified by Cernunno and the use of psychoactive mushrooms for religious-ritual purposes [13], a hypothesis that has been formulated by numerous archaeologists and ethnobotanists also regarding some Hun cauldrons and their ritual use in ceremonies that involved the use of psychoactive mushrooms for ecstatic-shamanic purposes [14].

Precisely this detail brought to mind an anecdote collected during the research work set just north of the Mainarde area, in Abruzzo, at the beginning of the 900s: the tale of a woman who came back from the mountain suddenly had a vision. He saw a large cauldron, filled with gold and covered with fur; she went there with the idea of ​​taking the gold, but she immediately noticed that from the top of a rock a being with horns (which the protagonist has associated with the devil for a clear a transfer cultural) had pointed at her and was running towards her; he then fled to avoid the encounter. The presence of archetypal similarities between the story of this "vision" and the Celtic mythical universe is amazing: (a) ecstatic vision, (b) cauldron, (c) gold, (d) fur, (e) being horned and furious. A series of connections and similarities that seem to come from a single mythical universe.

In the Germanic and Norse world we find, once again, the reason for death and resurrection in the guise of a deer, who [15]:

"[...] it is an animal of solar symbology since its horns that are perpetually renewed (emblem of eternity) are considered to be equivalent to the rays of the sun endowed with vivifying virtues. [...] The deer is also closely linked tocosmic tree Yggdrasyl. Like it, in fact, it participates in the three layers of being: the legs touch the earth, the body belongs to the surface world, the branched horns are like the branches that stretch out into the sky. According to Snorri's tale four deer leap between the branches of Yggdrasyl and graze its leaves: they are Dainn (Dead), Dvalinn (the one who lingers), Duneyrr (the one that makes noise on the gravelly ground), Duradror (sleepy boar). Also linked to the deer are the figure and the story of this Dorir, a great pagan worshiper nicknamed deer (hjortr). King Olaf Tryggvason had defeated him in battle and he had fled. One of the sovereign's men had thrown a spear at him and he had fallen to the ground dying. A large deer had come out of his body. "

Deer bones and skins

But is it really possible to glimpse a stretch of union between the Cervo di Castelnuovo and the Celtic world? The conjecture is less risky than it may seem at first glance and there are some to give us a trace Samnite inscriptions dating back to the time of the First Samnite War (343-341 BC) in which it is clearly stated that the Samnite army that was about to clash with the Roman one, was blessed by a priestly college composed of native priests and Celtic druids. The relationship between the Apennine peoples and those of Celtic lineage that populated the lands a little further north is verified by inscriptions dating back at least 300 years before our era. C.Elti and Osco-Samnites, perhaps due to their nomadic and pastoral habits, already met in much older times than De Bello Gallico.

And while all these connections were crowded in the head and the threads were re-tied, here comes a thin and slender man who immediately introduces himself: he is Ernest, the president of the association that organizes the pantomime of the Deer. We make him read pages from the books we carry with us, which speak of men who turn into deer, of bones and skins. Ernest immediately makes himself available for a visit to the headquarters of the association where the costumes and some important memories about the rite of the Deer Man are kept. A few minutes later we are in the headquarters of the association, we visit the first floor which hosts an exhibition with all the pantomime costumes: Cervo, Cerva, Martino, Cacciatore and our Janare with terrifying masks, Ernest proudly shows us a series of masks hanging from the wall, the result of the exchange and contamination of the Deer Man of Castelnuovo with many similar rituals spread throughout Europe from Sardinia [16] to England.

We then go down to the basement which is the laboratory where the costumes of the Deer Man rite are kept and assembled and, while we see how they are made and try some of them, Ernest while talking like a raging river and "gives us" one of those "Anomalies" within the narration that we sought so much for a deciphering of the rite of the Deer. In fact, he tells us that now the Deer Man wears a ready-made costume, a real suit with a horned helmet, leather jacket and leg cover, but once, and until a few decades ago, the skin was sewn like a costume around the body of the person impersonating the Deer Man, just before the rite. This particular type of magical-ritual practice immediately brings us back to the tales of Caucasian and European shamanism: the stitching of the skins on the man follows a "magical" scheme of transmutation of man into animal, a return to ferinity, to primordial sensations and needs, an ultimately ecstatic-shamanic practice.

An ecstasy is needed, which we can define "Mystical", to ensure that the spirit of the deer (and of the wild nature it embodies) comes into contact with that of man, who, in perfect line with traditional shamanic attributes, does not allow himself to be dominated by spirits, but leads them, guide, causes them to become his auxiliaries: in the case of the Man Cervo di Castelnuovo, so that the spirit of the animal helps the community to get out of the harshness of winter and lead it to a spring and a summer full of crops and fruits. This was precisely the link that united the other links in the chain and, we can say, closed the circle in the "game" of isomorphisms and series of similarities. The rite of the Deer Man of Castelnuovo is therefore almost certainly in an archaic context that has its roots at least in the Neolithic; an ecstatic, shamanic environment, connected to a cyclical vision of death and resurrection, to the Eternal Return [17], to the transmutation of man into animal (but also of animal into man).

Conclusion

Before leaving the association we visit a room on the ground floor dedicated to the painter Moulin, of whom we have already spoken; and here, among the photos of his works, we find some "recipes" of preparations based on wild herbs. We thus discover that, in addition to being a painter, Moulin had prepared an excellent one in his cave-house herbal laboratory and he knew the virtues and properties of all native plants. They tell us that in the village many have benefited from his medical remedies and have learned the use of herbs from him. So much herbal knowledge immediately brought us back to the metella nut plants seen a few hours earlier in Scapoli: in this magical place where ancient rituals and myths and archaic music linked to the agricultural and pastoral world survive, the traditional knowledge of plants and their "powers", not least thanks to the figure of Moulin, who populated these mountains only a few decades ago.

We return to the square to greet all the company that welcomed us as if we were at home and we promise to return soon with a little more material to decipher not only the figure of Janara but also the equally intriguing and magical figure of the Deer Man. We return to the lake just in time for the sunset and the show is exceptional: the steep and rocky spiers overlook the woods and among these we seem to glimpse theDeer man: Cernunnus, Or the Rex Nemorensis that pulls the strings that make the wheel of the seasons move, while ethereal janare dance around, almost nymphs of the lake and woods, illuminated by the full moon of the magical Mainarde.

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