Ari Aster's "folk-horror" film stages a Midsummer ceremony inspired by the ancient European rites of late winter and Calendimaggio: beyond the inaccuracies and poetic licenses, the fulcrum of the narrative must be recognized in the "descent into hell" and in the subsequent rebirth of the protagonist Dani, an initiation that obviously requires a sacrifice.
di Marco Maculotti
The real question about Midsummer shouldn't it be "Midsommar yes or no?" but "because Midsommar? ". The big issue with the film, as many Nordic spiritual fans have pointed out, is wanting to make a Midsummer celebration film centered around - gross mistake? - on the rites of other seasons: the end of winter and the advent of spring. But perhaps, meaning "winter", "spring" and "summer" as phases of the descent into hell and subsequent ascent of the protagonist Dani, as his seasons of the soul, the ceremony of "expulsion of winter" and her coronation as "Queen of May" may have their own why. Even in Midsummer.
After the success of Hereditary (film on the genre of demonic possessions that has brought a breath of fresh air to a sub-genre now of pure quotationism), ari aster with his most recent work he veers on folk horror, referring above all to what was one of the most successful titles of this British genre in the seventies, namely The Wicker Man (1973) by Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer. The plot follows its basic structure almost slavishly: external people (there the irrepressible and authoritarian Sergeant Howie, here a bored group of friends Yankee in the mood to party) come to a rural community (there in the Scottish Hebrides, here in Sweden) still dedicated to pagan cults and practices and so on they find themselves playing in spite of themselves the grotesque roles chosen for them within a ritual pantomime.
Nevertheless, the first differences can be glimpsed: if Hardy and Shaffer wanted to put in a dichotomous perspective the conflict between Christianity and the "civilized" English on the one hand and "paganism" and the sacrilegious idolaters of Summerisle on the other, Aster draws the line in a different way, by posing the post-modern society of consumption and appearance on the one hand and the traditional one of the pagan community of Hårga on the other.
Two "horrors" in comparison
Not that Aster is very interested in "cheering" on one rather than the other or denying the problems inherent in the different social and organizational paradigms, it is clear: of each of the two the paradoxes, the exaggerations, the follies, the crimes are highlighted. However, one can detect the completely opposite way of facing the problem of Evil in all its forms (physical and mental illnesses, old age, crime): in this sense the community of Hårga is maniacally distinguished by its own wanting to put order in this necessary evil, as if to make it less chaotic, more sensible, more coherent.
Consequences of this obsession with creating an order from chaos, so typical of traditional societies (the studies of Eliade and Evola say a lot about it) are - in the cinematic fiction that is Midsummer — the spontaneous immolation of elderly members of the community once they reach the age of 72 (about which we will tell later) or the physical elimination of foreigners who dared to disrespect the sacredness of the ancestors and the sacred books of the community. No less important is, in a dichotomous perspective with respect to US society, the inclusion of the individual in community life and his assignment to predefined roles and tasks according to his sex, age, rank and so on.
It stands out on the whole character organic, almost "from the hive", of the community of Hårga, even in the most paroxysmal moments, such as intercourse which is transformed into a (ritual of) collective enjoyment. Dani is initially shocked by this way of be, and nevertheless she is increasingly attracted to it. Perhaps because Hårga seems to be the exact opposite, for better or for worse, of the society from which she herself comes, and which often makes her feel so inadequate: a society where every person feels more and more atomistically alone, albeit in the midst of people, and in which the notion of family has almost completely disintegrated, not to mention that even more nebulous "community".
In this world atomistic and devoid of direction from which the guests come, evil strikes in a completely indiscriminate way, in a more subterranean and perhaps more treacherous way. Paradigmatic is the case of the protagonist herself, whose life seems to be falling apart for no real reason. In addition to spending time with an immature and anaffective boy who doesn't pay her the slightest attention, Dani he revels in a state bordering on depression for which, on balance, no real cause can be deduced. It also seems that she is not the only one in the family suffering from mental problems: her sister Terry, in a fit of madness, committed suicide with gas, taking her unsuspecting parents with her to the other world, asleep on the sofa. An extreme gesture that for Dani breaks all bridges with her previous life, and which allows her to leave for Sweden without any more effective ties in her homeland.
THEÄttestupa, the immolation from the cliff
The worldview of the Hårga community, so radically different from that of the American guests, is well exemplified by theÄttestupa, the rite of self-immolation from the cliff to which the latter witness in shock. Although there is no certain evidence that this custom has been practiced historically, there are several mentions of it in the ancient Scandinavian and Icelandic sagas.. The Swedish historian Anders Fryxell, in a passage of The History of Sweden (1844), describes it this way:
«Close by this farm there was a very high perpendicular rock, such that it was certain whoever should cast himself from the top would never reach the bottom alive. Here Skapnartunger's ancestors had always put an end to their own lives, as soon as they became very old, that their children might be saved from maintaining them, and that they themselves come to Odin and be freed from the pains and sufferings which accompany old age and a straw-death »
In addition to underlining the lunisolar value (because it is based on multiples of the solar number 6 and lunar 9) of the subdivision of the community members according to age (0, 18, 36, 54, 72), it is also interesting to note how the name of the elder sacrificed by this custom is transferred to his blood heirs that survive it: in this we can see a spy of the circular conception of the cosmos and of time professed by Nordic, Celtic and more generally archaic cultures, connected with the idea of a rebirth of the cosmos and, ultimately, of the soul itself, within their own clan.
This conception of the eternal return, in the circle of birth, death and rebirth, of the soul, is beautifully expressed by Edmund spenser, one of the greatest English poets of the sixteenth century, in a passage of his work The Faerie Queene (book III, canto VI, room 33):
“After they return, they will be planted in the garden
and again they will grow like someone they have never seen
carnal corruption or the sufferings of mortals.
For a thousand years and a thousand more they will remain there,
then they will change color and in the world they will return,
in that changing world of appearances until,
once again, they will have to return
where they originally grew up:
and so, like a wheel, they go running without stopping
from the old condition to the new one, and vice versa. »
Conception on the other hand also explained by the well-known rites of late winter / early spring carried out throughout the European area, including the two celebrations that in Midsummer, as well as in the already quoted Wicker Man, play such a decisive role in understanding the mythical and traditional inspirations of the film: we are talking about the rite of Calendimaggio around maypole, with consequent election of a "Queen of May", and of that, celebrated at the end of winter, concerning the "expulsion" and the ritual sacrifice of'Man-Bear (or, in the Hardy / Shaffer film, del Fool).
The "Queen of May" and the dance around the maypole
The "Queen of May", central character of the traditional celebration of Beltane/ Calendimaggio, considered an epiphany of the budding power of the earth that returns to bloom in spring, after the winter season, is obviously in Midsummer the protagonist Dani, who is awarded this title following the dance competition around the maypole. As in The Wicker Man the symbolism (typical, as well as Scandinavia, also of the British Isles) returns punctuallyMay tree as a symbol of the virile-generative power of atmospheric weather in opposition to the feminine-germinative power of fields and vegetation.
In this the interminable dances around the phallic simulacrum find their meaning: Dani, the last one to stop dancing, thus becomes the one that this power has been able to attract on herself, taking it away from the other dancers, and keep inside herself until the end. . Moreover the idea of prolonged dances came to Ari Aster from a traditional song (the oldest known version dates back to 1785) by Hårga, The so-called Hårgalåten or "Song of Hårga", which tells how the devil took the form of a violinist to force the women of the village to dance wildly until death, the English translation of which is reported here out of curiosity:
The fiddler pulled his fiddle out of his case and
Raised his bow to the rising Sunday sun
Then the people of Harga got excited
They have forgotten God and the whole world.The dance took place in the meadows and slopes
High up on the peak of the Harga Mountain
They wore both shoes and heels
Never getting the dance to stop.Where do you come from fiddler?
Tell us who taught you this wild and crazy melody?
If you don't stop now our hearts will burst
Oh God forbid, he has a hoof.The bells rang in the valley and went there
Father and mother and brother to the parish church
Where can the youth of Harga be now?
Oh my God, they're still dancing!They were dancing to the Harga song
High up on the Harga mountain peak
Tears aren't far off
While dancing, they wore through both body and soul.Stop your bowfiddler, before we
Dance life and soul and all the bones out of our bodies
No, he won't stop the dance before
Everyone falls down dead.
In a scene from Midsummer, an elderly woman from the community tells a version of this story to the girls who are preparing to participate in the dances, while they drink the psychotropic potion that will lead them to dance for hours around the Maypole, as if they were actually possessed by diabolical power. of the infernal violin of the traditional tale. The legend of Hårga's "violinist devil" probably derives from one of the several cases reported in the Middle Ages of the so-called "San Vito's Ball", episodes that saw large groups of people dance hysterically and frenziedly until death, perhaps intoxicated bylug (Claviceps purpurea) which sometimes grew on rye, causing psychoactive effects in the body of those who used it.
However, it should be noted that if in The Wicker Man the girl awarded the title of "May's Bride" was used by fellow villagers to lure the unsuspecting Sergeant Howie into a trap, Fool/ scapegoat destined to be sacrificed in the flames (dichotomy inside / outside), in Midsummer the dividing line between the two characters is surprisingly different, because to be elected "Queen of May" is precisely Dani, a stranger, coming from outside with his own group of friends including Christian, her partner, who will have to fill the role of in this ritual pantomime Fool ursino / sacrificial victim, also destined (like the unfortunate protagonist of the Hardy / Shaffer film) to be immolated with fire. It follows that the real conflict does not take place between the isolated community and its guests from outside, but rather between two "strangers", one of whom will be destined for sacrifice and the other to be finally incorporated into the community fabric.
In this way, almost paradoxically, the closed community of Hårga "opens up" to strangers more than that of Summerisle, welcoming Dani into its ranks, perhaps also by virtue of his inadequacy (unlike his friends) to live according to the rhythms of the atomistic world from which it comes. In this narrative choice we can perhaps see, as we anticipated at the beginning of the article, the director's will to put the drama of the young Dani at the center of the ritual, as if more than concerned with the regeneration of Hårga's community life or Swedish nature, it concerns the protagonist's "rebirth". A rebirth exemplified visually, in the viewer's mind, in that final smile as unexpected as it is visually and emotionally powerful.
The sacrifice of the bear and the "expulsion of winter"
To be sacrificed (along with 8 other designated victims) is ultimately Christian, the only person who, after the tragic end of his sister and parents, binds her to her old life, to the past "I" that Dani wants to throw herself into for good. shoulders. To be immolated, in other words, is Dani's “Christian” side, that is to say the vision of the world she professed before setting foot in Hårga.
With regard to the bear skin in which Christian is wrapped before being placed in the sacrificial wooden pyramid (which here has a function similar to that of the more epic "Wicker Man" in Hardy and Shaffer's film), It should be noted immediately that the bear is an animal with a very high symbolic content in the Nordic countries: it is Ari Aster himself to say in interview:
"The bear is a very important symbol in Norse mythology and in Scandinavian folklore. It was loaded in all of the right ways. To sort of tie it to Christian and the way that he dies. It occurred to me at some point in doing research for the film that this is the right way to send Christian off. "
It is archaeologically documented throughout the Scandinavian area a bear burial tradition from the Iron Age to the XNUMXth century; there are about fifty graves of this type in Sweden, Norway and Finland. It goes without saying that the burials assume that the animal has been "hunted" and ritually sacrificed: this practice has been interpreted as a ritual connected to the Finno-Ugric shamanism, in whose mythology the Bear was the son of the god of the sky, descended among men and finally sacrificed because of his disobedience towards his father [Paolo Galloni, Hunting the bear in medieval forests (i.e., the uncertain boundaries between human and non-human)].
However, it should be noted that the rituals centered on the "expulsion" and the ritual sacrifice of the bearded bear are found, even more than in the Nordic area, in that Alpine and in the area of Pyrenees French, Basque and Spanish. These ceremonies, unlike the Lappish ones, exasperate the character of "scapegoat" and the "winter" value of the bear, whose removal and / or sacrifice is necessary to welcome the rising spring and to remove from the community the sins accumulated in the previous year, as well as to prevent the potentially harmful action of the demons of famine and disease.
The sacrificial rite of Christian and his friends therefore seems to follow, rather than the Finno-Ugric and Scandinavian area, the carnival pantomimes widely spread throughout medieval Europe, apotropaic rites centered on the "ritual expulsion" of the winter season by means of the ceremonial killing of one of his "epiphanies": think of Fool (in the final scene inside the wooden pyramid Mark, now deceased, wears a jester's headdress) or precisely at theBear-man or Man-Deer of the various traditions still in force today. Alessandro Head in his comprehensive study Zoomorphic masks. Comparisons and interpretations from late ancient and early medieval sources lists in the following way the phases through which the ritual develops, beyond the particularities and local differences [p. 90]:
" to) a man […] morekerato with skins and / or other attributes of animal b) is reached outside the village or arrives in country sincethe outside (from the mountain, from the woods, from a marginal place del vilage), c) performs certain actions surprisingly uniformrmi in the testimonies, like dancing or begging and / or chasing e 'kicking out' the girls, behaving in such a way aberrant and animalistic; thereafter, d) suffers certain actions: comes forcosso and / or mocked and / or shaved and / or accused of specificand faults or even being responsible for all evils of the cocommunity; e) as a consequence, he is driven out of the villagethu or, more than frequente, killed by one or more 'hunters' or from lostsimilar natures; f) often resusquotes or is resurrected. "
In his best known work, The golden branch (1890), the Scottish anthropologist sir James Frazer tracked down similar rituals based on the “magical” transfer of evil onto a “scapegoat” and its public expulsion (by expulsion and / or sacrifice) not only in European but also, for example, North American traditions. Mandan Indians they celebrated their main festival in early spring, centered on the casting out of demons, ritually represented by a man painted in black who entered the village from the prairie to chase and scare the women. Eventually he was kicked out of the village and chased with whistles and jeers from the women who beat him with sticks and threw trash at him.
That said, and also reflecting on the scene of Christian and his friends' sacrifice in the finale of Midsummer, Testa's summary [p. 107]:
"The isomorphisms and analogies are too obvious to be be silentI deemed not very relevant: the mask of the Mandan, which repevidently exempts evil - the evils, the 'sins' - of the community (which come from the outside, fromthe world-out-of-the-villaggio) is mocked, mistreated, chased away; are the sameme azions that you found in almost all pantomimes soullesche of European folklore, where, however, sometimes the maschera, insteadand to be expelled from the village (or resurrected in order to make them independently leave the cultural space of community), is knocked down, or 'humanthrough shaving or others apseudo-rituals. Killing, expulsion or traffickingchin pseudo-ritual neutralize the otherness and evil of which the machera, which not by chance always comes from outside space of the villaggio or from hidden or marginal places of the same, is herald. »
Taking into account these ethnographic data, there are not a few scholars (Florentin, Gaignebet, Praneuf, Grimaldi) who have underlined the close relationship of homology existing between the bear, the Carnival Fool and the Wild Man, concluding that "since at carnival - as is evident from the overlapping of the dates - we celebrate the dishibernation of the bear, the pantomimes of the bear and the wild man - at least the Catalan and Pyrenean ones - they would represent a dramatization of this very significant event in the popular imagination linked to seasonal cycles and more precisely to the lunar ones "[Testa, p. 96].
It is the aforementioned Praneuf who points out how the bear "through its hibernation would perfectly represent the renewal and cycle of vegetation". In fact, although the existence of ancient hunting rites cannot be ruled out a priori, the plantigrade is more traditionally connected, in the ancient sacred calendar, to awakening from the lethargy that would take place on February 2, day of Imbolc / Candlemas and, consequently, at the end of the winter season.
Conclusions
Let us therefore return to our starting question: "because Midsommar? ». Why "Mid summer"? Could it be that from Ari Aster's point of view the winter season to be overcome, the lethargy from which to emerge, the shoots to blossom again were only Dani's business? Could it be that the whole story, which in more than one passage appears strongly in the balance between reality and hallucination, should be seen more as a metaphor for an individual drama experienced in the first person rather than as a linear narration of a story? It may be that the members of the Hårga community act as Jungian subconscious extensions of Dani's will, and through them he manages to escape from the prison in which he lived., getting rid of the "friends" who could barely stand it?
In our opinion, this hypothesis is also supported by the runes sewn on the clothes of their respective guests. If you notice it, the fact that the runes embroidered on Dani's robe are ᚱ (reid) to ᛞ (dagaz), whose meaning is respectively ᚱ = "wheel, journey, path; the movement and strength of a person in the decisions to be made; a journey to undertake in search of oneself; the return to the right path and to a correct order of things "and ᛞ = “Day, completion, awakening, the light of dawn after the darkness of the night; the cocoon that turns into a chrysalis and hovers in the sky and in the light ". The rune is sewn onto Christian's dress ᛏ (tyr), that is "the spiritual warrior, the courage, the strength" but above all the meaning of is interesting here "To overcome someone or something even at the cost of enormous sacrifices", being tyr the rune of will and of willingness to give up something dear in order to restore balance and harmony.
The choice and assignment of these runes, so explanatory in their symbolism, to the two main characters of the "ritual drama" cannot be accidental. Just as it is certainly not accidental that in one of the first scenes of the film we can see hanging, in Dani's bedroom, a painting by the well-known Swedish painter John Bauer, who (before dying prematurely and tragically in a nautical accident in 1918) had illustrated the traditional Swedish fairy tales in an excellent way. Bauer's painting that presents itself to the viewer is significantly titled Low Lilac Stackars!, literally "Poor little bear", and represents a little blonde girl with a crown on her head kissing a bear on the nose. Evidently one spoiler of the finale of their journey to come to the delightful Sweden. Or perhaps, more subtly, one predestination.
Bibliography:
- Ari Aster, interview
- James Frazer, The golden branch, 1890
- Anders Fryxell, The History of Sweden, 1844
- Paolo Galloni, Hunting the bear in medieval forests (i.e., the uncertain boundaries between human and non-human)
- Alessandro Head, Zoomorphic masks. Comparisons and interpretations from late ancient and early medieval sources
- Matthew Piludu Vesa, The rituals of bear hunting in Finland and Karelia: beliefs, songs, spells and magical rites
- Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1590