The fruit of infinity: meditations on Venus, the apple and the fig

What is the food of the soul? Or what fruits are born in the garden of the imagination? An adventure through the geography of the psyche, following the red thread of the apple, from that of Adam to that of discord, from the mists of Avalon to the celestial realms where Venus traces her star. An excursion through the heights and winding paths of the world of archetypes.

Fairies, witches and goddesses: "subtle nourishment" and "bone renewal"

An analysis of some beliefs concerning the "subtle nourishment" of witches and fairy beings will lead us to the discovery of a recurring mythology through the millennia, from the archaic times of the shamanic cultures of hunters to the era of inquisitorial processes: that of the so-called "renewal of the bones ".

The Sacred Wood of Bomarzo: an initiatory journey

Visiting the "Parco dei Mostri" of Bomarzo, conceived by Pier Francesco Orsini in memory of his late wife Giulia Farnese and created by Pirro Ligorio, is equivalent to making a real metaphysical journey, stimulated by the numerous hermetic-alchemical suggestions, in the abysses of the human interiority.

β€œPicnic at Hanging Rock”: an Apollonian allegory

Our analysis of Peter Weir's cult film, making use of the interpretative tools of the anthropology of the Sacred, in particular: the Sacred as "Totally Other" according to Rudolf Otto; the "breaking of level", the "suspension of time" and the theme of access to the Other World by Mircea Eliade; Apollonian symbolism according to the studies of Giorgio Colli.

The Friulian benandanti and the ancient European fertility cults

di Marco Maculotti
cover: Luis Ricardo Falero, β€œWitches going to their Sabbath", 1878).


Carlo Ginzburg (born 1939), a renowned scholar of religious folklore and medieval popular beliefs, published in 1966 as his first workΒ The Benandanti, a research on the Friulian peasant society of the sixteenth century. The author, thanks to a remarkable work on a conspicuous documentary material relating to the trials of the courts of the Inquisition, reconstructed the complex system of beliefs widespread up to a relatively recent era in the peasant world of northern Italy and other countries, of Germanic area, Central Europe.

According to Ginzburg, the beliefs concerning the company of the benandanti and their ritual battles against witches and sorcerers on the Thursday nights of the four tempora (Her hand, imbol, Beltain, Lughnasad), were to be interpreted as a natural evolution, which took place far from the city centers and from the influence of the various Christian Churches, of an ancient agrarian cult with shamanic characteristics, widespread throughout Europe since the Archaic age, before the spread of the Jewish religion - Christian. Ginzburg's analysis of the interpretation proposed at the time by the inquisitors is also of considerable interest, who, often displaced by what they heard during interrogation by the benandanti defendants, mostly limited themselves to equating the complex experience of the latter with the nefarious practices of witchcraft. Although with the passing of the centuries the tales of the benandanti became more and more similar to those concerning the witchcraft sabbath, the author noted that this concordance was not absolute:

"If, in fact, the witches and sorcerers who meet on Thursday night to give themselves to" jumps "," fun "," weddings "and banquets, immediately evoke the image of the sabb - that sabb that the demonologists had meticulously described and codified, and the inquisitors persecuted at least since the mid-400th century - nonetheless exist, among the gatherings described byΒ benandanti and the traditional, vulgate image of the diabolical sabbath, evident differences. In these cEverywhere, apparently, homage is not paid to the devil (in whose presence, indeed, there is no mention of it), faith is not abjured, the cross is not trampled, there is no reproach of the sacraments. At the center of them is a dark ritual: witches and sorcerers armed with sorghum reeds who juggle and fight with benandanti provided with fennel branches. Who are these benandanti? On the one hand, they claim to oppose witches and sorcerers, to hinder their evil designs, to heal the victims of their hexes; on the other hand, not unlike their presumed adversaries, they claim to go to mysterious nocturnal gatherings, of which they cannot speak under pain of being beaten, riding hares, cats and other animals. "

β€”Carlo Ginzburg, "IΒ benandanti.Β Witchcraft and agrarian cults between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesΒ», Pp. 7-8