Tag: San Nicola

The Krampus, double demonic of San Nicolรฒ

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On 5 December, in some areas of Austria, southern Germany (Bavaria), north-eastern Italy (Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia), Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary, traditional processions of the Krampus, double obscure of San Nicolรฒ, ritual remnant of the โ€œPerchtenโ€ (winter masked parades that date back to pre-Christian Alpine traditions). In this article we analyze the folkloric roots of the anniversary and its iconographic rediscovery at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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"Santa Claus executed", or the eternal return of an immortal rite

Published on: Last updated on: Written by: Categorized into: Anthropology, Esotericism, folklore, History, History of Religions

With an essay with a provocative title, "Santa Claus executed", Claude Lรฉvi-Strauss is inspired by a bizarre news event at his time - the hanging and holocaust of a puppet of Santa Claus by the Dijonese clergy - to arrive to the understanding of the "true meaning of Christmas", based on the reciprocal relationship between the world of children and that of the dead. The method used for this purpose is a synchronic and confrontational approach with non-European societies.

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The Friulian benandanti and the ancient European fertility cults

Published on: Last updated on: Written by: Categorized into: Anthropology, folklore, Middle Ages, Shamanism, History, History of Religions

di Marco Maculotti
cover: Luis Ricardo Falero, โ€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 workย 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 byย 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. "

โ€”Carlo Ginzburg, "Iย benandanti.ย Witchcraft and agrarian cults between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesยป, Pp. 7-8

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