Window – Roof – House – Soul

Michael Carroll in his book, Veiled Threats, tells of the following:

Gian Matteo Gilberti, bishop of Verona… instructed his priests to root out superstition, and singled out in particular “the practice of uncovering the roof so that the soul [of the dead] can get out, something that suggests the soul could be held back by a roof.” In fact, Italians have long believed that the human soul has a physical substance and so can be blocked by physical barriers like a roof. This is why those present at a death leave an exit for the soul of the dead person by removing a slat from the roof or opening a window. The fact that diocesan synods throughout Italy continued to condemn these practices into the modern era… is an indication of just how rooted and widespread this view was.

“A quaint superstition”, you might think. Mircea Eliade, however, further elaborates:

… the soul of the dead person departs though the chimney or the roof and especially through the part of the roof that lies above the “sacred area”. In cases of prolonged death agony, one or more boards are removed from the roof, or the roof is even broken. The meaning of the custom is patent: the soul will more easily quit the body if the other image of the body-cosmos, the house, is broken open above. Obviously all these experiences are inaccessible to nonreligious man, not only because, for him, death has become desacralized, but also because he no longer lives in a cosmos in the proper sense of the word and is no longer aware that having a body and taking up residence in a house are equivalent to assuming an existential situation in the cosmos.

-The Sacred and the Profane

If we are to give any creedence to Eliade, institutional spiritual institutions are not always the best apparatus in preserving the ancient religious ethos. It is probably not to be doubted that such an Italian practice originated with paganism, but the reasoning behind it (again, if we give Eliade creedence) transcends even the tired pagan/Christian divide.

For Eliade, reality only has meaning insofar as it conforms to the symbols of the divine. Once the language of these symbols breaks down, even the spiritual gatekeepers begin to conceive of the universe in increasingly desacralized terms. That is perhaps behind the sectoralized and atomized character of religion today, “orthodox” or not. In a place where even basic religious paradigms are separated from everyday life, any sense of continuity with the past becomes boderline farcical. Quomodo sedet sola civitas…

On the night battles

Catholic Witchhunters in Italy and the Decline of the Enchanted World

For a little over a year now, I have been contemplating the idea of a “marginal Catholicism”: a religiosity in contact but not necessarily controlled by the official hierarchy. One can call it, “popular Catholicism”, “folk Catholicism”, or even “underground Catholicism”. I write on it not because I have some romanticist vision of an unspoiled peasant past or because I idolize the voice of the people over and above the voice of their leaders. Nor is it an issue of a religion of the heart versus a religion of the head; such dichotomies ultimately prove trite and useless. There is, nevertheless, a great loss that we have experienced in modernity with relation to our “pre-modern” beliefs; a sense that how we believe and the principles behind those beliefs are fundamentally different from those of the past. At times, one generation removed or even right under our noses now, we realize that the way people saw God, the world, good, and evil is different from our own way of seeing things. The project that I have undertaken is to chronicle those differences; those things that have been silenced during the “purification” of popular religion in the continuing march of modernity.

In the book, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, the Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg tells the story of the relationship between the benandanti (or “good walkers”) and the Inquisition. In the region of the Friuli in northeastern Italy, a group of people born with a caul were summoned on the nights during Embertide to leave their bodies and fight witches for the good of the village. Under the command of an angel or a lead benandante, they would have ritual battles with witches during their “black Sabbaths”. The benandanti would attack with fennel stalks, and the witches would fight back with sorghum stalks. If the benandanti  won, the crops of the village would be safe for the year, but if they lost, disaster and famine would sweep the land. During these episodes, it was claimed that the bodies of the benandanti remained behind in their homes, still as if they were dead.

Tarantismo

I found a real gem on YouTube on the southern Italian phenomenon of la taranta. (You can view it by clicking here since it cannot be embedded into the blog). Although its origins remain obscure, it is said to be a folk ailment that is a mixture of hysteria, seizures, and other medical symptoms of madness. It is called la taranta since it is allegedly caused by a bite of a wolf spider, though modern science continues to be baffled as to its origins. The cure, as you see in the video, is wild dancing like a spider and the invoking of St. Paul (the illness usually takes place around the end of June around the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul.)

The illness is not unique in southern Italy. In many places, saints were seen as sending diseases not to chastise people, but rather to remind people that they existed and that devotion to them needed to be maintained (sort of like a mafia boss shaking them down). Il male di San Donato was seen as an illness sent by Saint Donatus, according to Michael P. Carroll in Madonnas that Maim. Like la taranta, it was characterized by convulsions and seizures. It was cured by prayers to the same saint.

On Relics

At this time, [Giovanni Castoldi] requested for his personal use one of the skulls of S. Orsola’s virgins as well as twenty-four teeth “in order to make a corona of gold”… Corona in this case might refer to either a necklace or a rosary. The fact that modern audiences might find it hard to imagine the highest-ranking religious official in Milan wearing a necklace or using a rosary made out of human teeth is an indication of how different our attitudes have become from those that prevailed in the Counter-Reformation Church.

-Michael P. Carroll, Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy

Mal’ Occhio

Somewhat related is the following quote from Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance :

Ficino remains of the same opinion as Plato and Galen: in the act of seeing, “the internal fire” is externalized through the eyes, mixed with the pneumatic vapor and even with the thin blood that engendered spirit. That theory is confirmed by Aristotle himself, who relates that menstruating women who look look at themselves in the mirror leave little drops of blood on its surface. This can only mean that it is the thin blood brought to the eyes along with the pneuma.

See also this post on the existence of the evil eye in Mexican culture.

Vincenzo Camuso – The Friendly Catholic Mummy of Campania

Michael P. Carroll, in his book, Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy, has about a page and a half of text that is well worth the price of the book. Everyone has heard of holy relics and holy souls, but what about holy mummies of Catholic devotion? Well, there’s at least one. His body was found in the church of S. Crisenzio in Campania during a church renovation, but no one quite knows when. No one knows either how anyone found out his name, Vincenzo Camuso. All people know is that he is un’ anima santa del Purgatorio (or an anima sola in the Spanish tradition) who comes to help people in time of need. His body was displayed in the church well into the 1960’s. Sometimes he appears to sick people to heal them (once he even showed in a hospital in the guise of a doctor to perform surgery). Other times he appears to the living to remind people to pray for the souls of the dead. He is certainly one of the most colorful characters of the folk Catholic pantheon.

Bloody Penances

I completely forgot to talk about the flagellants and other Holy Week traditions in southern Italy, as well as other folk traditions such as the professional mourning women and the dragging on the tongue on the floor. The point that Carroll makes is that the practices shown above in the video as well as other extravagances of Italian folk Catholicism often were introduced by preaching orders during the Counter-Reformation and far from “medieval” in origin. The things that we regard as “most pagan” in traditional Catholicism were often the products of early modern theological insights.

“Poorly Catechized” – Part II

Michael P. Carroll begins his book, Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy with an anecdote meant to shock the modern reader. After the Council of Trent, mendicant orders were sent into the Italian countryside to better inform the peasants about the Catholic religion. They were shocked and dismayed about what they found, to the point that they began to call the region, “the Italian Indies”. On what they thought were the essential questions of the Faith, these peasants were hopelessly ignorant. The most shocking incident was when the preachers asked how many gods there are. Some peasants would say three, ten, one hundred, and even more. When asked what a god was then, they would answer that the local priest or boss was a god, or the Pope, or their picture of the Madonna.

On the outside looking in…pt. II

image credit

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, There’s always laughter and good red wine. At least I’ve always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!

-Hillaire Belloc

Michael P. Carroll is not a good Catholic. But he is a good sociologist. I am now reading his work, Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy. Though I am just a few pages into it, the author writes an interesting prelude to the book, one that at first glance is unrelated to the rest of the work. Despite his last name, Professor Carroll is of Italian ancestry, his first relatives having come to the United States for the first time in the late 1800’s. His great grand-father, Felice Demartini, had spent some time in the United States before returning to Italy to start a family. Around 1907, one of his teenage daughters, Aurelia, had a falling out with him over the amount of work he demanded from her. She was apparently a maker of the colorful sashes worn by the gentleman of the region. The sashes became one of the main sources of family income. The more she made, however, the more her father demanded from her. One day, she protested that she could not produce them any faster than she was already working. Her father in a rage then began to chase his fifteen year old around the house with a club, intent on beating her senseless. The father then turned her out of the house and proclaimed to all who would listen that he would shoot his daughter on sight if she dared return. Her extended family then helped her to flee to America, where his family’s history in this country begins.

How the Italians became Irish

On Immigration, Folk Beliefs, and the Rationalization of American Catholicism

“Pagan! Heathen! Idolator!” These were among the epithets hurled at the Italian immigrants around the turn of the century. In addition to being viewed as potential mafiosi or anarchists, the sons of Italy had the further onus of being regarded as the bearers of anti-Christian beliefs and practices. The “Italian Problem” in its religious manifestation had been discovered by American churchmen, both Catholic and Protestant, well before 1900. In the following decades much energy, money, and ink were expended in efforts to find solutions to this “problem.” What exactly was the nature of the Italian Problem? With few exceptions, American Protestants and Catholics agreed that the Italian immigrants were characterized by ignorance of Christian doctrine, image worship, and superstitious emotionalism. In short, they were not true Christians.