The Divine can alter the Destiny of each of Us
Looking for university articles that could talk about Apulian traditions, I came across a scientific paper, written by two American anthropologists almost thirty years ago. Very interesting, both as historical evidence and as an article that with scientific method analyzes something highly irrational: bad luck.
With direct testimony I agree with what is written in the article, and in the details I find traditions and sayings that were commonplace in my childhood.
I will divide the article into three parts: in this first part I will give a small description of what a peasant society in a small town in the southeastern Murge in Apulia can and has been able to perceive as the influence of deities or demonic beings on personal misfortunes or illnesses.
Two writers have invoked an anthropology of misfortune (Worsley 1982:327) or suffering (Farmer 1988:80). Worsley stresses the importance of the fact that the pharmacopoeia and ritual repertoire of many healers are not just about illness, and Farmer invites us to make connections between the “personal meanings of illness” and broader issues in society, emphasizing the connections between various kinds of suffering at the physical, social, and economic levels. I doubt that Worsley and Farmer are assuming that medical and other anthropologists have not previously addressed suffering and misfortune as the focus of meaning in culture, or that medical anthropologists have not considered types of suffering other than illness, but their call for explicit anthropological attention to the general topic of misfortune and suffering is welcome, and there seems to be growing interest in this area.
Anthropologists have often analyzed individual varieties of supernatural harm, but have rarely produced culturally specific analyses of the complex systems of ways in which people or things are harmed through supernatural means. There are several supernatural causes of misfortune in Locorotondo so, instead of collecting separate data on the evil eye, witchcraft or curses, it may be useful to explore these phenomena, and others, with the idea that they constituted a system of symbols that had local heuristic value for reflecting on certain types of misfortune. This is a theme that we can also find on the island of Pantelleria and is reported on the concept of local construction of the “synthetic image” of the evil eye (Galt 1982).
In southern Italy, supernatural harm includes those varieties of misfortune affecting the human community that have no everyday causes and cannot be resolved by professional actors such as doctors, lawyers, social workers, union representatives, or other bureaucrats. In this article, the category “misfortune” includes consequences ranging from annoyance and discomfort to illness, accidental injury, death, unwanted love, business paralysis, and financial decline.
Locorotondo is a town of about 12,000 inhabitants located in the southeastern corner of the province of Bari in southern Italy. It is part of an area often called Murgia dei Trulli, an area characterized by the presence of trulli, houses built with corbelled domes. Recently the trulli and the area’s striking landscape have become a tourist attraction. The other main characteristic of the area is a highly dispersed settlement pattern that contrasts sharply with that typical of southern Italy, in which almost all inhabitants live in the city and go to the fields every day. Locorotondo’s dispersed settlement pattern dates back to at least the early 19th century and is based on the development, through emphyteusis, of small peasant properties. In living memory, the totality of the peasants in this town have lived in the countryside, while artisans, merchants, professionals and large landowners have lived in the city. Currently, just over 50 percent of the population lives in the countryside, and only a few retired farmers live in the city. Significantly, locals speak (in dialect) of peasants as crestiène de feuore, or “people from outside.” The pattern of dispersed settlement and smallholder agriculture is echoed to a lesser extent in the surrounding towns (Cisternino, Martina Franca, Alberobello, Fasano and Ostuni), but contrasts sharply with the pattern in the rest of Apulia, where the country residence of the farming population is uncommon. Farmers in Locorotondo and neighbouring towns have experienced a degree of prosperity based on viticulture that is generally rare for southern Italy, even if family plots are small.
Una cittadina divisa tra Passato e Presente
The division of Locorotondo’s population between town and country has created a dual working-class subculture that differs in values, dialect and degree of cultural conservatism. The increased isolation of the rural population, and particularly rural women, from outside influences, which historically entered Locorotondo only through city channels, has tended to keep elements of magical and supernatural belief in the countryside. In the last three decades, however, the countryside has undergone significant economic and cultural changes. Most men are no longer full-time farmers, but skilled construction craftsmen, truck drivers, or, in a few cases, steel mill workers in Taranto. These new occupations take men to cities far from Locorotondo and expose them to the new influences of urban ways of life.
The city center, then, is no longer the only entry point for ideas belonging to the broader regional and national culture, and the isolation of the countryside is steadily eroding. Of course, television and the Internet, now present in almost every rural home, has also contributed to this erosion. Magical beliefs and practices in rural Locorotondo came into conflict with more rationalistic worldviews later than in the city, but some magical beliefs have begun to disappear among all but the oldest people. Other elements, particularly beliefs about the evil eye, which have some spread throughout modern Italy, persist in both urban and rural Locorotondo.
It is interesting to note, in the author's article, how he refers to folk beliefs from Locorotondo and in the more widespread area of the Su-East Murge) but, distinguishing Past and Present is often not possible. Some traditions or "hearsay" are still current and, perhaps, converted into current myths that relate to the new social and economic fabric, as if Present and Past are entangled in one indissoluble spiral.
THREE TYPES OF SUPERNATURAL BEINGS IN LOCOROTONDO
Locorotondo peasants identified three types of supernatural beings as potential bearers of bad luck: God, demons and a form of nightmare called ajure. Of these, people contacted only the last one directly. Many rural dwellers experienced and believed in other supernatural beings-ghosts (spirte), a benevolent imp known as monachidde, and, of course, the saints-but did not see or speak of them as harmful.Ghosts were the spirits of suicides or those who had died prematurely in other ways. Such spirits haunted the places where they had died-often deep cisterns into which the suicides of Locorotondo threw themselves-until the days originally destined for their deaths arrived. Ghosts were also created when relatives violated the terms of a deceased person’s will. Ghosts appeared in strange and frightening forms, but, according to informants, once a living person realized that he or she was in the presence of a ghost, the apparition disappeared without doing any harm.It is important to note, however, that Locorotondo country people often experienced ghosts and that such experiences provided a personal key to the supernatural. It is not uncommon for the experience one had with a ghost, and not the teaching of the church, to be the basis for belief in life after death.
L’ ajure, on the other hand, was a mischievous spirit that manifested itself at night, sat on people’s chests or stomachs, paralyzing their movements, and did annoying things such as pinching victims’ flesh or tangling their hair. When the ajure approached people, they could neither move to shake it off nor open their eyes. As a result, no one is able to describe the ajure, although some say it is said to be cat-like. The ajure took care of many people in the countryside and niene seen in many agricultural areas as a constant and real presence. People considered waking up with bruises or tangled hair as evidence of a visitation. People also believed that the ajure visited horses at night-they were particularly attached to these animals-and entwined their manes and tails. One informant also related that this creature would beat a horse at night, after its owner had beaten it during the day, as a perverse warning to leave it alone; human cruelty to horses translated into a supernatural double dose.
Only in the case of horse beating did the coming of ajure reflect human actions. Otherwise there was a moral neutrality around the actions of its victims. The incredulous response to questions about the ajure, mentioned earlier, suggests that visits from this creature were very common, at least among older peasants. In the old town of Locorotondo, the experience with the ajure may have been less common, although I have only anecdotal evidence on which to base this idea. One elderly artisan-class woman with whom I spoke about this creature had in fact forgotten the cure and found it an amusing reminder of her past.
The belief in harm coming from the Devil (u diavule) is much more vague. Everyone agrees that the Devil was behind the powers of local witches, but they were unclear about the damage that could come directly from him. Some residents think that the devil could be the source of weather damage such as lightning or hail, and they claim that prophylaxis signs painted in white on trulli cones were “against the devil.” (Others see the signs as generated good luck charms or simply as things to be repainted by tradition, with little sense of their meaning when a house was being whitewashed.) People stylized blessed olive branches in fields and on buildings to protect them, because the olive tree has sacred connotations that counterbalance the evil of the devil. To stem storms and drive away hail, people also invoked saints in spells. People see God, however, as directly causing harm to evildoers during their lives and at the time of the final judgment. “Criste se ne pé” (“Christ demands payment”). Direct harm attributed to God or Christ fell into the category of “a malapotènse de Dig-ghie“-essentially, “God’s damaging power,” the divine version of a human curse. Of course, it is assumed that the victim of God’s power did considerable harm, particularly harm directed at parents. A widespread saying in Locorotondo professes, “A malapotènse d’u Segneure jè chère, ca cure a mamme, doppe ca ng’a deéte a robbe, na vuleute meis meis” (“God’s harmful power is that which [affects] the son who, after receiving his inheritance, does not want to rotate the care of his mother with his brothers”). Not caring for a parent is seen as the supreme act of disloyalty on the part of a child and thus as something subject to extreme consequences.
