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Halloween & the Witches of Benevento La
Danza delle Streghe
(the Dance of the Witches) by Pericle Fazzini*1
And yet, there really is a local Halloween, of sorts, near Naples. It's when witches and spooks come out at certain times and gather by the sacred Walnut Tree and do things that I am not at liberty to reveal (except that they dance and no doubt take shots of their famous and potent inebriating beverage, Strega [witch]). That place is Benevento in the hills about 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Naples. It is the capital city of the province of the same name in the Campania region of Italy and supposedly founded by Diomedes after the Trojan War. In Italian lore and literature dealing with witchcraft, Benevento and the sacred Walnut Tree are in the same class as the Brocken in the Harz mountains in Germany, where northern witches gather on the night of April 30, Walpurgisnacht. The Benevento gathering is often called in Italian folklore the tregenda, a word that may derive from an old plural form of trecento (three hundred) used to mean any large number. Today, it is used only to mean the gathering of witches at propitious times of the year, typically the winter and summer solstice and vernal equinox. In
1600,
the
celebrated
Jesuit
and
demonologist, Martin Antonius Delrio mentioned
the noce di
Benevento (Walnut Tree of Benevento)
in his Disquisitiones
Magicae libri sex (Six Books on
Investigations into Magic), and the sacred
tree and gathering of witches of Benevento
crop up often in literature and
anthropological studies. A poem published in
the 19th century in Naples, Storia della
Famosa Noce di Benevento (History of
the famous Walnut Tree of Benevento) goes into
some detail on the lore: there is the great
serpent twisted around the tree, and then
there is the poisonous nature of the tree,
itself, such as to paralyze you if you fall
asleep in the shade of the branches. More
recently, Italian anthropologist and
ethnologist, Giuseppe
Cocchiara (1904-65),
devoted an entire chapter to the witches of
Benevento in his 1956 book, Il paese di
Cuccagna e altri studi di folklore
(The
Land
of Cockayne and Other Studies in Folklore.
Reprint,
1980, Bollati Boringhieri. Torino.
)*2 A large body of scholarship has developed over the years dealing with the obvious syncretism —that is, the mixing of snake worship (possibly from the cult of Isis, particularly strong in Benevento under the Romans) and various forms of tree worship from northern Europe (which has given us the Christmas tree, for example). Northern influence penetrated into Italy with the Lombard invasions after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; thus, it is plausible that northern lore mixed with local, earlier lore come together to give us the “witches” of Benevento. Locally, the witches are often referred to as janara, possibly from dianara, a priestess of Diana. Of
the
many
legends
that
weave
the Lombards into the origins of the lore is
one that tells of a local Christian priest,
Barbato, in the mid-600s, when Benevento was
an autonomous Lombard duchy besieged at the
time by the forces of Byzantine emperor,
Constans II, still trying to maintain a hold
on the exarchate, the Eastern Imperial enclave
in Italy. The Lombard ruler of Benevento,
Romualdo, made a vow to Barbato to give up his
northern gods and embrace Christianity if
Benevento were spared from the Greek forces.
The Greeks, for whatever reason, lifted the
siege and went elsewhere; Romualdo promoted
Barbato to bishop of Benevento but reneged on
his own promise to switch faiths and continued
to worship his little golden statue of a viper
(the snake from the tree, one supposes). Then,
Romualdo’s good and faithful wife, Theodorada—and
what a witch she was!—ratted
him
out to Barbato and gave the bishop the statue.
Barbato melted it down and turned it into a
chalice for the Eucharist; he then went and
chopped down the walnut tree and built the
church of Santa
Maria del voto on the site. *1.Pericle Fazzini
(1913-87), an Italian sculptor best-known
for his 1977 work, The Resurrection, on the
premises of the Vatican. The Dance of the
Witches is from 1949 and is in the
Fazzini family collection in Rome. ^to text *2. Cockayne
means, roughly, “land of plenty”; the term
goes back to ancient times, existing with
slight variations in many languages. (See this link.) The
Cocchiara book is not to be confused with
the 1891 book, il Paese di Cuccagna by
Neapolitan writer, Matilde
Serao. ^to text
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As
globalization has sunk its vast talons into
our once diverse cultures, I have grown
accustomed to seeing, for example, St.
Valentine’s Day celebrated in Naples. So when
I saw the first