90th Festa di San Gennaro, Little Italy 2016

San Rocco in Frigento, Avellino

From the official website of the Comune di Frigento:

The statue of the Saint is taken in the streets of the town with a procession. Some women who are devoted to the saint put on their heads the “mezzetti” which are large wooden containers that contain roughly 30 kg of wheat.

The “mezzetti” are decorated with weaved wheat, colored ribbons and plastic flowers.

Feast of San Rocco from “The Godfather II”

In this clip, you can see many traditions which are still alive today, including the pinning of money to the saint! (I’ve yet to see an assassination at a festa in New York, though.)

Canzone di San Rocco

Forty minutes of plague trance, for all your plague trance needs. NB – The song is definitely for San Rocco, but the image is of San Giuseppe! Here is an image of San Rocco for contemplation while listening:

Ritmo e Danza di San Rocco

In this video, my teacher, Alessandra Belloni, demonstrates a ritual rhythm used in devotion to San Rocco in Calabria. This is a 6/8 rhythm, which is a time signature associated with trance and spirit contact in traditional religions from around the world, including African diasporic traditions.

Where the holy things are

In his Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs, Discoverable in Modern Italy and Sicily (1823), Rev. John James Blunt describes several locations where the Lares, or Roman domestic gods, were commonly positioned and where contemporary Italians and Sicilians often keep images of saints. These are:

1. “…in the public streets, particularly in situations where several ways met, and where the conflux of the populace was consequently greater. These were called Viales or Compitales…” (21)
2. “…to guard the entrances of houses…” (24)
3. “…for them a corner was reserved in their principle living rooms…” (25)
4. “…guarding the chamber and bed from the influence of evil spirits by sight.” (26)
5. “…the protection of shipping.” (30)
6. “…for charms…” (40), particularly as pendants around the neck

Vestiges of ancient manners and customs (1832)

Vestiges of ancient manners and customs, discoverable in modern Italy and Sicily (1832) by the Rev. John James Blunt is a compilation of Rev. Blunt’s observations on the culture of the Mezzogiorno region compared with texts describing that of antiquity. While Rev. Blunt, an Englishman, tends toward a tone at once condescending and titillated, many of his observations are worth reading.

Chapters:

I. Introductory Remarks
II. On Saints
III. On the Virgin
IV. On the Festival of S. Agatha at Catania
V. On the Churches of Italy and Sicily
VI. On the Religious Services and Ceremonies of the Italians and Sicilians
VII. On the mendicant Monks
VIII. On sacred Dramas
IX. On the Dramatic Nature of the Ceremonies of the Church of Italy
X. On Charms
XI. On the Burial of the Dead
XII. On the Agriculture of Italy
XIII. On the Towns, Houses, Utensils, &c. Of the Italians and Sicilians
XIV. On the Ordinary Habits, Food, and Dress, of the Italians and Sicilians
XV. Miscellaneous Coincidences of Character between the ancient and modern Italians

It is available through the grace of archive.org for reading and download here.

Sicilian rosary to Saint Joseph

Transcription courtesy of Preghiere Siciliane:

Posta:

San Giusippuzzu fustivu patri
virgini fustivu comu la Matri
Maria la rosa, Giuseppi lu gigghiu
datini aiutu, riparu e cunsigghiu.

Scura ora e aggiorna dumani
la pruvvidenza nn’aviti a mannari
la pruvvidenza di la casa mia
l’aspettu di Gesu, Giuseppi e Maria.

Grani: 

Ludamu l’eternu Quantu, lu Patri, lu Figghiu e lu Spiritu Santu
Sia lodatu e binidittu sia lu nomu di Gèsu, Giuseppi e Maria.

Pater Noster

Ave Maria 

Selected quotes from dark mother

“Healing black madonnas are associated with wooded areas, water (the sea, a lake, a river, a fountain), grottoes and caves, and with the subterranean, often volcanic, chthonic earth.” (140)

“Deborah Rose went to France in search of black madonnas; afterward, she wrote, ‘the last thing I expected was to re-enter Catholicism, the religion of my childhood.’ She found that ‘devotions of the catholic faithful were keeping alive a reverence for the mother that I suspected was much older than that to the Christian Mary.’ Her twenty five years of work in holistic health care have made her ‘a firm believer in body memories and cellular consciousness. On an individual, and I believe on a collective level, the body remembers the past. And the oldest memory is of darkness as the source and the beginning. The dark mother is the original mother.'” (149)

“Lucia’s popular meaning is caught at Canicattini Bagni, paleolithic site in Sicily, where Lucia is sought for eye maladies connected with loss of wisdom. In italian popular culture, loss of wisdom means loss of hindsight, or memory of the past, and loss of vision, or faith in the future.” (171-172)

“In popular themes underlying political traditions of the left in Italy, the black of anarchism is understood as fidelity of subordinated peoples to the truth of the earth.” (172)

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, dark mother: african origins and godmothers

law, logic, and the dark mother

“In Italy, Isis was a mother divinity associated with healing; the 6th century BCE temple to Isis at Pompeii is located next to a temple of Aesculapius, or Serapis. A significant characteristic of Isis, one later associated with the christian madonna, was that she was a compassionate mother. In the rhcistian epoch her son Horus was represented as a child figure. Isis is often depicted with a laurel wreath and two prominant ears, symbolizing that she listened with both ears to the prayers of all those who came to her, an image that can be found to this day in italian folklore.

“Water, always associated with Isis, held a sacred quality: holy water, holy rivers, and holy sea. The serpent, identified with Isis, was always sacred. …Isis and wheat, in the roman epoch, became Ceres and wheat. In the christian epoch Isis became santa Lucia, whose images always carry a sheaf of wheat. The olive tree, associated with Isis, has today become symbol of nonviolent transformation. Italy’s contemporary nonviolent left political coalition is named L’Ulivo, or the olive tree. …In her 600 BCE image in the Museum of Cairo, Isis is figured as a black nursing mother, who bears a startling resemblance to christian images of the nursing madonna.

“Veneration of Isis, her spouse Osiris, and son Horus persisted in all the pharaonic dynasties, a 3,000 year old history when belief in Isis spread from Meroe and Alexandria to ‘the whole Mediterranean basin.’ In Italy and other latin countries where the holy family is a focus of devotion, the trinity of Isis and her husband and child became the popular christian trinity of Maria, Joseph, and Jesus, popular trinity that differs from the motherless trinity–father, son, and holy ghost–of canonical christianity.

“At african Memphis, hymns praising Isis as a civilizing, universal divinity who had ended cannibalism, instituted good laws, and given birth to agriculture, arts and letters, moral principle, good customs, and justice. Mistress of medicine, healer of human maladies, sovereign of earth and seas, protectress from navigational perils and war, Isis was ‘Dea della salvezza per eccellenza… veglia anche sulla morte,’ divinity of salvation par excellence, who also watches over the dead. …

“Acknowledging the dark african mother who preceded patriarchal world religions does not, to this sicilian/american woman, seem all that iconoclastic. It may be a matter of how we think. Erik Hronung, egyptologist of the University at Basel, refers to the complementarity of egyptian logic, which resembles complementarity in physics. ‘For the Egyptians two times two is always four, never anything else. But the sky is a number of things–cow, baldachin, water, woman–it is the goddess Nut and the goddes Hathor, and in syncretism a deity a is at the same time another, not-a.’ For Hornung, ‘the nature of a god becomes accessible through a “multiplicity of approaches,” [and] only when these are taken together can the whole be comprehended.’ Sicilians, as Justin Vitiello reminds us, know this intuitively. So do artists, craftsmen, poets, and peasants of the world. In the 1970’s, when I began to research my italian godmothers/grandmothers, I came across a tile with a blue-black star with thrity-two points in a blue green sea. The tile was named Iside, italian for Isis.”

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, dark mother: african origins and godmothers, pp. 20-21, 27.