We continue with Marina Sanfilippo,
professor of the Department of Foreign and Sublingual Philologies.
Marina is an Italian philologist and was born in Rome,
and studied at the University of Sapienta.
Her research focuses on artistic and theatrical
reality, as well as on popular and folkloric.
And today she presents to us "In the Shadow of
the Enebro, Old Women and Christmas Witches".
Thank you very much, Marina.
Thank you, Irene.
You are many and you scare me a bit,
so I thought I would start with a confession,
a fatal one at the beginning, and then I'll go back, I hope.
I wanted to talk about the enebro.
And then, maybe I'll put it straight there.
But I'm going to move this, that's why.
Like this?
Yes, that's how it's heard.
Okay. Nuria, you are in the background,
if you see that it's not being heard, give me a sign.
I wanted to talk about the enebro, but I only had to wear it,
and I started playing with alliterations,
and the shadow and the witches appeared to me.
And alliterations never lie,
because I was thinking about it later,
the witches will come out later, but the shadow,
is that in popular cultures around the world,
the shadow of the very large and very green trees
are godmothers of the impossible.
Now, you come here from the West Park
and what you know are the enebro-tracers, which are very short,
but the enebro can measure up to 10 metres, so the shadow is very large
and it makes it possible for clandestine immigrants
to escape the most powerful army on the planet.
Now I'll explain it to you, it's Christmas, but the escape in Egypt
falls just the next day,
it's December 26th when they escape.
In fact, on December 26th in Italy,
especially in the north, especially in the
Veneto, on the crossroads they set fire
so that the Holy Family would not be lost.
And you will tell me, from Belen to Egypt,
you don't go through the Veneto.
But then I'll tell you,
well, I'll tell you about this with José Miguel de Barandiarán,
who in the first volume of his complete work explains very indisputably
that in the province of Alaba, in Peña Cerrada,
there is a rock where the footprint of the saw,
the mule of the Holy Family is engraved.
This happened because in the Veneto
they forgot to light a cross, of course.
So I think,
let's see if I also remember to change...
Why?
There it is, Alaba.
And Giotto puts us in an escape to Egypt,
in a desert landscape, almost without people,
but no, it was full of plants, animals, people.
A lot of things happen in the escape to
Egypt and a lot of plants and animals
help or don't help,
they answer or don't answer to the requests of the Virgin
and to her needs.
We have the dino, the chickpeas, the sauce, the monkey,
the rooster, the codorniz, the tongue,
and also the Gallic or Portuguese singers.
I'm not going to explain this, but after Alaba they got much further.
The white thorn, for example, was blessed
because according to what they did, according to the vice or service,
either the Virgin blessed them or cursed them.
The white thorn, the Virgin had washed the white clothes
of the child Jesus and she didn't know where to put it
and the thorn got there and dried everything in a blessed moment.
Then the Virgin became hungry.
Here Saint Joseph simply took a date from a palm tree
and this is a primitive, not an invention, as it seems.
This narrative that I'm going to tell you about
belongs to the narrative folklore of the Italians
who lived in Libya in the first part of the 20th century.
It is a cross between the Catholic imaginary and the Islamic world
because in Surah 19 of the Qur'an it is said
that God gave Mary dates for her to recover from childbirth.
In this story that Ferdinando Trabantoni
told his daughter Gracia Trabantoni,
it is a story that shows how traditions,
if they are not based on identity,
if they do not open to the spurious and mestizo bastard,
are much more creative.
In this case, Joseph gives the date to the Virgin.
The Virgin puts it in her mouth a little,
her mouth is filled with sweetness and then she says "Oh!
" and she says "Oh!" in such a penetrating way
that the next time you eat a date, look at the bone.
I don't know if you can see it, it has a little
circle marked and that is the "Oh!" of the Virgin.
And of course, it was so sweet that she bit it very hard
and the tip of her fang broke.
And if you now take a hammer and break that bone,
inside, corresponding to the circle, there is a white mark
which is the tip of the Virgin's fang.
And if on Christmas Eve at your house there
are people of age or of a childish soul,
you should really try it.
It is also worth a "Tascanueces de los
Grandes" because they will be fascinated.
Where am I going? Because the time is going to be...
Well, we have already reached the moment when the Romans arrive,
heartless, disbelieving, with their sandals,
and the Virgin sees them from afar and
starts looking for a place to hide.
And first she talks to the reed. And what does the reed do?
Well, it goes up all the branches,
you know, it has everything like that, and there was no place to hide.
So the Virgin cursed her and that is why
if you try to burn a little reed wood,
it twists and makes strange noises and is suffering the pangs of hell.
It is a vice, selfishness. But luckily there was the reed.
The reed that welcomed the family, the donkey, and then all its branches
under the frondosa and all its shade.
And also its pointed leaves tripled.
If you look at a reed branch, you will see
that the leaves are all in groups of
three, like a spiral around the branch.
And of course, the Romans arrive with their sandals, they prick their feet,
they try to separate the branches, there was no way. Blessed.
But what I have to tell you is that it was not a reed.
It was a reed, because we are talking about a dioic plant.
There are male and female specimens.
The male specimens that were on the cover have
a figure, I won't say phallic, but columnar.
On the other hand, the women, the girls, are more scattered,
more chonchas and generous.
So the whole family was saved under the dioic plant.
And thanks to this legend, all pagan
beliefs about the reed could also pass
and be transmitted in Christian Europe.
So the reed has magic, it has powers.
Well, power has science, which, as Eugenio Barba
says, is another kind of superstition like magic.
Botany says that the reed has the ability
to promote the formation of biogroups,
of trees and shrubs, all gathered around an old reed.
I add, as if I were a shaman, that they resist in rugged terrain,
rocky territories, extreme climates, facing boulders.
And with the stories, I suppose that at some point when you were little
someone will have read the story of the Grimm brothers, of the reed.
And there is a shadow that shines, shines, blinks,
promotes deaths, murders, reincarnations, a bit of everything.
Then a beautiful bird appears and sings that "my mother killed me,
my father ate me, my sister, Marlene, collected
my bones and buried them under the reed".
Well, the metric fails, but what happens
is that the bird reaches the end,
until it grabs a millstone and crushes the stepmother.
And so they all lived happily, without
eating waste, with respect to the bird.
Returning to more serious things, the reed is
associated with rituals of agricultural magic,
rituals of the step, wood, branches, and supposedly apotropaic objects.
And focusing on Italy, according to the regions, we
say that the reed removes lightning and lightning,
the smell of its berries repels snakes.
Christianity liked this very much.
Also, the sage cures the bite of the vipers.
This is interesting, a brew with black ash cures the drop.
And how the Christmas lobsters sometimes have side effects, take note.
In many areas of central or alpine Italy, for a long time,
the Christmas tree or the Christmas tree trunk, which
is much more Mediterranean, was made of black ash.
We didn't take the reeds into account.
I know that this didn't happen in Spain, but I do
see that now you hang black crowns on the doors
because they smell good, they have berries, they
are beautiful, but you are doing much, much more.
To explain this, I'm going to geolocate a bit, to calculate
that Italy has a very polycentric cultural identity.
You have to go to the most municipal or those small
geo-anthropo-historical regions when it comes to beliefs.
So, if you want to know more about the Egypt's
Guida, there you have everything philological.
Black ash, also, if you want.
Garfañana, we are in Tuscany, Tuscany in the north,
between the Sapuan Alps and the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines.
In Garfañana, until the 1970s, on 24 December, a
large oak was chosen, cut and the trunk was taken home
and had to burn from Christmas Eve until Christmas Eve.
The ashes were collected, used to bless the
house, to fertilise the fields, to make brebakes
and also bags were made with a little ash and hung
from the neck, protecting it from the witches.
Here they appear, because the witches cast an
evil eye, so they had to defend themselves.
To do so, they hung a branch or a black crown outside the door.
And the witches, who on the twelve auspicious days are very powerful,
arrived there and you will know that the witches have a knack for it.
If there is something to tell, they have to tell it.
And of course, there was the little branch of
black, in groups of three, all in a spiral,
and they counted, counted, counted, counted and
the day came and they couldn't cheat anymore.
Another thing. Ah, the dean is here.
Because in some villages the parish priest,
who is not a dean but was an authority,
would make a black-wood bench and if you
sat there during the Mass of the Rooster,
you could understand that among your neighbours there were witches,
possessed, demons, made and right, and I think two or three
little chairs in this faculty could also come in handy.
He said that the witches are very powerful
these days and I suppose you know that the women
who are born on 25 December have great
possibilities of developing witch skills and skills.
Men don't. Men prefer the race of lycanthropy, but they are also rare.
And there are spells that can only be transmitted on 25 December.
I think that I have… Carlo Levi, Christ has stopped
at Eboli, a novel that is deeply anthropological.
In this novel Carlo Levi tells that his maid had
taught him all kinds of spells and magic formulas
to make him fall in love and to cure diseases, but he
had always refused to let me know the spells of death,
those that can cause illness and death.
Only at Christmas can you say in great secrecy
and with oath not to repeat them to anyone
except on that same day, which is a
holy day, otherwise it is a mortal sin.
But if on 25 December you talk about killing a
person with a witch, you can do that quietly.
Also in Spain witches fly with magic boats.
In Italy they usually go to Egypt,
because they also like dates. And one day, two thousand years ago or so,
some Venetian witches were flying to Alexandria.
They say, "Un due tre, barca mia, vola
dritto, vola vola, Alexandria d'Egipto".
They are flying and they see a girl who they
understand perfectly well is just given birth.
She is there with her baby in her arms,
on top of a mule, her things fall,
there is an old man next to her, and he says to her
quickly, "You calm down, we'll take care of it, hide".
And the witches get out of the pockets
of a little fog of the Venetian lagoon,
they make a mess there, the Romans were
with pennaccios, with sandals, running,
they arrive and say, "No, no one has passed through
here, that way looks good, yes, yes, go that way".
And so the Virgin is saved. And do you know what she says to the witch?
"You have not betrayed me and I will not betray you".
And that is why we can never know for sure if a woman is a witch or not.
And I assure you that I have not invented it, here
it is, Novella Cantarusti was a great ethnologist
and this is a story of Friuli. But witches can be old and young,
I have promised to talk about old women and I have little time.
The old women of winter, in Italy there were
many, according to the regions, of all kinds,
and they have to do with this whole issue of three gifts,
but also the bonfires where the old woman is burned
as a symbol of the sterile and exhausted
nature of winter to allow way to spring.
But I'm going to focus on just one woman, the
befana, who is the one who brings us the gifts.
Santa Claus in Italy has no native folkloric root, but now he does.
The wise men are patrons of travellers and merchants.
The Medici family claimed them very much.
So, only in Lombardy they have a little
more prominence because their holy bodies
rested for centuries in a church in Milan
until the perfidious emperor Barbarossa
took them to Cologne in 1164.
But gifts kept falling from everywhere.
There was the Astella parade. I'm not going to talk about this.
We're going to talk about the befana only.
These are the Milanese kings.
The befana is now presented as a good witch
who brings gifts to the little children
and has a pointed hat because she is the witch.
But she is much more.
She never had a befana, she had a handkerchief.
This is also in the 20th century and seems very good.
And above all, in 1977 she was in agony so much
so that the Catholic government of Andreotti
decided to cancel a series of parties to
adapt Italy to the rhythm of contemporary life
and decided that, among them, January 6 was
the first Sunday of the month of January.
It was the day of the befana.
There was a popular uproar so much so that the socialist Craxi in 1985
re-designed the day of the befana, the day of the kings.
This meant that many folk groups, cultural associations, municipalities,
and authorities re-studied the befana.
And right now, on the one hand, there are
parties, let's say, of this patrimonialised
to promote the tourism of a place.
Here are the domes of Buerro Mini in Piazza Navona
and the firemen who make a befana fly in the middle of the square.
And also the folk groups rebuilt festivities, songs, rituals that existed
and revived what is called an emblematic party,
that is, that kind of party in which the whole community participates
and the whole community, regardless of
gender, of socio-cultural class, of any kind,
collaborates and in this way the bonds are strengthened and they play.
The game is the best way to unite without any patrimonialist attempt.
Tradition as an occasion to create and to express oneself creatively.
What was the befana like? I can say it quickly.
Irene, please, I'm going to read it to make it faster.
Myths and legends were added to it. Let's see a little bit of a befana.
Well, this was also... Here it is.
You see the change. And here we are in 1960, it's not prehistoric.
The girl is absolutely terrified.
It is an acculturative set that has more layers than a wedding cake
and in it they mix from the great goddesses of
the Neolithic to Greek-Latin goddesses of fire.
The befana also enters through the chimney, this diana, this proserpina.
I will tell you that among the objects that
characterized the befana were the wheel and the use.
Now less mythological are the calcetar needles.
According to tradition, the befana could be the wife of the orc.
Orc is a son-in-law but it is also a "huerco" as
the Sephardim used it, that is, it is a demon.
If we think that the befana is on the
side of the deceased as a bearer of gifts,
orc comes from "orcus". Let's see, classmates, "orcus"
is an inferior territory and it is also its lord.
Let's see a 19th-century Roman folk song.
Well, look at this here, it's disturbing.
The befana, which speaks of her husband who has long teeth like horns,
"that ten boys a day get divorced, that weep, that weep, that say,
'Oh, God, the ox that calls his mother, but all in vain'".
So, if it's the voracity of a beast or if
it's the voracity of death, it doesn't matter.
And the genealogy of the befana, we find
it in something else from the 19th century.
"The befana is the daughter of the bau, the
nephew of the orc, her paternal grandfather,
the cousin of the trentancana, who was the sister
of the ferret goat and the heir of the jungle man".
There's very little of "good witch" and, to add it, there
are also those who say that she was Herod's grandmother,
who is spying eternally on what her dear
grandson did, or the wife of Pontius Pilate,
Claudia Procula, who also decided to pay eternally for her husband.
On the Internet, a legend appears, according to
which it is an old woman who met the wise men,
but she didn't fulfill something, and
she's also all the time around the world,
but the most serious source I've found is Wikipedia, so anything can be.
I'll tell you later, I have a bibliography
because, deep down, I'm a philologist too.
I've only used non-digital paper books and oral archives that
are not on the Internet either, but I can show them to you.
So, the important thing about the befana is its ambivalence.
This ambiguity has an evil streak, it's a
bad omen to see it, you can't see the befana,
and it fills the media with "happy tangerines
with green leaves and dead black coal".
So that the media also become a double object.
On the one hand, it looks like the tales,
the bag of money that never runs out,
the cornucopia of abundance, but they are still a somewhat
disgusting and smelly object that touches the ground.
Everything is in the dichotomy, but as a good
mythological figure, she unites and surpasses anything.
As a last sample of the imaginary befanesque and its vitality, in 1996,
an animated film, La Frecha Zurda, in
which the perverse assistant of the befana
deceives her and sells toys to rich children,
although a poor child eventually saves him.
This project managed to summon two
great protagonists of the Italian scene.
Dario Fo, you know him, Lella Costa, no, women are always
less known, but she is an impressive woman of theatre.
Lella created a voice where there is goodness, but there
is neurosis, there is generosity, but it is very grumpy.
And Dario Fo, you can imagine how he braided hypocrisy, greed, everything.
I'll be quiet, I'll let the two pages of bibliographies pass.
And you know that the Romans, even if we take
off our sandals, are heartless and disbelieving,
but I would like to end in a liturgical
tone and say that the talk is over.
And who said it? And who wanted to hear
it? That they cannot die a bad death.
(Applause)