"Memorie dal sottosuolo". Una prospettiva di indagine sul simbolismo rituale delle feste religiose "tradizionali"

Abstract

In 1945, writing about the procession of Our Lady of Viggiano, Carlo Levi presents us a peasant world characterized by archaic beliefs and ritual practices, another world « where seasons run on peasant fatigue, [...] like three thousand years before Christ », a world « veiled with black veils, fiery and earthly [...] which you do not enter without a key of magic ». If that other world of the peasants seems to have come to an end today, the beliefs, practices and ritual symbols of reputed “pre-Christian” precedence or in any case alien to the official liturgy, as witnessed by Levi and many other narrators and demoanthropologists from the 19th and 20th century are not, however, definitively left to the past, nor are they rare or isolated. Today there are still several places, not just in the South of Italy, where devotional modes which preserve “traces” of Italic, Greek-Roman cults or even of more remote origin are perpetuated despite the economic and social transformations since World War ii, between functional and semantic “erasures” and “rewritings” more than morphological ones. In these cults, we can observe a “strong continuity” of ritual structures and symbolisms of agro-pastoral matrix, such as evergreen branches, bonfires and torch processions, offering collections, formalized food consumption, saints’ dances and races, ex-voto made of bread, etc. Considering this picture of the situation, we return to ask ourselves : can material and immaterial tokens of the past, even the remotest ones, help us understand what we observe in current festive contexts and, conversely, can current expressions of folklore give a contribution towards a clearer understanding of much older rites ? Do the meanings and functions of the rites, the motivations and the expectations of the worshippers of the present and of the past have anything in common ? Can a conscious use of the historicalcomparative method and of diachronic research help us understand the expressions of contemporary popular religiosity ?