ROOM OF WITCHCRAFT

Now that you have entered this part of the house of the Bàgiue (witches), visiting its rooms you will discover an unknown world, surrounded by a mist of legend and fear. It is told that in the deep night the witches soared the sky riding brooms and goats saying aloud the refrain «Unguento unguento portami al noce di Benevento sopra l’acqua e sopra il vento e sopra ogni altro maltempo» (ointment ointment take me to the walnut tree of Benevento, over water and over wind and over any other sort of bad weather). Yours too will be a trip that will take you far in time and in space, to discover new worlds and an ancestral knowledge buried underneath the mask of the diabolical witch. You will see objects that have belonged to a magical world that is partially still ours. You will admire the vestige of protecting and benevolent divinities that have guided humanity for centuries, only to be dethroned and then sent to Hell.

You will enter the magical world of officinal herbs and millenary secrets that wise women have guarded through time before ending in the hands of judges and inquisitors.

Finally, you will find out the true face of the witch, that of innocent women persecuted and murdered in terrible ways for a crime that was impossible to demonstrate.

Amulets and talismans

Amulets and talismans are the instruments with which magicians and agents of the occult capture the power of stars and the positive energies present in nature to protect themselves and those helped by them form negative influences. However, what is the difference between the two? Pliny the Young defines “amulet” as an object gathered from nature or human made used to protect the person bearing it from danger, pain and risks caused by malignant spirits. It protects those who wear it from diseases, curses and other obscure and dangerous forces. The talisman, on the other hand, is a charm. It has the task to draw positive energy or to expand the existing sphere of good: well-being, health, and success in the work place.

It often occurs that amulets and talismans are “mistaken” the one for the other. But they are not the same. The amulet is considered “protective/passive”, while the talisman is considered “protective/active”; the amulet protects and attracts good luck in general, the talisman propitiates and attracts specific benefices, even granting special powers to those who wear it.

Minerals have a great importance in their manufacturing, chosen in relation to the physical, psychological, astrological qualities of those who wear them. The choice of the propitious stone is made following a complex procedure of wisdom, based on the calculation of the possessor’s birth-date and on the analysis of the astrological virtues of single minerals.

Drawn from Paolo Portone, Documenti etnografici nel fondo Roman Inquisition del Trinity College di Dublino.

Divination

Cultural phenomenon of religious nature, which consists in gaining knowledge of necessities or events through faculties and techniques that, transcending normal modes of knowledge, are used to retrieve facts that are imperceptible to senses and unpredictable by means of reason and reckoning. One resorts to divination not only to obtain responses on the future, but also to know if a certain thing is true or not, to have news on people far away, to find lost objects, to find out who is responsible for certain events (thefts, marital betrayals, deaths, diseases, etc.). Divinatory or mantic practices include:

Inductive divination (Latin divinatio artificiosa): it is founded on the interpretation of objective signs, it requires the possession of an actual divinatory science by the divinator, it assumes the most diverse material as a source for predictions: the appearance of celestial or meteoric phenomena, the behaviour of specific animal species or the shape of the entrails of some of them, the ways in which natural processes such as combustion present themselves. Intuitive divination (Latin divination naturalis): it is founded on the direct inspiration from the divinity or from other mythological or sacred figures through the means of a prophet. The concept of intuitive divination embraces those forms of divination in which the prophetical vision is directly obtained, without the means of signs, and on levels of consciousness that are different from the wake: from the simple sleep to ecstatic furor. Among the numerous forms of intuitive divination based on dreams, the divinatory technique of incubation is prominent, fixed in oracles that were part of established centres of cult.

Curse

An important consequence of the persecutions against witches in Europe was the redefining of the concept of curse (maleficium). The curse, i.e. the action properly directed to damaging people, animals or objects, was no longer intended as the involuntary manifestation of individuals that, due to an evil destiny (being born or conceived in determined periods of the year, such as, for instance, Christmas Eve), could harm others, as in the case of the evil eye, but became a clear proof of the acquisition of diabolical powers obtained by means of a voluntary adhesion to the cult of Satan. In the areas that recorded the phenomenon of the witch-hunts, practices such as the merca, attested in Abruzzo, which consisted in a ritual cut operated on babies born or conceived in a prohibited period of the year in order to mitigate the effects of their evil nature, or the gift of three fates were overruled by a more drastic form of elimination of curse and witches. The denunciation to the authorities for bad fame, the trials instructed without being notified of the accusation, the abuse of torture as an instrument to ascertain truth led inevitably to social marginalization.

In light of what occurred in Europe during the age of the witch-hunts, the curse has gained an original and specific meaning as opposed to other magical cultures diffused in different times and continents. The curse mainly took the shape of a consequence of a pact voluntarily stipulated in exchange for their complete subjection, in body and soul, between human beings not gifted with special knowledge nor marked by an evil fate, and the prince of Evil, the Devil of the Christian tradition.

Charm and evil eye

This term defines a psychic condition of impediment and inhibition and, at the same time, a sense of domination, a being operated by a powerful as much as obscure force, which leaves no margin to the autonomy of the person, to the ability to decide and choose. Also the hostile force that circulates through the air and impends, inhibiting or forcing, is designated with the term charm. The image of a bond and of the charmed one as “bonded” is reflected in the term attaccatura, sometimes employed to designate the charm: in particular the attaccatura of blood is a bond symbolically represented as blood that is not free to flow in the veins. Cephalgia, drowsiness, exhaustion, slack, hypochondria often mark the charm: but the experience of an indomitable and fatal force remains its main trait. The charm involves an agent and a victim and, when the agent is configured in human form, the charm is determined as evil eye, which is the evil influence that proceeds from an envious glare (therefore the evil eye is also known as envy), with various shades that go from the more or less unvoluntary influence to the deliberately ordered charm with a defined rite, which can even lead to death. The experience of domination can lead to the point in which a personality, which contrasts with the norms accepted by the community, invades more or less completely a persons’ behaviour: the subject will then not simply be a charmed person, but a spirited one, that is a possessed or obsessed, someone who will have to be exorcised.

Ernesto de Martino, Sud e magia, p.11