Below is Carlo Levi's description of a Marian procession held in a village of
Southern Italy in the mid 1930s.
“In the afternoon, when the heat of the day had subsided, there was a
procession, beginning at the church and winding its way through the village …
first in line were boys carrying poles with white sheets and cloths attached to
them for banners which they waved in the breeze, then the band players from
Stigliano with their loud and shiny brasses. After them, on a throne supported
by two long shafts, which a dozen men at a time took turns in carrying, came
the Madonna.
...
Amid this warlike thundering there was no happiness or religious ecstasy
in the people’s eyes; instead they seemed prey to a sort of madness, a pagan
throwing off of restraint, and a stunned or hypnotized condition; all of them
were highly wrought up. The animals ran about wildly, goats leaped, donkeys
brayed, dogs barked, children shouted, and women sang. Peasants with baskets of
wheat in their hands threw fistfuls of it at the Madonna, so that she might
take thought for the harvest and bring them good luck. The grains curved
through the air, fell on the paving stones and bounced up off them with a light
noise like that of hail. The black-faced Madonna, in the shower of wheat, among
the animals, the gunfire, the trumpets, was no sorrowful Mother of God, but
rather a subterranean deity, black with the shadows of the bowels of the earth,
a peasant Persephone, or lower-world goddess of the harvest.
...
They pinned to the Madonna's robes five and ten lire notes and even dollar bills jealously saved from their labours in America. Most of them, however, hung garlands of dried figs around her neck or put eggs and fruit at her feet; they ran after her with other gifts when the procession had already moved on and mingled with the throng amid the noise of the trumpets and the shooting and shouting. As the procession advanced it became more and more crowded and uproarious, until, after it had gone through the entire village, it went back into the church. A few heavy drops of rain fell, but soon the wind swept away the clouds, the storm blew over and calm returned along with the first evening stars."
- Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli
I believe that Carlo Levi's description of the event as
"pagan" to be very apt, for there is more in Catholicism (especially
in its folk expression) that retains elements of our pre-Christian heritage
than most would like to admit. When Catholicism isn't sanitized for a modern
intellectual culture it tends to take on an ecstatic character with a
ritualistic language and expression that is foreign to us, this is due to our
lost connection with the land and lack of reliance upon divine powers for our
daily necessities. Levi's book was immensely interesting for displaying this
pre-modern worldview and way of life.
