Procession of the Black Madonna

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.