The Benandanti (Male)
Jenny
jennyg@compuserve.com
Fri Oct 16 10:07:22 1998
The most famous and well-documented sect of "Pagan" witches are the Benandanti of northern Italy.  Historian Carlo Ginzburg wrote about them in two books:  _Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries_ and _Ecstasies:  Deciphering the Witches' Sabbat_.  His work is based on the records of the Italian Inquisition, which ran the Benandanti trials.*p*The Benandanti ("Good-Walkers") were a special type of folk healers.  They were born, not made.  Any child born with a caul would eventually become one.  Men and women had different roles to play, different styles of magick.  (We'll look at the women Benandanti a while later.)*p*Male Benandanti fought for the fertility of the crops.  Four times a year, on Thursdays during the Ember Days, a spectral drummer called their souls out of their bodies.  In spirit form (and sometimes in spirit-animal form) they armed themselves with fennel sticks.  Then they fought against the evil Strega ("witches") who, armed with sorghum sticks, were trying to destroy the fertility of the fields.*p*The Benandanti did not consider themselves Pagan, nor do any Pagan deities appear in the stories of the male Benandanti (though we'll see a Goddess in the confessions of female Good Walkers).  In fact, the first Benandanti called before the Inquisition actually invited the inquisitor trying them to come to their next gathering.  That way, they said, he would be able to see that nothing un-orthodox was going on.*p*Nor did they consider themselves witches.  The Benandanti drew sharp distinctions between their activities ("white" witchcraft) and those of the "evil" Strega ("black" witchcraft).  Their clients often called them "benandanti-strega" (Good Walker witches) but the Benandanti insisted to the end that they were not Strega.*p*In several ways, the stories of the Benandanti reflect general European beliefs about witchcraft.  Most places believed that witchcraft could be innate.  That there were certain things that could make a person a witch or psychic -- being born into a witch-family, or with a caul, or on Christmas Eve, or as the seventh son of a seventh son.  Sorghum, the weapon of the witches, is probably broom sorghum.*p*The Benandanti's descriptions of their spirit journeys map very closely to modern teachings about astral projection.  The Benandanti said that their souls travelled out of their bodies, which appeared to be sleeping.  If the body was disturbed during their travels, the soul might not be able to find its way home.  One of their major healing powers was essentially "soul-retrieval", like what Shamans do.  Witches stole the spirits of children, which caused them to sicken and pine.  Benandanti could steal these back from the witches and re-integrate them with the child's body.*p*(Next:  a little more on the Ember Days, plus why Ginzburg's research doesn't validate Margaret Murray's Witch Cult hypothesis.)