The Bite of Memory – In the South of Italy

“The bite, like remorse,
is harsh to subdue.”
(Ernesto De Martino)

© Franco Pinna, 1959

I finally managed to have a very interesting book, recently published, in 2021.

The book, edited by Maurizio Agamennone and Luigi Chiriatti, two experts in Ethnomusicology and popular traditions, is entitled “The brides of St. Paul – Images of tarantism” (Kurumuny), and offers – for the first time – a complete photographic gaze at the phenomenon of tarantism, as well as the famous photographs by Franco Pinna illustrating the 1961 essay by Ernesto De Martino which brought to everyone's knowledge the ancient ritual of tarantate.

In the book “Le spose di San Paolo” there are nine protagonists, more or less professionals, who with their images have documented what happened in the chapel of St. Paul in Galatina next to the basilica of St. Peter, since 1954, with a still 19-year-old Chiara Samugheo, up to the most recent shots of 1992.

The images are impressive and it's a great satisfaction to see them all collected together for the first time; moreover, this topic has several points of interest for me.

Ethnographic, comparative, methodological, and affective.

Ethnographic. Let's start from the core of De Martino's studio, even if it is now well known in Italy and beyond, just for those who read from beyond the borders and have never heard of it.

I summarize briefly.

The essay is the result of fieldwork, in a team that included ethnographers, photographers, ethnomusicologists, and psychologists, in the summer of 1959 in the deep Salento, in the extreme south of Italy. Thus writes de Martino in the Preface that opens the book:

“The Land of Remorse” is, in the strict sense, Puglia as the elective area of tarantism, that is, a historical-religious phenomenon born in the Middle Ages and lasted until the 1700s and beyond, up to the current wrecks still usefully observable in the Salento Peninsula. It is a “minor” religious formation mainly peasants but once involving also the higher classes, characterized by the symbolism of the taranta that bites and poisons, and the music, dance, and colors that free from this poisoned bite.

With a tradition that dates back to Magna Graecia, this strange form of possession goes beyond the psychiatric territory of hysteria as an end in itself but is inscribed in a much more complex, cultural, and highly symbolic context.

First of all with the research on the type of spider that causes the poisoning. Although it will never be certain that it is the tarantula, since the name refers more to the city of Taranto, it is commonly designated as the most likely poisonous species, especially due to its habits that perfectly match the times of poisoning: how the tarantula is fertile and gives birth precisely in the harvest season in the fields, when women are bitten by the spider, in a symbolic heap of fecundity-eroticism-renewal and harvest.

The ethnographer also speaks of boredom, of hard work without any horizon of change or elevation of social status: De Martino demonstrates how ritual practices have the function of warding off the anxieties of an existence marked by poverty and marginalization, tarantism, therefore, had its roots in individual distress and was a pathological attempt to “have a voice” in what became the “symbolic” South of the whole world – that of the last.

The disease corresponded to the treatment, which was of a musical, dance type, during which the subject was brought to a state of trance during frantic dance sessions, giving rise to a phenomenon that has been defined as a “musical exorcism”. The instruments – violin, accordion, tambourine, and guitar – have a therapeutic function, just as dance is not at all a disconnected hysteria but has precise and codified movements over the centuries. Without this musical therapy, there would be hysterics.

In dance, these little woman, even very old ones, can dance for hours and hours, even for whole days. Each taranta wants her rhythm and if she doesn't like it, she falls to the ground or becomes aggressive. To “kill” the taranta, it is necessary to mimic the dance of the little spider, that is the tarantella: that is, it is necessary to dance with the spider, or rather to be the same spider that dances, identifying with it but, at the same time, also fighting internally with the spider, forcing it to dance until it gets tired, crushing it with the foot that violently hits the ground to the rhythm of the pinch.

 

© Annabella Rossi, 1960

Once healed, or to ask the saint for intercession for healing, every 28 and 29 June, the tarantate gather at the chapel of St. Paul of Galatina, in Lecce. On these two days, we witnessed the manifestations of possession with wild dances and rolling on the ground both in the street in front of the basilica and in the chapel dedicated to the saint who heals from the spider bite. When the De Martino team arrived, the well in the chapel had already been walled up, but in the photographs of the young Samugheo it was still open and the women drank the yellowish water (it is said to be full of the shredded bodies of tarantulas) which made them vomit until healing.

De Martino's ethnographic work on this ritual was the very first synchronous phono-photographic recording work in the context of an interdisciplinary investigation. Franco Pinna took home the impressive number of 464 negatives, as are Diego Carpitella's audio recordings.

It remains a pioneering work that made a peasant ritual from southern Italy famous all over the world.

It's impossible to realize this here in a small space. But it's easy to find information because a lot has been written about this work and tarantism.

Comparative. I have already had the opportunity to write, in this blog, on the relationship that exists between music and cure in different popular traditions.

Initially, I talked about it about the Kuda Lumping dance in Indonesia, then about the Babaylan in the Philippines, and the Pleng Arak in Cambodia.

In Kuda Lumping in Yogyakarta, I told of how the mind empty of thoughts, stunned by the hypnotic music of the gong, flutes, and drums that accompanies the dance, allows the jinn, the spirits, to enter the person's body – a phenomenon called “kesurupan”, a real possession that is exorcised through the same music, with physical punishments and by drinking milk that makes the evil spirit “vomited”.

The Filipino Babaylans, on the other hand, are the ancient priestesses, heirs of the pre-archaic and Filipino animist civilization who still lived in symbiosis with nature and its spirits, capable, through singing, of healing sick bodies and minds.

However, it is with the Pleng Arak that the similarities become powerful.

The Pleng Arak originates from the word Niot Lerng Rong, the meaning of which is that the spirits prefer to possess women while in the Neak Ta the spirits prefer men. These traditional music groups which have now almost completely disappeared in Cambodia, and which even date back to the pre-Angkor era, play for the spirits: they invoke them, give them pleasure if they are traveling and beg them to abandon us if they cause us pain or disease. They had the same therapeutic function, choreatic, of the Salento pizzica: the families of the sick people called them at home and could go on playing for days until the recovery came.

And each type of disease had a different melody and song.

The spirit chose the rhythm as the taranta chose the rhythm on which to dance, according to the spider that possessed it.

It is incredible to think of this invisible thread that has been knotted over the centuries by joining the spiers of the stupas of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the spiers of the chapel of St. Paul in Galatina, in southern Italy.

For De Martino, those were by now the last years of a still genuine tradition, even if later in the book photos were taken up to the nineties. Now there is only the great concert “La Notte della Taranta” which brings together artists from all over the world every year.

But Salento was once part of that dance tradition in which jinn, spiders, and spirits conversed with musical instruments, as well as in villages in the Philippines or Cambodia.

 

© Franco Pinna, 1959

Methodological. Maurizio Agamemnon's introduction, “Photographing tarantism”, suggests a very interesting theme for me.

Speaking of the problems that De Martino's team had to face in the summer of 1959, the methodological one emerges. It was in fact the first time that phono-photographic recordings were used in a field survey.

So writes Diego Carpitella:

There has been much discussion, and still discusses, on the opportuneness and legitimacy of letting the phono-photographic instruments in during a rite, a ceremony, etc. Some argue that these tools alter the situation to such an extent that it would be better to rely on one's memory resources rather than on the lens and microphone. Others argue instead that modern instruments not only give the possibility of studying, afterward, the ceremonial situation, the rite, but are themselves an indispensable means of scientific investigation, precisely because in the so-called alteration they involve, it is often possible to measure the rate of “distraction” or “deterioration” of a rite, the greater or lesser degree of sacredness or profanity of the participants. (Carpitella, 1973)

I think this is a really important reflection to make.

Whenever I am in a temple, during a Buddhist or Hindu ceremony, or during Islamic prayer, I always wonder how high the rate of “disturbance” of my presence is. There isn't a time when I don't feel too much when I see the participants' eyes turned towards me as I photograph them. It also happened that, during the recent workshops, some Muslim friends in the mosque asked the participating photographers not to take pictures during the prayer, because the sound of the camera can be a distraction to prayer.

What Carpitella writes: in this way it is possible to “measure the rate of “distraction” or “deterioration” of a rite, the greater or lesser degree of sacredness or profanity of the participants.” That is, the more the faithful or the actors of the rite are absorbed and concentrated, the more our presence is irrelevant for the purposes of the rite itself. But I don't like this idea of “testing” the faith, concentration or conviction of the participants through my camera, my presence, instead, I think that our task is to testify trying to condition as little as possible, to be evanescent or to become part of the same ritual.

The famous photograph of Koudelka during a funeral in his epic book “Gypsies”, of which I have already written here, remains a historical lesson.

 

© Chiara Samugheo, 1954

Affective. Lastly, I would like to add a significant emotional aspect.

I already knew about tarantate even before starting to photograph or having read De Martino's book, for the simple fact that my father was born in Galatina. With my family since I was one year old, I spent every summer in a seaside village a few kilometers from that city, at least until I was thirty.

My father always told me about tarantate and when we went to Galatina, to visit my grandparents when they were still alive, he took me to see the basilica of St. Peter and the chapel of St. Paul.

When I showed him this book, looking at the photos, he told me that already when he was 8 years old, he was running to see the tarantate on June 28th and 29th. My father is from 1945.

He tells me that their house overlooked the street and already the days before the festival he saw the carts go by with the women wailing on top of them.

Then he went to see those little old women dancing in the square in front of the chapel of St. Paul; it could not be accessed inside, it was only for the relatives of the sick, but at the time the well was still open, while in 1959 De Martino found it already walled up.

My father tells me that legend reports that there were living snakes at the bottom of the well. He has always believed in it, he does not think it is a question of hysteria because as a child he too collected tobacco in the fields and often heard like people bitten by spiders who then went crazy.

“Then how does an eighty-year-old woman dance for hours and hours under the sun?” He tells me.

And he adds how these little women climbed the altar almost to the ceiling. And how important the colors were, as De Martino writes.

One day an aunt who had lived in northern Italy for some time came to the city; she absolutely did not believe in it and that time came precisely for the patronal feast of St. Peter and Paul. She had a red dress, my father says, and like everyone else, she went to the square to see the tarantate.

She had to run away, he tells me with a smile, because they didn't like red and threw themselves at her aggressively. The aunt ran away in terror.

Then I showed him the video that I post here at the end, and my father remained silent to watch it. He certainly will have brought back his parents, his childhood, and his friends. All lost now.

But thanks to these images, and the videos, they are never forgotten.

This is the power of documentation.

If done with respect and study, then it has a fundamental value.

It not only testifies to rites, ceremonies, and popular traditions that would be lost but also the affections.

And the love of affections is a poison that we would never want to exorcise but continue to dance until the end of our days.

 

“Le spose di San Paolo – Immagini del tarantismo” a cura di Maurizio Agamennone e Luigi Chiriatti (Kurumuny, 2021)
Ernesto De Martino: “La terra del rimorso. Il Sud, tra religione e magia” (NET – Il Saggiatore, 2002)
Historical archive, De Martino:

Italian version