After the Second World War a Neapolitan ethnologist decided to study the magic of southern Italy not as a set of superstitions to be mocked, but as a serious cultural response to hard living conditions. Ernesto de Martino thus opened a season of research that changed the way the traditions of the Italian South are seen. His works remain essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of Italian folk magic.
A philosopher turned ethnologist
Ernesto de Martino was born in Naples in 1908. He trained in philosophy, in dialogue with the thought of Benedetto Croce, and soon became interested in the history of religions. His approach combined philosophical reflection, history and fieldwork, a rare combination at the time.
The Magic World and the "crisis of presence"
In 1948 he published Il mondo magico (The World of Magic), a bold theoretical work. In it he argued that magic arises from a specific experience: the crisis of presence, the risk that a person, faced with critical events such as illness, death, hunger or fear, loses the ability to be present to themselves and the world, to act and to decide.
According to de Martino, magic is not a reasoning error, as many nineteenth-century anthropologists thought, but a cultural technique for facing this risk. Through formulas, gestures and protective figures, the community offers the individual a model for regaining control of their existence. From this perspective magic "de-historicises" the crisis: it places it within a repeated mythic and ritual pattern that makes it bearable.
Research in Lucania
In the 1950s de Martino led ethnographic expeditions to Lucania, today's Basilicata, one of the poorest regions of Italy. He worked in teams, with researchers from different disciplines, and collected first-hand testimony.
The result was Sud e magia (Magic: A Theory from the South), published in 1959. The book describes practices such as:
- fascination or affascino, the negative influence exerted by another's gaze or intention, believed to cause malaise and weakness;
- the formulas for "removing" fascination, recited by experienced women;
- the fattura, the harmful practice believed capable of binding or harming a person;
- rituals protecting children, crops and animals.
De Martino did not merely describe. He linked these practices to the economic and social precariousness of peasant communities and showed how Lucanian magic coexisted with popular Catholicism. In the second part of the book he also related southern magic to the learned culture of eighteenth-century Naples, analysing belief in the jettatura, the evil eye, in the works of Enlightenment authors.
The Land of Remorse
De Martino's most famous work is La terra del rimorso (The Land of Remorse), published in 1961 and devoted to tarantism in Salento, Apulia. According to tradition, anyone bitten by the "taranta", a spider, fell into a state of malaise, agitation or melancholy. The remedy was a musical and choreutic therapy: musicians played frenzied rhythms, and the "tarantata" danced for hours or days until she felt freed.
In June 1959 de Martino led an interdisciplinary team in Salento. Its members included:
- the psychiatrist Giovanni Jervis;
- the ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella;
- the psychologist Letizia Jervis Comba;
- the photographer Franco Pinna.
The focus of the investigation was Galatina, where every year, around the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, the tarantate went to the chapel of St Paul to ask for grace.
A historical interpretation
De Martino reached an important conclusion: tarantism could not be explained simply as the effect of a spider bite, nor as an individual illness. It was a cultural symbol, a traditional way of expressing and resolving conflicts and suffering, often linked to bereavement, emotional frustration and oppressive social conditions. The "remorse" of the title plays on this double meaning: the bite that returns and the weight of an unresolved past.
De Martino also showed that tarantism had ancient roots, perhaps tied to the orgiastic cults of the Greek world, and that the Church had partly absorbed it through the figure of St Paul.
The legacy
De Martino died in Rome in 1965, leaving unfinished a work on "cultural apocalypses", published posthumously as La fine del mondo (The End of the World). His work has inspired generations of anthropologists and, indirectly, the rediscovery of Salento's folk music, the pizzica, now a broad cultural phenomenon.
For Studio Esoterico Cornelio, de Martino's lesson is of great value: traditional magical practices must be understood in their human and historical context, as responses to the fragility of life, and neither judged superficially nor exploited without respect.
In short
- Ernesto de Martino (1908-1965) studied the magic of southern Italy as a cultural response to the "crisis of presence".
- The World of Magic (1948) set out the theory; Sud e magia (1959) documented Lucanian practices.
- The Land of Remorse (1961), the fruit of the 1959 research at Galatina, interpreted Salento tarantism as a cultural symbol.
- His work changed the study of folk traditions and inspired the rediscovery of the pizzica.