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Procession of the dead is a motif present in the folkloric traditions around the world. It mostly refers to a march of ghosts, phantoms or souls, sometimes commanded by a creature related to the Otherworld, the Underworld or the Afterlife. The concept is taken to be of considerable antiquity, [1] and is classified in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature as Motif E491, "Procession of the dead". [2]
According to Carlo Ginzburg, the procession of the dead, as described by Orderic Vitalis, [3] [ failed verification ] comprised a march of sinners and damned people, being punished for their wrongdoings in life. [4]
Professor Christian Abry listed several alternate names for the phenomenon in Alpine, Southern France and North Italy tradition: curs dj’ànime; La processione dei morti; Tòtòprossenziò (from German Totenprozession); kór di trapacha (trépassés); procession des revenants; cours di mort; lou cours de i anime (Occitan language); Lou cours d’li mouòrt (in Balme); il corso delle anime (in Traversella); il corteo dei morti. [5]
Professors Fabio Armand, Marie-Agnès Cathiard and Christian Abry suggest that "the procession of the dead", as described in Christian mediaeval literature, is a "remythification" of the Wild Hunt phenomenon. [6]
There are various myths of processions of the dead, most related to the Wild Hunt.
A Croatian storyteller provided a tale with the motif of the "procesija mrtvih" ("procession of the dead") in the 1970s. [7]
In a Raeto-Romance tale, a man sees a procession of the dead and the last person is the soul of someone about to die. [8]
In Galicia and Asturias, it is known as Santa Compaña.
In Portuguese tradition there exists tales about one's double that take part in this procession. There are also tales about incomplete baptized individuals that join this cursed retinue. [9] [10]
The Benandanti in the Friuli are said to participate in these processions. Female benandanti were seen as connected to the processions of the dead, [11] as beneficient protectors against the malandanti. [12]
In Ancient Greece, the festival of Anthesteria was performed to honor and placate the dead, who were thought to walk freely among the streets.
The Nightmarchers of Hawaiian mythology are also considered to be a version of the "procession of the dead". [13]
Professors Fabio Armand, Marie-Agnès Cathiard and Christian Abry state they have found an occurrence of the theme of the procession of the dead "in the rural areas outside the Kathmandu Valley of Central Nepal". This retinue, called panchabhāya (from pancha 'five', and bhāya 'younger brother') manifest as "five or more spirits" riding on horses and dressed in white. [14]
The motif is also present in cultural traditions of Brazil. [15]
In Irish mythology, Donn is an ancestor of the Gaels and is believed to have been a god of the dead. Donn is said to dwell in Tech Duinn, where the souls of the dead gather. He may have originally been an aspect of the Dagda. Folklore about Donn survived into the modern era in parts of Ireland, in which he is said to be a phantom horseman riding a white horse.
A fairy tale is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful beings. In most cultures, there is no clear line separating myth from folk or fairy tale; all these together form the literature of preliterate societies. Fairy tales may be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends and explicit moral tales, including beast fables. Prevalent elements include dragons, dwarfs, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, griffins, merfolk, monsters, talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches, wizards, magic, and enchantments.
The Wild Hunt is a folklore motif occurring across various northern European cultures. Wild Hunts typically involve a chase led by a mythological figure escorted by a ghostly or supernatural group of hunters engaged in pursuit. The leader of the hunt is often a named figure associated with Odin in Germanic legends, but may variously be a historical or legendary figure like Theodoric the Great, the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag, the dragon slayer Sigurd, the Welsh psychopomp Gwyn ap Nudd, biblical figures such as Herod, Cain, Gabriel, or the Devil, or an unidentified lost soul either male or female. The hunters are generally the souls of the dead or ghostly dogs, sometimes fairies, valkyries, or elves.
English folklore consists of the myths and legends of England, including the English region's mythical creatures, traditional recipes, urban legends, proverbs, superstitions, and folktales. Its cultural history is rooted in Celtic, Christian, Nordic and Germanic folklore.
The Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index is a catalogue of folktale types used in folklore studies. The ATU Index is the product of a series of revisions and expansions by an international group of scholars: originally composed in German by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne (1910), the index was translated into English, revised, and expanded by American folklorist Stith Thompson, and later further revised and expanded by German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther (2004). The ATU Index, along with Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1932)—with which it is used in tandem—is an essential tool for folklorists.
The benandanti were members of an agrarian visionary tradition in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. The benandanti claimed to travel out of their bodies while asleep to struggle against malevolent witches in order to ensure good crops for the season to come. Between 1575 and 1675, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials, a number of benandanti were accused of being heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition.
A krsnik or kresnik is a type of vampire hunter, a shaman whose spirit wanders from the body in the form of an animal. The krsnik turns into an animal at night to fight off the kudlak, his evil vampire antithesis, with the krsnik appearing as a white animal and the kudlak as a black one. The krsnik's soul leaves the body, either voluntarily or due to a higher power, to fight evil agents and ensure good harvest, health, and happiness.
Grateful dead is both a motif and a group of related folktales present in many cultures throughout the world.
Evidence of magic use and witch trials were prevalent in the Early Modern period, and Inquisitorial prosecution of witches and magic users in Italy during this period was widely documented. Primary sources unearthed from Vatican and city archives offer insights into this phenomenon, and notable Early Modern microhistorians such as Guido Ruggiero, Maria Sofia Messana, Angelo Buttice and Carlo Ginzburg, have defined their careers detailing this topic. In addition, Giovanni Romeo's monograph Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell'Italia della Controriforma (1990) was considered pioneering and marked an important step forward in inquisitorial and witchcraft studies dealing with early modern Italy.In last 25 years a jurist and researcher on trials against witches, add many informations: the names of people involved in witchcraft, their jobs, the meetings. Monia Montechiarini in 'Stregoneria: Crimine Femminile', 'Streghe, eretici e benandanti del Friuli Venezia Giulia' and 'Streghe, Avvelenatrici e Cortigiane di Roma' discovered new secrets.
A dragonslayer is a person or being that slays dragons. Dragonslayers and the creatures they hunt have been popular in traditional stories from around the world: they are a type of story classified as type 300 in the Aarne–Thompson classification system. They continue to be popular in modern books, films, video games and other forms of entertainment. Dragonslayer-themed stories are also sometimes seen as having a chaoskampf theme - in which a heroic figure struggles against a monster that epitomises chaos.
The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pagan religion that had survived the Christianization of Europe. According to its proponents, accused witches were actually followers of this alleged religion. They argue that the supposed 'witch cult' revolved around worshiping a Horned God of fertility and the underworld, whose Christian persecutors identified with the Devil, and whose followers held nocturnal rites at the witches' Sabbath.
The first historian to posit the existence of European shamanic ideas within popular beliefs of otherwise Christian Europeans was Carlo Ginzburg, who examined the Benandanti, an agrarian cult found in Friuli, Italy, whose members underwent shamanic trances in which they believed they battled witches in order to save their crops.
Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age is a study of the beliefs regarding witchcraft and magic in Early Modern Hungary written by the Hungarian historian Éva Pócs. The study was first published in Hungarian in 1997 as Élők és holtak, látók és boszorkányok by Akadémiai Kiadó. In 1999, it was later translated into English by Szilvia Rédey and Michael Webb and published by the Central European University Press.
Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night is a study of the arrest and trial of Chonrad Stoecklin (1549–1587), a German herdsman from the town of Oberstdorf who was accused and executed for the crime of witchcraft after experiencing a series of visions. Written by the German historian Wolfgang Behringer, himself a specialist in the Early Modern witch trials of Germany, Shaman of Oberstdorf was initially published in German as Chonrad Stoekhlin und die Nachtschar: Eine Geschichte aus der frühen Neuzeit by R. Piper GmbH & Co. in 1994. It was subsequently translated into English by H.C. Erik Midelfort and published in 1998 by the University of Virginia Press.
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries is a historical study of the benandanti folk custom of 16th and 17th century Friuli, Northeastern Italy. It was written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, then of the University of Bologna, and first published by the company Giulio Einaudi in 1966 under the Italian title of I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento. It was later translated into English by John and Anne Tedeschi and published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1983 with a new foreword written by the historian Eric Hobsbawm.
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath is a study of visionary traditions in Early Modern Europe written by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg. First published by Giulio Einaudi in 1989 under the Italian title Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del Sabba, it was later translated into English by Raymond Rosenthal and published by Hutchinson Radius in 1990.
Thiess of Kaltenbrun, also spelled Thies, and commonly referred to as the Livonian werewolf, was a Livonian man who was put on trial for heresy in Jürgensburg, Swedish Livonia, in 1692. At the time in his eighties, Thiess openly proclaimed himself to be a werewolf (wahrwolff), claiming that he ventured into Hell with other werewolves in order to do battle with the Devil and his witches. Although claiming that as a werewolf he was a "hound of God", the judges deemed him guilty of trying to turn people away from Christianity, and he was sentenced to be both flogged and banished for life.
Perchtenlaufen is a folk custom found in the Tyrol region of Central Europe. Occurring on set occasions, the ceremony involves two groups of locals fighting against one another, using wooden canes and sticks. Both groups are masked, one as 'beautiful' and the other as 'ugly' Perchte.
The Bird Lover, also known as The Prince as Bird, is a type of narrative structure in folklore, no. 432 in the Aarne–Thompson classification system. In the typical version of story, a woman acquires a bird lover—a nobleman in the shape of a bird—who is wounded by means of a trap set by the woman's husband, such as a set of sharp points set up outside the woman's window. She follows the wounded bird's trail, cures him, and then marries him.
The Calumniated Wife is a motif in traditional narratives, numbered K2110.1 in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. It entails a wife being falsely accused of, and often punished for, some crime or sin. This motif is at the centre of a number of traditional plots, being associated with tale-types 705–712 in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index of tale-types.
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