Sicilian folk magic is a traditional practice that has been deeply rooted in the culture and history of Sicily. It is a unique blend of ancient rituals, Catholicism, and superstitions, which has been passed down from generation to generation. The main idea of Sicilian folk magic is the belief in the power of magic and the ability to harness it for various purposes. The people of Sicily believe that magic can be used to protect against evil spirits, bring good luck, heal ailments, and even influence the outcome of certain events. One of the key elements of Sicilian folk magic is the use of charms and amulets. These objects are believed to have special powers and are often worn or carried by individuals for protection or good fortune.
A holy little thing: writing and ancestral magic
My grandmother — or nonna — was born Concetta Maria Lipari. She went by the name Mary, at least in the United States. She emigrated with her sisters, by sea, from Palermo, Sicily.
“I saw Mussolini’s men under the lemon trees,” she told me once when I was in my mid-twenties. It would be one of the last times I saw her, her wrinkled hands held in my father’s palms. I was too young, too distracted, and too naive, to ask her for more memories.
The idea of her living under that regime becomes more real to me as I grow older, wiser, and more interested in how identities and places change due to oppression and ideology. How Sicily was ruled and conquered more than anywhere else, how all that change, fear, culture, and belief exists in my blood today. How it shows up in America, too. The salt and all the tides of time. And how we reckon with it.
I also think of the lemons. Those beautiful bright gifts from heaven; how, years after her death, I’d step foot onto Italian soil to taste their sweetness, to wander limoncello-drunk down Duomo steps and through piazzas and little streets. I started in the North on Lago Maggiore and made my way down through Naples to the Amalfi Coast. I still haven’t tasted Palermo, drank of my own blood.
There is magic in nature. In salt and lemon and water. And I think my grandmother knew this, although she wouldn’t refer to it as such. She was a devout Catholic — she’d go to church every day, maybe twice per day. She and my grandfather attended the Saint Gianna Beretta Molla Parish down in South Jersey, and when I attended both of their funerals, with the same funereal rites — the songs and smoke and procession — I felt that same intoxication I did as a child. I was again reminded of the power of ritual. The institution and its rites are overwhelming, luminous, frightening, and not a bit complicated. That tendency toward ritual, toward the magic and mysticism of action and intent, is etched into me. The primordial Paganism that was rewritten with fear and shadow — and yet I found some comfort in it.
I recall my grandmother doing a few things that bewildered me as a younger person. First, she pulled out a box of her own long, thick black hair — darker than my own — and waved it over our cake as we sat eating. My aunt promptly said, “Mom — we can put that away?!” But it was something about preserving her youth, reclaiming her power, keeping memories, staying safe. It was, I suppose, a spell of sorts. She lived well into her 90s.
LISA MARIE BASILE
My other memories are of altars and shrines — over the television, on shelves, in corners covered in embroidered cloth, candles, sacred images, tiny statuettes (one of which I took for myself, or was given; I can’t remember), crucifixion triptychs, figurines, vials, relics, holy water collected in old Cola bottles, taped with pictures of Jesus or the saints. I can almost evoke the scent of their home. Perfume, something dry and old, incense, the smell of the air in South Jersey—a specific mix of something and trees. It has all become mythology to me.
And upon the altars were scrolls — dozens of tiny scrolls, etched with prayers and blessings, wishes, and words in both Sicilian and in English. She’d slip the scrolls in between statues of saints and figurines, roll them up under hanging rosaries. Once, when I knew it was the end, I stole two of the papers. I felt she would forgive me. I wanted something of hers, something handwritten. Something beautiful. As a writer, it felt only right. Or perhaps that’s me romanticizing everything.
My grandmother wasn’t a warm woman. She had seven children and dozens of grandchildren — and she brutally picked favorites. The fear of God led her to judgment and cruelty in many ways, and we were not close for many reasons. As a child, she didn’t hold me in her lap or stroke my hair or care for me. She visited, we made dishes and dishes of food, she told me I was too skinny, and she sent me scapulars and bottles of holy water. She also warned me about the Devil and told me ghost stories. They were violent and strange and they haunt me today — the man who killed himself in her basement. The child swinging on a chandelier. The old woman dressed in black who came in and out of the house.
These stories were always told or spoken about at family dinners. The consensus was that Grandma Mary had ‘lost her marbles,’ or always been a bit off, that perhaps having seven children had worn her down. Perhaps it was emigration and a loss of her culture, assimilation, her marriage, the wars, or mental health issues. I think it is a mix.
LISA MARIE BASILE
But I am not so sure it wasn’t something else, too. Something divine or ghastly. I don’t know what I think of the afterlife, but I know my grandmother was tuned in to something. Some otherness. Some else-ness. She seemed to have existed in a magical realist realm. It seemed only loosely tethered to here and now. Of course, only in retrospect can you see these truths for what they are.
My mother, who isn’t Sicilian, always says, “You’re just like your grandmother Mary.” I can’t tell if it’s a good thing, but it’s a potent thing. I do have her pale olive skin, her dark hair. We are both water signs.
In this way, intuiting the power of the word was passed down to me. I now use scrolls on my own altars. I have been doing it before I knew I was doing it — before I thought of myself as a word witch or an alchemist of letters or a poet, and before I believed in anything at all.
I have always kept journals and wrote letters and I would throw wishes into rivers at a child. The writing felt Important to me. Performing poems aloud felt like I was achieving something, casting something out. Exorcising, incanting, making, even if I didn’t have the words for it nor the conscious cognisance of intention and belief.
I think of my grandmother’s use of scrolls as a Benedicaria, a (purposefully?) vague and recent term for Southern Italian or Sicilian traditions of blessings. Benedicaria is at its core Catholic, yet it operates without explicit language, without much ado. In Campania, where I traveled alone last year, it’s translated into do a little holy thing (Fa Lu Santuccio).
In my limited understanding, it is an innate, religious understanding of things you just do — in your house or with your family or in your kitchen. It’s intuited, not fancy, and detached from glossaries and definitions. It’s not stregheria, either. It’s something different.
It’s sacramentals and olive oil and warding off the evil eye. Saving hair and writing scrolls. It isn’t magical, and she wouldn’t want to see it that way. It’s just what you do.
Ironically, given this entire post and its emphasis on the Word, what my grandmother was doing — and what I do — doesn’t have a specific name. I may call it magic or witchcraft, and she may have called it prayer (especially writing in her mother tongue, which was, in many ways, taken from her). But it’s just what feels natural.
Writing is part of who I am. It is my sacredness and my profanity. My prayer and my craft. My impact, my wound, and my reclamation. A product of a divinity or a call to it. An ancestral power that I’ve tapped into, but one that feels, somewhat, on loan to me. I am a recipient of a message. I am a vessel. Maybe it comes from a God, or a saint. Maybe it comes from history’s echoes, some sort of ancestral hum. Maybe it’s a gene. Maybe it is a gift. Or maybe not at all.
I will fill my own life, and this world, with a sea of letters, stained by lemon and sunlight, and hope that it washes something beautiful to shore. It’s just a holy little thing, writing. It creates something from nothing. It’s my meaning. It is my thank you to existence.
Lisa Marie Basile is the founding creative director of Luna Luna Magazine, & the author of a few books of poetry and nonfiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times and The Magical Writing Grimoire. She's written for or been featured in The New York Times, Entropy, Grimoire Magazine, Sabat Magazine, Giallo Lit, Catapult, The Atlas Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and more.
Italian folk magic - Traditional, modern, Stregheria, Benedicaria etc
Oh yeah, another post. The previous one is already too long and I don’t want to bore you all too much.
As previously stated this is my VERY personal experience, and you can read about it and about my background in this post .
This post is will be edited if needed in the future, but at the moment it’s mainly to answer the question
“Is Stregheria and Italian Folk witchcraft the same? Or interchangeable terms?”
And personally, my answer is no, they aren’t.
They’re definitely related, and one can believe that “modern” Stregheria, as in the one practiced today, is a direct evolution of the traditional folk witchcraft but they have very different beliefs and crafts.
From what is my understanding, Stregheria is born within the Italo-American community by Italo-American writers that they said were based on knowledge belonging to "family traditions". It centered around pair of deities that are lovers and a messianic figure, called Aradia that is seen as a goddess of witches.I can’t really talk very in deep about Stregheria because I don’t practice it and it’s not widespread in Italy not in the older generations or the new. It's not what I practice as an Italian witch nor what most of the grandma would recognize as their crafts.
What I can say is that while its root might be in the Italian folk belief, it looks very different from the more “common ones” but that doesn’t make it less worthy, there are a lot of minor or very mystery beliefs in Italy. Especially at the time of the grandmothers of such authors.
For those more interested in the ones more widespread in Italy, the two more glaring differences are the existence of other gods besides the Christian one and the use of the term “Strega”, which means witch in Italian.
- In Italian folklore, there are powerful and mystical entities with amazing powers and some of them are used in spellcraft, but they aren’t called gods or considered the Christian God equal: they’re Lords, Madonne (as in Mea Domina, My Lady), Re and Regine (Kings and Queens) and a lot of Saints. Christianity is simply too much embedded in the culture and for so long that the previous folklore was adapted to be “more consistent” with the idea of monotheistic religion.
- Strega is a bad term. Or at least it was. Nowadays the modern, witchcraft practitioners have reclaimed it, but I have to say, a little part of me still feel uncomfortable when using it in Italian, because the term was, and from older generations still is, used almost exclusively for what we would call “Evil witches”, for the one doing hexes or harm, or putting il malocchio (the evil eye) on people or being in pact with malevolent entities. A traditional practitioner would be called with other names, like guaritrice (healer), fattucchiere/a (fixer) or ambiguous ways as a “good or wise woman” or other more regional terms.
Personally, I would put Stregheria under the umbrella term of Italian witchcraft, more in detail in the Italo (as in with Italian root but born outside of Italy) witchcraft category.
Benedicaria is a modern term and from what I see, the ones using it are mostly Italo-American with a Sicilian heritage but it's definitely more in line with what most folk magic is. For example, they also don't like to be associated with witchcraft and consider themselves more a kind of more "mystical" sect in Catholicism.
While Grimassi- Stregheria looks and reads very Wiccan in its concepts and ideas, Benedicaria seems like any other kind of Italian folk practices, maybe a little more distant from its pagan influence but it makes sense as it was created in another continent.
The term Benedicaria and its definition is probably the one that more closely represents what I learn and sees both my teenagerhood and nowadays when you see folk magic or general superstitions. I’m not really a fan of the term, because it isn’t used by those who practice it but it’s a useful term.
As I said in the Introduction post, what I’ll talk about in my following posts is a mix of what I learned from people who wouldn’t call themselves witches, but use folk magic crafts and myself who definitely, even if with some problems, call herself a witch. I will try to specify when I’m adapting from the “”original”” materials as it was taught to me but also, a lot of it is just general vibe and cultur*l background, so ask if you’re doubtful or can't understand something that I wrote.
Stregheria and Italian-American Folk Magic
‘Stregheria’ is a term used almost exclusively by American anglophones talking about a witchcraft tradition which allegedly emerges from Italy. Often, it is accompanied by Murrayesque claims of an unbroken pagan priesthood operating in secret up until today. Much of the work presented as ‘Stregheria’ appears to have originated with the writings of Raven Grimassi, which must be read with a critical eye. Grimassi is a controversial figure among Italian practitioners, to say the least. He himself states:
My first attempts at providing information on the Italian Craft began around 1979 with the self publication of books and a magazine. Working from material I had copied in my late teens and early twenties, I created an “outer-court” system through which I could convey the basic concepts of initiate teachings. Looking back on these early projects they were crude and amateurish. But for the time period they seemed to fit in with what most people were producing. …Thinking back on those days now I realize that I was a “true believer” in the things I had been taught and had learned. I think this was no more evident than in my writings on Aradia, which I presented in a self published work titled The Book of the Holy Strega.
I am not interested in critiquing Grimassi’s work or policing the self-identification of other practitioners. However, there are several facts which I think should be brought to bear when evaluating the claims of people who purport to practice, teach, or provide magical services under the banner of ‘Stregheria’.
‘Stregheria’ is not a common word in Italy. The Italian word for ‘witchcraft’ is stregoneria, and it has profoundly negative connotations, although some modern practitioners have followed the example of their anglophone counterparts and begin reappropriating the term. This is not to say that the word 'stregheria' is entirely fabricated; it appears in a handful of texts from the 18th and 19th centuries. Nevertheless, it’s a word that most native Italian speakers will never have heard. It puts more distance between the anglophone American practitioner and and the people who live in the region where their tradition allegedly originates.
The matter becomes more complicated when we consider the vast linguistic and cultural diversity of the modern nation of Italy. Italy as a unified country has only existed since 1861. The concept of a pan-Italian ethnic identity is even newer. Each region within Italy has a distinct culture, with attendant variations in language, food, and religious practice. As most of the Italian immigrants to United States came from the Mezzogiorno region of Southern Italy and Sicily, we would expect them to have their own regionally-specific socio-magical roles and unique words for them in their own dialects.
Some modern Italian and Italian-American practitioners use the term ‘benedicaria’, a neologism which emphasizes the role of blessing and Catholic sacramentals in the work. Practitioners of benedicaria may or may not identify with the social role of the witch. The line between ‘stregoneria’ and ‘benedicaria’ remains blurry at best. My experience with practitioners who use the term benedicaria is that they tend to pay closer attention to historical folk practices, which is laudable. However, the term is not itself historically attested, and we may hypothesize that whatever thing it represents was never meant to have a name.
So why bother with this line of inquiry? Does it really matter what word is used? If the people purporting to practice ‘Stregheria’ changed their branding to so it said ‘stregoneria’, or ‘benedicaria’, or even ‘Italian folk magic’, would that resolve the issue?
Not necessarily. The larger problem here is not what word is used, but how. It’s about forging a deep, authentic relationship with the people and the land that these words come from. And for Italian-Americans in particular, it’s about strengthening our relationship with our ancestors while respecting their other descendants. When anglophones (and American anglophones in particular) use the word ‘Stregheria’, they are engaging in a kind of exotification and cultural appropriation. Swapping one word for another will not necessarily eliminate those deeper issues.
Returning for a second to Grimassi, much of his work draws on reconstructions of ancient Etruscan religion. The Etruscans inhabited the regions now known as Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio. By contrast, approximately 84% of Italian-Americans trace their roots to Southern Italy and Sicily. Most Italian-American family traditions and folk religion will not be illuminated by study of Etruscan paganism. A practitioner with roots in Naples is better served by studying the cult of San Gennaro, the cult of the Holy Souls in Purgatory at Fontenelle Cemetery, or the cult of Mama Schiavona at Montevergine–cults which, unlike the Etruscans, survive until this day and can be experienced as living traditions rather than reconstructions.
But it is just these living traditions that some seek to negate by practicing Stregheria. Certainly, there are many legitimate reasons to be uncomfortable with Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Yet some of the most pagan-seeming Italian cults originate late into the Christian era–for example, the Madonna delle Galline, an emanation of the Madonna covered in chickens who originates in the 17th century. Likewise, the necromantic cults of the Holy Souls in Purgatory and the Headless Souls do not, as one might think, originate in pagan hero cults. Peter Brown in his classic work The Cult of the Saints demonstrates that even the cult of the saints as collective, rather than personal, dead was only possible with the innovation of Christianity. Nascent Christianity broke many of the pagan and Jewish taboos on ancestor worship, including contact with the remains of the dead. Removing these traditions from their Christian framework is not only historically inaccurate, but, as scholar Sabina Magliocco writes, it “does violence to the way practitioners [of living traditions] perceive themselves.”
Of course, this is not to say that Italian-Americans must simply emulate their Mediterranean cousins. Doing so is equally problematic, and ignores the fact that many rich cultural traditions, including entire dialects, are better preserved in the Americas than in the old country. The most fruitful approach is considering a real, rather than imagined history: a history which includes both Christianity and the trauma of immigration. That is how we wake up our saints.
These objects are believed to have special powers and are often worn or carried by individuals for protection or good fortune. The most common charms used in Sicilian folk magic include the cornicello, a small horn-shaped pendant, and the mano cornuta, which is a hand gesture meant to ward off the evil eye. Another important aspect of Sicilian folk magic is the use of prayers and invocations.
These are often recited during rituals or when performing certain actions to appeal to higher powers or spirits for assistance. These prayers can vary depending on the desired outcome, whether it is protection, healing, or bringing about a specific change. Sicilian folk magic also incorporates various folk remedies and herbal medicine practices. The use of plants and herbs is believed to have healing powers and is often used to treat minor ailments or ward off evil spirits. The Sicilian people have a deep knowledge of the local flora and how each plant can be used for specific purposes. Overall, Sicilian folk magic is a rich and complex tradition that reflects the beliefs and values of the Sicilian people. It is a way for them to connect with their ancestors and to tap into the mystical forces that surround them. Whether it is through the use of charms, prayers, or herbal remedies, Sicilian folk magic continues to be an important part of the cultural identity of the people of Sicily..
Reviews for "Exploring the role of herbs and plants in Sicilian folk magic"
1. John Doe - 2 stars - I was really excited to read "Sicilian folk magic" as I have always been interested in different cultures and their belief systems. However, I found this book to be lacking in depth and substance. The information provided was very superficial and did not provide a comprehensive understanding of Sicilian folk magic. It felt more like a brief overview rather than a detailed exploration. Additionally, the writing style was quite dry and lacked any real sense of excitement or enthusiasm. Overall, I was disappointed with this book and would not recommend it to others looking for a deep dive into Sicilian folk magic.
2. Jane Smith - 1 star - I was expecting "Sicilian folk magic" to be a captivating and informative read, but I was sorely disappointed. The book lacks proper research and relies on mere anecdotes and personal opinions instead of providing factual information. The author seems more interested in showcasing their own beliefs and experiences rather than presenting a well-rounded understanding of Sicilian folk magic. The writing style is also quite convoluted and confusing, making it difficult to follow along. I would advise readers to steer clear of this book if they are looking for an accurate and informative exploration of Sicilian folk magic.
3. Robert Johnson - 2 stars - "Sicilian folk magic" promised to take readers on a journey into the mystical world of Sicily, but it fell short of my expectations. The information provided felt repetitive and lacked any real depth. The author seemed to skim over important concepts and practices without providing enough explanation or context. I was left with more questions than answers after reading this book. Additionally, the excessive use of personal anecdotes made it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. Overall, I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for a comprehensive understanding of Sicilian folk magic.