Conjunctive Anomalies: A Reflection on Werewolves
| Autor | Carlo Ginzburg |
| Cargo | PhD from the Università di Pisa, Italy |
| Páginas | 110-118 |
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Conjunctive Anomalies: A
Reflection on Werewolves*
Carlo Ginzburg**
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.7440/res60.2017.09
* Result of a lec ture given at t he Presentation of P ublications
of the School of So cial Sciences at t he Universida d de los
Andes (Colombi a) in 2016. Bruce Li ncoln commented u pon an
earlier ver sion of this pape r; Maria Lu isa Catoni comme nted
upon the present o ne. I am deeply gratef ul to both of them
for their cr itical rema rks. Many t hanks ar e due to Anna
Ciamm itti for her help in c onstruct ing the nal d iagram.
Needless to s ay, the responsibi lity of what I w rote is mine.
** PhD from t he Università d i Pisa (Ital y). Professor Emer itus
at the Univer sity of Cali fornia Los A ngeles (United States) ,
and at the Sc uola Normale Supe riore di Pisa ( Italy).
Why did I choose this topic for our discussion? There are
several answers; let’s begin with the most obvious. In the
increasingly globalized world we inhabit, a compara-
tive approach to either history or anthropology is
unavoidable.1 Stories about werewolves spread from
Europe to other continents: any approach to this topic
will necessarily involve a comparative framework, but
comparison should not be taken for granted: we should
also reect on its aims, assumptions and methods. I will
try to do this, focusing on a specic case study involving
a rather special kind of werewolf.
1. Underlying my choice there is also a personal reason.
Fifty years ago I published my rst book, I benan-
danti, translated into English as The Night Battles. The
Spanish translation, published by the University of
Guadalajara, echoed the Italian title and subtitle: Los
benandanti. Brujeria y cultos agrarios entre los siglos
XVI y XVII (2005). The book explored, on the basis of a
series of Inquisition trials, some of them very long and
detailed, a previously unknown phenomenon recorded
in Friuli, on the Northeastern border of Italy, not far
from Venice. Men and women, mostly from a peasant
background, who called themselves benandanti (i.e.
people for the good) argued before the inquisitors that,
having been born in a caul (i. e. wrapped in the amniotic
sack), they were compelled to leave their body in spirit
four times a year, sometimes transformed into animals,
to ght against witches and wizards in order to ensure
the fertility of the crops. As a weapon, the benandanti
used fennel branches, while the witches used sorghum
sticks. “And if the benandanti won,” one of them said,
“that year the harvest will be rich.”
The inquisitors heard those tales in astonishment: they
had never come across anything like that (my reaction in
discovering those documents was no dierent from the
inquisitors’ reaction —an analogy which I began to reect
upon some years later [Ginzburg 1989b]). The benandanti
claimed to be counter-witches; the inquisitors, on the
contrary, regarded them as real witches who participated
in a diabolical cult. Relying upon dierent strategies
—leading questions or, occasionally, torture— the inquis-
itors tried to convince the benandanti. After fty years and
many trials punctuated by endless questions and denials,
the benandanti ultimately (although not completely)
started to confess to being witches, introducing the
hostile image imposed on them by the inquisitors.
1 I have develope d some implicatio ns of this point i n my
essay “Micr ohistory and World H istory” (2015).
Conjunctive Anomalies: A Reflection on Werewolves | Carlo Ginzburg
111
DOCUMENTOS
What I had discovered in the Friulian archives was,
I argued, a fragment from a deep layer of peasant
culture: the inquisitors’ astonished reaction to the
benandanti description of their nocturnal battles with
the witches was eloquent enough. But to what extent
was the Friulian case, undoubtedly exceptional from
a documentary point of view, also related to a unique
reality? In my book I advanced the following hypothesis:
what happened in Friuli had presumably also taken
place in other parts of Europe (and perhaps, I would say
today, in other continents as well). Peasant beliefs, mostly
centered on matters of fertility and possibly rooted in a
pre-Christian past, were reinterpreted by the inquisitors
as diabolical cults —and subsequently uprooted. A single,
also exceptional, case seemed to support my hypothesis:
a trial which took place in 1692 at Wenden, today Cesis,
not far from Riga (at that time Livonia, presently Latvia).
The defendant, an old man nicknamed “Old Thiess” was
accused of heresy: he counteracted by objecting that he
was a werewolf and therefore used to go to Hell with
other werewolves three times a year during the night
to recover the seeds of grain that had been taken away
by witches. “We are the hounds of God,” Thiess said,
referring to werewolves, thus subverting the traditional
stereotype that identied them with diabolical beings.
Here was a werewolf saying that he used to ght in
spirit, together with other werewolves, against witches
for the fertility of the crops. Could I compare Thiess’s
isolated, anomalous case to the Friulian benandanti? I
thought so —but what kind of comparison could I use?
Morphological? Or historical? The former perspective
takes only formal analogies into account, disregarding
both space and time, while the latter analyzes the same
analogies from a perspective based on space and time
that raises the possibility of mutual inuences, of a
common liation, etc. I had rst come across this alter-
native as a student when I read Marc Bloch’s great book
Les rois thaumaturges (1924, translated into English as
The Royal Touch). In the introduction, Bloch contrasted
two dierent kinds of comparison: “ethnological” (he
did not use the word “morphological”) and “historical,”
based on phenomena related to societies that had either
been disconnected or connected in historical times,
respectively. Following Bloch, in my rst book I explicitly
chose to limit myself to historical comparison only —a
choice which compelled me to suggest that the resem-
blances between the benandanti and Thiess, the Livonian
werewolf, pointed to a (completely forgotten) historical
connection between Friuli and the Baltic region, possibly
implying Slavic elements that they both have in common.
2. All of this was entirely speculative and exceed-
ingly vague. A growing feeling of dissatisfaction with
this kind of hypothetical history probably reinforced
my attraction to morphology —an attraction already
nourished by my interest in art history, and most
particularly in connoisseurship (art history attri-
butions usually start from purely formal features).
What I found so challenging in morphology was its
ahistorical orientation —its disregard, as I have said, of
both space and time, which makes it uninteresting, or
even distasteful, to most historians. But for a long time
I have felt a personal attraction to the devil’s advocate:
the ctitious character who, according to the rules of
early seventeenth-century canonization trials, asked
dicult, sometimes aggressive, questions about poten-
tial saints. I belong to the generation that witnessed
the triumph of structuralism: an approach that Claude
Lévi-Strauss repeatedly counterposed to history. Struc-
turalism, and more specically, Lévi-Strauss, played the
role of a challenging interlocutor for me for many years
—a sort of devil’s advocate. I regarded morphology, not
as an alternative to history, but as a tool that might
have opened up the possibility of overcoming the lack
of historical evidence, throwing some light upon the
puzzling analogies between the Friulian benandanti and
the old Livonian werewolf. I suspect that, at a subcon-
scious level, I was under the inuence of the line from
Vergil’s Aeneid that Sigmund Freud took as a motto for
his Interpretation of Dreams: “ectere si nequeo superos,
Acheronta movebo” (Aeneid, VII, 312), translatable as: “If
I cannot deect the will of superior powers, then I shall
move the River Acheron” or “If I cannot deect the will
of heaven, then I shall move hell.” For me, heaven was
history; morphology was hell.
3. Needless to say, I was not comparing myself to Freud:
but Freud has certainly been for me, for many years and in
many ways, an intellectual model. Not entirely by chance,
perhaps, the next step in my research focused on one of
the most famous of Freud’s case studies: “The Wolf Man.”
At the age of three, four, or possibly ve, the patient, a
Russian, had a dream: six or seven white wolves were
sitting on the branches of a tree, staring at him intensely.
This was the beginning of a long history of neurosis. In
my essay “Freud, l’uomo dei lupi e i lupi mannari” (1986)
(“Freud, the Wolf Man and the Werewolves”), I focused on
a detail from the patient’s life, which Freud duly recorded
without realizing its relevance. The patient was born in a
caul. In Russian folklore, werewolves were born in a caul.
The dream of the little Russian child was presumably
nourished by his nianja (nanny’s) stories. It was comparable
to the initiatory dreams of the Friulian benandanti, who
were also born in a caul. “In the wolf-man’s nightmare,”
I wrote, “we discern a dream of an initiatory character,
induced by the surrounding cultural setting or, more
precisely, by a part of it. Subjected to opposing cultural
pressures (the nurse, the English governess, his parents
and teachers), the wolf-man’s fate diered from what
might have been the case two or three centuries
earlier. Instead of turning into a werewolf, the patient
became a neurotic on the brink of psychosis” (Ginzburg
1989b, 148).
4. I have discussed the methodological implications
of my case study on Freud’s case study elsewhere;
here I will focus on the werewolf dossier that I have
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