PIject of the scandal, The Janara Festival of Beneventoorganized in the Samnite capital by the mayor Clemente Mastella. The event wanted to celebrate folklore and tradition, the organizers say. But, for the association of exorcists, He transformed an identity legend into a commercial brand. “Thinking of entertaining the population, children and teenagers included, with themes belonging to the world of evil, evil, horrid and macabre, which is precisely witchcraft, denotes a very serious inner malaise and an absence of civic consciousness”.
The press release published on the exorcist website ends with a (half) anathema: «Those who promote evil by presenting it fascinatingly, they risk greatly. Poison cannot be offered to the people hidden under the flavor of honey and pretend that the first to heavily pay the consequences is not those who served it ».
Who are the “Janares”, the witches of Benevento
Female creatures, often described as old and horrible women, with a eagle, sharp teeth and long hair, The jersey belong to the legend of Benevento, the “city of the witches”, but also to its history as women who have been processed here, tortured and burned.
According to popular tradition, the Janares were positioned On the breast of young men during sleep to suffocate themcausing night paralysis and nightmares. It was also believed that they were responsible for the disappearance of the giumente from the stables and that they could cause abortions and deformities in infants.
It is thought that the name Janara derives from Dianara, or a follower of the goddess of the hunting Diana. Then he became Janara. According to the myth, which seems to date back to the seventh century, the witches at night They gather around a walnut on the banks of Saturday: From the name of the waterway that crosses Benevento, the term “Sabbath».
In 1860, precisely because of the ancient legend that binds it to the Janares, the witch liqueur was born in Benevento.
The walnuts of Benevento, 1534–77, Pen and Bruno ink, Guglielmo della Porta. (Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group Via Getty Images)
The Janara Festival of Benevento, which makes the exorcists angry
The response of the mayor – practicing Catholic – The exorcist association did not get to wait. Clemente Mastella does not deny that the Janus Festival had a promotional purpose. Organized with other small Samnite municipalities and in collaboration with the “American Salem that shares the same tradition with us”, the event has attracted many visitors. “A nice costume party, with chirprints and fun. It is our history, our tradition. I repeat: nothing blasphemous».
The mayor has no intention of stopping in his recovery of the identity of Benevento as a city of the Janares. “Now I would like to make a park of the witches in Benevento. The funds are there, “he said. I don’t pay: «I would like to have the three times Oscar winner Dante Ferretti, artist and costume designer of legendary film works, to build it. It is my will, a way to leave a permanent mark in the city ».
In memory of the jers burned on the stake, also in Benevento
Between those who consider them witches and those who make their history a Halloween -style business, perhaps a little respect and memory for the Women in flesh and blood really lived and killed as Janus in Benevento.
Second The historian Benevento Abele de Blasio (1858-1945) In the city’s archbishop’s archive, 200 minutes of witchcraft processes were preserved, which were largely destroyed in 1860 together with all the documents that were considered “uncomfortable” by the Church. As he wrote in Incrat reservoirs, magicians and witches of BeneventoLuigi Pierro Editore 1900. “The Janara by combination appears in the stupid society When some poor and honest woman, without knowing it, is for the following fortuitous case, as a witch ».
The witch hunt
Beyond the legend, myth and folklore, it is truth of history that on the stake of women burned. Women who often had nothing to do with magic. They were actually mostly healer, who knew the medicater use of plants, midwife or prostitutes.
Witchhill women have begun to be persecuted since the fifteenth century. San Bernardino da Siena preached against in particular against those of Benevento, stating that they should be exterminated. In 1486, then, The Malleus Maleficaruma sort of manual for the inquisitor friars. Written by the Dominican Heinrich Kramer, he examines the case of witchcraft and witches: how to recognize them, process and torture them. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries the confessions they were extorted To the suspicions that then finished burned, sent to the gallows, tortured and killed.
The monuments of the witch
It is not known The number of victims of witch huntingover the centuries between the fifteenth and 17th. But in their memory there are memorials. As, in Triora, in the province of Imperiathe monument to the witch. Here the witches have already become a tourist attraction: There is a witch house, an ethnographic museum and prisons visits to the Fortino di San Dalmazio where they were imprisoned and died.
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