Gendering the Extended Family of Ginzburg’s Benandanti

In the forty years since Carlo Ginzburg surprised historians with evidence that a set of archaic beliefs about supernatural nocturnal battles waged by specially endowed people was flourishing in Italy’s northeastern corner in the late sixteenth century, subsequent research has enormously extended our information about their shamanstic analogs into widely scattered corners of the European world and far beyond. Since 1989, Ginzburg himself has contributed to this extension and confusion by stretching his ideas from the Benadanti to the breaking point with his Storia notturna.¹ If the dust jacket to the 1991 English translation extols Ginzburg’s “compelling evidence of a hidden shamanistic culture that flourished across the continent for thousands of years,” one searches its index in vain for specific references to “shamanism.” Nevertheless, by enormously extending the habitats of loosely related crypto-shamans both geographically and chronologically, Ginzburg has supplanted Mircea Eliade as an obligatory reference for European historians who discuss shamans.

At present, the historiography on shamanism seems littered with outdated general theories and awash in cultural relativism. While both anthropologists and historians express dissatisfaction with Eliade’s classical definition of 1951, uninformed by direct contact with shamans, as an invention that artificially synthesizes practices (including drumming, trances, spirit communication, and healing) that also play significant roles in nonshamanic contexts, both also express dismay at its misappropriation by contemporary Western self-styled shamans, which misrepresent indigenous practices in ways that reinforce subtly racist ideas of “noble savages.”²

The most important recent refinement of the concept of shamanism by a western European historian is Wolfgang Behringer’s masterful analysis of the ecstatic visions of an Alpine herdsman who was savagely tortured and burned for witchcraft at almost the same moment that Ginzburg’s Friulian inquisitors first encountered benandanti.³ Behringer argues that Chonrad Stoeckhlin “fits perfectly” with the definition of shamans employed by Russian anthropologists and even Eliade, who saw ecstasy and travel to the underworld as the heart of the phenomenon. But he also opposes Ginzburg’s “attempt to demonstrate the continuity of secret cults back into Eurasian prehistory” by arguing that Stoeckhlin’s animistic notions, like those of Siberian shamans, had been “inseparably mixed . . . with elements from high religions,” which however, “only partially accommodated the needs of the population.”⁴ Behringer goes on to examine other widespread European evidence suggesting elements of ecstatic shamanism, both earlier and later, but warns that they invariably present problems of transmission. “It is fairly clear,” he asserts, “that no pre-Christian cults survived the thousand years of Christian acculturation.”⁵ At the same time, he insists that these surviving mythical fragments, broken apart and partially extinguished, nevertheless reemerged in diverse new forms. Behringer’s following section, entitled (in both the German and English versions) bricolage,⁶ offers Levi-Straussian clues to these unpredictable recombinations. Behringer notes that Stoeckhlin set off a witch hunt in which (although a few other men did turn up among the suspects) he was the only man to be executed. His research has both refined our image of European crypto-shamans and connected them directly to outbreaks of witch-hunting.

Meanwhile, local research on Ginzburg’s original benandanti has downplayed their shamanistic elements while fitting them more closely into a better-known historical category, well represented in all types of inquisitorial records, by redefining them primarily as magical healers.⁷ However, neither investigation paid much attention to the gendering of benandanti, who appear to reverse the sex-linked but not sex-specific aspects of the ordinary and maleficent witches against whom many of their activities were directed. Since the most important criterion for becoming a benandante was being born with a caul, one could assume a priori that this was an “equal-opportunity” trait. Forty years ago, it is not surprising that the idea of separating the benandanti into men and women seems not to have occurred to Ginzburg, although his earliest examples were men, while some later examples were women. We now know that altogether, eighty-five people were denounced to the Holy Office as benandanti in inquisitorial sources. However, few of them were tried and...