The May rituals in Basilicata

…But what did this rite represent in antiquity? The Sacred Marriage, the Hieros Gamos, is a recurring theme in religious art as early as the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. It was a set of rites celebrated on the most important religious occasions, such as the return of Spring, mostly in May. Even today, after all, it is in this month that many “spring” festivals and fairs are celebrated in many regions.

At that time the union of masculine and feminine, symbolised by that of two trees and accompanied by feasts, songs and love rituals, was celebrated as the sacred manifestation of the mysterious powers that give and sustain life.

In one of the oldest historical civilisations of which we have written evidence, the Sumerians, 6,000–8,000 years ago, the Sacred Marriage between Inanna and Dumuzi was celebrated every year, in a ceremony in which the reigning monarch and the High Priestess, in the guise of the Goddess, were sexually united.

The erotic element – present in European folk traditions until it was expelled by religion and by the dominant sex-phobic culture, which considered such manifestations “abominable” – was not a sin among the most ancient “prehistoric” civilisations; on the contrary, it was a fundamental way of approaching the Sacred. Those rites were considered a necessary alignment with cosmic rhythms, a way of coming into contact with the fertility of the Earth, an auspicious drawing near to the life-generating powers. They were a good omen for the well-being of the whole community and for the fertility of crops, of human beings and of animals. The problem for us moderns is that, to truly understand those cultures and draw precious and unexpected lessons from them, we would have to remove the distorting lenses of our prejudices, starting with linguistic ones, carefully reconsidering the meaning of words such as “sex”, “eroticism”, “sin” and so on – since our perception of these and other terms is degraded, ambiguous or incomplete, and above all lacking in critical sense.

Reserving the right to develop this important subject elsewhere, as part of an interesting research into linguistic re-semanticisation, I will only observe that today we find ourselves in a rather “singular” situation – perhaps because we are dazed by an excess of information we do not even have time to analyse, but fundamentally because our culture has not given us the tools for critical analysis, nor the habit of conscious thought. We “know” many things, but the “sense” of things is not always clear to us. We confuse, for example, modern “sexual emancipation” – often nothing but pure consumerism, if not sordid exploitation and ignoble violence, or in any case the exploitation of one human being (mostly female) by another – with eroticism, or with the sexual customs of those very ancient civilisations…

Far from being senseless barbarians, those peoples – judging by what we can “read” in the images that have come down to us, now clearer thanks to the precious work of archaeological discovery and systematisation by eminent scholars such as Marija Gimbutas and other generous researchers – had a vision of sex certainly less twisted and distorted than the one we often find ourselves with.

It is enough to look carefully: first of all, in the countless scenes painted, scratched or frescoed on the walls of caves, tombs or houses throughout Old Europe, in the Aegean islands and elsewhere, we perceive no violence. There are no illustrated examples of hunting, rape, conquest, torture or war (which would appear regularly later, throughout the “historical” period, indeed marking the monomaniacal apotheosis of those themes, including andro-celebratory rhetoric); there are no traces of gratuitous promiscuity or sexual orgy for its own sake, nor signs of selfish or private abandon; on the contrary, sex appears as the means to reach a higher awareness, to approach totality, wholeness, to attune oneself with the Universe.

The sense of female authority is clearly highlighted, together with the importance attributed to the values it carries. Artistic expression emphasises the giving and sustaining of life, rather than the giving of death and suffering.

It is enough to look at the countless images – painted, scratched, sculpted or modelled in clay – of women-goddesses giving birth and breastfeeding, represented in the splendour of their complete nudity and in the awareness of the importance of what they are doing. They are powerful images, though not monumental – for they had no need to be – in which one perceives a sense of beauty, not of “indecency”.

Only later, with the advent of patriarchal culture, were the images of “giving life” – then covered by the taboo of obscenity – replaced with impunity by those of “giving death”, to which every possible value would be attributed.

To be continued…