The benandanti ("Good Walkers") were members of an agrarian visionary tradition in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. The benandanti claimed to travel out of their bodies while asleep to struggle against malevolent witches (malandanti) in order to ensure good crops for the season to come. Between 1575 and 1675, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials, a number of benandanti were accused of being heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition.
According to Early Modern records, benandanti were believed to have been born with a caul on their head, which gave them the ability to take part in nocturnal visionary traditions that occurred on specific Thursdays during the year. During these visions, it was believed that their spirits rode upon various animals into the sky and off to places in the countryside. Here they would take part in various games and other activities with other benandanti, and battle malevolent witches who threatened both their crops and their communities using sticks of sorghum. When not taking part in these visionary journeys, benandanti were also believed to have magical powers that could be used for healing.
In 1575, the benandanti first came to the attention of the Friulian Church authorities when a village priest, Don Bartolomeo Sgabarizza, began investigating the claims made by the benandante Paolo Gasparotto. Although Sgabarizza soon abandoned his investigations, in 1580 the case was reopened by the inquisitor Fra' Felice de Montefalco, who interrogated not only Gasparotto but also a variety of other local benandanti and spirit mediums, ultimately condemning some of them for the crime of heresy. Under pressure by the Inquisition, these nocturnal spirit travels (which often included sleep paralysis) were assimilated to the diabolised stereotype of the witches' Sabbath, leading to the extinction of the benandanti cult. The Inquisition's denunciation of the visionary tradition led to the term "benandante" becoming synonymous with the term "stregha" (meaning "witch") in Friulian folklore right through to the 20th century.
The first historian to study the benandanti tradition was the Italian Carlo Ginzburg, who began an examination of the surviving trial records from the period in the early 1960s, culminating in the publication of his book The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966, English translation 1983). In Ginzburg's interpretation of the evidence, the benandanti was a "fertility cult" whose members were "defenders of harvests and the fertility of fields". He furthermore argued that it was only one surviving part of a much wider European tradition of visionary experiences that had its origins in the pre-Christian period, identifying similarities with Livonian werewolf beliefs.[1] Various historians[who?] have alternately built on or challenged aspects of Ginzburg's interpretation.
The benandanti ("Good Walkers") were members of an agrarian visionary tradition in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries...
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries is a historical study of the benandanti folk custom of 16th and 17th century Friuli, Northeastern Italy. It was...
Pietro and Cesaria and leader of a group of witch hunters called the Benandanti, inspired by their historical counterpart. Astrid Meloni as Amelia, Pietro...
Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg compared Thiess' practices to those of the benandanti of northeastern Italy, and argued that they represented a survival of...
Valcellina. In 1966, he published The Night Battles, an examination of the benandanti visionary folk tradition found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friuli...
e benandanti del Friuli Venezia Giulia' and 'Streghe, Avvelenatrici e Cortigiane di Roma' discovered new secrets. The existence of the Benandanti, an...
shamanistic cult centering around these beings, comparable to the Italian Benandanti and donas de fuera. One of the earliest pieces of evidence comes from...
Telegraph via News.com.au. Retrieved 2011-10-15. The story of these so-called benandanti is recounted in Carlo Ginzburg's study The Night Battles: Witchcraft and...
translation 1983). He noted similarities between the perchtenlaufen and the benandanti, a visionary tradition which existed in Early Modern Friuli, a province...
This case was also noted by Carlo Ginzburg as similar to that of the Benandanti. The court tried to make Thiess confess that he had made a pact with the...
("seeress") the Italian fattucchiere ("fixers"), guaritori ("healers") or benandanti ("good walkers") the Portuguese curandeiros/as, benzedeiros/as ("blessers")...
of otherwise Christian Europeans was Carlo Ginzburg, who examined the Benandanti, an agrarian cult found in Friuli, Italy, whose members underwent shamanic...
published by the Minor Planet Center on 25 September 2018 (M.P.C. 111803). Benandanti Furlanis Ladinia List of dukes and margraves of Friuli List of Friulian...
always, female, and generally depicted as either villains or heroines. Benandanti – Agrarian visionary tradition in Italy Brethren of the Free Spirit –...
and executed in 1610. The Inquisition also concerned itself with the Benandanti in the Friuli region, but considered them a lesser danger than the Protestant...
Richella and "the wise Sibillia" in 15th century Northern Italy, the Benandanti of 16th and 17th century Northern Italy, the Armiers of the Pyrenees,...
also pointed to Carlo Ginzburg's discovery in the 1960s of the Italian benandanti, folk magicians who practiced anti-witchcraft magic and were themselves...
ogre and their job is to take away children who do not behave well. The Benandanti were linked to a pagan-shamanic peasant cult based on the fertility of...
until death, which made it heresy; it was the same thing practiced by the benandanti, also often accused for witch craft. Both Polissena di San Macario and...
interpretation of the benandanti; Cohn stated that there was "nothing whatsoever" in the source material to justify the idea that the benandanti were the "survival...
Seventeenth Centuries. JHU Press. ISBN 9781421409924. Ginzburg, Carlo, Benandanti: "de goda häxmästarna". Stehag: B. Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1991...
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