Corsican culture: I Mazzeri (English subtitles)

• Report rights infringement
• published: 04 Apr 2010
• views: 20287

Corsican tradition is primarily concerned with death. The Corsicans' attitude to the dead is ambivalent. Yet they are not a particularly melancholy people. They know how to enjoy themselves with an undisguised zest on appropriate occasions: family weddings and christening parties, local festivals, carnival. The celebration of a successful election, when the partisans of the triumphant candidate let go in outbursts of gunshot, fireworks and song. But the Corsicans have inherited a religion of veneration of the dead, that of the megalithic builders, which was superimposed on an earlier insular cult of the same character; one perhaps natural to a people who attached so great value to human life. Archaeology has shown that the dolmens and other types of megalithic sepulchres were designed for collective burial. In Corsica the statue-menhirs are explicit. It can hardly be doubted that they commemorate deceased chieftains, warriors and heroes. The Megalithic cult of the dead lingered on in the Corsican collective unconscious, determining beliefs, attitude and customs. The un-Christian funeral rites, the voceru (song in honour of the deceased), the caracolu (ritual dance), the practice of collective burial in the arca(burial place underneath the altar), the more recent elaborate family tombs, the attention paid to the dead on All Souls' Day, the vendetta itself, which decreed that murder should avenge murder to appease the spirit of the murdered man; all these customs, as well as various popular beliefs must surely hark back to the Megalithic faith. Like a dark, rank plant of the maquis, it survived through the centuries alongside Christianity, sometimes intertwining with it, sometimes smothering it, never extirpated to this day. The phenomenon mazzeri, dream-hunters who go out at night to kill an animal, in which face they recognize a person who will die in the space of time running from three days to a year. The activities of the mazzeri, stem from an epoch anterior to that of Homer, from the Corsican hunting and foodgathering peoples of the pre-Neolithic times (before about 6000 B.C.) The mazzeri are dream-hunters, who go out at night to kill an animal. They recognize in the face of the animal someone known to him, nearly always an inhabitant of his village. The next day he will tell what he has seen and the person mentioned will die in the space of time running from three days to a year, and always within an uneven number of days. If an animal is only wounded by the mazzere, then the person it represents will meet an accident or illness, but not death. How to become a mazzere (mazzeru-man/mazzera-woman)? It depends on two factors: predisposition and initiation. To be a mazzere it is necessary to have a psychic gift that opens the door to the parallel world. The origin of the gift is mysterious, as is that of a gift for spiritual awareness that leads to priesthood. Without such a gift no one can become a mazzere, for the initiation takes place in dreams. The postulant is co-opted by a practiced mazzere who "calls" him, to join him in a dream-hunt. Initiation take place most often in adolescence. Mazzerisme runs in certain families. What sort of people are they? They were usually armed with sticks and stones; in Corsica women rarely carried firearms. Mazzeri, have no animosity towards the animal they have to kill, not towards the human being it represents. So they may be shunned or even hated by their fellow villagers because they are thought to bring death, they are peaceful enough in their daily waking lives. They are uninterested in electoral and political rivalries; they never played any part in the vendettas, holding their own, marginal position in Corsican society. Between themselves, men and women alike, they live on a footing of equalitiy, regardless of distinctions of sex or social status. According to traditional popular belief a mazzere is a person who has been improperly baptised, the priest or the godparents having omitted some word or gesture of the ceremony. Many mazzeri are known for their notorious piercing look, that seems fascinating, rather than intimidating. They recognize only the Christian God and the undefined qualcosa, or quellu quassu: that wich is above.