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There is a bottle of water in our house, labelled so that no one will drink it by mistake. My partner was given it at Frenċ Mercieca’s house in Għarb, drawn from his well. The warning keeps the object from drifting too easily into picturesque folklore. This is not simply holy water, interchangeable with any other blessed substance, but water retained for a particular use and not intended for drinking. Drawn from a particular depth and given under instruction, the bottle gathers trust, caution and memory.
I did not quite know what to make of it until I read Cassandra Quave and Andrea Pieroni on the women called upon in illness in rural Lucania. These women were not ordinarily named witches, shamans or even healers. They were quelli che aiutano, those who help. Most were older women. Some tended bones, some the evil eye, some the crossed nerves of labouring bodies. The more accomplished kept small notebooks of prayers and procedures, and payment took the form of food or something made in the household. Their authority was neither medical licence nor clerical office. It was the authority of knowing what to do when a person was frightened and no longer certain what kind of thing had happened.
Their forms were concrete. A thumb traced the Cross upon a forehead. A prayer was repeated three or nine times. Scissors cut above a child’s stomach, and a black-handled knife moved over pain without touching it. The Trinity, Mary and the saints were invoked, though local plants and figures might enter the prayer beside them. These practices did not form a single system. They varied between villages, families and helpers. Some illnesses belonged to prayer, others to herbs or medicine. If the ritual failed, people sought another helper and eventually a doctor. The household grammar was porous, not absolute.
Reading this, I understood whose house the bottle had come from. Frenċ Mercieca was a Gozitan farmer who knew medicinal herbs, received people at home and prayed for the intercession of Our Lady of Ta’ Pinu. He asked no fee, though offerings to the shrine were welcomed. He is remembered insisting that healing did not belong to him as a private power, and when asked to teach his art, he is said to have answered that his teacher would never die.
The well belongs to this world because it is at once ordinary and deep. It does not manufacture sacred power. It receives what has gathered below sight and offers it by bucket, labour and measure, while the label keeps reception from becoming careless possession. The herb likewise remains a creature. Its properties may be known through use, error, memory and experiment, and prayer does not make it less material. Prayer places its action within gratitude, petition and dependence.
Ernesto de Martino helps to explain why such practices mattered. In his account, misfortune threatens more than health, for a person may undergo a crisis of presence, losing the power to stand within the world as one who can choose and act. Ritual gives the crisis a form. The affliction receives a name, the danger a limit and the household a procedure. The threatened person returns to history because terror has been placed within an inherited order.
This is a profound description of the human stakes. It is not, for me, a complete account of efficacy. De Martino finally locates gods, saints and powers within the cultural apparatus by which presence is restored, so that they are real as operations within a habitable world and no more. I cannot follow him there. A ritual may contain anxiety, restore agency and return the sufferer to ordinary action, while the reality to which prayer answers need not be produced by the need that prayer meets. The household gives form to the encounter. It does not invent everything that answers through the form.
A distinction is required, though it will not divide every practice neatly, for it names less a class of acts than a direction within them. The question is whether efficacy is received or possessed. Blessing belongs to charis. It asks and gives thanks, uses words, gestures and matter seriously, and leaves the effect within the freedom of God and the created qualities of the thing. A charm, in the possessive sense, closes the circuit, so that the correct object, number or secret formula must work, and grace becomes a force stored in technique.
The difference is not simply between a rosary and an amulet. A rosary may be recited mechanically, as though repetition compelled heaven, and an amulet may be received modestly as a reminder of prayer and protection. Even a sacrament does not work as a charm. Its efficacy rests in Christ’s promise and action, not in a power possessed by its minister. The decisive matter is the relation enacted. Does the act refer beyond itself, or return to the hand as possession?
The evil eye makes the ambiguity sharp. In the Lucanian communities, admiration without a blessing could be felt as dangerous. A young woman who praised a baby but omitted “God bless you” met such resentment that she afterwards avoided offering compliments. The belief gives envy a recognisable shape, that disturbance by which another’s good becomes intolerable, yet it can also make affection suspect and turn neighbours into hidden assailants.
The invisible may be real without being innocent. Envy moves through bodies, glances and households, but a tradition that names invisible harm may also deepen the fear it means to relieve. The helpful one can gather a frightened person, listen, touch the aching place and restore a sequence to experience. She can also confirm an attribution that binds the sufferer more tightly to suspicion. Unofficial authority is still authority, and its intimacy is both its strength and its danger.
Gail Faith Edwards preserves many recognisable details of this world: Catholic prayers, ritual numbers, scissors and keys, household transmission and concern with malocchio. Her writing becomes cautionary when scattered practices are gathered into a system called Benedicaria and placed within an unbroken history of goddess religion. Resemblance too readily becomes descent. Diana becomes Mary, and local practice becomes a surviving prehistoric religion. The past is no longer received through fragments and difficult evidence, but made to yield a complete inheritance.
The deeper danger is not commerce but the possession of continuity. A living practice, once detached from the field, household, local saint and dialect prayer, can become more coherent in recovery than it ever was in life. One begins by honouring the helpful ones and ends by claiming their unnamed acts as parts of a secret system now available to be taught.
Frenċ offers the better caution, though he too is flattened in retelling. I have heard him reduced to a herbal eccentric, even to the man with the marijuana. Whether or not cannabis formed part of his remedies, that anecdote cannot bear the weight placed upon it, for it detaches a curious drug from an integrated religious vision. Public accounts place his herbs within prayer, spiritual counsel, devotion to the Eucharist and sustained reference to Our Lady of Ta’ Pinu. Whatever he received was directed towards the shrine, and he long desired a Way of the Cross on Għammar Hill opposite it, so that the landscape itself would carry the pilgrim from Marian petition into the Passion of Christ.
What is lost in the reduction is the scale of that vision. Herb, body, moral counsel, pilgrimage, Eucharist, shrine and hill belonged within one field of answerability. Frenċ used what grew from the earth and did not make the earth the final source of healing. His refusal to claim a special skill referred whatever he knew beyond himself. His knowledge remained local, practical and, finally, unmastered. Mystery of that kind cannot be possessed as technique.
The helpful ones stand near a necessary boundary. They remind us that illness is never only an event in tissue, that it can disturb a household, a history and a person’s capacity to inhabit the world. They remind us too that care once had more time, more touch and more local knowledge than many systems now allow. Yet help remains true only while it does not bind.
The herb may be gathered. The well may be sounded and its water carefully kept. The path may rise from Ta’ Pinu towards Għammar, and the oil may be poured and the prayer remembered. But the herb is not an occult machine, the well does not belong to the bucket, and grace is not activated by the hand that asks for it.