THE
WORLD OF "LA MISERIA"
229
songs in honor of the Madonna rise into the broad heavens. In other
places the feast begins only in the morning when hundreds of small
processions form, usually carrying images of the Madonna decorated
with pagan symbols; and as they arrive, the whole procession, composed
of animals and humans, walks around the sanctuary, church bells ring,
a bagpiper plays his monotonous litany, and from a near-by hill fire–
works burst in seemingly endless succession. The sanctuary is often too
small for the crowd, and some women fight their way in to set a candle
before the image of the Madonna. And often, when the police fail to
intervene, they attempt to move toward the altar on their knees, licking
the ground with their tongues.
No wonder that it is the women who set the tone of these celebra–
tions. Among the followers of Dionysus, it was the maidens of Thrace
who roamed the forests to catch and devour the sacred pig. So, in
the realm of
ala miseria"
it is the women, the lowliest of a downtrodden
society, who find in the orgiastic celebrations of the Madonna a momen–
tary
respite from their daily fate.
Our description so far has illustrated the initial statement that in
the traditional peasant civilizations the historical element is a strictly
objective factor. The peasant has no choice but to see in history some–
thing given in whose making he has no active part. We might ask now
whether the experience of the last twenty or thirty years, and partic–
ularly of the period after World War II, has not made for a substantial
change
in the traditional position. War and emigration, the cinema
and the rise of the political parties have no doubt created a new type
of awareness. Until recently one's position had been interpreted in
tenns of a cosmic sense of justice, of the very laws of life which governed
one's society. Now it is being compared, here and there-and more and
more vividly and insistently-with the living standards of the people
in
Rome, in Moscow, in Hollywood. The organic conception of life
in
which each function was roughly equivalent to every other function,
in
which each aspect of life was intimately related to every other, makes
way
for an emphasis upon one plane of life, the economic-political one,
and for an awareness of needs-a word practically unknown in the
traditional society-demanding to be satisfied at any cost. The inability
of the great majority to satisfy these needs increases social tension,
while the belief in the cosmic sanction of the existing order and, with it,
the sense of dignity and of understanding of everything human decreases.
More specifically, the historical element is gradually being re–
moved from the realm of acceptance; the objective conditions of
ul
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