di Adele Campanelli
Adapted from Marija Gimbutas - Twenty years of Goddess study - Proceedings of the conference of the same name – Rome 9-10 May 2014 – Laima Editorial Project – Turin
This brief intervention is dedicated to our ancestors, "wise women" and to Marija Gimbutas' ability to seek and find her Ancestral Mother and to give her back the word.
And in Canidia, at the old peligne and sabelle mentioned by Ovid in the Fasti, representing all the subaltern cultures that the literature of the victors has reduced to extras in minor stories.
On the shores of what was once Lake Fucino, on the opposite shore from Celano, there is a place full of history and legends, where ten years ago archaeological excavations identified the remains of a sanctuary, characterized by the presence of two temples double cell. The site, where the city of was organized Anxa, it is a steep mountain slope now covered with woods, already frequented in ancient times by the devotees of Angitia, the ancient mother deity of the Marsi. The lucus Angitiae it is known from ancient literature as a wood sacred to the sorceress goddess, sister of Medea, progenitor of the lineage of the Marsi, famous – precisely because of her teachings – as snake charmers, connoisseurs of herbs and poisons, soothsayers.
Studies clarify the nature of Angitia, the formation of the myths that are connected to it, and the interpretation of the epigraphic sources that attest to its diffusion.
Her residence on Lake Fucino, which the inconstant regime of the waters made mysterious and disturbing, brings her closer to Diana, lady of Nemi, and sister of Apollo, of which some archaeological traces also remain in this area. She suspended between heaven and earth, daughter of the Sun but also, like Hecate, the nocturnal goddess, Angitia is the "cultured" transposition of the indigenous mother, the only heir of the original mythical ancestors documented in the dedications to dis ancibus.
His name recalls the dominion over anxieties, anginas, the cramped dies and the day dedicated to her as Angerona, in the Roman calendar, should be linked to this sphere: December 21, i.e. the winter solstice, the moment in which the duration of daylight is the shortest and the night the longest of the year .
The cult of Angizia, of which a Greek reading has been handed down to us, seems to have gradually emerged from a common fund of collective cults linked to the ancestors, whose attestations in the caves of the Fucens basin date back to the Paleolithic.
The first connection of Angizia with Fucino is in Gellius, the annalist who lived in the XNUMXnd century PEC who, in a passage reported by Solino, identifies in the goddess one of the daughters of Aeeta together with Circe and Medea, emphasizing, in contrast to Circe's curses, the positive function exercised thanks to the knowledge of healthy remedies, as well as the healing skills that would have earned her the cult as a divinity among the Marsi.
The relationship of Angizia with the snakes is already in Virgil and is suggested more directly by the comment of Servius who, identifying Angizia with Medea, derives its name from the root of the verb ange (choke): the goddess, in fact, thanks to her carmine (magical verses), would cause the snakes to suffocate.
Silio Italico attributes to Angizia the ability to manipulate toxic herbs and to cure the effect of poisons, but also a great ability to intervene on the forces of nature.
In the case of Angizia it is rather difficult to separate its magical nature from the divine one which was already syncretized by literary sources in the second century. In other ways, the sources themselves report how she had become a goddess for her healing skills.
Its attribution to the same magical context to which the ancients attributed Circe and Medea dates back to the fourth century, and comes from Campania, where Angitia is associated with Circe and Medea, daughters of Helios, confirming its character related to the birth and death of sunlight.
The supernatural power of Angizia follows literary places also used for Medea, whose Greek myth assimilated early in Etruria traces an image of her as a great sorceress, endowed with supernatural powers that allow her to dominate and subvert the laws of nature.
This image is very consistent with the most ancient testimonies such as that of Hesiod and is devoid of the negative connotations with which it will be loaded over time. His migration to the Marso territory, i.e. to the internal Apennines, suggests a complex relationship between the Etruscan and Italic worlds.
The story reported by Gellius of Medea who through his son reigned over the Marsi seems to be the fossil of a myth penetrated and kept locally in the lands around the Fucino and then taken up by the comment to Virgil who recalls how Medea, Circe's sister, would have arrived during of his wanderings in the land of the Marsi to teach this people how to tame snakes. The overlap with Angizia seems to be documented by the source it speaks of Medeia anguish.
Angizia is also called Divia, in the sense of celestial, and chandelier emphasizing the link with the chthonic agricultural and funerary mother divinity, a divinity therefore linked to the aspects of the fertility of nature and to the death and rebirth of life, to which mantic and oracular characteristics relating to its links with the underworld were not extraneous.
The influence of Greek mythography spreads over the whole of Fucino, "as big as the sea" which is "recognized" as a magical place inhabited by terrifying beings. The wild nature of the waters now marshy, now overbearing in the flood phases has somehow influenced the descriptions of the ancient authors who rewrote the local sagas through the use of literary images characteristic of Hellenism. The center of diffusion of these erudite mythologizing had been in the cities of Greek and Etruscan culture in northern Campania in an era prior to the second Samnite war, presumably dating back to the end of the fifth century PEC, with which the Marsi must have had frequent and intense relationships.
On the other hand, some characteristics of the place had favored the recognition in the ancient female divinity marsa, also in the neighboring Pelignean areas and further away in Isernia, of a goddess similar to the Mefite of the Ansanto valley or in Marica at the mouth of the Liri, who it was born not far from Luco along the valley connecting with Campania. In fact, the scholarly tradition reports its existence.
The characteristics of some geographical places have played a central role in the organization of the sacred in the processes of ethnic-cultural aggregation of the various Italian races and often these places are inhabited by female entities for whom the border between the divine and the magical is rather thin: think for the Campanians of Lake Averno and the very famous Sibilla Cumana, the Sabine Cutilian waters inhabited by Vacuna who suffocated wayfarers with her mortal breath, the Ansanto Valley in Irpinia where Mefite was venerated or as in Lucania in Rossano di Vaglio .
Furthermore, the relevance to Angizia of rock cults, which we hypothesized at the beginning, could also refer the goddess Marsa to those cave-dwelling figures to whom the imagery linked to sorceresses who, like Circe, are often represented in caves, is particularly pertinent. An archaeological testimony of the presence of caves inhabited by mother divinities, in particular Queen Pia Giovia and Herentas is the cave of Rapino in Abruzzo, where the documented practice of sacred prostitution seems to be the antecedent to which medieval tales could be traced back on the sibyls, who in the Apennines seduce wayfarers into caves hidden in the thick of the woods in the presence of enchanted waters.
The tale of Tuta, the ancient city that once stood near the Colle cave, seems to belong to these legends of ancient origin. Cianfarani tells us, who collected this story on the spot, of the sorceress Maruca, daughter of another sorceress, Ruta. Maruca had taken a beautiful young man, Tase, as her lover, but three girls Ruma, Tatu and Sepiana fought for him. Maruca burnt with jealousy unleashed against the three girls who were fleeing all the elements and killed them. Both the archaic nature of the names (Tuta Maruca is the Italian name of Chieti) – which have no counterpart in the local onomastics – and the presence of the sorceresses and the love affair cannot fail to recall myths and similar contents from other places. After all, the sacred cave seems to be the ideal place to carry out religious rites linked to death and rebirth, selected for this purpose since the most remote ages as evidenced by the archaeological materials found in the caves of the Apennines and in particular in that of Bolognano, where burials of children with traces of combustion and ocher were found in the oldest levels.
It is imaginable that at a certain point the veneration for ancient local magical entities, whose main characteristics seem to be those of connoisseurs of natural phenomena, was replaced by the religion of the ancient mothers syncretized since prehistoric times in the figure of the potnia theron Mediterranean environment, with not dissimilar attributions and characteristics: I am thinking of Feronia, Mater Matuta, Angizia/Angerona, Vesuna, which Licia Luschi's readings trace back to the pre-cereal phases.
The overview of the particularities of the site and the contacts with other peoples contributed to characterize the religious nature of Angizia, whose tradition persists tenaciously among the Marsi through time, and still until yesterday in the popular children's games which in the last century were recorded by scholars of the folklore.
Recent investigations at the Lucus Angitiae site have yielded three female statues from a small room, part of a building adjacent to the older temple which confirms the relevance of this area to female cults.
These are three large statues one third of life partially found in situ next to the frescoed wall of a sacellum. The first to be found, the only one out of place in the collapsed soil of the structure, is in marble and reproduces a cloaked female deity who makes the gesture of revealing herself.
Another, also in marble, was arranged on the back wall and depicts a Venus. The third is in terracotta; Also veiled and adorned with a rich necklace, she sits on a large throne complete with cushion.
As regards the identification of the three subjects represented, two of which perhaps belong to a group placed on the back of the sacellum, it is evident that the theme present is that of the double function of the woman in the two meanings, one more Greek-like as mother and daughter (Demeter/ Kore), the other more widespread in the local world of mother and wife (Ceres/Venus).
The iconographic readings of the terracotta work investigated by Daniela Liberatore recognize in the subject a matronly divinity close to Demeter, created by a Magna Graecia artist of great quality on behalf of local clients. The dating of the three works around the XNUMXnd century PEC if on the one hand confirms some ideas on the cults practiced in this area, on the other it offers new clues on the indigenous religious characteristics of the sanctuary and on the foreign cultural influences which bring it closer to other environments.
The presence of ex voto clearly referable to the sexual sphere of an absolutely new type does not contrast with the qualities of the divinities represented in the statues whose identity refers to the Potnia of ancient memory, fertiliser, lady of life and death. The more specifically "Dionysian" aspects do not contradict other Abruzzo contexts and the general proximity to the propitiatory rites of fertility is also well documented in other sacred areas of the region.
Even the typology of votive materials is similar to that Koine Etruscan-Campania Latium culture, which sees the uniform introduction in Central Italy of the custom of dedicating mostly clay objects of local manufacture connected above all with the rite of sanatio.
Exceptional in this picture are the clay masks of rectangular shape reproducing a face with or without a mouth. The presence of these objects whose oracular allusions seem clear on the one hand, and on the other those connected with the funeral mask documented both in the sanctuaries of Corvaro, in the Equicoli, of Corfinio (Fountain and sacellum with dedications to Hercules) and Castel di Ieri in the Peligni, in the Ansanto Valley (Sanctuary of Mefite), and in the Colle cave in the Marrucina area, it seems to have its place of diffusion from the Fucens basin, in which we have the maximum concentration right from the Angizia sanctuary.
The archaeological area that has just been explored is just a piece in a picture of which many features are still elusive. At the present state of research it is not possible to state that the two temples can be attributed to Angitia. However, the particularity of the double cell suggests that it may belong to a double female cult, in particular that of Ceres and Venus, widely attested in Abruzzo in their complementarity of mother and wife. On the other hand, some epigraphic testimonies referable to Angizia, albeit controversial, seem to be able to also refer the goddess marsa to the sphere of cererium. Her complementary role with Venus is well suited to the particularities that this goddess assumes among the Italics, where her very name Herentas implies the domain of which she is mistress: the desire aimed at procreation. Furthermore, the proximity between Herentas and Mefite or Marica has already been underlined by La Regina with absolute clarity.
The most interesting problem is undoubtedly that relating to the possibility of identifying in this, just excavated, the sanctuary of Angizia and in the discovered statues the representation of that divinity.
The peculiarity of the two-celled temple is still the most identifying element of a local cult. In fact, the typology is absolutely unknown to Roman architecture, and its replication, in larger dimensions, in the opus reticulatum temple only confirms the importance and continuity of the double cult practiced there. The epigraphic documentation examined by the scholars seems to ascertain the existence of a divinity Actia associated with the qualification of Cereria, furthermore the presence in neighboring areas of the female priesthood of Ceres and Venus has already been underlined which would appear to be two functional aspects of the woman mother and wife . This Venus, goddess of desire, Herentas in Oscan, it is attested in many places of worship in the Italian area and also in Luco if it is possible to refer, as Sanzi Di Mino claims, to that divinity the beautiful Greek original preserved in the Torlonia dal Fucino Collection. As we have already seen, her religious sphere linked to fertility and sexuality is quite documented among the Italians. Already on other occasions we have gone so far as to identify the two goddesses in question in the double cult, traced by the two side-by-side temples present in the forum of Teate, which we think can also be re-proposed for the case of the sacred area under excavation where the link between the temple and the statues is suggested by the discovery on the floor of the right-hand cell of the marble forearm of the small image identified with Aphrodite.
The difficulty of recognizing a precise divinity in the enthroned statue would be justified not only by the absence of the attribute in the right hand, but also by an iconographic language that brings together different elements to probably represent a local divinity whose characteristics are assimilated to those of Demeter but not perfectly.
The characteristics that Angizia assumes in the XNUMXrd century and which are documented by the typology of the materials of the archaeological context is typically Demetrian, even in its familiarity with the serpent, documented in late sources which is also associated with Demeter and Hecate elsewhere.
The transformation of the goddess/sorceress Angizia into a divinity close to the Roman Demeter/Ceres could well be explained by the need for elite premises directed to the control of sacred traditional also through autoromanization, well demonstrated by the Latinization of the alphabets as early as the XNUMXrd century PEC In the late XNUMXnd century, an intellectual climate of resistance and counter-acculturation matured. The fervor of activity around the great sanctuaries denotes the will of the Italian ruling classes to gather around the memories of their homeland precisely at the moment in which the dissolution of the political-economic conditions that had given rise to those memories was foreseen.
What the local cultural climate was is well illustrated by the Agnone table, where the two strands – the Demetrian and the Dionysian – intersect in an original way.
The product is the grafting of two spheres of thought, the Pythagorean and the Orphic, characterized by anti-worldly and mystical tendencies, ascetic and iatromantic practices to which Plato alluded when speaking of Italic philosophy, in reference to the complex of forms of thought and eschatological beliefs, wisdom traditions or shamanic forms, mystical and esoteric doctrines and religious practices.
Adele Campanelli
Adapted from Marija Gimbutas - Twenty years of Goddess study - Proceedings of the conference of the same name – Rome 9-10 May 2014 – Laima Editorial Project – Turin
