The Night Battles Quotes

“There is not much doubt about any of this. Obviously, what we have here is a single agrarian cult, which, to judge from these remnants surviving in places as distant from one another as were Livonia and the Friuli, must have been diffused in an earlier period over a much vaster area, perhaps the whole of central Europe. On the other hand, these survivals may be explained either by the peripheral positions of the Friuli and Livonia with respect to the centre of diffusion of these beliefs, or by the influence, in both cases, of Slavic myths and traditions. The fact that in Germanic areas, as we shall see, there were faint traces of the myth of nocturnal combats waged over fertility, might lead us to lean towards the second possibility. Only intensive research may be able to resolve this problem.”
― Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

“In the fighting that we do, one time we fight over the wheat and all the other grains, another time over the livestock, and at other times over the vineyards. And so, on four occasions we fight over all the fruits of the earth and for those things won by the benandanti that year there is abundance.’ Thus, at the core of the nocturnal gatherings of the benandanti we see a fertility rite emerging that is precisely patterned on the principal events of the agricultural year.”
― Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

“In conclusion, the Germanic origins of the myth of the processions of the dead is practically certain; but the question remains unresolved as far as the battles over fertility are concerned. To be sure, the presence of this second myth in Livonia and among the Slovenes seems to suggest a tie to the Slavic world. In the Friuli, where Germanic and Slavic currents flowed, the two myths might even have converged and formed the more comprehensive one of the benandanti.”
― Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

“At other times the children discerned in the water of the vase a figure which Giuliano recognized as the ‘mistress of the game’, (a designation used alternately for Diana and Herodias) who ‘clothed in black, with a chin to her stomach’, appeared before Giuliano himself, saying she was ready to reveal to him ‘the properties of herbs and the nature of animals”
― Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

“Thus, the mysterious journeys by women during the nights of the Ember seasons was an ancient motif and not limited to the Friuli. Moreover, it always seemed to be closely connected to the myth of the nocturnal travels of the band of women led by Abundia-Satia-Diana-Perchta, and thus also to that of the ‘Wild Hunt’ or ‘Furious Horde’.”
― Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

“of ‘base-born old folk or ignorant and simple people, vulgar rustics’, or of women,”
― Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries