“Sacred Stones and the Immanence of Life in the Alpine Folk Traditions”

with Mary Beth Moser

Wednesday, March 24, 2021 at 3 pm Eastern Daylight Time 

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The importance of rocks in the traditional culture of the Italian Alps is evident in the archaeology, folk stories and everyday practices. Rock surfaces scraped smooth by receding glaciers in Valle Camonica, a UNESCO world heritage site in northern Italy, bear hundreds of thousands of engravings dating from across the millennia. Direct contact with certain rocks by sliding or rubbing was believed to promote fertility, a practice still remembered in the popular culture. The location of shrines, chapels, and churches in and on rocks acknowledges a continuity of sacred sites. In Piedmont, the chapel that holds the highly venerated statue of the Black Madonna of Oropa is built directly upon a rock.

In the folk stories once told in villages throughout the mountains, rocks are associated with power in the spiritual realm. Imprints on erratics, large boulders left from the ice age, are said to be of saints and the Virgin Mary – or the devil and witches. So-called witches once danced around rocks before the Council of Trent banished them and turned them into stone. A folk remedy for epilepsy, considered a spiritual sickness, utilizes the powder of a certain rock as medicinal. Spring water coming from the rock characterizes sites of fertility rituals. Water held within indentations in the rocks was considered blessed.

Drawing from my on–site research, folk literature, and interviews, I will present specific examples and visual images of rocks in northern Italy that have been regarded as sacred and even life-giving in the folk practices.

Mary Beth Moser is passionate about her ancestral homeland of Northern Italy. She holds a Ph.D. in Women’s Spirituality from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she has taught and lectured. Her dissertation, “The Everyday Spirituality of Women in the Italian Alps,” received ASWM’s 2014 Kore Award. Her publications in ASWM proceedings include: “Wild Women of the Waters” (2016) and “Submerged Spirituality in the Italian Alps” (2020). Mary Beth lives on an island in the Salish Sea in the Northwest US where she serves as president of the Seattle Trentino Club.  See her work on Trentino ancestry and culture at Ancestral Connections  and on the Black Madonnas Resource Center at DeaMadre.

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Save the dates for upcoming ASWM Salons:

April 7  at NOON Eastern Daylight Time
“Daughter of the Goddess, Sister of Man: Matriarchal Patterns in the International Fairy Tales”
Heide Goettner-Abendroth

April 21 at 3pm Eastern Standard Time
“Bringing The Civilization of the Goddess to Life in The Four Novels of The Earthsong Series”
Mary Mackey

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.