Travelling in Spirit: From Friuli to Siberia

Carlo Ginzburg
UCLA, USA and Scuola normale superiore, Pisa, Italy

1. I never met a shaman in my life. My knowledge of shamans

and their European counterparts (if they ever existed: an issue
I will address later) is unashamedly bookish. But should I really
be ashamed? Isn’t history an honorable craft, which more often
than not deals with books and papers, old and new, preserved in
libraries and archives?
These rhetorical questions will lead us nowhere, ­unless we as-
sume that both historians and anthropologists share an experi-
ence of distance – the distance between the observers’ categories
and those of the actors.1 I am referring to the well known distinc-
tion between etic and emic levels of analysis that Kenneth Pike,
anthropologist, linguist and missionary, picked up and reworked
from linguistics (etic and emic referring, respectively, to phonetics
and phonemics). As I argued elsewhere, Pike’s argument might
be rephrased as follows: observers (including historians) ask etic
questions which are either anachronistic or ethnocentric, or both,
in order to retrieve, through a long and sometimes difficult tra-
jectory, emic answers – the categories and voices of the actors.
Far from identifying a scientific approach with either the etic or
the emic (as Pike and Lévi-Strauss did, respectively) I have argued
that historians and anthropologists should engage in a sustained
dialogue between the two dimensions, etic and emic.2

2. The dichotomy between observers’ and actors’ categories will

provide a framework for the case study I am going to share with
you: a retrospective evaluation of my own research experience over
thirty years, from the early sixties to the late eighties, from my first

How to cite this book chapter:

Ginzburg, C. 2016. Travelling In Spirit: From Friuli to Siberia. In: Jackson, P.
(ed.) Horizons of Shamanism: A Triangular Approach to the History and
Anthropology of Ecstatic Techniques. Pp. 35–51. Stockholm: Stockholm
University Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/bag.d. License: CC-BY 4.0
36 Horizons of Shamanism

book (I benandanti, translated into English as The Night Battles)

to Storia notturna. Decifrazione del sabba, translated into English
as Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. As a student back
in 1959, I made a triple, sudden decision: to become a historian;
to work on witchcraft trials in early modern Europe; to focus on
the attitudes, beliefs, voices of the women and men accused of
witchcraft. The latter decision had both biographical and ideolog-
ical implications: on the one hand, my memories as a Jewish child
during the Second World War; on the other, my recent encounter
with Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written in the Fascist
prisons. I had been particularly impressed by Gramsci’s remarks on
“the culture of subaltern classes” (cultura delle classi subalterne).
But my project to approach witchcraft trials as a crude form of
class struggle was also a deliberate updating of Jules Michelet’s
romantic vision of the “Witch” as a symbol of social revolt.
A document, dated 1519, I found in the Inquisition files pre-
served in the State Archive of Modena, seemed to provide sup-
port for my initial hypothesis: a trial against a peasant, Chiara
Signorini, accused of having cast a spell against her landlady, who
had ejected Chiara from her own possession. But in the essay (the
first I ever published) dedicated to that trial I ultimately pointed
at a broader issue, i.e. the cultural clash between the inquisitor
and the peasant woman. “Cases such as that of Chiara Signorini”
I concluded “can have exemplary value even in their most unique
aspects”. 3 The word for “exemplary” in the original Italian
­version – “paradigmatico” – did not imply an allusion to Thomas
Kuhn’s paradigm, since The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
was published the year after: but the tension between cases and
generalizations was already at the heart of my research, where it
has remained ever since. I will come back to this issue later.

3. The inquisitor who conducted Chiara Signorini’s trial was the

Dominican friar Bartolomeo Spina, the author of a well known
demonological treatise (Quaestio de strigibus). May we describe
him as an observer, who relied upon psychological and physical
pressures to convince Chiara to answer his own questions – his
own etic questions – following his lead? If we were to accept this
implicit analogy we might also note that Chiara withstood the
 Travelling in Spirit 37

Inquisitor’s pressures on one matter only: she stubbornly refused

to confess she had taken part in the witches’ Sabbath. May we say
that the latter element was not part of Chiara’s emic categories?
A long time ago I began to work in this direction in an essay
entitled “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist”.4 A reversal of the
analogy – “The Anthropologist as Inquisitor” – would stress the
concern for truth, as well as the cultural distance, shared by both
anthropologists and inquisitors vis-à-vis the actors they were con-
fronted with (i.e. natives, defendants). But as soon as we look
at those asymmetrical relationships from a distance, everything
becomes more complex: both observers and actors would turn
into actors. For instance, the observer I was at that time would
become, in the eyes of the observer I am now, an actor. Let me
add immediately that I am not particularly attracted by the fash-
ionable notion of agency. Acting, or acted upon? I am tempted to
answer this question in Latin, echoing (with due qualifications)
Martin Luther’s famous dictum: actus, non agens. As you will see,
the multiplication of egos I will deal with in my presentation does
not have a narcissistic purpose – quite the contrary.
4. The unexpected feeling of disappointment I experienced
in discovering a document which seemed to confirm my initial
­hypothesis – witchcraft as a crude form of class struggle – had
left me without a specific research program. I spent one year
(1963) wandering across Central and Northern Italy, searching
for fragments of Inquisition archives and reading as many witch-
craft trials as I could, at random. One day, while I was consulting
the Inquisition trials preserved in State Archive of Venice, I came
across a testimony given in 1591 by Menichino, a young cowherd
from Latisana, a little town in Friuli. He said that, since he was
born in a caul (that is, wrapped in the amniotic sac) he was a
benandante (literally, somebody who goes for the good): there-
fore, he was compelled to dream, three times a year, to go “like
in a smoke” in the field of Josaphat, where he fought with fennel
stalks against the witches, “to preserve the faith”. Then he added:
“when the benandanti won it was a sign of a good harvest”. The
dream (Menichino explained) first came to him after a conversa-
tion he had had with a friend, Giambattista Tamburlino, who had
also declared he was a benandante. “When you have to come, you
38 Horizons of Shamanism

will come” Tamburlino said. “You will not be able to force me”
Menichino replied. His friend insisted: “You will have to come
anyway”. “And a year after these conversations”, Menichino
went on “I dreamed that I was in Josaphat’s field”.5
In an essay I wrote many years ago I tried to reflect on the rea-
sons for my own excitement in coming across that document – a
discovery that led me to write a book on 16th- and 17th-century
Friulian benandanti.6 I was astonished at the amount of unex-
pected details which emerged from those documents, unveiling a
deep layer of peasant beliefs. As I told in my book, the Inquisitors
tried to fill the gap between what they expected and what they
heard from the benandanti, urging the benandanti to confess that
they were not counter-witches at all but real witches. But in my
retrospective reflection I refrained from explaining (first of all, to
myself) why an analogy between Friulian benandanti and Siberian
shamans had struck me as being self-evident almost right away. I
will address this issue now.
5. In Andrei Znamenski’s helpful book on the impact of
shamanism on the Western imagination, I have been enlist-
ed among the scholars who felt the impact of Mircea Eliade’s
“cross-­cultural and transcendental vision of shamanism”.7 “In
fact”, Znamenski remarked, “in his essay Some Observations on
European Witchcraft (1975) Eliade had already pointed to the
similarities he had noticed between witches’ practices described in
European folklore and shamanic trances”.8 In fact, in that essay,
as any reader (Znamenski excepted) can see, Eliade started from
my own book (published in 1966) to advance parallels between
Friulian benandanti and Romanian calusarii, as evidence of his
earlier argument about shamanism as a broad, cross-cultural phe-
nomenon.9 I will leave aside my strong reservations about Eliade
as a scholar, which I have expressed elsewhere.10 Here I would
like to point out that when I first came across the benandanti I
had not read Eliade’s writings on shamanism. What I knew about
shamanism came from another, far more original source: Ernesto
de Martino’s Il mondo magico, published in 1948, later translated
into seven languages.11
The impact of de Martino’s book on the English-speaking
world has, so far, been minimal.12 This may be partly ascribed to a
 Travelling in Spirit 39

scandalously inadequate translation, first published in 1972, after

the author’s death, and then reprinted several times, with the title
Primitive Magic: the Psychic Powers of Shamans and Sorcerers.13
In this English version the introduction, as well several passages
and footnotes, were tacitly suppressed; some quotations were tac-
itly added; above all, de Martino’s highly nuanced, peculiar style
was grossly simplified, to the point of distortion.
I will say something about de Martino’s complex work and per-
sonality in a while. But first, let me point out that shamans play a
crucial role in Il mondo magico, as its very beginning – a two-page
long quotation from Sergei Shirokogoroff’s The Psychomental
Complex of the Tungus, published in London in 1935, a book
which, as you know, has remained a classic reference on shaman-
ism until today.14 Let me take a short passage from that quotation:

“In the state of great concentration the shamans and other peo-
ple may come into communication with other shamans and ordi-
nary people. (…) The shamans use this method in their common
practice when they want to meet some people or other shamans.
Sometimes they do not realize the motive as to why they leave
one place or go to another where they meet the person who called
them – ‘they go because they feel they must go’.” 15

This passage must have crossed my mind as soon as I read the

dialogue between Tamburlino and Menichino, the two benandanti
from Latisana: “When you have to come, you will come”. Their
conversation worked as an initiation, anticipating – and apparently
producing – the specific content of the dream Menichino had one
year later. (Later, I found detailed descriptions of initiations and
dreams in dozens of trials against Friulian benandanti). If at that
time I had had direct access to Shirokogoroff’s book, I would have
found more parallels. For instance, the following passage, which de
Martino skipped in his quotation from the aforementioned text:

“…before falling asleep the Tungus express their desire to see dis-
tant places and people. If the dream occurs the fact is interpreted
as a voluntary direction of the soul”.16

6. In the nineteen sixties my knowledge of Shirokogoroff’s eth-

nographic work was still mediated, and filtered, by de Martino.
40 Horizons of Shamanism

I mention this seemingly irrelevant detail in my attempt to recon-

struct a chapter in the historiography of shamanism, conceived as
a case study in the transmission of knowledge. An experiment in
intellectual history, perhaps? Yes, but even more an experiment in
the history of reading – an activity shared today by a large part of
the human kind, but still inadequately analyzed in its complexity.
The relatively simple case I am dealing with implies a chain of
transmission based on three links: (a) Shirokogoroff’s Psychomental
Complex of the Tungus; (b) de Martino’s reading of that book
(which he first reviewed, and then quoted extensively in Il mon-
do magico); (c) my indirect and partial access to Shirokogoroff’s
book through de Martino’s Il mondo magico. In principle, in order
to understand how the chain worked one should focus on each
of its links. The limits of my knowledge (first of all, linguistic)
prevent me from dealing adequately with Shirokogoroff’s truly
impressive work, which I have only recently read. But something
should be said about its theoretical framework, and especially its
anti-­ethnocentric attitude, duly pointed out by Andrei Znamenski
in his detailed comment.17 But “anti-ethnocentric attitude” is
a mild label for Shirokogoroff’s radical relativism. His sarcastic
­references to “European folklore” included medieval cosmogonies,
19th-century evolution theory, and ultimately “science” (in telling
quotation marks), as in the following passage:

“…cosmogony of the Middle Ages is already fixed as medieval

folklore, regardless of whether it was created by the most learned
scholastic scholars or by the ignorant farmers. We may say that
the theory of evolution with its teleological background as it was
practiced, professed, in the European universities in the middle
of the 19th-century, in the eyes of the present generation being
styled as a ‘scientific theory’, in the eyes of later generations will
appear in its real form of European folklore of a given period.
(…) The basis of this attitude is a strong belief in the difference
between ‘science’ as knowledge of realities and method, on the
one hand, and ‘folk imagination’ crystallized in ‘folklore’ (in the
common sense).”18

Shirokogoroff’s dismissive remark on the theory of evolution and

its teleological background had a self-critical implication. A few
 Travelling in Spirit 41

years before he had put forward a theory of ethnos according to

which:

“The division of mankind into the ethnical units (ethnoses) is a nat-

ural function which is at the same time an impulse of development
of man as a whole” and culture “is a product of a purely biological
function, and all phenomena of a physical, social, psychic and tech-
nical order are concrete manifestations of this process”.19

In The Psychomental Complex of the Tungus ethnical units still

play a central role, although Shirokogoroff explicitly rejected tra-
ditional racist theories as:

“confined only to phenotypic rough characters, such as forms of

the head, body, limbs and hair, also pigmentation, while perhaps
the most important characters, the chemical functional complex
and physical constructive complex remain beyond observation,
without speaking of the chromosomes and plasma, about the dif-
ferences of which in human species we have only vague guesses”.20

Shirokogoroff could not foresee that in a few decades Luigi Cavalli

Sforza and other geneticists would have demonstrated that with-
in the human species there are no significant genetic differences.
But Shirokogoroff’s commitment to scientific progress (like in the
aforementioned passage) apparently implied a distantiation from
his early positivist background. In a footnote (Shirokogoroff of-
ten used them for methodological digressions) he commented on
the “ambiguous term ‘objective’”, remarking that a “philosophi-
cal” discussion” about it:

“nowadays would be quite superfluous for no abstraction of the

thinking process is possible, the process being physically bound
with the cognizing individual and all his cognition is a mere reac-
tion of the milieu. (…) When I oppose ‘objective’ to ‘subjective’ I
have in view only a relative elimination of rude feelings and now
quite evident theoretical aberrations which are still prevailing in
the young sciences”.21

Shirokogoroff’s radically emic approach (to use Kenneth Pike’s

categories once again) must be interpreted in the light of those
passages. His painstaking ethnographic accounts of shaman
practices were fuelled by a scornful reversal of traditional eth-
42 Horizons of Shamanism

nographic assumptions. “Folklore” was science, and science was

“European folklore”. Nowadays, the shocking overtone of the
following remark could easily be missed:

“In so far as the shaman uses his intuition in the ‘finding of causes’
he does not differ from any other man who is using the method
of breaking of the existing ethnographic complex as a means for
proceeding from the known to the unknown”. 22

In a previous passage Shirokogoroff had written “The Tungus have

many “facts” supporting their hypothesis” about ojan, i.e. spirits.23
In reading a statement like this I am tempted to compare The
Psychomental Complex of the Tungus with another book also
published in 1935, in Basel: Ludwik Fleck’s Entstehung und
Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache (Genesis and
Development of a Scientific Fact), made posthumously famous by
Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For the
time being, I am unable to say whether Fleck’s and Shirokogoroff’s
radical relativism could be regarded as similar developments from
a common source.
But coming back to Shirokogoroff: is a purely emic approach
possible? The answer is no. Shirokogoroff himself once wrote:
“As a matter of fact, we have only one method which may be
used, namely, the comparative method” – a sentence which might
have inspired Evans-Pritchard’s famous gloss “and that is impos-
sible”.24 Comparison necessarily implies an etic point of view,
which for Shirokogroff coincided with his theory of ethnos –
probably the most problematic element of his work. Although he
changed his view about them, he took ethnic units for granted.
7. De Martino owned a copy of The Psychomental Complex of
the Tungus, published a review of it in 1942, but was already ex-
tensively quoting it in 1940.25 What brought Shirokogoroff’s book
to his attention was, presumably, another book mentioned in Il
mondo magico: Wilhelm Mühlmann’s Methodik der Völkerkunde,
Stuttgart 1938.26
Mühlmann, the author of a well known history of anthropolo-
gy went through a long and successful academic career in anthro-
pology and folklore; two bibliographies dedicated to him after
the War duly included his earlier books on Rassenkunde (he was
 Travelling in Spirit 43

a full-fledged Nazi).27 In his Methodik – in many ways a remark-

able book – he repeatedly mentioned, and warmly praised, The
Psychomental Complex as an example of accomplished func-
tionalist anthropology, based on a historical and psychological
approach. Moreover, Mühlmann advanced some challenging com-
parisons between Shirokogoroff’s Psychomental Complex and
another book, recently published: Gregory Bateson’s Naven.28 In
an obituary, published in 1940, Mühlmann included long passag-
es from letters sent by Shirokogoroff (who died the year before)
from his exile in China in the late ‘30s: violent anti-­British tirades,
cautious appreciation of the political developments in Germany,
insightful self-reflections on The Psychomental Complex of the
Tungus. 29
De Martino may have come across that obituary: but his
interest in Shirokogoroff’s work was located elsewhere. In a
long article, the first part of which came out in 1942 (it later
­became, in revised form, the first chapter of Il mondo magico) de
Martino objected to the customary skepticism, shared by almost
all ethnologists, concerning the reality of magical powers among
“­primitive” populations. This scandalous issue should be serious-
ly addressed, de Martino argued, on the basis of parapsycholo-
gy and related phenomena, which he had been deeply interested
in since his youth.30 In this perspective, de Martino quoted long
passages from The Psychomental Complex as evidence for the
reality of magical powers among the Tungus. The “facts” that
Shirokogoroff had recorded in detail, driven by the cognitive im-
peratives of his radical relativism, were inscribed by de Martino
in his own, very different, perspective. Let me say right away that
I do not share (and I never did) either de Martino’s interest in
parapsychology or his attempt to demonstrate the reality of mag-
ical powers. But I was (and I am) deeply interested in the bold
theoretical argument which de Martino advanced in Il mondo
magico. Here is a highly compressed, and necessarily inadequate,
presentation of it.
Today we are used to taking reality for granted, along with
our presence in it: but this, de Martino argued, is the outcome
of a long historical process, in which magic played a crucial role.
As one learns from accounts based on ethnographic fieldwork on
44 Horizons of Shamanism

different cultures, human beings, when confronted with highly

critical situations, are threatened by a “loss of presence” – the risk
of being submerged in the world. (Once again, de Martino was
relying upon Shirokogoroff’s work on the Tungus, especially on
what he called “olonism” – a compulsive mimicry of other peo-
ple’s behavior). In those critical situations the shaman acts as a
cultural hero, reestablishing the human presence in the world. The
shaman’s performance is a relic from an unrecorded past. Il mon-
do magico is a bold attempt to retrieve this past – a layer which
took place before history, making human history possible.31
Needless to say, de Martino’s argument is entirely speculative.32
But until recently I was not aware of the deep emotional over-
tones of de Martino’s reading of The Psychomental Complex of
the Tungus. They emerge in Giordana Charuty’s fine biography of
de Martino, based on a large number of unpublished documents:
Les vies antérieures d’un anthropologue (The Former Lives of
an Anthropologist). In his youth de Martino had suffered from
epileptic seizures, which he reinterpreted, retrospectively, in the
framework of his own concept of “loss of presence”:

“The experience of epileptic ‘aura’ is the sign that presence is go-

ing to weaken… [After the crisis] presence re-emerges from the
shipwreck, along with a world which has retrieved its forms, its
feelings. It was like sliding down from history, slowly”.33

In de Martino’s Il mondo magico we can easily detect – today –

a strong element of conscious personal identification with the
shaman and his world. Shirokogoroff’s approach appealed to de
Martino not only for its intrinsic intellectual value, but also for its
rejection of earlier pathological interpretations based on “arctic
hysteria”. By turning European science into European folklore,
and the shaman into a cultural hero, Shirokogoroff paved the way
for de Martino’s interpretation.
8. Il mondo magico gave me an indirect access to
Shirokogoroff’s work on Tungus shamans, as well as a powerful
interpretive tool: de Martino’s “loss of presence”. Both elements
affected my response to the testimony of Menichino da Latisana,
which I stumbled upon in the Venice State Archive. I discovered
more Inquisition trials, in which male and female benandanti talked
 Travelling in Spirit 45

at length about the battles they used to fight in spirit, usually four
times a year, against witches, for the fertility of the crops. Later, in
the introduction to my book, I wrote: “I have not dealt with the
question of the relationship which undoubtedly does exist between
benandanti and shamans” (in the Italian version I had written, even
more bluntly, “esistente”, existing).34 A stab in the dark, which
many years afterwards I decided to turn into a research project.
Its outcome– Storia notturna, translated into English as
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath – has been hotly de-
bated.35 I will not attempt to retrace the trajectory which led me
to argue that the image of the witches’ Sabbath emerged from the
convergence between an aggressive conspiratorial stereotype and
a deep layer of shamanistic beliefs. I will limit myself to making
some comments on the most debatable element of my book: the
attempt to rely on a dual approach, morphological and historical.
What ultimately led me to morphology was my distrust vis-
a-vis shamanism as a transcultural category. If I had accepted
it, the analogy between the Friulian benandanti and Siberian
shamans, which came to my mind at the very beginning of my
research, would have found an immediate, and seemingly le-
gitimate, explanation. My attitude was different: the analogy,
I thought, implied a connection which I felt unable to address.
From an historian’s point of view, the question I was confronted
with was inadmissible.
I wandered for a couple of years, reading extensively, without
a definite plan, reading works of different kinds on witches and
shamans. Then chance once again befell my path. While I was
visiting the Archaeological Museum in Siracusa, I was suddenly
struck by a detail of a huge Greek vase representing a battle of
the Amazons, which reminded me of a similar detail in a fresco
by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. I decided to commit myself to
a completely new project: research on Piero, which ultimately be-
came a book dealing with some of his works.36 Many years later I
realized that such detour into art history unconsciously addressed
the problem I was grappling with in my research on the witches’
Sabbath: the relationship between form and context.
Piero della Francesca’s pictorial trajectory is a much debated
topic among art historians, due to lack of chronological evidence.
46 Horizons of Shamanism

I tried to circumvent the obstacle by focusing on contextual ele-

ments (iconography and patrons) which suggested a chronology
that significantly diverged from the one advanced by art historians,
based on stylistic data. To address the analogy between benan-
danti and shamans I made a similar experiment, but in reverse:
I used a morphological approach which led me to put forward a
plausible historical context. As I explained in my book Storia not-
turna, I was especially inspired by two imaginative developments
of Goethe’s morphology: Vladimir Propp’s work on folktales and
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on “family resemblances”.
9. My work on witchcraft has been harshly criticized, among oth-
ers, by Willem de Blécourt, who has written a few essays on it. Let
me quote a passage from one of them, concerning Storia notturna:

“These far-reaching conclusions are based on an analysis that is

vaguely structural, profoundly phenomenological, only morpho-
logical in name and hardly historical; it is selective instead of serial
and devoid of contexts. (…) How can one put history back into a
linking exercise based on superficial resemblances?”37

Each of these strictures – “selective instead of serial”, “devoid of

contexts”, “superficial resemblances” – deserves a specific discus-
sion. Let me start from the latter, which goes back to morpholo-
gy. I will briefly mention two pieces of evidence which convinced
me that the Friulian benandanti were not an isolated phenom-
enon. The first is a trial which took place in Livonia at the end
of 17th-century. The defendant, an old man named Thiess, con-
fessed he was a werewolf. Three times a year he would go with
other werewolves, in the form of wolves, “beyond the sea”, in
hell, to fight the witches for the fertility of the harvests. We, the
werewolves (Thiess said), are “the hounds of God”, and our souls
ascend to God. Likewise, many benandanti said that, metamor-
phosed into animals, they fought the witches for the faith and the
fertility of the crops. 38 The second piece of evidence – Freud’s fa-
mous case study on the “wolf-man” – provided me with a further
link between benandanti and werewolves: according to Slavic folk
beliefs, people born in a caul (i.e. wrapped in the amniotic sac)
were supposed to become werewolves. The “wolf-man”, Freud’s
patient from Russia, was born in a caul: a detail that Freud
 Travelling in Spirit 47

r­ ecorded, without realizing its meaning in folk culture. The dream

which marked forever the little Russian child – wolves sitting in
the branches of a tree and gazing at him – should be regarded,
I argued, as a sort of initiation, shaped by the folktales he must
have heard from his nianja. “The wolf-man’s fate” I remarked
“differed from what it might have been two or three centuries
earlier. Instead of turning into a werewolf he became a neurotic,
on the brink of ­psychosis”.39 A conclusion that Shirokogoroff (I
realize now) would have ­immediately subscribed to.
It would seem hard to dismiss the convergences I mentioned
as “superficial”. None of the traits involved – and even less their
combination – are obvious. But they are certainly related to anom-
alous, not to say unique cases. According to de Blécourt, Storia
notturna “harbours a dimly concealed north Italian and even
Friulian bias”. The reason for the alleged “Friulian bias” are given
by de Blécourt himself a few paragraphs later, in a comment to my
first book, I benandanti: “[it] contains an elegant and well consid-
ered presentation of surprising material which is still unique in a
European witchcraft context”.40 Unique it was. Retrospectively, I
realize that I started from a chance event, an anomalous document
(Menichino’s confession found in the State Archive of Venice) turn-
ing it into a case, first Friulian, then Eurasian. (Incidentally, both
terms – case, chance – share the same Latin etymology: cadere,
to fall).
Here comes de Blécourt’s second criticism of my approach,
which he labelled “selective instead of serial”. But I will not waste
your time in rejecting the naive idea that only a serial approach
would be appropriate to human sciences and humanities.41 I used
clues – selective clues – in order to build up an experiment which
was, as experiments always are, based on a selection of data.
Contextual evidence was not part of the experiment. Hopefully,
some further research will use it to confirm, to rework or to re-
fute my argument concerning the long term continuities across the
Eurasian continent.
According to de Blécourt “the concept of continuity not only
provided the framework for the contextualized details which plague
Storia notturna; it is also one of the foremost articulations of na-
tionalist proclivities”.42 I wonder whether this remark insinuates
48 Horizons of Shamanism

that I am either an Italian or a Friulian nationalist. “Ginzburg” de

Blécourt wrote “never seems to have discovered the fascist leanings
of the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade, whom he
quotes favorably in Storia [notturna]”.43 In the footnote related to
this remark no references to my book are mentioned. Apparently
de Blécourt missed a footnote in which I had written: “The pathos
of defeat inspired Eliade, who had behind him a Fascist and an-
ti-Semitic experience (…) to construct a theory of the flight from
history” [in his book The Myth of the Eternal Return].44
10. I will not insist on the aforementioned allegations, which
I regard as personally offensive (and false). But they touch upon
a very important issue – the political overtones of the debate on
shamans and shamanism – which de Blécourt addresses in sim-
plistic terms. The involvement of scholars with a more or less ex-
plicit Fascist and Nazi orientation is well known. Their political
and ideological commitment usually affected their research – both
their approach and their results. But we must bear in mind that
(as I once wrote about Georges Dumézil’s work) a sharp distinc-
tion should be drawn between questions and answers. Answers
that we regard as morally or politically unacceptable should not
necessarily imply a dismissal of the questions they allegedly ad-
dressed. “Even racism, to take one extreme example” I argued “is
one answer (scientifically unfounded and with a monstrous prac-
tical outcome) to a very real question related to the connection
between biology and culture”.45 The topics we are discussing, and
the scholarship related to them, are full of treacherous, disturbing
implications. Political correctness will not protect us.
11. When I first read Il mondo magico I was unaware of
Shirokogoroff’s political orientation; I was unaware of de
Martino’s personal involvement in relying upon Shirokogoroff’s
argument; I was aware of de Martino’s attempt to demonstrate
the reality of magical powers – but I didn’t share it. The mixture
of conscious and unconscious elements, biases and chance, I have
been trying to describe, is not the exception but the rule. All our
decisions are taken in a context which is more or less similar to
the one I am describing. We are all acted upon and are acting at
the same time. Reading can be regarded as a miniature model of
all kinds of social and cultural processes – including the intricate
 Travelling in Spirit 49

transmission, based on tales, rituals, and dreams, which I have

tried to explore flying in spirit from Friuli to Siberia.

Notes
1. For a more obvious approach see Znamenski 2007:187: “indeed,
as student of shamanism, Eliade was a perfect example of an arm-
chair scholar – extremely well read in secondary sources, he never
observed a single shaman”. On Eliade’s work, see later.
2. Pike 1967; 1990; Ginzburg 2012b.
3. Ginzburg [1961] 2013a:14.
4. Ginzburg [1988b] 2013e (at that time I was still unaware of
Kenneth Pike’s dichotomy).
5. Ginzburg 1983:74–77; 1972:11–116.
6. Ginzburg 1993:75–85; 2012b:215–227.
7. Znamenski 2007:184–187. See Eliade 1946; 1951.
8. Znamenski 2007:184–185.
9. Eliade 1975.
10. Ginzburg 2010.
11. de Martino 1948. The manuscript was sent to the publisher,
Giulio Einaudi, on August 8, 1946: see Angelini 2007. Translations:
English, French, Spanish, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Japanese.
12. See Ferrari 2012.
13. The blurb refers to de Martino as if had he still been alive (he died
in 1964). The first edition, published by Bay Books, Australia, was
reprinted by Prism Press in 1988, 1990, 1999. According to a reprint
with no date, entitled The World of Magic, the English translation
was translated from the French version (Le monde magique, 1967).
14. Shirokogoroff 1999.
15. de Martino 1999:4 (quoting Shirokogoroff 1935:117ff.) (see de
Martino 1948:22–23) I have reinstated the quotation marks in the
last sentence.
16. de Martino 1999:5 (quoting Shirokogoroff 1935:117ff.) The pas-
sage is omitted (…) in de Martino 1948:23.
50 Horizons of Shamanism

17. Znamenski 2007:107–113.

18. Shirokogoroff 1935:42.
19. Shirokogoroff 1924 (this is a revised translation of a paper pub-
lished in Russian in 1923).
20. Shirokogoroff 1935:23–24.
21. Shirokogoroff 1935:11 note **.
22. Shirokogoroff 1935:360.
23. Shirokogoroff 1935:141.
24. Shirokogoroff 1935:413.
25. Archivio De Martino, 3.8.26 (Charuty 2009:259 note 65; de
Martino 1942a. See also de Martino 1942b; de Martino 1943–1946:5:
“I principali risultati ottenuti finora (1940)”. In 1942, when he ­received
from Father M. Schulien the suggestion to read Shirokogoroff’s
book, de Martino was already familiar with it (a point missed by
Angelini 2008:33–34). Angelini emphasizes (pp. 33–38) the impact of
Shirokorogoff’s book on de Martino, relying upon the latter’s remarks.
26. See de Martino 1948:93 note 2 (misquoted as: Methode), 100
note 1. In his first book de Martino had praised Mühlmann’s contri-
bution to the Lehrbuch der Völkerkunde 1937 as “speculativamente
tra i più elevati che ci sia accaduto di leggere nello spoglio che ab-
biamo fatto della materia”: de Martino 1941:197–198 (Mühlmann
1936, is mentioned on p 192 n. 38; see also pp. 193–195). A copy of
a later book by Mühlmann 1964, is preserved in de Martino’s library
(now at the Mediateca dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Roma) with a
handwritten dedication: “Dem verherten Kollegen Prof. De Martino
zur freundlichen Erinnerung, Roma, 24. April 1965”. De Martino
died a few days later (May 6).
27. Mühlmann 1936 (Il mondo, pp. 94 note 1, 159 note 1). See
Reimann & Kiefer (eds.) 1964; 1984; Mühlmann 1968. See Michel
1991; Klingemann 2009:363–373.
28. Mühlmann 1938:158, 162–163 and passim. The preface is dated
“Hamburg, 13. März 1938. Am Tage der Rückkehr Oesterreichs ins
Reich”.
29. Mühlmann 1940.
 Travelling in Spirit 51

30. See Charuty 2009:254 ff.; Satta 2005.

31. In a conversation which took place in the early ‘60s in Rome,
Angelo Brelich, the historian of religions, remarked that de Martino
had tried to grasp “una frangia di ultrastoria”. On the intellectual
trajectory leading to Il mondo magico see my essay Ginzburg 1988a.
32. For a comparison with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of
the Enlightenment see Ginzburg 1979b.
33. Charuty 2009:57–59 (quoting passages, translated into French,
from de Martino’s unpublished notes). A retrospective, not so veiled
allusion to this trajectory can be found in de Martino’s following
remark : “il primitivo, il barbarico, il selvaggio non erano intorno
a me, perché accadeva talora che anche dentro di me sentissi con
angoscia risuonare arcaiche voci, e fermentare inclinazioni e sugges-
tioni a comportamenti gratuiti, irrazionali, inquietanti: qualche cosa
di caotico e di torbido, che reclamava ordine e luce. Si maturò così un
corso di pensieri e di ricerche che mise capo alla tesi fondamentale del
Mondo magico etc.” (de Martino 1953).
34. Ginzburg 1983:XXI (I benandanti, p. XIII).
35. Cfr. Klaniczay 2010:203–204.
36. Ginzburg 1981; 1985b (with an introduction by Peter Burke).
37. de Blécourt 2007a:128–129. See also de Blécourt 2007b; 2007c.
38. Ginzburg 1983:28–31.
39. Ginzburg [1985a] 2013d:134.
40. de Blécourt 2007a:128–129.
41. Ginzburg [1979a] 2013b.
42. de Blécourt 2007:139.
43. de Blécourt 2007:139.
44. Ginzburg 1990:203 note 70.
45. Ginzburg 2013f:114.