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Posted: March 26
(Prizzi, Sicily) The stone streets of this small Sicilian hill town cooled rapidly as the Easter sun slid behind late afternoon clouds. A teacher at the Jesuit school in Palermo where the three of us were taking a holiday had invited us to visit this ancient town perched on a rocky nob about an hour and a half into the interior of the island. He grew up in Prizzi and wanted us to experience what is undeniably a unique way to celebrate Easter, the “dance of the devils.”
If that seems hard to understand, it is. We began the learning process by stopping at the home of our host’s parents. We parked the car on a narrow street clinging to an abrupt drop off and then wound up steep lanes bounded by tall, narrow houses. The parents’ house was bigger than it seemed, two rooms and some stairs, another room and more stairs, and so on. You would have to be fairly tough just to manage daily life in a hill town. Prizzi is known to be tough, one of the Mafia towns near Corleone where the Cosa Nostra leader Totó Riina came from.
There are many churches in Prizzi, but the town is best known for its devils. The town published a slick brochure that explains this custom that inexplicably has not become a major tourist attraction. There are two main costumes that are used. One is a yellow one-piece sort of overalls capped with a mask with slanted eyes and glaring fangs; the other is red with a grotesque round face crowned with horns and a long mane of hair. The yellow figure represents death while the red figures are devils whose red color represents flames.
So on Easter morning, the time when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, kids in Prizzi put on these costumes and go around town banging on doors and demanding gifts from the awakened neighbors. This is actually not so different from the U.S. custom of Halloween, but it seems strange to have it on Easter Sunday. Of course, after the children finish going around, people go off to Mass to celebrate the formal rites of the day.
The dance begins in the evening. Part of the ritual is a widespread medieval custom of remembering the meeting of Jesus and his mother after the resurrection. One group of men carry a large statue of Jesus on their shoulders, walking through the town seeking the other large statue of the Madonna, carried on their shoulders by another group. This is typical. Even St. Ignatius has a meditation in the Spiritual Exercises to imagine this encounter that is not mentioned in the Gospels but makes emotional sense.
The twist that Prizzi gives to the practice is that Death and the Devils dance in the street between the two statues, trying to prevent their coming together. The yellow and red figures rush back and forth until the two sword-carrying angels command them to bow down before Jesus. The men carrying Jesus also start rushing back and forth, and lower the statue threateningly towards the devils. I found myself hoping that the men carrying the big statue were strong enough to keep it from tipping over as they ran towards the devils.
Of course, this dance does not happen just once, but six times in various streets around town. We stayed for two of them. The town band appeared the second time, and the devils danced with each other. I think the folks enjoyed the devils more than Jesus and Mary. At first I stayed up on a balcony overlooking the scene; some friends of our host opened up their house to us. But I couldn’t get good photographs removed from the action, so I walked down into the crowd. Soon one of the devils collared me and led me dancing away to a store front beyond the crowd where I had to pay something to escape their clutches. The atmosphere seemed more Carnival-ish than Pascual. Finally, Jesus and Mary appeared, and the angels forced Death and the Devils to bow down before the One who one the victory.
The main idea seems to be that the devils are celebrating because they think they won after Jesus was crucified, but Easter means that Jesus won. I’m not sure how all this fits in with Mafia or Sicilian traditions. The people who invited us are certainly kind and good and proud of their town which they opened to us.
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