Seekers in Sicily: Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica

by Elizabeth Bisland; Anne Hoyt

At ten o’clock a throbbing dirge begins. The first of the processions is under way. A band plays a funeral march, and is followed by acolytes swinging censers. Pious elderly citizens, perspiring in frock coats, carry tall, flaming candles that drop wax upon their clothes. A few priests, in black and purple, follow, bearing holy vessels. Behind these a row of men in mediæval armour and carrying halberds, surround a heavy, hand-borne bier hung with black velvet, on which rests a glass and gilt case containing an image of the Crucified—a life-sized image, brown with age. Presumably it has been taken from some ancient and revered Spanish crucifix, for it is crowned with thorns, is emaciated, is writhed with pain, painted with the dark, faded red of streaming wounds—one of those agonised figures conceived by the pious realism of the older Spanish sculptors.

Immediately follows another hand-borne litter upon which is standing a tall Virgin clothed in black hood and mantle—a pallid, narrow-faced Virgin—also Spanish and realistic. The delicate clasped hands hold a lace handkerchief, her breast is hung with votive silver hearts. The features are distorted with grief, the lids, reddened with tears, are drooped over sunken, deep-shadowed eyes, and her countenance seamed and withered—a poignant figure of unutterable maternal woe! Burning candles alternate with mounds of roses about the edge of the platform on which she stands.

As the dead Son and the mourning Mother pass, hats come off and heads are bowed, signs of the cross are made. A few of the older peasant women fall to their knees upon the sidewalk and mutter an Agnus Dei, a Hail Mary, with streaming tears. A priest walks last of all, rattling a contribution box at the end of a long stick, looking anxiously at the balconies and windows from which the well-to-do spectators lean. For his is but a poor church; the velvet palls and cloaks are cotton, and frayed and faded, the bier and platform old, and so massive that the stalwart bearers must set them down often to wipe away the sweat, which is why it takes advantage of the unpre-empted morning hours and is early in the field.

Later in the day, in Gaspero’s cab and under his guidance, Jane and Peripatetica take up a coign of vantage in a square debouching upon the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, along which the Jesuits are to parade at four o’clock. Here the crowd is solidly packed, the balconies and windows crowded with the aristocracy of Palermo. The Guarda Mobili in their splendid uniforms keep open the way for the marching fraternities and sodalities with their crucifixes and Virgin-embroidered banners, open a lane for the monks, for the crowds of tiny angels and cardinals who must patter for hours in the slow-moving procession. Priests and acolytes swarm; censers steam, hundreds of candles of all weights and heights flare and flame, and then slowly, slowly, to the wailing music, moves forward a splendid catafalque of crystal in which lies stretched upon a bed of white velvet, richly wrought with gold, a fair youth. A youth with white, naked limbs, relaxed and pure; not soiled by the grimy, bloody agonies of martyrdom, but poetised to a picture of Love too early dead—a charming image. And the beautiful tall Virgin is not the simple Mother of the Carpenter convulsed with despair. She is a stately, sorrowful Queen, crowned, hung with jewels, robed in superb royal weeds; proudly refusing to show the full depth of her bereavement, as she follows her dead Son amid the wax torches shining palely in the sunshine through the white and green of the sheaves of lilies that grow about her knees.

The emotional effect upon the crowd is intense; one can hear like an undertone the sound of indrawn, gulping breath. Gaspero passes his sleeve across the tears in his dark eyes.

This version of the tragedy is lifted above the realism of pain into a penetrating and lovely symbolism that swells the heart with poignant and tender emotions as the divine funeral train winds slowly away, with perfume, with lights, and with the slow sobbing of the muffled drums.

So had Sicilians two thousand years ago crowded every spring to see a similar spectacle of a weeping Queen of Love following an image of a lovely dead youth....

“Ah! and himself—Adonis—how beautiful to behold he lies on his silver couch, with the first down on his cheeks, the thrice beloved Adonis—Adonis beloved even among the dead.... O Queen, O Aphrodite, that playest with gold, lo, from the stream eternal of Acheron they have brought back to thee Adonis—even in the twelfth month they have brought him, the dainty-footed Hours.... Before him lie all that the tall tree-branches bear, and the delicate gardens, arrayed in baskets of silver; and the golden vessels are full of the incense of Syria. And all the dainty cakes that women fashion in the kneading-tray, mingling blossoms manifold with the white wheaten flour, all that is wrought of honey sweet, and in soft olive-oil, all cakes fashioned in semblance of things that fly, and of things that creep, lo, here they are set before him.

“Here are built for him shadowy bowers of green, all laden with tender anise, and children flit overhead—the little Loves—as the young nightingales perched upon the trees fly forth and try their wings from bough to bough....

“But lo, in the morning we will all of us gather with the dew, and carry him forth among the waves that break upon the beach, and with locks unloosed, and ungirt raiment falling to the ankles, and bosoms bare we will begin our shrill sweet song.