“Exactly,” said the guard who believed in the moth, “we do not know how the medicine works any more than we know how the Madonna works, or how a dream affects the lottery, but if you do nothing it is no use hoping.”
With regard to my cold, the sceptical guard, with a twinkle in his eye, recommended me to repent of the sins for which I had said it was a punishment. I was ready to do so if I could be sure as to which sins it was more particularly aimed at. The sceptical guard thought he knew.
“Did you not tell us you had been on the Mountain at the festa? When the sagrestano unveiled the picture in the sanctuary this morning, the Madonna heard the bells ring and looked round the church; no doubt she recognized you as the heretical Englishman she had seen prying into her mysteries. She probably regretted she had not paid you out at the time and, as you came her way this morning, took the opportunity of doing it now.”
I agreed that it would have been more of a miracle had she done it in a balmy August,
in the midst of other occupations, instead of in a tempestuous January when business was slack; but, on the whole, I did not believe that either the Madonna or my sins had had anything to do with my cold which I considered to be a natural, or non-miraculous, consequence of the rain and the wind. But the sceptical guard objected that even so the Madonna could not get quite clear, for, if she is credited with the rain, as she certainly is, she must be debited with its unpleasant consequences, if any.
The guard who had heard the bells ring, when he came to meet us, gravely nodded his approval, not seeing that the sceptical guard was speaking ironically, but he began to suspect presently. The guard who believed in the moth told us that he had been stationed once on the coast a little east of Girgenti, near a town where the peasants pray for rain to their patron, S. Calogero, whose painted image, carved in wood, stands in their church. If it rains at once, well and good, they return thanks, and there is an end of the matter. But if their prayers are unanswered after what they consider a reasonable time, they hold a service and punctuate their prayers with threatening cries—
The saint sometimes chooses the second alternative and sends the rain—the peasants return thanks, and all goes well. But if he is still obdurate, they assume he has chosen the first, put the threat into execution, take down S. Calogero, tie a cord about his neck and reverently cast him into the sea where they leave him till it does rain. If one waits long enough the rain always comes at last, even on the south coast of Sicily. Then they pull the poor saint out of the water, dry him, give him a fresh coat of paint and carry him back to his place in the church, with a brass band and thanksgiving—another form of the recurrent death and resurrection of the god, imitating sunset and sunrise.
“We call this treatment of S. Calogero an act of faith,” said the sceptical guard, “and yet when a gambler puts a few soldi on any number he may have dreamt of, we call it superstition. The peasant and the gambler are both playing for material gain, and S. Calogero in the sea has as much connection with the meteorological conditions as the dream has with the lottery numbers; yet the treatment of the saint has the sanction of the Church and the
act of the gambler is branded as superstitious. But to abuse a thing is not to alter its nature.”