Benandanti
Based on Wikipedia: Benandanti
The Night Battles
Four times a year, on certain Thursdays that fell during the Catholic Church's fasting periods, farmers in northeastern Italy would fall into a deep sleep—and their souls would slip out of their bodies to wage war.
They called themselves the benandanti, which translates roughly to "good walkers." And in the late 1500s and early 1600s, they told the Church authorities something extraordinary: that they were spiritual soldiers fighting to protect their villages from witches who wanted to destroy the harvest. They claimed to leave their physical forms behind, transforming into mice, cats, rabbits, or butterflies, and fly through the night sky to do battle in the fields.
The men fought with stalks of fennel. The witches—the malandanti, or "bad walkers"—fought back with sorghum stalks, the same plant used to make witches' brooms. If the benandanti won, the crops would flourish. If they lost, famine would follow.
This was not a metaphor to them. This was real.
Born with a Veil
The benandanti believed you couldn't choose to become one of their number. You were born into it, marked from your very first breath by a sign that set you apart from ordinary people: the caul.
A caul is the amniotic membrane that sometimes covers a newborn's face at birth—a thin, filmy veil that must be peeled away. Most cultures throughout history have attached special significance to children born this way. In the Friuli region of Italy, where the benandanti tradition flourished, the caul was believed to grant extraordinary powers. Soldiers thought it could protect them from harm. Lawyers believed it could help them win cases. And for certain children, it was the mark of a destiny they could not escape.
Mothers would teach their caul-born children about the benandanti from infancy, passing down the traditions that would shape not only their waking beliefs but their very dreams and visions. This is a striking detail. It suggests that the ecstatic experiences these people reported—the sensation of flying, of leaving the body, of battling supernatural enemies—were conditioned by the stories they absorbed in childhood. Their minds were, in a sense, programmed to have these specific visions.
The historian Norman Cohn put it this way: both the waking thoughts and the trance experiences of individuals can be deeply conditioned by the generally accepted beliefs of the society in which they live. The benandanti didn't just believe in spirit flight. They experienced it, in states that may have resembled what we now call sleep paralysis or lucid dreaming, because their culture had prepared them to experience exactly that.
The Spirit Journeys
The timing was precise. The benandanti gathered their spiritual forces during the Ember Days—four sets of three days each year when Catholics were expected to fast and pray. These were liminal times, thresholds between seasons, moments when the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds was believed to grow thin.
On these nights, the benandanti said, their spirits would depart their sleeping bodies and take animal form. They would ride through the sky on various beasts, traveling to distant locations—sometimes nearby villages, sometimes as far as Verona, over a hundred miles away. There they would meet other benandanti for what sounds, in the old testimonies, like a combination of carnival and combat.
One benandante described it this way:
Sometimes they go out to one country region and sometimes to another, perhaps to Gradisca or even as far away as Verona, and they appear together jousting and playing games... the men and women who are the evil-doers carry and use the sorghum stalks which grow in the fields, and the men and women who are benandanti use fennel stalks.
The battles had practical stakes. When the benandanti won, the wine would be good and the wheat would grow tall. When the witches prevailed, they would sneak into homes and cellars, spoiling the wine by dropping filth into the barrels, cursing the fields, bringing disease and death.
But the men and women of the benandanti had different roles. The men were warriors, fighting in the fields. The women attended great feasts in the spirit world, dancing and drinking with processions of spirits, animals, and faeries. At these gatherings, presided over by a mysterious female figure called "the abbess" who sat in splendor at the edge of a well, they would learn which villagers were destined to die in the coming year.
This is a crucial distinction from the witch trials happening elsewhere in Europe at the same time. The early benandanti accounts contained none of the elements that defined the demonic witches' sabbath in church doctrine. There was no Devil. No renunciation of Christ. No trampling of crucifixes or desecration of holy objects. The benandanti saw themselves as Christian soldiers, fighting on the side of good.
As one of them told the Inquisition:
I am a benandante because I go with the others to fight four times a year, that is during the Ember Days, at night; I go invisibly in spirit and the body remains behind; we go forth in the service of Christ, and the witches of the devil; we fight each other, we with bundles of fennel and they with sorghum stalks.
The Inquisition Takes Notice
In early 1575, a village priest named Don Bartolomeo Sgabarizza stumbled onto something that confused him.
A man named Paolo Gasparotto, who lived in the village of Iassico, had given a charm to a local miller hoping to heal the miller's sick son. The priest, intrigued by this folk magic, summoned Gasparotto to learn more. What he heard was bewildering.
Gasparotto explained that the child had been "possessed by witches" but saved by the benandanti—or "vagabonds," as they were also called. He went on to describe the Thursday gatherings, the fighting and playing and leaping about, the battles between fennel and sorghum. He even offered to bring the priest along on the next journey.
Sgabarizza didn't know what to make of any of this. He brought Gasparotto before the Inquisitor, Fra Giulio d'Assis, at the monastery of San Francesco in Cividale del Friuli. The benandante spoke freely, adding more details: after their battles and games, the witches and benandanti alike would pass through villages looking for clean water to drink. If they couldn't find it, the witches would sneak into cellars and ruin the wine.
The priest and the Inquisitor exchanged glances. Was this man serious?
Sgabarizza investigated further. He found another self-proclaimed benandante, a public crier named Battista Moduco, who corroborated the stories. But ultimately, Sgabarizza and the Inquisitor decided to drop the matter. They concluded, it seems, that these were just tall tales—colorful peasant superstitions that didn't warrant serious attention.
That might have been the end of it.
The Trap Closes
Five years later, in 1580, a new Inquisitor named Fra Felice da Montefalco reopened the case.
Gasparotto was brought in for questioning. This time, terrified, he denied everything. He claimed he had never been a benandante, that such things were against God. The Inquisitor wasn't convinced. Gasparotto was thrown into prison.
That same day, the authorities rounded up Battista Moduco. Unlike Gasparotto, Moduco remained defiant. He admitted openly to being a benandante and described his visionary battles against the witches. He insisted that he and his fellow benandanti were fighting "in service of Christ." Montefalco, perhaps surprised by his forthrightness, let him go.
The next day, Gasparotto was interrogated again. This time he confessed—he was indeed a benandante. He even named two people he claimed were witches. The Inquisitor released him, ordering him to return for further questioning.
When that questioning came, in September 1580, Gasparotto made a fateful addition to his story. He claimed that an angel had summoned him to join the benandanti.
An angel.
For Montefalco, this changed everything. In the theological framework of the Inquisition, such an angel could only be one thing: a demon in disguise. Satan, after all, was known to appear as an angel of light to deceive the faithful. The Inquisitor began pressing Gasparotto, suggesting that his beautiful angel was actually the Devil.
Under sustained psychological pressure, isolated and frightened, Gasparotto began to doubt himself. His certainty crumbled. Within days, he told Montefalco exactly what the Inquisitor wanted to hear: that yes, the apparition must have been the Devil tempting him. When Moduco was brought in again, he confessed the same thing.
The trap had closed.
The Transformation
This is the pattern that the historian Carlo Ginzburg, who rediscovered the benandanti in the 1960s, found so devastating and so illuminating.
The benandanti began as something genuinely strange—a folk tradition that didn't fit the church's template of satanic witchcraft at all. These people believed they were defenders of their communities, Christian warriors fighting evil. They didn't worship the Devil. They didn't even encounter him in their visions.
But the Inquisition could only understand supernatural experience through one lens. If you claimed to leave your body at night, if you attended gatherings with other spirits, if you possessed magical powers, then you must be part of the demonic conspiracy that the church had been battling for centuries. The Inquisitors asked leading questions. They applied pressure. They suggested the answers they expected to hear.
And gradually, over decades of interrogation and persecution between 1575 and 1675, the benandanti tradition was warped into something it had never been. The night battles became the witches' sabbath. The defenders of the harvest became servants of Satan. The very word "benandante" in Friulian dialect became synonymous with "strega"—witch—a corruption of meaning that persisted into the twentieth century.
Gasparotto and Moduco were ultimately convicted of heresy. They escaped excommunication but were sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to pray on the Ember Days for God's forgiveness. Their penalties were later reduced to two weeks of confinement in Cividale.
They got off lightly compared to what would follow. Over the next century, as the Inquisition continued to investigate the benandanti, the accused increasingly confessed to the standard witch-trial narrative: devil worship, sabbaths, maleficent magic. Whether they genuinely came to believe this about themselves, or simply learned what they needed to say to survive, is impossible to know.
What the Benandanti Tell Us
When Carlo Ginzburg published his study of the benandanti in 1966—titled "The Night Battles" in English translation—it sent ripples through the academic study of witchcraft and folklore.
The standard historical interpretation had been that witch trials were essentially the persecution of innocent people accused of impossible crimes—that there was no "there" there, just mass hysteria and institutional cruelty. Ginzburg's research suggested something more complicated. Here was evidence of genuine folk beliefs, visionary traditions with deep roots, that existed independently of church doctrine about satanic witchcraft. The benandanti weren't making things up under torture. They were describing experiences that were real and meaningful to them, shaped by a tradition that may have predated Christianity itself.
Ginzburg argued that the benandanti were part of a widespread European fertility cult, fragments of which survived in various forms across the continent. He drew connections to similar traditions elsewhere—most strikingly, to the werewolf beliefs of Livonia, a region encompassing modern Latvia and Estonia, where men claimed to transform into wolves to battle witches for the sake of the harvest.
Not all scholars have accepted Ginzburg's sweeping interpretation. Some argue he overstated the connections between disparate folk traditions. Others question whether we can really speak of an ancient fertility cult persisting beneath the surface of Christian Europe for centuries.
But certain aspects of the benandanti story seem beyond dispute. Here was a tradition of visionary experience—call it trance, ecstasy, shamanism, sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming—that ordinary farming people experienced as absolutely real. They were not lying. They genuinely believed they left their bodies to battle for their communities' welfare.
And here was an institution, the Inquisition, that could only interpret such experiences as demonic. Over a century of sustained pressure, the institution didn't simply punish the benandanti—it transformed them, forcing their beliefs into a mold they had never occupied. The defenders of the harvest became, in official memory and eventually in popular understanding, the witches they had claimed to fight.
The Power of the Frame
There is something almost unbearably sad about the interrogation records. You can watch, across decades of testimony, as the benandanti lose their bearings.
The early accounts are confident, even proud. The benandanti know who they are. They are good walkers, Christian soldiers, protectors of the harvest. They speak freely about their experiences because they believe they have nothing to hide.
The later accounts are confused, contradictory, desperate. Under interrogation, the accused try to figure out what the Inquisitors want to hear. They absorb the theological framework being imposed on them. The angel becomes a demon. The battle for fertility becomes a sabbath of evil. The fennel stalk becomes a witch's tool.
The Inquisition didn't simply extract false confessions. It rewrote reality itself—or at least, it rewrote the way people understood and described their own inner experiences. The benandanti's children and grandchildren grew up in a world where the very word for their ancestors' tradition had become a synonym for evil.
This is what makes the story of the benandanti more than historical curiosity. It's a case study in how institutions with sufficient power can reshape not just behavior but belief, not just public statements but private understanding. The benandanti didn't just stop claiming to be good walkers. Over generations, they forgot there had ever been such a thing.
What was lost? We can't know for certain. Perhaps it was simply peasant superstition, a collection of vivid dreams and trances that meant nothing beyond the meaning their dreamers assigned them. Or perhaps, as Ginzburg believed, it was the last fading echo of traditions stretching back thousands of years, ways of understanding the relationship between human communities and the natural world that Christianity had never fully displaced.
Either way, by the time historians came looking for the good walkers, there was no one left who remembered what they had been.
Fennel and Sorghum
One detail haunts me from the old accounts: the weapons.
The benandanti fought with fennel stalks. Their enemies fought with sorghum. These weren't arbitrary choices—both plants had deep associations in Mediterranean folk culture. Fennel was considered protective, beneficial, a ward against evil. Sorghum was the stuff of witches' brooms, associated with malevolent magic.
There's something almost playful about the image: men and women in spirit form, battling in moonlit fields with nothing more dangerous than plant stalks. It doesn't match our modern imagination of supernatural combat, all lightning and fire and dramatic special effects. It's humbler than that. More earthy. These were farming people, and even their spiritual warfare was rooted in the plants they knew, the crops they tended, the rhythms of sowing and harvest that structured their lives.
The sorghum stalks and fennel wands were swept away with everything else. But somewhere in the Friuli region, those plants still grow. The descendants of the benandanti walk past them without a second thought, having long forgotten what their ancestors believed those humble stalks could do.