Essays · by Frater Custos · 11-minute read

The red cap

Twenty dialect names for a single sprite, from the Garfagnana to the Salento. The traits that recur are documented and surprising — but the explanation that comes to mind first is contradicted precisely by the strongest cases.

If one sets out in a row the entries of this atlas that concern the Italian household sprite, the map of the names looks like the map of twenty different creatures. Linchetto in the Garfagnana, buffardello between the Lucchesia and Liguria, mazapégul in Romagna, mazzamurello between the Marche, Abruzzo and Umbria, lenghelo in Lazio, munaciello in Naples, monachicchio in Basilicata, scazzamurieddhu in Apulia. And within each of them, further names again: caicarel, cheicatrèpp «belly-presser», laùru, carcaluru, scarcagnulu, pappardello, piffardello.

It is not the map of twenty creatures. It is the map of one single thing, called by twenty names — and the interesting part is not the resemblance, which anyone notices, but which traits exactly recur and which do not. Because the traits that recur are not all explained in the same way, and the explanation that comes to mind first — an ancient pre-Christian spirit surviving under twenty names — is contradicted precisely by the cases that at first sight support it best.

What recurs, exactly

Seven traits, each attested in at least two areas far apart from one another. It is not an impression: it is what the entries say, each with its own sources.

Two families of traits, not one

The temptation, having reached this point, is to conclude that underneath there lies a single and very ancient figure. But the seven traits are not of the same kind, and it is worth separating them, because they are explained in two different ways.

The first group describes an experience. The weight on the chest, the impossibility of moving, the presence felt in the room, the creature small yet crushing: this is not folklore travelling, it is sleep paralysis. On waking from a REM phase, consciousness returns before the muscular atonia has dissolved, and for a few tens of seconds the body remains immobile while the mind is alert; since in REM alveolar ventilation falls by about forty per cent, one feels a weight compressing the thorax. The paradox of the scazzamurieddhu — as small as a three-year-old child and capable of immobilising an adult — is the exact description of this: the crushing force does not come from the weight of the figure, it comes from the atonia.

This group of traits recurs from one end of the peninsula to the other for the simplest reason possible: the experience is the same because the brain is the same. Cheyne, Rueffer and Newby-Clark have shown that these experiences organise themselves into three nuclei that recur in every culture — the presence of an intruder, the pressure on the chest, the sensations of floating and of being touched. The Abruzzese pantafica is the only Italian figure on which a dedicated study exists: Jalal, Romanelli and Hinton interviewed sixty-eight inhabitants of Abruzzo, collecting the local explanations of the episode.

The second group describes an object and a gesture. The red cap; the fact that it can be snatched from him; that by snatching it one obtains a treasure or a power; the manes knotted in the night. Here there is no neurological experience: there is a story. And stories are not born everywhere in the same way — they travel, with people, with merchants, with transhumant shepherds, with soldiers, with books. The contiguous distribution of these traits along the Apennine ridge is the map of a circulation, not of a common root.

The trait that seems the oldest is the most recent

And here the thesis of pre-Christian survival breaks down of its own accord, on its best example.

The trait that more than any other gives the impression of coming from very far back — the sprite is the spirit of a dead child — is attested with precision in two areas: the Abruzzo-Molise mazzamurello and the Lucanian monachicchio. But in the documented formulation it is not «a dead child». It is a child who died without baptism.

And it is a difference that decides everything. Because that story cannot exist before Christianity: it needs baptism, the theology of limbo and the prohibition of burial in consecrated ground in order to stand up. It is not a pagan residue that has survived: it is a Christian figure, and a rather late one. Behind it lies a heavy demographic reality — until the early twentieth century infant mortality in the inland South was well above a hundred and fifty per thousand in the first year of life, with a substantial share of deaths in the hours following the birth, before baptism was possible. The story gives a place to children whom theology left in between and whom the cemetery would not receive.

The trait that seems the most archaic is therefore the most datable and the most modern of the seven. Those who construct continuity with a remote past usually start from exactly there.

The case of Naples, which is another case again

It is worth isolating the munaciello, because it ruins every scheme — and because it is the reminder that not all resemblances are to be explained together. The most accredited historical reconstruction identifies him with the pozzari, the workmen who maintained the tunnels of the underground aqueduct of Naples: men of slight build, suited to passing through the conduits, with a hooded cloak that made them look like monks. Climbing up the wells, they arrived inside the houses. Which explains together, and with no need of anything else, the disappearances of objects, the sudden gifts and the night-time presences.

Here the little hooded man is neither a neurological experience nor a migrating story: it is a trade. Matilde Serao, in 1881, was already collecting the other variant as well, that of the deformed child.

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What this recurrence does not prove

At the end of an article of this kind, the sentence one expects is that beneath the twenty names there lies a single ancient spirit of the European house. I am not writing it, because I do not know it, and because the material above does not support it.

What the material does support is more modest and more solid: that one group of traits describes a universal physiological fact, and recurs for that reason; that another group describes a story that has circulated, and whose distribution resembles a map of contacts; and that at least one trait is Christian and late, although it seems the oldest of them all. They are three different explanations for a single resemblance, and to mix them into one single history would mean doing exactly what this site exists in order not to do.

One thing remains that can be said without reservation, and it is not a small thing. From Fivizzano to Otranto, for centuries, when someone woke in the night unable to move and with a weight on the chest, he found a name already waiting to be given to that weight — and a way of dealing with it: to snatch off its cap. The story did not explain the episode, but it made it manageable, and it gave the person who suffered it something to do instead of only something to fear.