Le sorchie e la «synagogue»

the Aosta Valley · The Alpine arc
The whole of the Valle d'Aosta, with a lexical line separating the upper and middle valley from the lower valley; the documented trial of 1439 is in the community of Fénis

Le sorchie e la «synagogue» — the dominant trait of all the Valle d'Aosta legends about the synagogue is not visual, it is acoustic: the common denominator is the deafening noise — bells and handbells, animal cries, metallic sounds.

Variants and dialect names

synagogue, in the Valle d'Aosta patois, is the name of the night gathering of demonic entities — the local equivalent of the sabbath; the term comes from the Greek synagogē «assembly» and was used in a derogatory sense in the Middle Ages against the heretical sects. The witches are sorchie in the upper and middle valley, arèdje in the lower — this last from the Latin HAERETICUS. Neighbouring terms: revenàn (those who come back), arme eun péna (souls in torment), boune-z-arme (good souls).

What is told

The dominant trait of all the Valle d'Aosta legends about the synagogue is not visual, it is acoustic: the common denominator is the deafening noise — bells and handbells, animal cries, metallic sounds. To this is added a music that draws one dangerously into the dance: whoever comes near risks being pulled into the dancing. Taking part are the witches, the devil in person, malefic animals — cats, goats, toads — and, the decisive element, ordinary people of the village who lead a double life.

What it was forthe author’s reading

The motif of ordinary people with a double life makes the synagogue a device of suspicion about the neighbourhood, and it is the same mechanism that in the fifteenth-century trials turns into chains of denunciations. The legends of night noise then work as an interdiction: they mark out places and hours to be avoided. But the most interesting fact is linguistic, and it runs in the opposite direction to the one expected: that in the lower valley the witches are called literally «the heretics» is the proof that the vocabulary of learned persecution came down into the spoken language, and not the other way round.

Where it is attested

Lexical data and areas of attestation from the Sportello linguistico per il patois of the Regione Valle d'Aosta (Guichet linguistique), «Le mot du mois: synagogue». Article devoted to it: Alexis Bétemps, «Aspects de la “synagogue” en Val d’Aoste», in Le Monde alpin et rhodanien. Revue régionale d’ethnologie, vol. 20, no. 1-4, 1992 — a monographic issue, Êtres fantastiques dans les Alpes. Recueil d’études et de documents en mémoire de Charles Joisten, DOI 10.3406/mar.1992.1490. On the trials: Silvia Bertolin – Ezio Emerico Gerbore, La stregoneria nella Valle d’Aosta medievale, Quart, Musumeci, 2003, based on trial and inquisitorial documentation; and Ezio Emerico Gerbore, Donne e uomini nella tempesta. La stregoneria medievale in Valle d’Aosta, Pedrini, 2025. The persecution develops from the beginning of the 15th century, with a documented case at Fénis in 1439, and spreads by way of extorted confessions: the stereotype of the sabbath is formed through the trial records. Documentary infrastructure: the BREL (Bureau régional pour l’ethnologie et la linguistique), via Croix-de-Ville 16, Aosta; the Concours Cerlogne, a school competition established in 1963 and still annual, which has produced ten volumes and whose recordings are kept at the BREL; the Centre d’études francoprovençales «René Willien» at Saint-Nicolas.

Caution

Why B and not A. I have not been able to read Bétemps's article of 1992 — Persée blocks automatic access: I have verified its citation, author and DOI, not its text. And I do not have a single localised story, comune by comune: the place-names of the synagogue almost certainly exist in the materials of the Concours Cerlogne, but that survey has not been done. The entry rises to A after consulting Bétemps and at least one Cerlogne collection.

Three things that circulate without a source. «Survival of an Alpine pagan cult»: the linguistic evidence says the opposite — arèdje and synagogue are terms of learned persecution that entered the patois, and the synagogue of the legends is, at least in part, the sabbath of the trials handed back to oral narrative. «The witches burnt in the castle of…»: the Valle d'Aosta castles are a strong tourist draw and witchcraft is associated with them with some abandon; every localisation should be checked against Bertolin-Gerbore, who work on the trial records. The Servan, the Alpine sprite that the repertories attribute to the Valle d'Aosta, is in the sources I have found attested in the Valais, Savoy, Haute-Savoie, Bugey and Dauphiné, not in the Valle d'Aosta: as a Valdostan figure it is not documented.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.