Currently music therapy is coming into vogue internationally to treat psychosomatic and neuropsychiatric diseases and disorders, however it is a therapeutic model that has its origins in ritual contexts that precede the scientific use of music as a healing tool.

A local example of traditional music therapy is tarantism , a choreutic-musical ritual with religious and therapeutic values ​​that took place in Salento (southern Puglia) from the Middle Ages to the end of the 1950s.

Tarantism is a religious healing ritual called ” musical exorcism ” which allowed, through music and dances, to heal ailments caused by the bite of a poisonous spider.

The dance-musical rite of healing

The central element of the ritual is the tarantula , called taranta , a poisonous spider which, according to local opinion, with its pinch can cause confusion, agitation, paroxysm and torpor.

The victims of the taranta were mainly women dedicated to harvesting wheat and the consequence of the bite was the possession of the spirit of the spider .

The only effective cure against this form of possession consisted in the intervention of a local orchestra made up of guitarist, violinist, tambourine player : the musicians arranged themselves around the woman lying on a sheet and intoned different pizzica melodies until they “wake up” the calibrated with the correct one. At that moment the woman began to roll and writhe on the ground in a convulsive dance that lasted several minutes, until the symbolic death of the spider which took place through the intercession of St. Paul .

The climax of the ritual took place during the night between 28 and 29 June , in the chapel of San Paolo in Galatina , in the province of Lecce. The tarantate went on pilgrimage to the Church accompanied by musicians as a sign of gratitude to the Saint for the grace received or to invoke it if it had not yet been granted.

Find out more about the Salento pizzica

Anthropological reading of tarantism

Although tarantism has been reduced by medicine to a form of mental disorder , collective hysteria or female fiction and by the Church to a form of witchcraft , the phenomenon has been thoroughly studied by anthropology for its peculiar symbolic values ​​and for its underlying meanings. to this cultural expression.

The best known study on tarantism dates back to 1959, when Ernesto de Martino went to Salento to do research on the subject. On the field, De Martino became aware of a series of elements that excluded the interpretation of tarantism in terms of disease or disorder : some areas were considered immune to the bite, the treatment was repeated every year on very specific dates, the cases were almost exclusively female, and the age and kinship relations of the tarantatas presented well-defined characteristics.

According to the anthropologist’s interpretation, the ritual was not so much aimed at healing from spider venom, but rather at expressing, through a culturally accepted performative act, a dissent towards the condition of subordination, poverty and social suffering to which they were subjected above all. Southern peasant women.

The contemporary rebirth of tarantism

The tarantism observed and described by Ernesto de Martino disappeared together with the socio-economic situation of the time. Traditional peasant society is slowly disappearing in an attempt to occupy other productive sectors, thus leaving space in the fields for new workers, in most cases migrants from other cultural traditions for whom the poisonous spider does not have the same symbolic value. The taranta does not “pinch” anymore.

However, the transformation of the southern context did not bring about the complete dissolution of the ritual, but rather a reinterpretation of it . For about ten years, in fact, tarantism has risen in new guises that integrate the elements of Salento’s cultural identity to the current condition experienced by the population of Southern Italy.

This process of recovery of the choreutic-musical elements of tarantism by municipalities, musical groups and associations, defined as neo- tarantism , is becoming a movement of cultural, social and ideological reappropriation that is arousing great public interest not only in the South but in the whole Village. 

An event that marks an important moment in the process of cultural rebirth of tarantism was the concession of the Church of San Paolo to the Municipality of Galatina by the current owner, which took place in 2005.

Furthermore, the Municipality of Galatina, in collaboration with Unesco, organizes every year an event with an emblematic name: “ La Taranta is alive: the rhythm and beat of the pizzica tarantata ”.

During the three-day event, it is possible to relive this cultural tradition and re-signify it according to the cultural codes of a changing Italy, in which the past is no longer perceived as pagan barbarism and backwardness, but as a symbol of identity of a world. which proudly resists cultural homologation.

To learn more about the relationship between tarantism and music therapy, we recommend reading the book “ Il ragno che cura. Tarantism and music therapy between past and present ”(2007) by Costanza Pintimalli.