Festa de la Madonna de Montevergine AKA Queer Italian Folk Medicine and Magic
This is an extra special thing! Less of a workshop, more of a celebration and gathering. For everyone not just queer italian-ish people. We'll eat some pasta, make protective little amulet bags andddddd make some magical flying ointment to get you on your broomsticks. This'll be a more flowy thing - making it 3 hours so you can come when you can and leave when you need to.
Here's the why and when:
Every February 2, hundreds of queer and trans Italians and those who love them make a long pilgrimage up Montevergine, a mountain outside of Naples to worship the Black Madonna (I can tell you more about what that means in person). There's a painting of her in the monastery there, and the faithful queers force their way into the church, past the begrudging monks and pray to her. She's been adopted in Southern Italy as a patron saint of queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people, stemming from a story that way back in 1252, she saved the lives of two gay lovers who had been tied to a tree and left to die on that very mountain.
This perhaps gayest of Catholic pilgrimages is said to go back at least until the 1600s !! Going even deeper, the monastery is said to have been built on the ruins of a more ancient temple to the Greco-Roman-Anatolian Earth goddess Cybele. She was worshipped in ecstatic, sensual rituals by eunuch priests who, if you read descriptions of them in ancient sources, would almost certainly today call themselves trans or non-binary. For ages in the region around Naples there's been a socially accepted third gender - the femminielli. The festivities at Montevergine are also known as the juta dei femminielli - the pilgrimage of the femminielli.
My dad's mom's parents immigrated to Astoria over 100 yrs ago from Italy. My great-grandma was from a little mountain town near Benevento in Southern Italy, a town renowned (and feared) as the place that all Italian witches flew to on the sabbath for their witch parties. The region also was home to many small antifascist partigiani militias that resisted the Nazis and Mussolini. I dove into Italian folk medicine and magic last year with herbalist Lisa Fazio and want to share some of what I learned and celebrate the queer witchy radical bits of Italian history and identity that get overshadowed by the mafia and the awful right wing toxic masculinity of so many Italian-Americans.
Here's a video about the juta:
This gathering will be at my apartment in Astoria! It'll be cute and cozy. Masks are not required but are of course welcome. I have a very sweet dog, so if you don't dig dogs or are allergic, this won't be the one for you! I'll send my address after you register.
This gathering is donation based. $10 funds the materials needed for each person. $25 will fund your materials and those of a neighbor! :) No one turned away for lack of funds.
If you sign up but later decide you can't make it, please let me know before the workshop so I know how much material to get.