Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/219



is a large and picturesque village in the Abruzzi Mountains, nearly three thousand feet above the sea level, and on the border of the old territory of the ancient Marsi. The Marsi claimed descent from Marsia, son of Circe, and were renowned of old for their magic arts and their power over serpents, and their descendants at Cocullo to this day claim power over serpents, and hereditary immunity from serpent- bites.

S. Domenico of Foligno is now Patron of Cocullo, and is credited with miraculous powers of healing the bites of dogs and serpents, and even hydrophobia—and toothache!—and persons are brought from all parts of South Italy, and even Sicily, to be cured at the Feast of Serpents, or Feast of S. Domenico, which is held at Cocullo on the first Thursday in May. Persons suffering from hydrophobia, it is said, either die or are cured on entering the bounds of Cocullo, and so vivid is the popular faith in this treatment that more than one southern commune has of late years voted a sum of money to defray the cost of sending a patient attacked by this terrible disease to Cocullo for the Feast of S. Domenico. In the year 1906 the festival was to be on the third of May, and I arrived there on the first. For many days beforehand the Serpari, or snake-men of the village, collect numbers of live serpents from the surrounding hills and valleys, and keep them till the morning