Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/301

Rh with the stream, lake or sea in which they have met their fate.

Returning, however, to the occult influence supposed to be exercised by the corpse of an offender put to death by legal authority, it is remarkable to find that the Sicilians yet indulge in a kind of criminal-worship, a cult of their most notorious felons and cut-throats. Mr. Leland says in Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, 1892, pp. 245, 246, that in old times those souls of men who had slain many victims were invoked above all others, the belief being that they carried into the other world the audacious power which they had won by blood. "This worship of dead criminals is to-day in full action in Sicily  as the reader may learn in detail from a chapter in the Biblioteca delle Tradizioni popolari Siciliane, edited by Guiseppe Pitrè, vol. xvii., Palermo, 1889. In it we are told that when murderers and other atrocious criminals have been beheaded, if they do but confess and receive absolution before death, they are believed to become a specially favoured kind of saints, who, if invoked when anyone is in danger of being robbed and slain, come down from heaven and aid the victim. And this is carried so far that there is actually a chiesa delle anime de corpi decollati (a 'church of the souls of beheaded bodies') in Palermo, with many pictures of the holy miracles wrought by the sainted murderers." Mr. Leland adds that these saints have frequently been the very scum of Sicilian brigandage, outrage, robbery, and wickedness—incarnate fiends—yet they are adored, and their relations are proud of them, while no word is said as to their unfortunate victims who have very probably expired without the benefit of ecclesiastical rites. The church of the Madonna of the Drowned is, like that of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies, also visited by those praying for protection against danger. This custom is illustrated by the dialogue and action in Rosa: A story of Sicilian Customs, by G. Pitré, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. lxxiv., pp. 624-640;