2024/2025 - Apulia, Italy
Sēcrētus
Sēcrētus is an exploration of Southern Italy hidden traditions that have quietly endured through time, specifically in Puglia and Basilicata. It traces the structure of these traditions, their emotional and psychological meaning, and the quiet conditions that have allowed them to persist, even as modern life continues to reshape our landscape.
These are not tales of a distant past. They live in the hands and words of a few who still remember, women who heal your soul with prayers, who interpret signs in oil and water, who carry gestures older than memory. Their knowledge is rarely written, never openly taught. It moves in secrecy, passed down through matriarchal lines, and often only under strict conditions, at the end of a life, or in a moment of deep need.
The practices documented here reflect a world where religion and folklore are not separate things, but flow tightly together. Saints, alongside ancestral forces. Sickness is not just physical but can arrive through fear, envy, or the unintentional gaze of another. Healing is both an act of faith and of skill, ritualised, precise, and deeply personal.
At the centre of many of these rituals is the figure of a woman who holds a space between healer and seer, between the sacred and the feared. She does not claim power in a formal sense, but rather carries it as inheritance, as a burden, as a responsibility. Often misunderstood, sometimes avoided, still quietly sought when no other help seems to work.
Themes of magical force, enchantment, possession, malefic influence, and exorcism are closely tied to the pressure of daily negativity. In moments of psychological weakness, any brush with the negative carries the risk of something more dangerous: the collapse of moral energy, and the quiet disappearance of one’s own presence.In this light, the ritual moment, what we might call the “magical”, takes on a particular weight. It offers a way to hold the crisis still, to shape it within a known horizon of symbols, gestures. These practices do not seek to explain misfortune through logic or history, but instead to contain it, to shield the individual within a protected space. In doing so, they temporarily suspend the demand for personal responsibility, allowing the self to face darkness without being entirely exposed to it.
In a time when education, science, and medicine have reshaped our understanding of the world for the better, these older ways of knowing might seem out of place, fragile, even obsolete. And yet, they endure. Quietly, in the margins, carried by a few who still remember. Not many, and not for long, but still, they remain.
Sēcrētus does not attempt to explain these practices or to prove anything. It listens. It records. It follows traces that are fading, but not yet gone.
"Religions, however elevated they may be, if they are truly religions and not merely moral life, or knowledge, or poetry unfolded and made autonomous in the consciousness, always contain a mythical-ritual core, a public ‘externality’ or ‘display,’ a magical technique in action, however refined and sublimated."
Ernesto De Martino - Sud e Magia
