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"Legends of the Sibilline Mountains" is a small book about an
obscure corner of Italy and an equally obscure backwater of world
literature. And yet the subjects it touches upon--amongst them, the
roots of literature in popular consciousness, the intimations of
Christian existentialism, the absorption of pagan traditions into
Christianity--reach far and wide. Goddess worship, necromantic
rites, the death of Pontius Pilate, Benevenuto Cellini, Goethe's
"Faust," Wagner's "Tannhauser..".they all connect here in a real
place of strange geological formations and magical beauty. The
Sibilline Mountains, dividing Le Marche from Umbria, were
"celebrated in the 14th and 15th centuries throughout all Europe
for magical fairy tales and necromantic initiations," according to
the author, Giuseppe Santarelli. In the most famous of these tales
a mysterious Sibyl inhabits a grotto devoted to the pleasures of
the flesh, luring knights to eternal damnation. Another legend
concerns the Lago di Pilato, a mountaintop lake where Pontius
Pilate's body had been cast that later became a destination for
demonic rituals. In a witty and personal tone Santarelli, director
of the Sanctuary of Loreto, discusses the origins of the myths in
folklore, their literary transformations through the centuries, and
the archeological traces they left behind.
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