THE DREAM HUNTERS OF CORSICA

When Dorothy Carrington first visited Corsica in the aftermath of the Second World War a stranger she met in her first days told her to, "Get away from here before you are completely bewitched and enslaved." It is our great fortune that she ignored the warning, refused to flee, and in her sober yet highly engaged way fell under the alluring spell of 'The Granite Island'.

This was the title of her now classic book – an evocative blend of travel writing, history and cultural exploration. Subsequently, however, at the encouragement of the poet and Blake scholar, Kathleen Raine, Carrington wrote a focused book, 'The Dream Hunters of Corsica' on the more 'esoteric' or 'occult' aspects of that culture, still in evidence when Carrington arrived, if being increasingly occluded by the island's modernization.

The 'Dream Hunters' of the title are the 'mazzeri'. These are both men and women who are chosen (or mentally infected) usually by a relation to go, in their dreams, on a hunt. Equipped with various weapons - usual and unusual - they track down a wild boar, say, and killing it suddenly see in its face or hear in its death squeal the signature of a familiar person. That person will die within the year. It is not that the hunt is the cause of death simply its precognition but needless to say such a 'gift' is ambiguous. Mazzeri had a complex place in Corsican life - respected yet feared, tolerated but not embraced. Yet within the mazzeri themselves, there was an equalitarian acceptance and social freedom that women especially found attractive in a very patriarchal and hidebound social structure. Most mazzeri embraced their lot, some tolerated it, a few, pursued by the guilt of being fate's messenger, sought escape in an exorcism that often included being rebaptized. Carrington, herself, met two: a woman and a man, and both struck her as impressive people in their own right handling their fate as best they could. Neither thought of it as anything other than a simple, empirical reality; and, Carrington's sober assessment of the tradition does nothing to suggest otherwise.

Carrington deftly further explores this tradition speculating as to its roots – ancient seemingly by its characteristics before the island acquired settled agriculture – its relationship to engrained attitudes to fate or destiny and the attitude towards it of the Church – ambivalently tolerant and mazzeri were never subject to the Inquisition unlike those accused of the active manipulation of the world in magic or witchcraft. She, also, looks at it most relevant comparator in other cultures, namely shamanism. In this she recognizes similarities – the importance of travel in the imagined, yet real, landscapes of dream or trance and a service, if a dark one, to the wider community. But also, she sees very real differences – though both are often traditions that flow through specific families, mazzeri are simply infected by proximity to a family member who is a mazzeri whereas shamans go through s rigorous patterns of initiation following an initial crisis and an extensive training to serve their communities in a wider manner of ways, especially healing.

In Corsica, healing was the prerogative, not of mazzeri, but of a signadori though they sometimes, if rarely, coincided in the same person. This would usually be a woman, less often a man, who had this gift of healing. Sometimes this was simply the knowledge of herbal remedies but often it concerned protecting against the evil eye. For this, you would be diagnosed by olive oil (or similar) dropped in water, the less the oil coalesced, the deeper the problem. The cure would be provided by first holding the water/oil combination above your head or in your hands (in a suitable container) and blessings offered in time-honored prayers/incantations, kept secret by the signadori, and learned by them by heart on Christmas Eve when the Lord's coming keeps all evil at bay. The oil/water would then be disposed of (as sometimes would be the container depending on the depth of contamination).

Here Carrington notes a common cultural cross-reference for the evil eye, sometimes generated through the envy of the known, sometimes a more diffuse fated miasma – that is widespread. I encountered a notable example when I lived in Macedonia when a friend's sister discovered that her sister-in law was casting 'it' towards her new born baby. It was addressed by going to the Macedonian equivalent of 'signadori' who used melted metal, rather than oil, as their tool of diagnosis. The ailing baby flourished. I have often wondered since how, given the power and ubiquity of envy, do we go unprotected against its (un)conscious ministrations in our 'modern' world – and does it make a difference that such protection is not, or rarely, available?

This brings us to the great unasked question of the book – but a truly important one – if we grant that the experience of both 'mazzeri' and 'signadori' are, more often than not, what they say they were or are – precognition in one case, healing protection in the other – why did the former essentially die out in Carrington's lifetime and the other retreat? Is this simply a question of an occlusion by the change of custom – the modernization of Corsica by which a practiced tradition simply dies out – like that other well-known Corsican habit of vendetta? Or is it that for the practice(s) actually to be possible, we need to live in a world that grants them the possibility? At one cultural nexus, magic is possible, at another it is not (or is more difficult to practice) because our cultural epistemological expectations can actually change what is possible. In a way it would explain much – the past would not be populated by the deluded, attendant to miracles that could not have happened but simply populated by people more epistemologically open to the possibility of their happening, so they do? The laws of nature would be more like habits to be learnt and possibly unlearnt again? It opens the fascinating question as to whether the ''occult" has it cycles and what would be their determinants?

Be this as it may, Carrington's books are wonderfully made accounts of a culture – its history and complexity - made more strikingly convincing because Carrington's prose is so sober, straightforward, and realistic (as was the woman herself when I met her). She never idealizes but neither does she condescend. She leaves people's actual experience open to review; and, any explanation is always exploratory, an experiment in knowing, cleaving to people's actual experience, including her own. They are masterpieces of inquiry and account, and deeply recognized by the honors paid to her by the culture she inhabited so courteously.