The Corsican Mazzeru at the Dawn of XXI E Century: The End of a Shape of Shamanism?

Abstract

The mazzeru or the mazzera is a key character of the Corsican society, he is at the same time an intermediary psychopompe and an actor of the symbolic passage of the land of the living towards the world of the deaths. In Corsica, the said person mazzeru is a very real individual being a member of the community, which dreams mostly about a hunting during its sleep. During this dream, he brings (shoots) down an animal; at this precise moment his function of intermediary of the worlds, boatman of souls, is going to become a reality because when he turns the animal, the head represents a person who will soon die. This intermediary of the worlds is situated in the sociopolitical limits of the villages of the island, his powers him being similar in a genre of chamane. In Corsica, this phenomenon seems to have resisted partially the christianization and the numerous religious prohibitions, which were able neither to cover completely this archaic religion, nor to transform it. The mazzeru is situated after all in the center of a vision meadow and post-mortem specific, which makes perceive (collect) the death as a passage. We shall develop our reflection around the testimonies, the evolutions of this survival and the problem of its transmission at the time of the globalization.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n8p764