Procession of the dead

What it is

A motif found in folk tales in many parts of the world: a line of ghosts, phantoms or souls moving together, and now and then led by a being from the Otherworld, the Underworld or the afterlife. The idea is judged to be very old. Stith Thompson's Motif-Index gives it the number E491. It is less a rite with a fixed script than a story pattern that keeps surfacing, and each region fills it with its own detail: a troop on horseback, a company of the punished, a double walking with the rest. Where the tales are told, the parade of the dead is something to be met, feared, and sometimes read as a sign.

Where it comes from

Carlo Ginzburg points to the account left by Orderic Vitalis, where the line is made up of sinners and damned people doing penance for what they did while alive. Fabio Armand, Marie-Agnès Cathiard and Christian Abry treat the mediaeval Christian versions as a "remythification" of the Wild Hunt, their term for an older notion of a spectral host riding out. How far back the idea reaches is unsettled, though it is held to be old. Christian Abry has gathered the names used for it in the Alps, southern France and northern Italy, a set of dialect forms, one of them marked as Occitan.

How it is done

Accounts of the motif describe rather than prescribe: someone meets the company and sees who marches in it. In a Raeto-Romance tale the last figure in the line is the soul of a person still alive, and the sight signals that death. A Nepali version tells of a mounted troop, five riders or more, all dressed in white. In ancient Greece the same idea settled into a public festival, the Anthesteria, held to honour and soothe the dead because they were believed to roam the city at that time.

What it is for

Two kinds of use sit side by side. In ancient Greece the festival gave the dead their due and kept them content, since they were held to be out among the living then. In the stories the procession mostly works as a warning: meeting it, and above all seeing a familiar face at the end of the line, is taken to mean a death is coming. Among the benandanti of Friuli the women were seen as protectors against the malandanti.

Who does it

For the most part the motif has no officiant: the company is met by an ordinary person in a story, and the tale needs no ritual expert. The one group tied to it is the benandanti of Friuli, who are said to take part in these processions, with the women among them looked on as beneficent protectors ranged against the malandanti. In ancient Greece the matter belonged to the city and its festival rather than to any single individual.

Peoples and places

Names change with the map. Galicia and Asturias call it the Santa Compaña. Portuguese lore tells of a person's double caught up in the line, and of the incompletely baptised forming a cursed retinue. Northern Italy and the Alps carry a cluster of dialect names, and a Croatian storyteller gave a tale of the "procesija mrtvih" in the 1970s. In Nepal the troop is the panchabhāya, or five younger brothers, said to ride in white. Hawai'i has the Nightmarchers, and traditions in Brazil carry the motif as well.

What people believe

Behind the stories lies a picture of the dead as social: they travel in companies rather than alone, and the company may have a leader from the Otherworld. Moral order shows in some versions, where the marchers are sinners paying for their lives. Baptism marks a boundary in Portuguese lore, where those who died before the rite was complete are said to join a cursed train. A living person can also appear in the line as a double.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Stith Thompson's index places the motif at E491, a sign of how widely it was catalogued. Carlo Ginzburg reads the account of Orderic Vitalis as a march of the damned doing penance. Armand, Cathiard and Abry argue that the mediaeval Christian descriptions remake the Wild Hunt. Christian Abry's survey of Alpine, southern French and northern Italian names shows how local the vocabulary is, with forms borrowed from German (Totenprozession) standing beside Romance ones.

Compare and confuse

The nearest relative is the Wild Hunt, the spectral ride that scholars treat as kin or source. Local names differ widely: Santa Compaña in Galicia and Asturias, procesija mrtvih in Croatian, panchabhāya in Nepal, Nightmarchers in Hawai'i, and across the Alps and northern Italy a spread of dialect phrases such as curs dj'ànime and il corteo dei morti.

Questions people ask about Procession of the dead

Good reading and sources

• Procession of the dead on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data