Badalisc

Also Known As: Andrista form; Basalisk or Basalisc in the wider Valsaviore, and the two names refer to the same being
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Italian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It spends a year in the woods above the village watching everything the villagers do, and gives all of it back in one rhymed speech.
Role in Mythos: It is the licence a small alpine community grants itself once a year to hear its own misconduct read out loud without anybody having to accuse a neighbour directly.
Relation to Humans: The people of Andrista hunt it down on Epiphany eve, rope it and walk it into the square so its speech can be read to them. It hurts nobody, and the moment the last line is read it is fed, teased, asked to dance and let go.

The clappers start somewhere below the houses, a dry wooden rattle that carries badly in January air and is meant to. Andrista is a scatter of stone roofs above the Valsaviore, high enough that the cold works its way into the mortar, and on the evening of the fifth of January a dozen men come out of a back room at the edge of the village wearing other people’s faces. Old men with white beards, old women, a young lady with a painted mouth. Each one carries a torch. They are going up into the trees to catch the thing that has been watching them all year.

It has been up there since the last time, doing the only work it has. It listens. It sees the wrong door open at the wrong hour, the argument at the wash house, the money that changed hands and should not have. It keeps all of it. Then, some days before Epiphany, it comes down off the slope and hides itself in one of the village stables, a different one each year, and waits to be found.

The hunt is loud and deliberately shambolic. The masked men run the lanes shouting at one another in dialect, doubling back, taking a route nobody plans twice, and the racket only settles when somebody hits on the right stable and the beast is forced out into the open.

What comes out is about the height of a man and shaped like nothing in particular. A young man carries it from inside. The head is an enormous timber frame skinned with hide, fitted with glass eyes and a pair of horns, and the mouth is the whole point of the thing: a red cavern worked by a stick from within, so the jaws bang open and shut without pause for as long as it is in the village. The teeth are hobnails, the same iron studs shepherds once hammered into wooden shoe soles to keep them from wearing through and from sliding on ice. Below the head the body is a heavy woollen blanket. Within living memory it was a sheepskin. There is no line anywhere on it where the animal is supposed to end.

The written accounts cannot agree on the hide. One has goat skin stretched over the frame with cow horns above it, another has cow skin and goat horns, and a recent restoration quietly replaced the goat with sheep. Nobody in Andrista appears to be losing sleep. What every account does agree on is that the creature is mute. Not a word, not a growl, in any telling.

Once found it is roped, partly so it cannot get at the crowd. Two masks go ahead of it throwing water across the stones and sweeping the way clean with a broom, which is a peculiar courtesy to show a monster. Behind come the rest of the village and an accordion. Somewhere in the middle of it walks the signorina, a man in skirts and a borrowed wig, placed there because the beast is understood to have appetites and somebody has to hold its attention.

The procession climbs to the terrace in front of the town hall, above the main square. There the Badalisc hands a folded sheet of paper to one of the masks, and the mask turns to the square and reads it out in the creature’s name. This is the ‘ntifunada, and it is why anyone comes.

The speech is in dialect and in rhyme and it is about them. A year of the village’s gossip, its scandals, its small disgraces and its politics, delivered in verse to a square packed with the people it concerns. The sins get named. The sinners do not. Everyone standing there knows exactly which is which, and that gap is the entire engine of the thing: the pleasure of hearing it finally said, and the drop in the stomach of the one it is about.

Where any of this came from is not recorded, because it was never written down, only handed on. Testimony gathered in the valley puts the rite at Andrista for at least a century and very likely a good deal longer than that. The floor of the Camonica valley is carved with thousands of prehistoric rock figures and it is tempting to go looking for the beast among them, but that is a hope rather than a finding, and nothing joins the two ends.

The name is the better puzzle. Across most of the Valsaviore the creature is a Basalisk, and Badalisc is Andrista’s own version of the word. One explanation is unromantic and has a paper trail: a notary named Bazalico, or Basalico, turns up in a bundle of letters from the end of the 1600s still kept in the Andrista parish archive, arguing Andrista’s side of a bitter quarrel with Cevo that opened in 1686 over the parish Bishop Bartolomeo Gradenigo had granted the hamlet three years before. Once the quarrel was settled, the lawyer’s name may simply have slid sideways onto a mask that already existed. A second explanation reaches for a serpent said to lie in the caves of the Androla and to kill with a look, on the reasoning that a monster sharing the snake’s den would end up sharing its name. The third and most domestic derives it from badhelì, a small wooden bucket, on the grounds that the head is made of wood. Wood does keep surfacing. The clappers that announce it are wood. So is the ash sword one of the hunters uses to keep it at arm’s length after the capture.

The obvious answer, that this is just the basilisk of the bestiaries wandered up into the Alps, is the one the people who have looked hardest are least willing to hand over. The resemblance sits in the sound of the word and not much else.

The church fought the festival for a long time on the grounds that the thing was pagan, and for women the prohibition was sharpest. To see the Badalisc or to hear its speech was to break a taboo, and at Epiphany Mass the following morning any woman who had broken it was refused Communion. The older accounts state flatly that only men took part. Fieldwork from the last twenty years describes women helping the men into their costumes and then walking in the procession with everyone else. Something loosened. Nobody recorded when.

The sixth of January belongs to the children, who are shut out of the rest of it entirely. They go door to door collecting maize flour until they have enough, carry it to the osteria before evening Mass and cook the Polenta del Badalisc. Until recently each of them brought a small salame as well, made deliberately at slaughtering time and kept hanging on the family pole all year for this one afternoon.

Its power lasts about two hours and rests on a single fact: it was outside all year, and outside is where things get seen. It cannot be lied to about the last twelve months. It cannot be bargained with, because it does not speak. Roped, hemmed in by torchlight and outnumbered forty to one, it is still the most frightening object in the valley, and the rope is there less to stop it leaving than to stop it coming forward.

The limits are just as precise. Being mute, it cannot deliver its own verdict and depends completely on whichever villager is holding the paper. It gets caught. Every year, without exception, it gets caught. And when the last line of the speech has been read the whole apparatus collapses at once: the authority goes out of it, the fear goes with it, and inside a few minutes somebody is jokingly asking the monster to dance. Then it is stood in the corner of the room while the polenta comes out, and afterwards it is put back into the scrub above the houses to begin listening again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Badalisc?

The Badalisc is a mythical beast of Andrista, a hamlet of Cevo in Italy’s Val Camonica, and the costumed mask that represents it. It is said to live in the woods of the Valsaviore, watching the village all year. Every Epiphany eve it is hunted down, tied with a rope and brought into the square so its speech can be read aloud.

What happens at the Badalisc festival?

On the evening of 5 January masked men carrying torches search the village until they find the Badalisc hidden in a stable, then rope it and lead it in procession to the terrace in front of the town hall. There an interpreter reads its speech to the crowd, and the night ends with dancing, polenta and grilled food. The afternoon of 6 January belongs to the children, who collect maize flour door to door and cook the Polenta del Badalisc.

What is the ‘ntifunada?

The ‘ntifunada is the Badalisc’s speech: a rhymed monologue in Camunian dialect that airs a year of the village’s gossip, scandals and politics. Because the creature is mute, a masked villager reads it out on its behalf. It names the misdeeds but never openly names the person responsible.

Does the name Badalisc come from the basilisk?

The resemblance to the basilisk is disputed and treated as unresolved. Three explanations circulate: that the name comes from a notary called Bazalico who argued Andrista’s case in a parish dispute with Cevo in 1686, that it comes from a serpent called Basalisk said to live in the caves of the Androla, or that it comes from badhelì, a small wooden bucket, because the mask’s head is built of wood.

Why were women once forbidden to see the Badalisc?

The church opposed the festival as pagan, and for women seeing the Badalisc or hearing its speech was treated as breaking a taboo. Any woman who did so was refused Communion at the Epiphany Mass the next morning. That restriction has since fallen away, and women now help dress the masks and walk in the procession.