Bread and Festivities in Sicily

Abstract

Among the important parts of the traditional calendar rites in Sicily are bakery and pastry products made in special shapes. Being produced and consumed during certain rituals and being shaped to reflect their mystic connotations, these products become the integral signs of these rituals in both the constitutive and functional sense. What is refl ected in their symbolism, beliefs, and related practices is the deeply archaic peasant worldview in the framework of which these rituals had been shaped; and in particular, it is the meaning that is attached to the infl uence of chthonic forces in the cyclic reproduction of natural and social life.