Canto III of Il bastone miracoloso contains the most elaborate scene of the entire poem, as well as the most awkward one: a friar, Father Bonanchiena, decides that the cane harbors a diabolical spirit and performs a full-fledged exorcism on it, complete with stole, holy water, and a Latin formula—"parti, o espíritu inhumano, el Cielo y yo te lo ordenamos" ["depart, oh inhumane spirit, Heaven and I command you to do so"]. The cane, which has no patience for liturgy, knocks him down with a single blow along with the aspergillum. Father Inquisitor then steps in, offended that a minor friar would arrogate to himself jurisdiction over the Devil—a matter that belongs to him by office—and convenes his own tribunal.
That is where the poem gets truly interesting: before proceeding, the friars earnestly debate what exactly the object before them is. Fra Garofano suggests it might be Moses's staff. Brachino counter-proposes that perhaps it is Saint Joseph's cane, the very one that blossomed in the legend of his selection as Mary's husband. The Inquisitor dismisses both hypotheses with an argument that is logically flawless within his own framework: Moses's staff would never strike sacred backs, so it cannot be that. It can only be the Devil.
For the final confrontation, each friar arms himself with his trusted relic: Fra Broscia carries wrapped in a black cloth a lock of Muhammad's beard; Fra Garofano puts on, as a protective undershirt, a shred of Savonarola's burned skin. The cane, naturally, does not discriminate: it beatings the Inquisitor first, out of hierarchical precedence, and then everyone else without exception of relic.
It is easy to read this as simple anticlerical mockery—and to a large extent, it is—but there is something more precise hidden in the scene, and it has to do with procedure, not belief. What Pignotti is parodying is not superstition in the abstract: it is an actual protocol, backed by centuries of scholastic refinement, meant to distinguish genuine diabolical possession from fraudulent cases or mere illness. The tradition is called discretio spirituum—discernment of spirits—and its foundational treatise, De probatione spirituum by Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, dates to 1415. Gerson was not writing a manual of superstition: he was trying to solve, with the intellectual tools of his era, a genuine epistemological problem—how to distinguish a true vision or possession from a feigned one, or from natural delirium—and he proposed evaluation criteria, not blind faith. Two centuries later, the Rituale Romanum of 1614 systematized those criteria into an almost clinical protocol: to confirm a genuine possession, the exorcist had to verify that the possessed spoke or understood languages they had never learned, manifested physical strength disproportionate to their age or build, revealed knowledge of hidden or distant things, and displayed a violent aversion to the sacred. Four verifiable criteria, in theory replicable by any trained examiner. A protocol, word for word.
Pignotti’s scene dramatizes, almost without exaggeration, that exact procedure: identification of the nature of the phenomenon by eliminating alternative hypotheses (Moses's staff? Saint Joseph's cane? ruled out by internal argument), application of the standardized ritual (aspersion, formula of incantation), and empirical verification of the outcome (does it yield to the command or not?). The joke isn't that the inquisitors are methodless idiots. The joke, far crueler and more interesting, is that they do have a method—a serious method, inherited from centuries of serious scholastic debate—and they apply it with total procedural honesty to a phenomenon that, within their own conceptual framework, has zero chance of being correctly diagnosed, because the entire framework is misdirected from the start. It is not the absence of rigor that condemns them: it is having rigor pointing in the wrong direction—something that, let us be honest, can happen to any discipline, including those we call science today without quotation marks.
And here it is worth pausing for a second on the scene's most uncomfortable detail, the one Pignotti likely included purely for comedic effect without fully measuring its edge: Savonarola’s burned skin, used as a protective amulet against the Devil. Because Girolamo Savonarola did not die of natural causes, nor was he a canonized saint with official relics. He was hanged and burned in Florence's Piazza della Signoria in 1498 by order of the Church itself, excommunicated as a heretic and schismatic, accused of false prophecy. The very institution that decided his body should burn like a heretic's is the one that—generations later, at least in the popular imagination Pignotti mockingly captures—ends up treasuring a fragment of that burned skin as if it were a shield against evil. Yesterday's heretic is today's talisman, and the distance between both statuses depends on nothing Savonarola did or refrained from doing: it depends entirely on which side of the institutional verdict he fell, and how much time has passed since.
If Savonarola's ghost could look in and read his own cameo in Pignotti's poem, I doubt he would laugh. But he would probably say something like this: that he too was once a "phenomenon" subjected to the same type of scholastic discernment that now passes judgment on the cane—his visions, his prophecies about the punishment of Rome, were evaluated using the exact tools of discretio spirituum, and the tribunal decided, with total procedural conviction, that they came from the wrong side. That the criterion that condemned him is formally identical to the one his institutional executioners would later use, without irony, against a wooden stick in Congo. And that the burned skin someone now wears as an amulet is physical proof that the verdict of a tribunal—however rigorous it may seem at the time, however well-founded on the best available theory—is not a fact about reality: it is a bet with an expiration date. The cane struck the Inquisitor just like everyone else. Savonarola, who knew firsthand what it was like to be on the receiving end of the cane back when it was still called the stake, could have warned him that sooner or later, it always ends up striking the one holding the protocol, too.
Generated with AI · Revised by me.
