Lo spazio d’esperienza delle processioni religiose

The present article analyzes the phenomenology and semiotics of religious processions. On the one hand, these rituals succeed in congregating several individual agencies, thus helping them to obliterate the frontier between the sacred environment of the place of worship and the profane environment of the space surrounding it. Consequently, in religious processions, subjects experience an enlargement of the environment of the sacred that encourages them to believe in its omnipresence, in the reassuring belief that their entire existence takes place (literally and metaphorically) under the protection of transcendence. On the other hand, ‘accidents’ caused by the persistence of individual agencies within the collective one constantly ‘threaten’ the symbolic efficacy of religious processions: the tentative expansion of the sacred environment into the profane one results in a symmetrical expansion of the latter into the former. The collective agency of rituals disintegrates into the individual agencies of routines until subjects not only no longer believe that transcendence extends its protection also over the profane environment, but on the contrary, fear that such protection is fragile in the sacred environment as well. Rituals do not only turn into routines but collapse into the re-emergence of the insecurity of transition. Acclimation and tolerance turn into invasion and exile. The profane invades the sacred, and the believer feels exiled even in the protected environment of the place of worship.