Part One: Chapter IV--FAFLON

This is a chapter of 19th-century antiquarian folklore scholarship — most likely from Charles Godfrey Leland's *Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition* (1892) — in the tradition of comparative mythology and folk-belief collection. Its central claim is that the Etruscan wine god Fufluns (cognate with the Roman Bacchus) has survived as a living folk deity in Romagna, Tuscany, known among peasants and witches as "Faflon," and the author presents collected legends, a folk hymn, and fieldwork testimony as evidence. The piece also identifies a folk ritual blessing for travelers as a survival of the Roman goddess Fortuna Redux, arguing that ancient pagan deities persist in Italian peasant culture under altered names but with intact functions. What distinguishes the work is its combination of philological argument (tracing "Faflon" back through Etruscan inscriptions) with on-the-ground ethnographic collection from rural informants, blending the scholarly and the anecdotal. The author makes a pointed comparative argument that these folk-survivals preserve a "natural simplicity" entirely absent from Catholic religious imagery, which he characterizes as artificial and theatrical by contrast — implying that pre-Christian religion is more authentically rooted in lived experience than institutional Christianity. The text will appeal most to readers interested in the persistence of classical paganism in European folk custom, the history of religion in Italy, or the methodology of 19th-century folklore studies.

Part One: Chapter IV--FAFLON

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