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Rituals of belief Photo by Susan Caperna Lloyd Lucy Reyes is pushed to her crucifixion site in the Kapitangan church courtyard by Roman soldiers on Good Friday in the Philippines. She personifies resistance before sacrifice can be made and reenacts a component of Old World fertility rites. Sunday Apr 1, 2018 at 6:00 AM Sarah Lemon for the Mail Tribune @thewholedish Bearing the dark Madonna’s bier through the streets of Trapani, Sicily, this week will lift a weight from Susan Caperna Lloyd’s shoulders. This Easter concludes Lloyd’s professional and spiritual journey photographing Holy Week folk rituals in Sicily, Spain, the Americas and the Philippines. Thirty-five years in the making, the Ashland artist’s work will be acquired by the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and culminate in a book titled “The Crucifixion of Lucy Reyes - Holy Week Rituals of Sacrifice, Fertility and Power.” “Everyone experiences a resurrection — a rebirth,” says Lloyd. “I had found so much power with the Madonna in Trapani because she leads us through the dark.” Trapani’s Madonna of Sorrows led Lloyd in the late 1980s to the Philippines, where on assignment for National Geographic she photographed the crucifixion enacted by Lucy Santos-Reyes, a woman who offered herself as a ritual sacrifice to revitalize her soul. “She is a healer, a folk healer,” says Lloyd. “She does this to gain power to heal … she does not bleed.” In her altered state of consciousness, Santos-Reyes suffers no visible injury as nails are driven through her hands and feet. The woman’s ecstatic trance and bloodless resilience, says Lloyd, are nothing short of “amazing.” The graphic scene is one among Holy Week’s numerous and diverse “mysteries” that have compelled Lloyd for so many years, beginning with Trapani’s Procession of the Mysteries, which she characterizes as a predominantly folk, rather than religious, event. “It was synthesized,” says Lloyd of Catholic symbols and pageantry fused with springtime fertility rites of cultures that predate Christianity. “These agricultural rituals were going on for millennia. “What is fertility? It is the feminine.” Reclaiming the sacred feminine and striving toward female equality have been hallmarks of Lloyd’s generation. It perhaps comes as little surprise that fellow female scholars in anthropology, ethnography and religious studies have called Lloyd’s work groundbreaking. At University of Rome, Lloyd plans an April 9 lecture titled “And Then We Can All Come Home: Further Journeys With Trapani’s Dark Madonna.” Pilgrimages to France and India acquainted Lloyd with another saint and deity, Sara Kali of the Roma people and her predecessor, Hindu Kali, a dark mother figure who bears her faithful’s troubles and sorrows before symbolically drowning them in holy bodies of water. “Twenty thousand statues of her are thrown into the Ganges,” says Lloyd. “All your issues go into the water.” While witnessing the ritual in India three years ago, Lloyd could fully process the death of her sister, Angela, several years previously. An accomplished dancer who was studying flamenco in Spain, Angela died unexpectedly, as did Lloyd’s other younger sister, Shaun. Both were in their 40s. “It broke me up, and I grieved a lot over that,” says Lloyd, who was raised Catholic in Medford. Because Lloyd promised Angela, on the very night of her death, that she would join her in Spain to dance flamenco, there was no question of keeping her word and posthumous travel plans. Learning and photographing flamenco, as well as the Roma culture and Hindu Kali, have since shifted Lloyd’s focus from documenting Holy Week. “This is my last visit,” she says, adding that her husband, Tom, an Ashland lawyer; sons, Sky and Shane of Washington D.C.; and brother, Gary Caperna, a Medford architect, all accompanied her this week to Sicily with hopes to participate in the Trapani procession by carrying one of the biers. “This is not some weird folk thing,” says Lloyd. “It is joining a community … to process all of our losses and griefs.” It isn’t just faith, tradition or contemplation of the loss of family, friends and other significant people that draws participants and onlookers to Holy Week processions, says Lloyd. Everyone moved by the ceremony is in effect searching for some lost part of him or herself, echoed by the Madonna’s daylong meanderings through the streets of Trapani, she says. “She is looking for her lost son in the procession.” Even as women in many parts of the world have been gaining strength and momentum for social change, says Lloyd, men, particularly young men, seem lost amid changing cultural values and the deviation from longtime identities and rites of passage. “Our sons do not have Boy Scouts anymore, bar mitzvah, confirmation … Where are their rituals?” she asks. The desire to be an individual who’s part of something bigger, evidenced by modern-day trends from tattooing to political protests, says Lloyd, is revealed in her work and forthcoming book. Hers is both a commentary — and a quest — of “going back to your roots before they are lost.” “These rituals are timeless and do not change,” she says. “They are getting even more popular.” See Lloyd’s photography and read more about her work at https://capernalloyd.wixsite.com/sclloyd Reach freelance writer Sarah Lemon at [email protected].