   #copyright

Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches

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   Title page of the original edition of Aradia.
   Enlarge
   Title page of the original edition of Aradia.

   Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches is a 1899 book by Charles Godfrey
   Leland. The book is an attempt to portray the beliefs and rituals of an
   underground religious witchcraft tradition in Tuscany that had survived
   for centuries until Leland's claimed discovery of its existence in the
   1890s. Scholars have disputed the veracity of this claim. Still, the
   book has become one of the foundational texts of Wicca and
   Neo-paganism.

   The text is a composite. Some of it is Leland's translation into
   English of an original Italian manuscript, the Vangelo (gospel). Leland
   reported receiving the manuscript from his primary informant on Italian
   witchcraft beliefs, a woman Leland called "Maddalena". The rest of the
   material comes from Leland's research on Italian folklore and
   traditions, including other related material from Maddalena. Leland had
   been informed of the Vangelo's existence in 1886, but it took Maddalena
   eleven years to provide him with a copy. After translating and editing
   the material, it took another two years for the book to be published.
   Its fifteen chapters portray the origins, beliefs, rituals and spells
   of an Italian pagan witchcraft tradition. The central figure of that
   religion is the goddess Aradia who came to Earth to teach the practice
   of witchcraft to oppressed peasants in order for them to oppose their
   feudal oppressors and the Christian church.

   Leland's work remained obscure until the 1950s, when other theories
   about, and claims of, "pagan witchcraft" survivals began to be widely
   discussed. Aradia began to be examined within the wider context of such
   claims. Scholars are divided, with some dismissing Leland's assertion
   regarding the origins of the manuscript, and others arguing for its
   authenticity as a unique documentation of folk beliefs. Along with
   increased scholarly attention, Aradia came to play a special role in
   the history of Gardnerian Wicca and its offshoots, being used as
   evidence that Pagan witchcraft survivals existed in Europe, and because
   a passage from the book's first chapter was used as a part of the
   religion's liturgy. After the increase in interest in the text, it
   became widely available through numerous reprints from a variety of
   publishers, including a 1999 critical edition with a new translation by
   Mario and Dina Pazzaglini.

Origins

   "Maddalena" as a young fortune-teller.
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   "Maddalena" as a young fortune-teller.

   Charles Godfrey Leland was an American author and folklorist, and spent
   much of the 1890s in Florence researching Italian folklore. Aradia was
   one of the products of Leland's research. While Leland's name is the
   one principally associated with Aradia, the manuscript that makes up
   the bulk of it is attributed to the research of an Italian woman that
   Leland and Leland's biographer, his niece Elizabeth Robbins Pennell,
   refer to as "Maddalena". According to folklorist Roma Lister, a
   contemporary and friend of Leland's, Maddalena's real name was
   Margherita, and she was a " witch" from Florence who claimed a family
   lineage from the Etruscans and knowledge of ancient rituals. Maddalena,
   in correspondence with Leland, signed as "Maddalena Talenti".

   Leland reports meeting Maddalena in 1886, and she became the primary
   source for his Italian folklore collecting for several years. Leland
   describes her as belonging to a vanishing tradition of sorcery. He
   writes that "by long practice [she] has perfectly learned... just what
   I want, and how to extract it from those of her kind." He received
   several hundred pages worth of material from her, which was
   incorporated into his books Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular
   Tradition, Legends of Florence Collected From the People, and
   eventually Aradia. Leland wrote that he had "learned that there was in
   existence a manuscript setting forth the doctrines of Italian
   witchcraft" in 1886, and had urged Maddalena to find it. Eleven years
   later, on January 1, 1897, Leland received the Vangelo by post. The
   manuscript was written in Maddalena's handwriting. Leland understood it
   to be an authentic document of the "Old Religion" of the witches, but
   explains that he did not know if the text came from written or oral
   sources. Maddalena's correspondence with Leland indicated that she was
   intending to marry and emigrate to the United States, and the Vangelo
   was the last material Leland received from her.

   Leland's translation and editing was completed in early 1897 and
   submitted to David Nutt for publication. Two years passed, until Leland
   wrote requesting the return of the manuscript in order to submit it to
   a different publishing house. This request spurred Nutt to accept the
   book, and it was published July 1899 in a small print run. Wiccan
   author Raymond Buckland claims to have been the first to reprint the
   book in 1968 through his "Buckland Museum of Witchcraft" press, but a
   British reprint was made by "Wiccens"[ sic] Charles "Rex Nemorensis"
   and Mary Cardell in the early 1960s. Since then the text has been
   repeatedly reprinted by a variety of different publishers, including as
   a 1998 retranslation by Mario and Dina Pazzaglini with essays and
   commentary.

Contents

   Afer the eleven year search, Leland writes that he was unsurprised by
   the contents of the Vangelo. It was largely what he was expecting, with
   the exception that he did not predict passages in "prose-poetry". "I
   also believe that in this Gospel of the Witches", comments Leland in
   the appendix, "we have a trustworthy outline at least of the doctrine
   and rites observed at [the witches' Sabbat]. They adored forbidden
   deities and practised forbidden deeds, inspired as much by rebellion
   against Society as by their own passions."

   Leland's final draft was a slim volume. He organised the material to be
   included into fifteen chapters, added a brief preface and an appendix.
   The published version also included footnotes and, in many places, the
   original Italian that Leland had translated. Most of the content of
   Leland's Aradia is made up of spells, blessings and rituals, but the
   text also contains stories and myths which suggest influences from both
   the ancient Roman religion and Roman Catholicism. Major characters in
   the myths include the Roman goddess Diana, a sun god called Lucifer,
   the Biblical Cain as a lunar figure, and the messianic Aradia. The
   witchcraft of "The Gospel of the Witches" is both a method for casting
   spells and an anti-hierarchical "counter-religion" to the Catholic
   church.

Themes

   François Boucher's nude Diana Leaving Her Bath. The goddess is wearing
   a crescent moon crown.
   Enlarge
   François Boucher's nude Diana Leaving Her Bath. The goddess is wearing
   a crescent moon crown.

   Entire chapters of Aradia are devoted to rituals and magic spells.
   These include enchantments to win love (Chapter VI), a conjuration to
   perform when finding a stone with a hole or a round stone in order to
   turn it into an amulet for Diana's favour (Chapter IV) and the
   consecration of a ritual feast for Diana, Aradia and Cain (Chapter II).
   The narrative material makes up less of the text, and is composed of
   short stories and legends about who the birth of the witchcraft
   religion and the actions of their gods. Leland summarises the mythic
   material in the book in its appendix, writing "Diana is Queen of the
   Witches; an associate of Herodias (Aradia) in her relations to sorcery;
   that she bore a child to her brother the Sun (here Lucifer); that as a
   moon-goddess she is in some relation to Cain, who dwells as prisoner in
   the moon, and that the witches of old were people oppressed by feudal
   lands, the former revenging themselves in every way, and holding orgies
   to Diana which the Church represented as being the worship of Satan".
   Diana is not only the witches' goddess, but is presented as the
   primordial creatrix in Chapter III, dividing herself into darkness and
   light. After giving birth to Lucifer, Diana seduces him while in the
   form of a cat, eventually giving birth to Aradia, their daughter. Diana
   demonstrates the power of her witchcraft by creating "the heavens, the
   stars and the rain", becoming "Queen of the Witches". Chapter I
   presents the original witches as slaves that escaped from their
   masters, beginning new lives as "thieves and evil folk". Diana sends
   her daughter Aradia to them to teach these former serfs witchcraft, the
   power of which they can use to "destroy the evil race (of oppressors)".
   Aradia's students thus became the first witches, who would then
   continue the worship of Diana. Leland was struck by this cosmogeny: "In
   all other Scriptures of all races, it is the male... who creates the
   universe; in Witch Sorcery it is the female who is the primitive
   principle".

Structure

   Aradia is composed of fifteen chapters, the first ten of which are
   presented as being Leland's translation of the Vangelo manuscript given
   to him by Maddalena. This section, while predominantly made up of
   spells and rituals, is also the source of most of the myths and
   folktales contained in the text. At the end of Chapter I is the text in
   which Aradia gives instructions to her followers on how to practice
   witchcraft.

   The first ten chapters are not entirely a direct translation of the
   Vangelo; Leland offers his own commentary and notes on a number of
   passages, and Chapter VII is Leland's incorporation of other Italian
   folklore material. Medievalist Robert Mathiesen contends that the
   Vangelo manuscript actually represents even less of Aradia, arguing
   that only chapters I, II and the first half of Chapter IV match
   Leland's description of the manuscript's contents, and suggests that
   the other material came from different texts collected by Leland
   through Maddalena.

   The remaining five chapters are clearly identified in the text as
   representing other material Leland believed to be relevant to the
   Vangelo, acquired during his research into Italian witchcraft, and
   especially while working on his Etruscan Roman Remains and Legends of
   Florence. The themes in these additional chapters vary in some details
   from the first ten, and Leland included them partly to "[confirm] the
   fact that the worship of Diana existed for a long time contemporary
   with Christianity". Chapter XV, for example, gives an incantation to
   Laverna, through the use of a deck of playing cards. Leland explains
   its inclusion by a note that Diana, as portrayed in Aradia, is
   worshipped by outlaws, and Laverna was the Roman goddess of thievery.
   Other examples of Leland's thoughts about the text are given in the
   book's preface, appendix, and numerous footnotes.

   In several places Leland provides the Italian he was translating.
   According to Mario Pazzaglini, author of the 1999 translation, the
   Italian contains misspellings, missing words and grammatical errors,
   and is in a standarised Italian rather than the local dialect one might
   expect. Pazzaglini concludes that Aradia represents material translated
   from dialect to basic Italian and then into English, creating a summary
   of texts, some of which were mis-recorded. Leland himself called the
   text a "collection of ceremonies, "cantrips," incantations, and
   traditions" and described it as an attempt to gather material,
   "valuable and curious remains of ancient Latin or Etruscan lore" that
   he feared would be lost. There is no cohesive narrative even in the
   sections that Leland attributes to the Vangelo. This lack of cohesion,
   or "inconsistency", is an argument for the text's authenticity,
   according to religious scholar Chas Clifton,standardized because the
   text shows no signs of being "massaged... for future book buyers."

Claims questioned

   Charles Godfrey Leland wrote journalism, comedy and books on folklore
   and linguistics. Aradia has proved the most controversial.
   Enlarge
   Charles Godfrey Leland wrote journalism, comedy and books on folklore
   and linguistics. Aradia has proved the most controversial.

   Leland's writings show no doubt that "the witches even yet form a
   fragmentary secret society or sect, that they call it that of the Old
   Religion, and that there are in the Romagna entire villages in which
   the people are completely heathen". Accepting this, Leland supposed
   that "the existence of a religion supposes a Scripture, and in this
   case it may be admitted, almost without severe verification, that the
   Evangel of the Witches is really a very old work [...] in all
   probability the translation of some early or later Latin work."

   Leland's claim that the manuscript was genuine, or even that he
   received such a manuscript, has been called into question. After the
   1921 publication of Margaret Murray's The Witch-cult in Western Europe,
   which hypothesised that the European witch trials were actually a
   persecution of a Pagan religious survival, American sensationalist
   author Theda Kenyon's 1929 book, Witches Still Live, connected Murray's
   thesis with the witchcraft religion in Aradia. Arguments against
   Murray's thesis would eventually include arguments against Leland.
   Witchcraft scholar Jeffrey Russell devoted some of his 1980 book A
   History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans to arguing
   against the claims in Aradia, Murray's thesis, and Jules Michelet's
   1862 La Sorcière, which also theorised that witchcraft represented an
   underground religion. Historian Elliot Rose's A Razor for a Goat
   dismissed Aradia as a collection of incantations unsuccessfully
   attempting to portray a religion. In his Triumph of the Moon, historian
   Ronald Hutton summarises the controversy as having three possible
   extremes:
    1. The Vangelo manuscript represents a genuine text from an otherwise
       undiscovered religion.
    2. Maddalena wrote the text, either with or without Leland's
       assistance, possibly drawing from her own background with folklore
       or witchcraft.
    3. The entire document was forged by Leland.

   Hutton himself is a sceptic, not only of the existence of the religion
   that Aradia claims to represent, but also of the existence of
   Maddalena, arguing that it is more likely that Leland created the
   entire story than that Leland could be so easily "duped" by an Italian
   fortune-teller. Clifton takes exception to Hutton's position, writing
   that it amounts to an accusation of "serious literary fraud" made by an
   " argument from absence"; one of Hutton's main objections is that
   Aradia is unlike anything found in medieval literature.

   Mathiesen also dismisses this "option three", arguing that while
   Leland's English drafts for the book were heavily edited and revised in
   the process of writing, the Italian sections, in contrast, were almost
   untouched except for corrections of "precisely the sort that a
   proofreader would make as he compared his copy to the original". This
   leads Mathiesen to conclude that Leland was working from an extant
   Italian language original that he describes as "authentic, but not
   representative" of any larger folk tradition. Anthropologist Sabina
   Magliocco examines the "option one" possibility, that Leland's
   manuscript represented a folk tradition involving Diana and the Cult of
   Herodias, in her article Who Was Aradia? The History and Development of
   a Legend. Magliocco writes that Aradia "may represent a 19th century
   version of [the legend of the Cult of Herodias] that incorporated later
   materials influenced by medieval diabolism: the presence of "Lucifero,"
   the Christian devil; the practice of sorcery; the naked dances under
   the full moon."

Influence on Wicca and Neopaganism

   Magliocco calls Aradia "the first real text of the 20th century
   Witchcraft revival", and it is repeatedly cited as being profoundly
   influential on the development of Wicca and Neopaganism. The text
   apparently corroborates the thesis of Margaret Murray that early modern
   and renaissance witchcraft represented a survival of ancient Pagan
   beliefs, and after Gerald Gardner's claim to have encountered religious
   witchcraft in 20th century England, the works of Michelet, Murray and
   Leland helped support at least the possibility that such a survival
   could exist.

   The Charge of the Goddess, an important piece of liturgy used in Wiccan
   rituals, was inspired by the Aradia's speech in the first chapter of
   the book. Parts of the speech appeared in an early version of
   Gardnerian Wicca ritual. According to Doreen Valiente, one of Gardner's
   priestesses, Gardner was surprised by Valiente's recognising the
   material as having come from Leland's book. Valiente subsequently
   rewrote the passage in both prose and verse, retaining the
   "traditional" Aradia lines. Some Wiccan traditions use the name
   "Aradia", or Diana, to refer to the Goddess or Queen of the Witches,
   and Hutton writes that the earliest Gardnerian rituals used the name
   Airdia, a "garbled" form of Aradia. Hutton further suggests that the
   reason that Wicca includes skyclad practice, or ritual nudity, is
   because of a line spoken by Aradia:

          "And as the sign that ye are truly free,
          Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men
          And women also: this shall last until
          The last of your oppressors shall be dead;"

   Accepting Aradia as the source of this practice, Robert Chartowich
   points to the 1998 Pazzaglini translation of these lines, which read
   "Men and Women / You will all be naked, until / Yet he shall be dead,
   the last / Of your oppressors is dead." Chartowich argues that the
   ritual nudity of Wicca was based upon Leland's mistranslation of these
   lines by incorporating the clause "in your rites".

   The reception of Aradia amongst Neopagans has not been entirely
   positive. Clifton suggests that modern claims of revealing an Italian
   Pagan witchcraft tradition, for example those of Leo Martello, and
   Raven Grimassi of Stregheria, must be "match[ed] against", and compared
   with the claims in Aradia. Clifton further suggests that a lack of
   comfort with Aradia may be due to an "insecurity" within Neopaganism
   about the movement's claim to authenticity as a religious revival.
   Valiente offers another explanation; that the identification of Lucifer
   as the God of the witches in Aradia was "too strong meat" for Wiccans
   who were used to the gentler, romantic Paganism of Gerald Gardner and
   were especially quick to reject any relationship between witchcraft and
   Satanism.

   Clifton writes that Aradia was especially influential for leaders of
   the Wiccan religious movement in the 1950s and 1960s, but that the book
   no longer appears on the "reading lists" given by members to newcomers,
   nor is it extensively cited in more recent Neopagan books. The new
   translation of the book released in 1998 was introduced by Wiccan
   author Stewart Farrar, who affirms the importance of Aradia, writing
   that "Leland's gifted research into a 'dying' tradition has made a
   significant contribution to a living and growing one."
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