Aradia or The Gospel of the Witches

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ABOUT THE BOOK This book documents the origins, beliefs, rituals and spells of an Italian witchcraft tradition. Based on Italian manuscript, the Vangelo, and Leland's research on Italian folklore and traditions, it describes how the goddess Aradia was born of Goddess Diana, came down to Earth, established witches and witchcraft, taught the practice of witchcraft to peasants in order for them to oppose their feudal oppressors and the Roman Catholic Church, and returned to heaven. It also contains the ceremonies and invocations or incantations to be addressed to Diana and Aradia, the exorcism, of Cain, and the spells of the holy stone, which is to be chanted at witch-meetings.

PREFACE IF the reader has ever met with the works of the learned folk-lorist G. PITRE, or the articles con tributed by "Lady VERE DE VERE" to the Italian Rivista, or that of J. H. ANDREWS to Folk Lore, he will be aware that there are in Italy great numbers of strege, fortune-tellers or witches, who divine by cards, perform strange ceremonies in which spirits are supposed to be invoked, make and sell amulets, and, in fact, comport themselves generally as their reputed kind are wont to do, be they Black Voodoos in America or sorceresses anywhere.

But the Italian strega or sorceress is in certain respects a different character from these. In most cases she comes of a family in which her calling or art has been practised for many genera tions. I have no doubt that there are instances in which the ancestry remounts to mediaval, Roman, or it may be Etruscan times. The result has naturally been the accumulation in such families of much tradition. But in Northern Italy, as its literature indicates, though there has been some slight gathering of fairy tales and popular superstitions by scholars, there has never existed the least interest as regarded the strange lore of the witches, nor any suspicion that it embraced an incredible quantity of old Roman minor myths and legends, such as OVID has recorded, but of which much escaped him and all other Latin writers.¹

This ignorance was greatly aided by the wizards and witches themselves, in making a profound secret of all their traditions, urged thereto by fear of the priests. In fact, the latter all uncon sciously actually contributed immensely to the preservation of such lore, since the charm of the forbidden is very great, and witchcraft, like the truffle, grows best and has its raciest flavour when most deeply hidden. However this may be, both priest and wizard are vanishing now with incre dible rapidity-it has even struck a French writer that a Franciscan in a railway carriage is a strange

**Contents and Sample Pages**