In 1899, Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, “the gospel of the witches”, containing a goddess-orientated creation and saviour narrative, purported to descend from an ancient, hermetic tradition of witchcraft in Italy. A. D. Manns explores this text via an enchanting conjecture: that the writer, medium, and witch Roma Lister played a pivotal role in the formation of both Aradia and, therefore, a new form of paganism called Wicca.
In 1899, the aging American journalist Charles Godfrey Leland brought out what he described as a bona fide witchcraft “scripture” of unknown authorship. Asserting that he had acquired the source material republished in Aradia, or, The Gospel of the Witches from Maddalena, a Tuscan fortune teller, Leland presented the book as a groundbreaking discovery proving that paganism had survived undetected in Italy since at least the Middle Ages. Although Leland said the original manuscript — since lost — was in Maddalena’s handwriting, he believed that Maddalena had “derived” its content from an older oral tradition. Leland had, he claimed, spent over ten years trying to find this legendary gospel (the Vangelo), scouring the Italian countryside while immersing himself in a world of “witches and shadows, faded gods and forgotten goblins of the olden time”.12
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What was novel about the manuscript was its goddess-orientated creation and saviour narrative, a “myth found nowhere else” (in the words of witchcraft historian Ronald Hutton).3 The book explained that the Goddess Diana instructed her daughter, Aradia, to save poor and disenfranchised members of society from enslavement. To fulfil this mandate, Aradia taught them sorcery, an art enabling the downtrodden not only to free themselves from the subjugation of the rich, but also to destroy hierarchies of oppression in their entirety.4