… I wouldn’t address this subject on my YouTube channel. Another reason is that Aradia has been extremely influential. So regardless of whether there is historical, folkloric evidence of her actual presence in Italy, she is still a figure that has been extremely influential for the birth of Wicca, for the birth of contemporary Paganism and also even now I would say that that kind of influence has remained in one way or another.

So before we crack on I want to say hi to the people in the chat. I can see some Patrons and a channel member. So hi João, Edward and Andrew and thank you for moderating the chat. Hi, Dave and Paul and Craig. So it’s nice to see you guys here. So yeah, I guess that we can start and hopefully more people will join as we go along and also it’s possible to see this afterwards.

So the concept of Aradia is very interesting because Leland presented in “The “Gospel of the Witches” this figure Aradia as the daughter of Diana and Lucifer and as the queen of the Witches – as sort of a messiah. A kind of a messiah and it has elements of an Antichrist because we will see that there are very strong anti-Christian elements and also rebellious elements and there is this affiliate of going against the status quo and against the hegemony of Christianity. But also Aradia is portrayed as a very ancient, almost primordial Witch and we will go into that.

Oh, hi Hank and hi Donovan and Astro, nice to see you in the chat.

So we will start by reading some passages from the two main sources. One is the “Triumph of the Moon” by Ronald Hutton, the new and revised version from 2019 which is updated compared to the one from the ‘90s. And then there’s a paper from Sabina Magliocco called “Aradia in Sardinia” where she presents her thesis about Aradia actually being part of the Italian folklore because most historians and most scholars are sceptical about whether Aradia is a genuine, authentic Italian figure or whether it is something that Leland has, some would say, that Leland has fabricated it. Others would say that Maddalena fabricated it. Maddalena is the Witch that Leland met in Tuscany and that gave him the “Gospel of the Witches.” So we will see that there are different takes from different scholars and there are a few main theses about the authenticity or lack thereof of the “Gospel of the Witches” and the figure of Aradia and where does Aradia come from anyway?

Oh, hi Hank and hi Donovan and Astro, nice to see you in the chat.

So we will start by reading some passages from the two main sources. One is the “Triumph of the Moon” by Ronald Hutton, the new and revised version from 2019 which is updated compared to the one from the ‘90s. And then there’s a paper from Sabina Magliocco called “Aradia in Sardinia” where she presents her thesis about Aradia actually being part of the Italian folklore because most historians and most scholars are sceptical about whether Aradia is a genuine, an authentic Italian figure or whether it is something that Leland has, some would say, that Leland has fabricated it. Others would say that Maddalena fabricated it. Maddalena is the Witch that Leland met in Tuscany and that gave him the “Gospel of the Witches.” So we will see that there are different takes from different scholars and there are a few main theses about the authenticity or lack thereof of the “Gospel of the Witches” and the figure of Aradia and where does Aradia come from anyway?

So we will start now by reading some passages and commenting on some passages from Ronald Hutton and then we will proceed on reading something from the “Gospel of the Witches” and Sabina Magliocco’s article and then we can have a discussion about it.

And before we start I would like to remind everybody that this project can only exist thanks to your support so if you have the means I would really appreciate it if you support my work with a one-off PayPal donation, by joining Memberships or my Inner Symposium on Patreon. All the links will be found in the info box and in a pinned comment and otherwise like, subscribe and share this video around and harass all of your friends and family with my videos and then you can blame it on me and send a link to this exact moment in the video so that I will be the one to blame for that.

So we can start now. So as I said I’d like to start first with “The Triumph of the Moon” here Ronald Hutton starts to talk about Leland and his approach to Maddalena and then he proceeds on talking about the different theses around the authenticity of this figure. So the encounter between Leland;

“and termed cunning craft happened in Florence in 1886, when he met a young woman called Maddalena, who came from the Tuscan Romagna, and from far to the east of the city. She sounds like an almost classic representative of a cunning woman, having generated the family trove of charms and invocations which were intended to heal, break curses and invoke spirits and tales. He gathered these from her and then hired her as a research assistant commissioned to bring back more from friends in her native region.” … “And the results were these three successive volumes: ‘Etruscan Roman Remains,’ ‘Legends of Florence’ and ‘Aradia.’”

“So Leland was careful to point out that although the whole world of popular magic was known to some of his informants as the old religion.”

And I have to premise here that we will talk about that more, as we move along through the sources, but there is no Italian source that I know of that mentions Aradia or the Italian version of the old religion which is La Vecchia Religione. And this is another concept that we find in Leland and that has then influenced Wicca. So I have a video on Wicca and whether Wicca is the oldest religion and in there I talk about how Gerald Gardener was influenced by Margaret Murray who, in her two books.

“The God of the Witches” and the “The Witch-Cult in Western Europe” claims that there is this historical unchanging lineage of a Witch cult that survived Christianity and goes back to the times of the pre-Christians and this idea was, for some reason, a narrative that was very successful at the time because Leland, well Leland actually comes before Margaret Murray, to be fair, and he claims something similar, he claims that there is this old Witch cult in Italy called La Vecchia Religione, or the old religion in English. And it had Aradia as the sort of the messiah of this religion and this Witch cult, this pagan witch cult has survived Christianity and has lived underground. He claimed it was in certain areas of Italy and survived the Christianisation of Italy. But, as Ronald Hutton says,

“He was quite careful to point out that even though the whole world of popular magic was known to some of his informants as the old religion and, as I say, there are no folk records of that, besides Leland, who was an amateur folklorist. by the way. It did not really adapt to a religious system he argued, with some plausibility that it did embody a coherent and distinctive cosmology of a world teeming with spirits with whom humans could work and that this was descended from ancient times. The more contentious part of his interpretation was that his hatred of Catholicism made him insist that it somehow remains separate from and inimical to popular Christianity rather than assimilated into it. For all this, he was careful not to press too far the claim of Stregheria, the cunning craft… ”

And I also have videos of Stregheria, the Italian-American tradition that was created by Grimassi and it was obviously strongly based on Leland and Leland’s work, and again, Stregheria is not an Italian term and is not a term that is found in folk records in Italian folk records. Leland was an American, he was primarily a journalist and then he got enamoured with Europe and especially with Italy, where he lived most of his life, and with the folk traditions of the place. So,

“… for all of this, he was careful not to press too far the claim of Stregheria to represent a religion in itself, he described it as ‘something more than a sorcery and something less than a faith’ which seems to be a fair and a sensitive characterisation.”

Now.

“Aradia is strikingly different from the two earlier books.”

We saw that there are three books that emerged from his encounter with Maddalena, this Witch that passed down to him this secret book and the “Gospel of the Witches.” And this was something that mirrored quite well something that at the time was believed in folk traditions, that Magic was somewhat linked to this secret book that you had to find. And he was claiming that the “Gospel of the Witches” was this book and that he managed to get it from Maddalena. Interesting that Maddalena is also a Christian name, linked to Christianity. Actually, this whole thing is somewhat linked to Christianity which we will explore as we go along. This is interesting because he claims so strongly that this is a tradition, this Witch cult in Italy, the Stregheria is a tradition that survives Christianity and remained completely separate from Christianity but there are so many elements that actually link it to Christianity, as we will see.

“So Aradia is different from the earlier two books because it tries to represent the publication of a single manuscript, the Vangel or gospel of a secret religion of Witches. In his appendix Leland told how he had heard rumours regarding the existence of such a work since he became interested in Italian Witchcraft in 1886; which would certainly conform well with English parallels, such as the belief that Witches and cunning folk had a book which was the source of their power.”

That’s what I was mentioning. And …

“He went on to say that he repeatedly urged Maddalena to obtain a copy of it for him. And that on New Year’s Eve of 1897 she handed over the manuscript which he now printed for the first time. By that date, she had long moved out of her native part of the Romagna in her search for material for him and claimed to have found the necessary information in the Elsa Valley which lies in the Tuscan mountain near Siena.”

So let me see if there are any questions so far because when I’m reading I can’t actually see the chat, so I always have to check.

So this is the premise that we see here. Then we have that, interestingly, Leland …

“got rid of the fact that Aradia was apparently a figure from Christian and not Pagan mythology by suggesting that she was not the New Testament queen but an ancient Semitic goddess of the same name.”

Because one of the things that we will also explore further is that Leland equates Aradia with Herodias, which is found in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. And it’s interesting because even though the reference and we will see later the history of how Herodias became associated with Witchcraft and with Diana and with all the mythology that surrounds Leland’s work is actually very Christian and clearly linked to the New Testament. But he claimed that it was actually because, the claim that Leland was putting forward is that this tradition Stregheria was untouched, not only was pre-Christian and not only was the old religion but also it was untouched by Christianity; part of an unchanging lineage, the same claim that we find in Margaret Murray. It’s very similar, to this idea of a Witch cult, a fertility cult that goes back from before the times of Christianity and kind of remains underground or somewhat untouched by Christianity.

So he claims that actually, Aradia is not the Herodias from the New Testament but an ancient Semitic goddess of the same name. But there is no evidence that he provides for this variation, nor for how a Semitic goddess had been transplanted to Italy, nor even for the former existence of this deity. In “the medieval and early modern sources for the which religion portrayed in Leland’s book are clear enough. Their origin point is the popular traditions of the night flying retinues of spirits led by a superhuman female who was known by many local names, but most commonly to churchmen – and eventually in popular tradition – as Diana and Herodias. Many people over the centuries, especially women, claim to have roved with them and learned Magic from them which enabled their establishment as the equivalent of the British cunning Folk. These traditions were recorded from the ninth century onward and eventually spread over a large area of Central Europe, extending South into Italy. The clerics who made the records, however, long regarded them neither as heresy nor Paganism, but just as a silly super superstition, usually to be punished with light penances.”

And that’s because the claim was that they were travelling in their dreams or so it was not something that they were doing in the physical world and that appeared to churchmen as being more akin to a superstition.

“The Witch religion in “Aradia” is simply the late medieval, satanic, version that the inquisitors made of the Diana and Herodias tradition with the sympathies reversed. The devil is there, under the name of Lucifer… “

Because, as we will see when we read the “Gospel of the Witches,” Aradia is the daughter of Diana and Lucifer and that’s interesting. I wonder, I had my own idea as to why he portrayed Aradia as the daughter of Diana and Lucifer but I’ve read from these sources a different view, the view here is that all these figures come from a Christian folk interpretation and folk construction of what Witchcraft was about. And linking Diana with Witchcraft, Herodias with Witchcraft and obviously the devil and in this case, Lucifer is what is mentioned. Another idea that I personally had, I think when I first read the “Gospel of the Witches,” is that in antiquity Diana was sometimes… because you have different forms of Diana in the Roman tradition but in some cases, Diana, which in Latin would be ‘Dēana,’ was also called, also had the epithet of Lucifera and luciferus male or lucifera female; in Latin it’s Lucifer and it means bringer of light.

So I think that I thought that because, you know, in the “Gospel of the Witches” Diana and Lucifer are brother and sister and then I thought is it because it’s the epithet of Diana and so they are seen as part of the same family because it’s kind of the same person split into two. The person, you know, the deity and her episode but that was my own speculation because it seems that from at least from the sources that I’m mentioning and others that I’ve read it seems more likely that it was more the combination of different elements that have been in Christian culture and Christian culture being associated with Witchcraft.

So Diana is the goddess because Diana is the only Pagan goddess mentioned in the New Testament and this is something that we will read later as well. So thank you, Jeanette. I was looking at the chat. If you want to make sure that I answer your question I would really appreciate it if you were to Superchat it. I think that I’d better… no it’s not allowing me to move this to the second screen. Anyway, let’s go back to the reading. So as we will see, as we saw…

“The devil is there under the name of Lucifer and the two female divinities made this concert and daughter and their human adherence meet to worship them… ”

And YouTube doesn’t like me when when I say these things. So you can read it here.

“… and plan evil against fellow human beings.”

So their deities including Lucifer are transformed into forces of nature and of freedom and this kind of reflects – you may recall that I have published a video on the romanticising of Lucifer Satan and the devil during the Romantic times and Leland was quite a subversive chap because he was somewhat involved in the… and yeah, I think that I read that he was very keen on the French Revolution and so he had a kind of revolutionary mindset and it is, in my opinion, quite evident in the work that he has is – how can I put it? It’s like he’s not particularly keen on the status quo and the power in charge. So

“ … this all suggested the Witches of Aradia had no existence outside mythology, representing a nineteenth century reworking of a late medieval reworking of an earlier medieval dream-world.”

Now we will see that this is one of the theses, so I have to premise that here Hutton in “The Triumph of the Moon” is presenting, he’s not really making an argument per se, he’s presenting the different takes from different scholars, historians and ethnographers as to what is their view of the authenticity of Leland’s work. So this is one of the theses. Then the second one is that Vangel, in Italian it would be vangelo the “Gospel of the Witches”…

“… was partly concocted by Maddalena to satisfy an employer who ardently wanted to possess the legendary Witches gospel.”

And “Aradia was to some extent,” according to this thesis, “the concoction of Leland himself. And there can be no doubt that he had a reputation even in his lifetime for being an unusually unreliable scholar.”

So he didn’t have a good reputation with other scholars and that’s a known thing. And the same can be said for Margaret Murray whom we talked about her in the other video that I mentioned earlier about whether Wicca is the oldest religion. Margaret Murray was also not particularly … you know, her works didn’t have a scholarly consensus, not even in her own time. But the one person that truly and fondly believed in Margaret Murray’s work was Gerald Gardner. But even at the Folklore Society her work was not really considered to be sound. So that’s an interesting thing to also point out. And the same happened with Leland and because there were accounts of people saying that Leland was very good at adapting to different situations he would be a folklorist among folklorists and they were mentioning other types of roles and when he was in a situation he would just be very good at blending in and looking and sounding like one of the people that he was in a community with at a given time. But we don’t want to do an ad hominem here, which is a logical fallacy where you evaluate an argument based on the person and we need to evaluate arguments or claims, historical or otherwise, based on the claim itself, not on the person. But it’s good background information.

So the three positions that we have just mentioned and they indicate that either everything is true or it’s completely false and made up by Leland or completely false made up by Maddalena, which means that Leland was in good faith but that Maddalena wasn’t. These three positions are quite extreme, according to Hutton, and it is quite possible that truth lies in some combination of them. And then here he explores different views that are a bit more nuanced and we will go into the paper by Sabina Magliocco who’s mentioned first here and we will analyse that. So …

“Sabina Magliocco did not think that an actual witch religion lay behind Aradia but suggested, however, that it was possible that he or Maddalena had collected a nineteenth century version of the medieval legend of Diana and Herodias.”

And we will explain that further because we will look at the specific paper.

“Marion Gibson, who inspected Leland’s papers and noted that he had left among them an English equivalent to Aradia, a manuscript purporting to be the grimoire of a medieval or early modern Yorkshire cunning woman but written by Leland himself and incorporating information on Magic from sources derived from both periods. She also noted that he wrote poems in which he strongly identified with Witches and that the manuscript of “Aradia” in his archive is in his handwriting.”

And we should note here according to Leland the manuscript of Aradia was handed to him by Maddalena in her handwriting and she was Italian according to him.

“She had that the Italian in which it is written has errors it would not be made by a native speaker.”

And I can definitely confirm that. And it’s not like Italians don’t make grammatical mistakes, obviously, everybody in their own native language can make mistakes but the mistakes that you find in Aradia are mistakes that a native speaker wouldn’t do. Yeah, there are certain specific mistakes that native speakers do and non-native speakers do and it’s quite clear the difference. And so, for instance, one thing that I noticed in Aradia is that the concordance between masculine and feminine is incorrect. So that you have the adjective in masculine and the noun is feminine. Things of this sort, and these are things that only a non-native speaker could do because Italian native speakers make different types of mistakes, more with verbs and especially in a different specific sense. But not this one because that’s more intuitive. I mean putting together a female article with a female adjective and a female noun is something that you instinctively do as an Italian native speaker. Gibson ultimately left the question of authenticity open.

“Juliet Wood, an expert in folklore who concluded that… “ this is another thesis that we have… “concluded that Aradia was not copied from a stable written text, a ‘gospel,’ but from various pieces of genuine Italian folklore on which Leland or Maddalena had imposed the alien structure of a specific Witch cult.”

So, in this case, the thesis is that Aradia was put together in a way as to convey the sense that there was a Witch cult behind it but elements of what are found in Aradia are from Italian folklore, according to these theses. And the conclusion that Hutton gives here is quite interesting. He says,

“All these together seems to represent with both editions of the present book,”

As I said this is the “Triumph of the Moon,” the second updated edition from 2019.

“… a current scholarly consensus that Aradia does not describe a genuine Italian Witch religion, while failing to clinch the matter of how it was written and by whom.”

So, as you can see, the reason is really in agreement among scholars, I mean there is an agreement on something. So the agreement is that Aradia is not describing a genuine Witch religion. And I will also give you my take on that. But what is uncertain is whether there are elements from what is still up to debate, and different scholars have different views, is whether elements of Aradia come from genuine Italian folk traditions or whether it is everything is concocted or everything is, you know, come from out of the imagination of either Maddalena or Leland.

So I think that it’s interesting that here there’s the portrayal of an Italian Witch cult – one thing that always comes to mind to me is that Italy is a very young country. So an Italian Witch cult would imply first of all the existence of Italian, which is Italy, and Italy was, the unification of Italy is pretty recent, it’s late nineteenth century, around the time of Leland, really. So yeah, I guess that probably I’m also curious as to why he was so interested in this Italian folk tradition and perhaps it might have been because he had a similar interest as Margaret Murray in trying and identifying a pagan witch tradition that dated back from before the times of Christianity. And since Italy is famous for its Roman and Greek heritage which was pagan, maybe that’s why he was looking into that, in Italy. But my experience and of course, my research is with contemporary practitioners not with the nineteenth-century ones. So I can talk about the contemporary world and the syncretism with Christianity is definitely there. I did find one Witch and Shaman, in Italy who claimed that her tradition was the only Italian tradition that was not syncretised with Catholicism but other than that one case, all the other cases that I have studied had a strong syncretism with Christianity.

So let’s now let me see if there are questions before I move on to a different text.

So Star_Punk-Zero is asking, would it be a fair assessment to conclude that Leland created the Paganism in Aradia to hide the Catholicism in the magic traditions he found interesting?

Well, that’s a big claim and I’m not comfortable saying that. I think that there are elements from Leland’s work that are potentially linked somewhat to Italian folk traditions but the way he presented them is uniquely Leland. I’m not familiar with any Italian folk record that would portray a tradition like that or Aradia as the daughter of Diana, Diana and Lucifer. So I’m quite sceptical about the authenticity of what Leland stressed to be Italian, an Italian folk religion. As you saw there is definitely a consensus that what is written in Aradia does not reflect an Italian tradition. What is up for debate still, among scholars, is whether there is still some connection with other folk practices, folk traditions and folk places. And I picked the paper from Sabina Magliocco that we will go into now. That has maybe the most, how can I put it? That she claims that there was a figure akin to Aradia in Sardinia and that might mean that the figure of Aradia was also present in Italy in the nineteenth century. So that still does not imply that what is portrayed in Aradia that kind of tradition is an Italian witch cult, an Italian tradition. It might mean, in the case, one agrees with Sabina Magliocco’s theory, that there might be some links in the folklore to what Leland has presented in Aradia the “Gospel of the Witches.” So now I will show you that paper and we will read and comment on it.

So hopefully you can see my screen now. OK, so this is the paper that I was talking about. So first of all let’s start with who is Aradia, and because we didn’t really talk too much about it when we were commenting on Hutton’s work. But here we have it portrayed to be and the history of Aradia and Herodias. So we can dive a bit deeper into the figure of Aradia and the history of the evolution of this figure. So Aradia is arguably one of the central characters of the amateur folklorist Charles Leland’s, I always want to call him Joffrey for some reason, the “Gospel of the Witches” where she appears as the daughter of Diana sent to Earth by her divine mother to teach the mysteries of Witchcraft to Italian peasants.

Gerald Gardner was certainly influenced by Leland in his creation of modern pagan Witchcraft particularly in the use of the name Aradia as the principal goddess of the craft up until the 1960s and his Priestess Doreen Valiente-based The Charge of the Goddess and possibly the most widely diffused piece so Wiccan liturgy on materials from Leland’s Aradia. So regardless of whether this is one of the things that are important to acknowledge and is that different works and myths and legends can have importance and impact and relevance regardless of whether they are historically accurate. And this is the difference between the realm of myth and the realm of history. So one thing that I want to premise and actually highlight is that even in the following thesis that Aradia did, you know, the text produced, the text that Leland published is not historically accurate, that doesn’t mean to say that it doesn’t have any value. Because the fact that it was so influential in the birth of Wicca, in the birth of contemporary Paganism and has shaped even, for instance, the Charge of the Goddess which is quite important for Pagans, It still means that it has historical value, it is just a different type of historical and also religious and mythological value. The historical value of something can also be in how the text has shaped something that has been influenced by it. So I would say that regardless of its historical and anthropological accuracy, Aradia has been an extremely influential text and an extremely influential work. Same as with Margaret Murray and I always encourage people to read it. It’s also very controversial, there’s some anti-Semitism. And so sometimes I also find it interesting because I have literally heard Pagans who try to reframe certain things in this text, that reminded me a lot of when Christians, who are quite progressive, tend to reframe things from the Bible in a way that mirrors more today’s cultural and social sensibility. But there are aspects of Aradia that are also problematic from social and political points of view and it’s quite aggressive as a text. We will read a bit of it later. So that’s not a trigger warning but kind of a heads-up.

Why are you saying that I hate you? I adore Jewish people I’m against any kind or anything that goes against egalitarianism. I’m totally against misogyny and racism and anti-Semitism and anything that undermines any class of human beings. It’s something that I find repugnant and disgusting. (Response to trolls posting in the chat)

So that doesn’t mean that it’s not important to study texts that have those elements, just as a premise, because I think that the most powerful sort that we have is knowledge and education and I don’t think that cancelling text or cancelling culture is something that is beneficial even to those ends that sometimes that types of, you know, those people want to argue for.

But let’s go to Aradia again. So Leland equates Aradia with Herodias and later also she is a version of Lilith. This is another interesting thing because, and it comes from a combination of Christian culture and Jewish culture because Herodias is this figure from the New Testament. I’m not sure if you guys are familiar with the story but she was the one who was considered responsible for John the Baptist being beheaded – because her daughter was dancing at Herod’s birthday party and since John the Baptist was against the adulterous relationship between Herod and Herodias she didn’t quite like him. And so that’s what happens in the New Testament. So since there is this scene of the beheaded man, that we had with John the Baptist, there have been some artistic portrayals of Lilith that have the same imagery and so there have been people that have equated Herodias with Lilith and probably art has contributed to creating that cultural link. But it’s not really a link that we find in those religious traditions but with culture and folklore you find that over time people really develop associations between things that might not be strictly linked, but they become linked in the folk perception of people, in the cultural perception.

So Ronald Hutton is funny because we just read from Hutton what Sabina Magliocco says and she talks about what he says, which is amazing. I like this aspect of scholarship.

“So Hutton suggested that the name Aradia was actually Leland’s Italianisation of Jules Michelet’s witch Goddess “Herodiade’ from his novel La Sorcière from 1862. While Michelet’s romantic, egalitarian portrayal of Witchcraft certainly influenced Leland, who may well have based his assumption that Aradia was in fact Herodias upon the work of Michelet, my research suggests that Aradia already existed in Italian folklore; she did not need Leland to invent her”

So for those who are fond of the idea of Aradia being an Italian, part of the Italian folklore, I think that you will like this paper. I will leave the references in the info box. So if you check it tonight or tomorrow you will definitely find them.

“So the presence of Aradia in Sardinia as late as the 1980s illustrates the tremendous conservatism of this legend, even as it also fully adapted to a Sardinian context and blended with indigenous Legend material.”

So I can give you a summary first before we keep reading that. But what Sabina Magliocco is arguing is that in Sardinia folklore there is this figure called sa Rejusta who, in the 1980s, was called sa Rejusta but before that was called s’Araja Justa or Arada Justa and Araja or Arada according to Magliocco might be the Sardinian version of the Italian Aradia. And what she is explaining here is that these s’Araja Justa belonged in, and this is the 1980s. And then she tries to do an archaeology of folk traditions to tie to try and understand what sa Rejustacomes from. She says that it belongs to nursery boogies and it is a figure that, at different times and in different places in Sardinia was trying to keep children in check or to, you know, was meant to punish children or to punish young women that were not really engaging as much as they should have with weaving and other activities that, at the time, women were supposed to be doing, to have a good marriage and a higher status in the community. And this figure of saRejusta or s’Araja Justa was also linked to Herodias and Diana.

So let’s go here now.

“So well-known motifs recognisable from European folklore: the malicious night-Witch who can shrink herself to enter through the keyhole, and who, when presented with tiny objects such as seeds or grains of sand is forced to count them and thus thwarted from causing harm. …. sa ReJusta has a slightly different name: Sorre Justa.”

So you have different version.

“The same spirit is called mama Erodas (‘mother Herodias’) … sa ReJusta derives from an earlier cluster of legends about night roaming, supernatural female figures linked with spinning and weaving, magic, the janas or fairies…”

The Janas are considered spirits but also, nowadays in Sardinia, they are considered to be Witches. There was a person during my fieldwork, one of my informants, who considers herself to be a Janas.

“… and with meting out Justice, rewarding the dutiful and punishing the wicked.”

Now, this is interesting because this is the story of how these figures have evolved over time.

“During the Middle Ages, beginning around the ninth century…”

This is something that also happened.

“… report a number of ecclesiastic documents report legends about night-time spiritual processions led by a supernatural figure in the areas which are now Northern Italy, Southern France and Western Germany. In the narratives and their associated beliefs, these processions would enter houses consume food which would magically regenerate, sing, dance and generally disport themselves … legends incorporating fantastical material, some women actually confessed to participating in this gathering at night while their bodies lay sleep in bed.” and then “believers refer to the leader of the spiritual assemblies by a variety of names including Madonna Oriente (‘Milady of the East’), la signora delguioco (‘the lady of the game’), Richella or (‘Richie,’ the lady of riches)Abundia, Satia, Holda, Perchte, Bensozia(from Latin bona socia, ‘the good associate’) or Bensoria (from Latin bona soror, (‘the good sister’) … beginning with the earliest report of these legends, in the work of Regino, … clerics associate the leaders with two figures from the New Testament: Diana and Herodias… Regino complains that many believe that Diana is a goddess or a queen who holds one third of the earth under her charge. He admonishes Bishops to warn their flocks against the false beliefs of women who think they follow ‘Diana the pagan goddess or Herodias’ on their night-time travels, riding out on the back of animals over long distances, following the order of their mistress who called them to service on certain appointed nights. These warnings along with the names of Herodias and Diana” or Diana sorry, in Latin it is Diana “are repeated in the encyclicals of Raterius of Legi, Bishop of Verona, and in Burchard of Worms and numerous later ecclesiastical writers, eventually passing into the body of canon law. In 1310 the Council of Treviri combined the two names creating ‘Herodiana’ which would be Herodias plus Diana.”

“Historian Carlo Ginsburg argues that churchman’s identification of the leader of women’s night-time spiritual assemblies with Diana and or Herodias was an attempt to render understandable within an ecclesiastical framework a body of folk beliefs that did not conform to the knowledge base and expectations of the clergy. It was the clerics who, in their encyclicals and confessors’ manuals, drew the connection between the leaders of spiritual assemblies and figures more well known in the ecclesiastical context, such as Herodias and Diana … both figures of Herodias and Diana are drawn from the New Testament, the principal body of knowledge upon which medieval ecclesiastical knowledge was built and that both are negative characters therein.”

Let me see if there are any questions. Oh wow, I had a good instinct.

So wonderful work and informative! I will withhold questions till playback.

Okay, thank you and thank you for the Super Chat.

This is a great review validating my initial impression of “Gospel of the Witches.”

Thank you, Urania.

Inserting some chocolate magic here. Thank you, Dr Puca.

Thank you, Hank. I really enjoyed your chocolate by the way. So okay, I think that I covered your questions. The thing is that I don’t actually see the chat when I’m reading because I’m on a different screen but I can see the SuperChats.

So yeah, I think that it’s interesting, you know, what I find interesting is that when I think about Leland and the “Gospel of the Witches” and this combination of Aradia or Herodias. Herodias was described by Christians as a Witch. Why was she described as a Witch? Well, she was responsible for the beheading of John the Baptist. She was also a woman and you have that sense, and we have talked about that in the past on the channel, that Witchcraft has very often in history and not just by Christians, but more generally Christian, is often a term of ‘othering.’ This is religious studies parlance, its a term of othering meaning that the religion of the others is ‘Witchcraft’ and demons in history, in the past, were the Gods of the others. So you have that demons are the Gods of the others and Witchcraft is the religion or the spirituality or the religious beliefs of the others. So when Herodias was described as a Witch and she acquired all those qualities over the Early Middle Ages and the Middle Ages and then she got associated with Diana – I keep saying that Diana because that’s how I learned how to pronounce that name – but when she got associated with Diana and why Diana? Because Diana is the only pagan Goddess found in the New Testament. So you have Herodias who is arguably the wickedest woman or person, woman definitely, in the New Testament. She becomes a Witch because that’s the term of othering, then you have the link with Diana, the only pagan Goddess in the New Testament and then you have Lucifer, the devil who’s the arch enemy in Christianity, especially in the New Testament, that figure that is portrayed as the devil. So you have these three elements in the “Gospel of the Witches” and Aradia is the combination of the two, of Diana the only pagan Goddess found in New Testament and Lucifer.

So and when Diana appears in the New Testament obviously it’s not a positive figure so it’s interesting how Aradia is portrayed by Leland as this Messiah we will read a little bit of the “Gospel of the Witches” she’s seen as a messiah who has to incarnate on the earth to teach people Witchcraft, Italian peasants Witchcraft and to always troll Christianity and it’s quite aggressive also towards the Trinity and Christian beliefs. So I just find it fascinating how the text and a legend of a witch cult, an Italian Witch cult that claims to be exquisitely Pagan and untouched by

Christianity is so incredibly rooted in Christianity. So that’s my remark on that. But let’s go back to the text because I think this is quite an interesting paper.

“So Herodias, or ‘Erodiade,’ in Italian (we say Erodiade) appears in the Gospel of Matthew as the sister-in-law of King Herod. She hated John the Baptist and wanted him dead and she so she concocted a plan to kill him. She persuaded her daughter Salome to dance for Herod in exchange for the head of the saint. The plan worked … several early Christian legends explain how when Salome saw Saint John’s head brought before her she began to weep and repent her sin in a feat of remorse. A gust of wind issued from the Saint’s mouth and blew the famous dancer into the air where she is condemned to wander forever in penance.”

I actually translated a piece from old Italian for Ronald Hutton that has that element. Anyway, I just remembered that.

“So Diana is the only pagan Goddess mentioned in the New Testament and … for medieval clerics, not only was Diana a Pagan goddess, but she was also one associated with the worst kind of spiritual activity. This connection to Witchcraft and the spirits of the dead was crucial in helping clerics censor beliefs in the night-time spiritual journeys, arguing both that the spirits were evil and that the experiences of women who reported journeying with them were inspired by demons … by linking the leaders of the spiritual assemblies to Herodias and Diana, medieval churchman clearly strove not only to insert secular folk beliefs into Christian religious structure but to frame them as a form of pagan idolatry and thus condemn them.”

So that’s interesting, I think. And then another thing is that there are

“said to be in Sardinia beings called Janas, whose name means followers of Diana,’ linking them directly to the medieval legends of roaming spirits.”

Now what is interesting here, is that in Italy as well there are the Witches of the Campagna region which is my home region, I’m not from Sardinia but I am from Campagna, which is another southern Italian region. And in Campania, the Witches are called Janare so you may notice that the J in Campagna, in Neapolitan is pronounced ‘ye’ and in Sardinian ‘ge.’ So Janas would be pronounced in Neapolitan ‘yanas.’ So you can see how janara is kind of similar. And there are two etymologies that I’ve read of the term janara from the Campagna region, that’s the Witch of the Campania region. The first one is ianua which is Latin for door and the second one is dianara which means follower of Diana. So that would be similar to what Magliocco is here explaining about the Janas, the Sardinian Janas because the janara are the followers of Diana.

Now the issue that I find that makes me ask questions, you know, is when Witches are portrayed in Italy as followers of Diana, is it because they were followers of Diana or is it because in a Christian perspective, the only Pagan goddess known in the New Testament is Diana and so being non-Christian and doing something somewhat Pagan means that you are a follower of that one deity that is mentioned there? So I guess it just makes me curious as to why Diana specifically and looking at the history and the development of the perception of these figures it seems to me like it may have a lot to do with Christianity. But I just wanted to express that thought to you.

“Now, Sardinian Janas have as their Patroness Araja or Arada.”

And here we get to the argument that Magliocco is presenting about the fact that Aradia might have potentially been a figure in the Italian folklore in the nineteenth century when Leland was writing about it. Because in Sardinian folklore the Patroness of the Janas who, as we just said, are Witches, also fairies and spirits.

“ whose name is a version of the medieval Italian Erioade.”

So Araja or Arada is the Sardinian, probably, version or cognate of the Italian.

“It is in fact the rendering in Sardo (Sardo is the Sardinian) of a hypothetical Italian word ‘Aradia.’”

So in this paper, Magliocco is presenting indirect evidence that there might have been a folk figure called Aradia in Italian because there was a figure in Sardinia called the Araja or Arada. It’s also important to say that the actual name Aradia is not in any folk document of Italian folklore, there isn’t one mention of Aradia. So this is kind of indirect evidence of the fact that there might have been a term because Araja or Arada sounds like a potential Sardinian version of this Italian word. So that’s the argument that Magliocco puts forward.

“At some time a character called Aradia must have existed in Italian folklore and that’s when her stories were brought to Sardinia and her name as well as details of her legend acquired a Sardinian flavour. In some cases the leader of the Janas is called s’Araja demoniu, ‘Aradia the demon,’ a reflection of the demonisation of the legend at the hands of medieval clerics. If s’Araja demoniu is the leader of the fairies it is not an unreasonable leap to hypothesise that at some point in Sardinian legendary this figure split into two, acquiring a counterpart who was not demonic but righteous, rewarding industriousness and punishing laziness in young women who are spinning and weaving. The name of the spirit was s’Araja Justa (‘the just Aradia’) and here we have the light the likely antecedent of sa Regjusta.”

Sa Regjusta is the figure that Magliocco has reported from the 1980s and sa Regjusta is probably the antecedent. If you see these things (markup for correction) here is because this is a pre-print. Usually, scholars are allowed to publicly post the pre-prints but not the published version.

“Legends of Herodias and Diana most likely entered Sardinia during the 12th and 13th centuries when the city-states of Pisa and Genoa vied for control over the island. This was exactly the time during which these legends were widely diffused in continental Italy and when clerics were writing encyclicals warning against the dangers of believing these tales. In fact, it is not unlikely that it was through the influence of clerics themselves that the legend was imported. By the 15th century, it could be found in Sardinian confessionals.”

I think that I’ve read, yeah, this is the last part that I wanted to read from this paper.

“By the nineteenth century Herodias and Diana as leaders of the ladies of the night had vanished from Sardinian oral tradition, replaced instead by the gioviana and sa Rejusta who helped industrious girls fulfil their obligations but threatened lazy ones with brutal retribution. At some point there was a character known in Italian folklore as Aradia, derived from medieval legends of Herodias and linked with night flights, entry into homes, spinning, weaving, and Magic. While she seems to have disappeared from the folklore of Tuscany and Emilia, where Charles Leland reportedly found her in the late nineteenth century, she still exists in Sardinia, albeit in a localized form.”

So this is the paper that I wanted to read to you. I think I find it quite interesting because I think this is the most, how can I put it, it’s the most

Leland-friendly thesis that we can find. But so what do I think about it? I think that Magliocco’s thesis is very interesting and in a way, I wonder. It makes me wonder if something is found in a local form in Sardinia, if there was some other place in Italy where the figure of Aradia was present, wouldn’t we have other folk records of that? And to what extent the fact that we have a similar figure in Sardinia is an indication of the fact that in other regions that figure might have been part of the folklore? I think these are interesting questions and I don’t have a clear answer. I only have more questions. But as you have seen from Hutton’s summary and from the thesis put forward by Magliocco, when it comes to Aradia and the “Gospel of the Witches” there is a consensus that there is no Italian Witch cult as Leland portrayed. What is in question is whether elements of the “Gospel of the Witches” may have been found, albeit structured in a different way, not in a systematic Witch tradition, Witch religion but whether some of the elements of the “Gospel of the Witches” may be genuinely and authentically from Italian folklore? And that is possible as we have seen. There are scholars that have thought that that is a possibility. The problem is that, at the moment, the evidence is very, very scarce. So that’s also important to highlight.

Urania is asking, did Dr Puca say Diana was Goddess in the Old Testament? I missed that point.

In the New Testament, in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, Diana is mentioned. She’s the only Pagan goddess who’s mentioned in the New Testament and that’s the part of the Bible that is particularly important and relevant for Christians, especially for Catholics since we are talking about Italy.

So let’s now look at the actual text, shouldn’t we? I can’t believe it’s already been an hour and 15 minutes. I hope you guys are still interested but we are heading towards the last part. So I’m not gonna read the entire “Gospel of the Witches” but just part of it. Let me just…

So in the preface, we have different chapters:

“How Diana gave birth to Aradia or Herodias” so it is in brackets that it is Herodias or Herodias of the sufferings of mankind and how Diana sent Aradia on Earth to relieve them by teaching resistance and sorcery. Also How to invoke Diana or Aradia.”

Then we have the Sabbat in Chapter Two.

“How Diana made the stars and the rain”

Then we have some folk practices like the conjuration of the lemon and pins. That is something that is also found in the gospel, of Aradia by Leland. This is interesting because that is something that is found in Italian folklore. So my impression is that there are elements in Aradia or the “Gospel of the Witches” that come from Italian folklore it is just the way things are combined together, they are articulated in a way that makes them not particularly Italian if that makes sense. So one thing is to look at different aspects of the Italian folklore and another thing is to construct and claim that there is a tradition and put together all those elements in a coherent way, where those elements are not to be found in that coherent way and claim it to be a Witch cult and Witch tradition. So that’s the problematic side of it.

I’m trying to see whether I can get the read mode. So let me see if you can see. Okay, now you should be able to see it.

So this is the part that has inspired the Charge of the Goddess and also we come or generally the idea of the Esbat. I think I mentioned in the past and in a Magus Lecture that I did on Wicca, the idea of the eight Sabbaths and the monthly Esbats that Gerald Gardner combined in Wicca and the way he conceptualised them come from a combination of Margaret Murray and Leland. In Margaret Murray, you find the idea that Witches celebrate Sabbaths and Esbats it’s just that Sabbaths are more public and Esbats are more private. But they are numerous and they are not restricted to eight Sabbaths and an Esbat but each month when there is the full moon. Whereas the idea of celebrating every full moon comes from Leland as we will see.

“When I shall have departed from this world,

Whenever ye have need of anything,

Once in the month, when the moon is full,

Ye shall assemble in some desert place,

Or in a forest all together join

To adore the potent spirit of your queen,

My mother, great Diana. She who fain

Would learn all sorcery yet has not won

Its deepest secrets, then my mother will

Teach her, in truth all things as yet unknown.

And ye shall all be freed from slavery,

And so ye shall be free in everything;

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.

And ye shall make the game of Benevento,

Extinguishing the lights, and after that

Shall hold your supper thus:”

Doreen Valiente

And then it continues and then you have the Sabbath here.

But let me go back to StreamYard. It’s a bit difficult to juggle between the different windows.

So that has inspired Wicca and the Charge of the Goddess. Other elements that you find also the sky-clad, not that Gardner needed any convincing on that, but you also find here the idea of sky-clad that you find in Wicca. So there are other parts of the “Gospel of the Witches,” if you read it where Aradia is portrayed as a messiah who has come to the Earth in a similar fashion as Jesus, you know, she’s kind of divine but she was incarnated on the earth. The difference is that she has that kind of anti-Christian mission because she is helping oppressed people and in this case, Leland means oppressed by Christianity. Because in other passages of the text, there are very harsh remarks towards the Holy Trinity, saying that the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit are three devils and so there is this very aggressive anti-Christian sentiment throughout the “Gospel of the Witches” and in Aradia’s role. So Aradia is very subversive and she has the role of teaching Witchcraft for the purpose of overthrowing Christianity it seems to regain power for people who are oppressed.

So I guess that, let me know if you guys have any questions because we are approaching the end of the live stream. But I guess that my closing remarks are: so what is portrayed by Leland in Aradia the “Gospel of the Witches” is definitely not an Italian Witch cult. It’s not an Italian Witch tradition. There might be elements including Aradia, as Magliocco suggests, that come from the Italian folklore. But that is not the same as saying that that is one tradition and that it is one tradition the way it is portrayed. Also, I find it interesting how he portrays the alleged Italian old religion, La Vecchia Religione, in Italian, how he portrays that as something that has survived Christianity, is untouched by Christianity and you see so many elements that are rooted in Christianity, in Christian folklore, in the Christian religion. I mean why Diana is the goddess? Okay, there might be other reasons but Diana is the only pagan goddess in the New Testament and then you have Lucifer, who is a figure that is linked to Christianity. And then you have Aradia who is Herodias because in the texts it says Aradia and then Herodias, who is from the New Testament, even though he claims that it’s a Semitic Goddess. But it’s just so Christian, you know, to me it just seems like, exquisitely Christian for something that claims to be a surviving Pagan tradition untouched by Christianity.

But, you know, I’ve presented the sources and I’ve told you what my conclusions are. I still think that it would be interesting to see whether there are other elements of Italian folklore and I think that there it is likely that there are. I think that the way Aradia was written and published in a way where it’s, you know, you can kind of believe that it is Italian. So there are elements that make it make it easier to believe that it might be Italian but they are put together in a way that is very Leland if that makes sense.

So let me see if there are other questions.

So I think that we can close our conversation here. It’s been almost an hour and a half. I hope you enjoyed it guys. Let me know in the chat and in the comments whether you enjoy this kind of format. I think it’s the first time that I did a kind of commentary lecture type, presenting sources on a subject. I hope you liked it and let me know in the comment section if you do if you did.

So whether you’re watching this live or whether you’re watching this afterwards.

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First streamed 26 Feb 2023