Aradia

Gospel Of The Witches

ARADIA

Gospel of the Witches

This book was written by Charles G. Leland in 1890. It is not copyrighted in any way and

therefore may be duplicated in any manner required for the widest possible dissemination.

PREFACE

If the reader has ever met with the works of the learned folk-lorist G. Pitre, or the articles

contributed 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, whodivine 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 practiced for many

generations. I have no doubt that there are instances in which the ancestry remounts to mediaeval,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 indicated, 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.

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

unconsciously 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 incredible rapidity - it has even struck a French writer that a Franciscan in a railway carriage is a strange anomaly - and a few more years of newspapers and bicycles (Heaven knows what it will be when flying-machines appear!) will probably cause an evanishment of all.

However, they die slowly, and even yet there are old people in the Romagna of the North

who know the Etruscan names of the Twelve Gods, and invocations to Bacchus, Jupiter, and

Venus and Mercury, and the Lares or ancestral spirits, and in the cities are women who prepare strange amulets, over which they mutter spells, all known in the old Roman time, and who can astonish even the learned by their legends of Latin gods, mingled with lore which may be found in Cato or Theocritus. With one of these I became intimately acquainted in 1886, and have ever since employed her specially to collect among her sisters of the hidden spell in many places all the traditions of the olden time known to them. It is true that I have drawn from other sources, but this woman by long practice has perfectly learned what few understand, or just what I want, and how to extract it from those of her kind.

Among other strange relics, she succeeded, after many years, in obtaining the following

Gospel, which I have in her handwriting. A full account of its nature with many details will be found in an Appendix. I do not know definitely whether my informant derived a part of these traditions from written sources or oral narration, but believe it was chiefly the latter. However, there are a few wizards who copy or preserve documents relative to their art. I have not seen my collector since the Gospel was sent to me. I hope at some future time to be better informed.

For brief explanation I may say the witchcraft is known to its votaries as la vecchia