Aradia

Gospel Of The Witches

nakedness, and the orgy, were regarded as symbolical of the

body being laid in the ground, the grain being planted, or of entering into darkness and death, to be revived in new forms, or regeneration and light. It was the laying aside of daily life.

The Gospel of the Witches, as I have given it, is in reality only the initial chapter of the

collection of ceremonies, incantations, and traditions current in the fraternity or sisterhood, the whole of which are in the main to be found in my Etruscan Roman Remains and Florentine Legends. I have, it is true, a great number as yet unpublished, and there are more ungathered, but the whole scripture of this sorcery, all its principal tenets, formulas, medicaments, and mysteries may be found in what I have collected and printed. Yet I would urge that it would be worth while been the faith of millions in the past it has made itself felt in

innumerable traditions, which deserve to be better understood than they are, and I would gladly undertake the work if I believed that the public would make it worth the publishers outlay and pains.

It may be observed with truth that I have not treated this Gospel, nor even the subject of

witchcraft, entirely as folk lore, as the word is strictly defined and carried out; that is, as a mere traditional fact or thing to be chiefly regarded as a variant like or unlike sundry other traditions, or to be tabulated and put away in pigeon holes for reference. That it is useful and sensible to do all this is perfectly true, and it has led to an immense amount of valuable search, collection, and preservation. But there is this to be said, and I have observed that here and there a few genial minds are beginning to awake to it, that the mere study of the letter in this way has developed a great indifference to the spirit, going in may cases so far as to produce, like Realism in Art (to which it is allied), even a contempt for the matter or meaning of it, as originally believed in. I was lately much struck by the fact that in a very learned work on Music, the author, in discussing that of ancient times and of the East, while extremely accurate and minute in determining pentatonic and all other scales, and what may be called the mere machinery and history of composition, showed that he was utterly ignorant of the fundamental fact that notes and chords, bars and melodies, were in themselves ideas or thoughts. Thus Confucius is said to have composed a melody which was a personal description of himself. Now if this be not understood, get beyond the letter

and fancies himself scientific is exactly like the musician who has no idea of how or why melodies were anciently composed.

The strange and mystical chapter How Diana made the Stars and the Rain is the same

given in my Legends of Florence, but much enlarged, or developed to a cosmogonic-mythologic sketch. And here a reflection occurs which is perhaps the most remarkable which all this Witch Evangel suggests. In all other Scriptures of all races, it is the male, Jehovah, Buddha or Brahma, who creates the universe; in Witch Sorcery it is the female who is the primitive principle.

Whenever in history there is a period of radical intellectual rebellion against long established

conservatism, hierarchy, and the like, there is always an effort to regard Woman as the fully equal, which means the superior sex. Thus in the extraordinary war of conflicting elements, strange schools of sorcery, Neo-Platonism, Cabala, Hermetic Christianity, Gnosticism, Persian Magism and Dualism, with the remains of old Greek and Egyptian theologies in the third and fourth centuries at Alexandria, and in the House of Light of Cairo in the ninth, the equality of Woman was a prominent doctrine. It was Sophia or Helena, the enfranchised, who was then the true Christ who was to save mankind.

When Illumination, in company with magic and mysticism, and a resolve to regenerate

society according to extreme free thought, inspired the Templars to the hope that they would

master the Church and the world, the equality of Woman derived from the Cairene traditions,