An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Aradia

Aradia: or the Gospel of the Witches is the title given by Charles Godfrey Leland to the important collection of witch-lore that he published in 1899 (David Nutt, London). He tells us that as far back as 1886 he learned from his acquaintances among the witches of Italy that there was a manuscript in existence setting forth the doctrines of La Vecchia Religione, the Old Religion of witchcraft. He urged his friend, Maddalena, to obtain it for him. (See LELAND, CHARLES GODFREY.)

Eventually, at the beginning of 1897, he received a manuscript from her; and this formed the basis of his book Aradia, which was published in London by David Nutt. It is one of the most important pieces of evidence for the survival of the Old Religion into modern times, and also for the fact that the beliefs of the witches do constitute a religion, however fragmented by the passing centuries.

It is the more convincing in that it is, as it stands, obviously muddled and incomplete. In fact, in my own opinion, the text of Aradia has been deliberately ’pied’, because the witches, although they regarded Leland as one of themselves, indeed as a veritable stregone, or powerful wizard, did not really want their secrets published in plain terms. In order to sort out the text of Aradia, one needs to be a witch oneself, and also to be able to compare Leland’s English translation with the Italian original. It so happens that this writer possesses both these qualifications.

Aradia seems, curiously enough, to have been bypassed by most writers on witchcraft. At the time when Leland published it, most of its contents would undoubtedly have been considered ’not quite nice’. Its sexual frankness—which Leland has toned down in his translation—its attacks on the Christian Church, its anarchistic attitude towards the social order, all contributed to make it a book that was pushed aside. Moreover, it did not fit in to any recognised category. People simply did not know what to make of it.

In those days, the study of folklore had not progressed very far. Such ideas as those advanced today, of the ancient matriarchal system which preceded the patriarchal society as we know it, of the worship of the Great Mother Goddess throughout ancient Europe and the Near East, even of witchcraft as the remains of an ancient religion, were then something quite novel, and little, if at all, regarded. Sir James Frazer’s famous book, The Golden Bough (Macmillan and Co, London, first published 1890), had started people thinking about the implications of the Sacred Divine King; but such thought had not ventured very far into these implications.

Yet the cosmogony of Aradia, this fragmentary collection of spells and stories received from illiterate Italian peasant women, is of this ancient matriarchal kind. Leland says of it:

To all who are interested in this subject of woman’s influence and capacity, this Evangel of the Witches will be of value as showing that there have been strange thinkers who regarded creation as a feminine development or parthenogenesis from which the masculine principle was born. Lucifer, or Light, lay hidden in the darkness of Diana, as heat is hidden in ice. But the regenerator or Messiah of this strange doctrine is a woman—ARADIA, though the two, mother and daughter, are confused or reflected in the different tales, even as Jahveh is confused with the Elohim.

Because of this feature of the Vangelo delle-Streghe, or Gospel of the Witches, Leland thought that it might have originated in the writings of “some long forgotten heretic or mystic of the dark ages”. Today, however, we know that the ancient matriarchy underlies all the later religions and social structures that have grown above it, as the deep dark earth itself underlies all, whether forest or city.

The actual text of the Vangelo was too short and fragmentary to make a book of. So Leland supplemented it with some similar stories, involving witchcraft and the worship of Diana, which he had gathered during his travels in Italy, and which are additional evidence of his central thesis. This is, that witchcraft was still surviving in his day, as a living though clandestine religion; and that it was not, as the Catholic Church asserted, the invocation of Satan, but something much older, namely the cult of the moon goddess Diana and the semi-religious, semi-magical practices associated with her.

This, then, is the doctrine of the Vangelo delle Streghe: “Diana was the first created before all creation: in her were all things; out of herself, the first darkness, she divided herself; into darkness and light she was divided. Lucifer, her brother and son, herself and her other half, was the light”. (This is a concept paralleled by some of the religious thought of the East, particularly that of the religion of Shiva and Shatki, from which the Tantric beliefs and practices arise.)

The Vangelo goes on to tell how Diana, seeing the beauty of the light, trembled with desire, longing to receive it back again into her darkness. But Lucifer, the light, fled from her, like the mouse which flees before the cat. (This is another echo of very ancient things. One of the titles of the Greek Sun-God was Apollo Smintheus, ’Apollo the Mouse’; and sacred white mice were kept in some of his temples).

So Diana went in search of counsel, “to the fathers of the Beginning, to the mothers, the spirits who were before the first spirit”. Now, who were these mysterious primeval powers, both male and female? It seems from the foregoing that they were the unmanifest aspects of Diana herself—what C. G. Jung has called the Ouroboros, the male female foundation of Nature.

The counsel Diana received was that “to rise she must fall; to become the chief of goddesses she must become a mortal”. So in the course of the ages, when the world was made, Diana descended to earth, “as did Lucifer, who had fallen”.

Now, as the god of the sun, Lucifer ’falls’ in the course of every year, as the sun declines into winter. Then he becomes the Lord of the Underworld, as did the Egyptian sun god Osiris. This also has a more esoteric meaning, when the light ’falls’ by becoming enmeshed in the world of manifestation.

So, continues the Vangelo, Diana prevailed upon Lucifer by the first act of witchcraft. Her brother had a beautiful cat, which slept upon his bed every night. Diana spoke to the cat, because she could perceive that it was really a fairy spirit in the form of a cat; and she persuaded it to change forms with her. So she lay upon her brother’s bed, and in the darkness, while he slept, she resumed her own form, and made love with him in his sleep. Thus she became pregnant by her brother, and eventually gave birth to her daughter Aradia.

When he awoke in the morning, Lucifer was angry to discover how “light had been conquered by darkness”. But Diana sang to him a song of fascination, a powerful spell of enchantment, and Lucifer fell silent and yielded to her. “This was the first fascination; she hummed the song, it was as the buzzing of bees (or a top spinning round), a spinning-wheel spinning life. She spun the lives of all men; all things were spun from the wheel of Diana. Lucifer turned the wheel”. (Once again, we are back in the realms of very ancient myth—the myth of Fate, the spinner, the great goddess who spins human life. The function of the male is merely to “turn her wheel”, after a love-chase in which the female is the pursuer, and he the pursued.)

Then follows the story of how Diana, by an act of witchcraft, created the round heaven above, peopled it with stars, and made rain fall upon the earth. “And having made the heaven and the stars and the rain, Diana became Queen of the Witches; she was the cat who ruled the star-mice, the heaven and the rain”.

The image of the moon as “the cat who rules the star-mice” is a striking and poetic one. It reminds us of Diana’s transformation into a cat in order to seduce Lucifer, and of the way in which cats have long been considered sacred and magical animals, and the companions of witches. As the moon, Diana is the natural ruler of water and rain.

The Vangelo tells of Diana’s daughter. Aradia, born by her to her brother Lucifer. Diana took pity upon the sufferings of the poor, whom she saw oppressed by their rich feudal masters. She observed how they suffered from hunger and constant toil, while the wealthy, supported by the Christian Church, lived well and safely in their castles.

She saw, too, how many of the oppressed were driven by their wrongs to become outlaws, and to take to crime because they had no other resource. She saw the Jews and the gypsies, whom their sufferings made into criminals. She decided to send upon earth her daughter Aradia, to be the first witch, and give to the poor and powerless some refuge and resource against their oppression by Church and State.

So Diana instructed Aradia in witchcraft and told her to found on earth the secret society of witches. She would show the men and women who followed her how to strike secretly at the “great lords” with the weapon of poison, and “make them die in their palaces”, how to conjure up tempests to ruin the crops of those peasants who were rich and mean and would not help their poorer brothers. Moreover, when the priests of the Christian Church threatened her, or tried to convert her, she should tell them, “Your God the Father, Son, and Mary are three devils. The true God the Father is not yours”.

Diana instructed her daughter in all that she knew of witchcraft, and Aradia in her turn went on earth and taught it to her followers, the witches. Then Aradia told them that she was going to leave the world again; but that when she was gone they should assemble every month at the full moon, meeting together in some deserted place, or in a forest. There they should adore the spirit of Diana, and acknowledge her as their queen. In return, Diana would teach them all things as yet unknown.

They should feast and drink, sing and dance; and as the sign that they were truly free, all of them, both men and women, should be naked in their rites. “All shall sit down to the supper all naked, men and women, and, the feast over, they shall dance, sing, make music, and then love in the darkness, with all the lights extinguished for it is the Spirit of Diana who extinguishes them; and so they will dance and make music in her praise.”

Aradia told the witches that at the supper they should eat cakes made from meal, wine, salt and honey, cut into the shape of a crescent moon, and then baked; and when the cakes were made, an incantation should be said over them, to consecrate them to Diana. (In the Vangelo, there are three confused incantations, supposedly given for this purpose, which in my opinion are among the things that have been put in to mislead. The real incantation appears later, if one reads the text carefully: “I do not bake the bread, nor with it salt, nor do I cook the honey with the wine; I bake the body and the blood and soul, the soul of great Diana. . . . ”)

So it came to pass that Diana recalled her daughter Aradia, after the latter’s mission on earth was accomplished; but she gave Aradia the ability to bestow upon the witches who invoked her, certain powers, which the Vangelo proceeds to enumerate:

To grant her or him success in love.

To bless or curse with power friends or enemies.

To converse with spirits.

To find hidden treasures in ancient ruins.

To conjure the spirits of priests who died leaving treasures.

To understand the voice of the wind.

To change water into wine.

To divine with cards.

To know the secrets of the hand.

To cure diseases.

To make those who are ugly beautiful.

To tame wild beasts.

Once again, there is a subtlety in the text; the second in this list is really two powers, to bless and to curse. If one counts the powers with this in mind, they come to thirteen, the witches’ number. These powers may, moreover, be taken literally or symbolically.

The Vangelo continues with incantations to Diana and Aradia (who is really a younger version of Diana herself); spells for various purposes, such as to obtain a familiar spirit—il folletino rosso, the Red Goblin who dwells in a round stone; the conjuration of the lemon stuck with pins, to make either a charm for good fortune or a curse of malediction; a spell to enjoy a girl’s love in a dream: incantations for good luck, to bring good fortune to one’s vineyard, and so on; as well as a number of strangely enchanting stories, not all of them actually from the MS. that Leland received; but, as mentioned above, included by him because they obviously belonged to the same body of myth and legend.

Evidently not all the stories are of the same age. The beginning of the Vangelo, which I have described in detail above, seems to be the oldest part. All, however, will repay study. Leland realised the importance of what he had discovered; but he was aware of his advancing age, and the lack of sympathy in his own day for such ideas. He appeals at the end of his book, for any who possess information confirming what is set forth therein, to communicate it or publish it in some form, so that it may not be lost. However, many years were to pass before the Old Religion could come further out of the darkness.