An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Leland, Charles Godfrey

Charles Godfrey Leland was a remarkable, many-sided personality, to whom students of folklore and witchcraft owe a great deal. His most famous books on these subjects are Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling, first published in London in 1891 (University Books Inc, New York, 1962); Etruscan-Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, first published in London in 1892; and Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, published in London in 1899.

In addition to these, Leland was the author of over fifty books on a variety of subjects, and was probably most famous in his lifetime for the book he wrote as a joke, Hans Breitmann’s Ballads, a series of comic verses in the idiom of old-time German-American immigrants (Trubner and Co, London, 1872).

Not only was Leland a pioneer in the systematic collection and study of folklore, legends, and old and curious languages such as Romany and Shelta (the Celtic tinkers’ language which he discovered); he was also a pioneer in education and psychology, and his ideas were far in advance of his day. Moreover, his own talents as an artist and craftsman were outstanding. His illustrations to his own works have an originality, strangeness and charm which capture the true spirit of magic and fairytale.

Leland not only studied magic and witchcraft; he practised them. His letters and other writings are full of references to successful spells he accomplished. For instance, he once wrote to a friend, while he was in England and was staying at Brighton:

On the steamboat to England Mrs. Leland found that a diamond worth perhaps $40 or $50 had fallen from her ring, probably while asleep in her berth. The whole stateroom was overhauled in vain. I invoked the spirit and I predicted its recovery. A few days after, here in Brighton, she found it loose at the bottom of her travelling bag. And I had another invocation to find a friend who I was confidentially assured had left Brighton. One day I invoked the spirit, and he bade me follow two girls on the other side of the way. I did so for some distance, when I met my friend, who had just returned to Brighton; I might have been here a year without doing so.

One of his most prized possessions was the Black Stone of the Voodoos. There were only five or six of these ’conjuring stones’ in the whole of America. They were small black pebbles, which had originally come from Africa, and whoever succeeded in obtaining one became thereby a Master of Voodoo, and was recognised as such by the practitioners of Voodoo in America. Leland was given one, which he exhibited to the Folk-Lore Congress in London in 1891.

In 1888 Leland became the first President of the Gypsy-Lore Society. In the winter of that year, in Florence, he was initiated into the witchlore of Italy, La Vecchia Religione as it was called, meaning ’The Old Religion’. He had made friends in Florence with a beautiful young witch called Maddalena. She came from the wild countryside of the Romagna Toscana; and members of her family had, from time immemorial, told fortunes, preserved ancient legends and incantations, and practised spells and enchantments. Her grandmother, her aunt and her step-mother had all been witches and had trained her from childhood in the rites and beliefs of the Old Religion.

Maddalena gave Leland a mass of legends and incantations, upon which he based his books about Italian witchcraft; and she also introduced him to other witches.

Leland states, in his Etruscan-Roman Remains: “There are many people in Italy, and I have met such, who, while knowing nothing about Diana as a Roman goddess, are quite familiar with her as Queen of the Witches.” Leland was not, however, the first to realise that witchcraft in Italy was the survival of the old cult of the moon goddess Diana. In 1749 Girolamo Tartarotti had published a book. A Study of the Midnight Sabbats of Witches, in which he stated that “The identity of the Dianic cult with modern witchcraft is demonstrated and proven”; but his book had made no particular impact. The credit for first lifting the study of witchcraft out of the category of fantasies about broomstick-flying and consorting with demons, and into that of comparative religion and anthropology, belongs to Charles Godfrey Leland.

The lore of ghosts, witches and fairies surrounded Leland from boyhood. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 15th August 1824; and when he was only a few days old, his old Dutch nurse carried him up to the garret of the house, and placed a Bible, a key, and a knife on the baby’s breast, and lighted candles, money, and a plate of salt at his head. The object of this rite was to cause him to rise in life, to be lucky, and to become a scholar and a wizard; it certainly seems to have succeeded.

He was a descendant of John Leland, who became the Royal Antiquary in 1533, and of Charles Leland, who was Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in the reign of Charles I. His family came to America in 1636 and settled in Massachusetts.

Charles Godfrey Leland was educated at Princeton, from which he graduated at the end of four years. He then went to Europe, where he studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich, and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He took part in the Paris Revolution of 1848; and later he fought in the American Civil War, on the Union side, and saw the Battle of Gettysburg.

He worked extensively as a journalist in America, and also prospected for oil; travelling in the old Wild West, and once staying with General Custer at Fort Harker. His appearance was striking; over 6 feet tall, bearded, and with handsome features and blue eyes, which his niece and biographer, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, described as “the eyes of the seer, the mystic”.

Deeply devoted to his wife, Isabel, whom he married in 1856, he survived her death by less than a year. His long and active life closed at Florence in 1903.