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Aradia, or The Gospel of the Witches |
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, who divine 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. Hopiter, 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
religione, or the old religion, of which DIANA is the Goddess, her daughter
Aradia (or Herodius) the female Messiah, and that this little work sets
forth how the latter was born, came down to earth, established witches
and witchcraft, and then returned to heaven. With it are given the ceremonies
and invocations or incantations to be addressed to Diana and Aradia, the
exorcism of Cain, and the spells of the holy-stone, rue, and verbena, constituting,
as the text declares, the regular church-service, so to speak, which is
to be chanted or pronounced at the witch meetings. There are also included
the very curious incantations or benedictions of the honey, meal, and salt,
or cakes of the witch-supper, which is curiously classical, and evidently
a relic of the Roman Mysteries. The work could have been extended ad infinitum
by adding to it the ceremonies and incantations which actually form a part
of the Scripture of Witchcraft, but as these are nearly all - or at least
in great number - to be found in my works entitled Etruscan-Roman Remains
and Legends of Florence, I have hesitated to compile such a volume before
ascertaining whether there is a sufficiently large number of the public
who would buy such a work. Since writing the foregoing I have met with
and read a very clever and entertaining work entitled Romanzo dei Settimani,
G. Cavagnari, 1889, in which the author, in the form of a novel, vividly
depicts the manners, habits of thought, and especially the nature of witchcraft,
and the many superstitions current among the peasants in Lombardy. Unfortunately,
notwithstanding his extensive knowledge of the subject, it never seems
to have occurred to the narrator that these traditions were anything but
noxious nonsense or abominably un-Christian folly. That there exist in
them marvelous relics of ancient mythology and valuable folklore, which
is the very cor cordium of history, is as uncared for by him as it would
be by a common Zoccolone or tramping Franciscan. One would think it might
have been suspected by a man who knew that a witch really endeavored to
kill seven people as a ceremony rite, in order to get the secret of endless
wealth, that such a sorceress must have had a store of wondrous legends;
but of all this there is no trace, and it is very evident that nothing
could be further from his mind than that there was anything interesting
from a higher or more genial point of view in it all. His book, in fine,
belongs to the very great number of those written on ghosts and superstition
since the latter has fallen into discredit, in which the authors indulge
in much satirical and very safe but cheap ridicule of what to them is merely
vulgar and false. Like Sir Charles Coldstream, they have peeped in the
crater of Vesuvius after is had ceased to "erupt", and found
"nothing in it." But there was something in it once; and the
man of science, which Sir Charles was not, still finds a great deal in
the remains, and the antiquarian a Pompeii or a Herculaneum - 'tis said
there are still seven buried cities to unearth. I have done what little
(it is really very little) I could, to disinter something from the dead
volcano of Italian sorcery. If this be the manner in which Italian witchcraft
is treated by the most intelligent writer who has depicted it, it will
not be deemed remarkable that there are few indeed who will care whether
there is a veritable Gospel of the Witches, apparently of extreme antiquity,
embodying the belief in a strange counter-religion which has held its own
from pre-historic time to the present day. "Witchcraft is all rubbish,
or something worse," said old writers, "and therefore all books
about it are nothing better." I sincerely trust, however, that these
pages may fall into the hands of at least a few who will think better of
them. I should, however, in justice to those who do care to explore dark
and bewildering paths, explain clearly that witch-lore is hidden with most
scrupulous care from all save a very few in Italy, just as it is among
the Chippeway Medas or the Black Voodoo. In the novel to the life of I
Settimani an aspirant is represented as living with a witch and acquiring
or picking up with pain, scrap by scrap, her spells and incantations, giving
years to it. So my friend the late M. Dragomanoff told me how a certain
man in Hungary, having learned that he had collected many spells (which
were indeed subsequently published in folklore journals), stole them, so
that the next year when Dragomanoff returned, he found the thief in full
practice as a blooming magician. Truly he had not got many incantations,
only a dozen or so, but a very little will go a great way in the business,
and I venture to say there is perhaps hardly a single witch in Italy who
knows as many as I have published, mine having been assiduously collected
from many, far and wide. Everything of the kind which is written is, moreover,
often destroyed with scrupulous care by priests or penitents, or the vast
number who have a superstitious fear of even being in the same house with
such documents, so that I regard the rescue of the Vangelo as something
which is to say the least remarkable.
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