When he penned Aradia, Gospel of the Witches in 1899, Charles Godfrey Leland ended up writing a cornerstone text within the twentieth-century neo-pagan revival. In it, he asserted that his findings were based on an extant earth-based folk religion in northern Italy, whose figurehead was Aradia, a woman connected to the cult of the goddess Diana. While followers of Leland’s writings ultimately facilitated the creation of Wicca—which, as of 2021, counted 1.5 million followers—there are doubts about both his scholarly investigation and whether Aradia was indeed an established mythological figure in medieval paganism.

Magic and witchcraft were lifelong fascinations for Leland. According to his own family lore, he had a childhood nurse who was a reputed witch and performed a ritual to ensure his success in life. Additionally, a bout of “brain fever” supposedly left him with a fascination with romance and mystery.

“His interests in folk tradition were formed by his contacts with Black American and immigrant Irish servants and with Native American farm workers employed by his New England cousins,” writes Juliette Wood in Béaloideas. “Such contacts […] fed his romantic imagination.” He also viewed civilization as following a progressive curve, interrupted by the reactionary world of medieval Europe. “[It] was a common feature in the romantic, post-Enlightenment thinking that Leland favored,” Wood writes.

After inheriting money from his father, Leland, with his wife, relocated to Europe, where he remained until his death in 1903. His interest in witchcraft came to dominate his later writing. Aradia outlined the principles of “the old religion” practiced between Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, as narrated by a single source he called Maddalena.

“Here, he claimed, the cult had continued despite repression by Leland’s bête noire, the Catholic Church, until one of the streghe, Maddalena, collected material for him,” writes Wood. “[I]t was dismissed or ignored by folklorists and historians who felt, by and large, that Leland was overly reliant on one source.”

Leland presented European material as the survival of an ancient pagan cult—moreover, a paganism that had been demonized by Christianity.

“When he recognized Christian elements, he tended to downplay or dismiss them, with the result that witchcraft was depicted as something opposed to, rather than assimilated with, Christianity,” notes Wood. This perspective aligned with the trends among nineteenth-century folklorists and anthropologists.

Leland also magnified the alleged world-building of this religion.

“The key issue from the point of view of folklore praxis and the creation of an identity for Italian witches, and thus whether this is a counter-religion or a series of loosely connected general magic practices, is the context in which the chants are placed,” explains Wood. “The sense that this material embodies a coherent worldview is stronger in Leland’s comments than in the chants themselves.”

While the chants were no doubt authentic in substance, the relevant point was whether they were a pre-existing unified group used in association with a specific witchcraft ritual or were brought together subsequently by Leland or Maddalena.

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“Many of them do indeed seem to be independent and not connected with a specific witchcraft cult,” writes Wood.

Another flaw of Aradia was that it presented a single text with little comparative material.

“The text itself is quite unlike medieval or Renaissance works on magic,” notes Wood, “but accords well with what one would expect of a counter-religion as described initially by French historian Jules Michelet.” Michelet, in fact, famously theorized that witchcraft was a counter-religion persecuted by the Church. Thus, it’s not surprising that scholars have focused on him as a source for Leland’s worldview rather than on an oral, independent witch tradition.

As for the identity of Aradia herself, the name is unfamiliar to contemporary speakers of the dialects spoken in the Tuscany and Romagna regions that Leland allegedly visited. Leland identified it as a local variant of “Herodias,” the murderer of St. John the Baptist. Surprisingly, however, Romania (not Romagna) provides evidence that the name “Aradia” is a variant of Ariadne, a figure tied to the Dionysian cult, which would make sense with the agricultural and rural component of Leland’s alleged religion.

“As with the incantations,” writes Wood, “Leland transforms folk material in a somewhat creative manner. Aradia and Diana are linked in Romanian folklore, but the mother/daughter relationship is attested only in the Leland/Maddalena material.”

While Diana and witchcraft became linked in Western Europe, the goddess was also the protector of slaves in the Roman Empire. Wood attributes Leland’s association of Diana with expressions against Christian oppression to this.

“Since he also viewed the contemporary magic of Italian witches as an expression of popular democracy, it’s unsurprising that his work continues to attract modern Wicca,” she writes.

Despite the historical and religious inconsistencies that emerge, and despite the fact that the magical practices outlined in Aradia don’t form the building blocks of a larger counter-religion, they nonetheless remain a significant and important element in cultural history—regardless of whether Aradia herself was ever an agrarian demigoddess. On that note, Wood cites both “the firefly incantation,” a nursery rhyme in Northern Italian folklore, and the “lemon and the pins” spell as words still used in popular magic in Northern Italy.

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