Aradia remains one of the most influential and mysterious works ever written on la vecchia religione, the Old Religion of pre-Christian Italy. In this seminal text, folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland preserves the mythic narrative, ritual language, and liturgical practices of a tradition in which Diana is the primordial Goddess and Aradia (Herodias) is her incarnate daughter, teacher, and liberator. Witchcraft here is not superstition but a sacred inheritance, carried by the marginalized and kept alive through an unbroken thread of devotion.

According to the traditions recorded within, Aradia is the female Messiah of the witches, sent by Diana to instruct the oppressed in the arts of resistance, justice, and magic. The gospel recounts her descent to earth, her teachings among her people, the founding of the witch cult, and her ascent back to the celestial realms—forming a mythology that is at once ancient, rebellious, and deeply spiritual.

The text preserves ceremonies, invocations, and ritual formulas addressed to Diana and Aradia; the exorcism of Cain, reimagined within Italian witch-lore; and traditional spells employing rue, verbena, and the holy-stone—rites that constitute, as the manuscript itself declares, the “regular church-service” of the witches, spoken or chanted at their gatherings.

Also included are the benedictions of honey, meal, and salt, the ritual cakes of the witch-supper, whose structure echoes the ancient Roman Mysteries. Drawn from the living folklore of Tuscany and Romagna, these elements make Aradia not merely a curiosity of folklore but a rare survival of pre-Christian ritual consciousness.

Whether approached as myth, anthropology, or spiritual scripture, Aradia stands as a foundational text of modern witchcraft, offering a window into a tradition where devotion, defiance, and ancestral memory converge.

This is the gospel of the Old Religion.