In 1899, Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, or, The Gospel of the Witches — a scripture he claimed to have collected in Italy, proving that paganism had survived there undetected since the Middle Ages. A. D. Manns’s PDR essay asks the question nobody has answered: who actually wrote it?

What was in the book was unlike anything else in the record.

  • The goddess Diana sends her daughter Aradia to free the poor and disenfranchised
  • Aradia teaches them sorcery — not just to escape the rich, but to destroy hierarchies of oppression altogether
  • Christianity is named as a religion of diabolists: “your God, the Father, and Maria are three devils”
  • The promise: freedom “until the last of your oppressors shall be dead”

Historians have never found evidence of an organized pagan witch-cult in nineteenth-century Italy. Ronald Hutton points out that the reactionary Catholic regimes running central Italy until 1859 would hardly have missed whole villages rejecting Christianity. The manuscript is lost. Its supposed author, the Tuscan fortune-teller Maddalena, was on Leland’s payroll.

Manns adds an overlooked candidate: Roma Lister, raised in Rome, settled in Florence, a folklore collector who worked as Leland’s research assistant from roughly 1893 to 1897, knew Maddalena personally, and — crucially — was a practising medium and automatic writer.

  • She told the Italian Folklore Society in 1893 that her whole life had “been spent among witches and wizards”
  • She treated a businessman’s failing profits with a wizard’s “pocket godling” stone, and reported his winter receipts had increased
  • By 1901 she was signing as a Fellow of the Theosophical Society
  • She channelled a spirit from Atlantis in a 1903–05 automatic-writing book, under a pseudonym
  • Leland’s own metaphor for her: “take a witch to catch witches”

The timing is the argument. Leland received the Aradia manuscript in January 1897 — exactly when Lister was delivering him masses of collected folklore, some of which he published with a generic nod to “other authorities.” Whether she drafted it or channelled it in a circle of Tuscan folk witches can’t be settled. That she had both the access and the ability is beyond doubt.

Either way, the religion that followed was built by women. Aradia reached Doreen Valiente in the 1950s, who used it to rewrite Gerald Gardner’s Wiccan rituals. Magical women gathered the material, magical women adapted it, and a new religion of witches came out the other end.