Charles Leland - Folklorist and
Author whose 19th Century field studies in Italy revealed
the existence of a surviving Witch Cult from ancient times.
He wrote and had published several classic texts, such as
Aradia; Gospel of the Witches, and Etruscan Roman Remains
(both published by 1899.) Leland's writings on Italian
Witchcraft bear many striking similar elements to the
writings on Gardnerian Wicca written by Gerald Gardner over
one half a century later.
Many people today think of Gerald
Gardner as the founder of modern Wicca/Witchcraft. Gardner's
books on Witchcraft published in the mid-twentieth century
brought about a growing interest in the Old Religion of
pre-Christian Europe. However, over half a century earlier a
man named Charles Godfrey Leland wrote on many of the same
topics later popularized by Gerald Gardner. For example, the
theme of witches meeting at the time of the full moon, being
nude, calling their ways The Old Religion, celebrating with
ritual cakes and wine, and worshipping a god and goddess all
appear in Leland's writings on Italian Witchcraft circa
1896.
In chapter four of his book Gypsy
Sorcery & Fortune Telling, published in 1891, Leland makes
the earliest connection between Wicca and modern Witchcraft:
"as for the English word witch,
Anglo-Saxon Wicca, comes from a root implying wisdom..."
Leland's footnote here reads: "Witch. Mediaeval English
wicche, both masculine and feminine, a wizard, a witch.
Anglo-Saxon wicca, masculine, wicce feminine. Wicca is a
corruption of witga, commonly used as a short form of witega,
a prophet, seer, magician, or sorcerer. Anglo-Saxon witan,
to see, allied to witan, to know..."
What I find interesting is
Leland's "pre-Gardnerian" reference to Wicca and Witchcraft.
Of further interest is the fact that there is no single
element of the basic structure of Gardnerian Wicca that
cannot be found in Leland's earlier writings, as noted in
the opening of this article. The only exception would be the
clear mention of a ritual circle. However, in the Italian
witch-hunters manual (Compendium Maleficarum, 1608) we do
find a woodcut of Italian witches gathered in a circle
traced upon the ground. Therefore the historical support for
this aspect of Italian Witchcraft may have been obvious
enough for Leland to have felt no need to address it
specifically.
But who was this Leland
character, and why should we take particular notice of his
writings in the first place? Charles Godfrey Leland was a
famous folklorist who wrote several classic texts on English
Gypsies and Italian Witches. He was born in Philadelphia on
August 15, 1824 and died in Florence, Italy, on March 20,
1903. Leland was fascinated by folk lore and folk magic even
as a child, and went on to author such important works as
Etruscan Roman Remains, Legends of Florence, The Gypsies,
Gypsy Sorcery, and Aradia; Gospel of the Witches.
In 1906 a two volume biography of
Charles Godfrey Leland was written by his niece Elizabeth
Robins Pennell. In chapter One, recounting his personal
memoirs, Pennell writes of his infancy:
"In both the 'Memoirs' and the
'Memoranda' he tells how he was carried up to the garret by
his old Dutch nurse, who was said to be a sorceress, and
left there with a Bible, a key, and a knife on his breast,
lighted candles, money, and a plate of salt at his head:
rites that were to make luck doubly certain by helping him
to rise in life, and become a scholar and a wizard."
Pennell goes on to tell us that
Leland's mother claimed an ancestress who married into
"sorcery." Leland writes in his memoirs: "my mother's
opinion was that this was a very strong case of atavism, and
that the mysterious ancestor had through the ages cropped
out in me." The biography of Charles Leland is filled with
accounts of his early interest in the supernatural, an
interest that turned to a life long passion. Of this passion
Pennell writes:
"It is what might be
expected...of the man who was called Master by the witches
and Gypsies, whose pockets were always full of charms and
amulets, who owned the Black Stone of the Voodoos, who could
not see a bit of red string at his feet and not pick it up,
or find a pebble with a hole in it and not add it to his
store - who, in a word, not only studied witchcraft with the
impersonal curiosity of the scholar, but practised it with
the zest of the initiated."
As a young boy Leland grew up in
a household that employed servants. According to Pennell,
Leland learned of fairies from the Irish immigrant women
working in his home, and from the black servant women in the
kitchen he learned about Voodoo. Leland writes of his
boyhood: "I was always given to loneliness in gardens and
woods when I could get into them, and to hearing words in
bird's songs and running or falling water." Pennell notes
that throughout Leland's life, he could never get away from
the fascination of the supernatural, nor did he ever show
any desire to.
Fluent in several foreign
languages, at age eighteen Leland wrote an unpublished
manuscript English translation of Pymander of Trismegistus,
a hermetic text now commonly known as Hermes Trismegistus:
His Divine Pymander. The Pymander, as it was often called
for short, was the foundation for much of the hermetic
writings that inspired many Western Occultists during the
later part of the nineteenth century and early part of the
twentieth century.
In 1870 Leland moved to England
where he eventually studied Gypsy society and lore. Over the
course of time he won the confidence of a man named Matty
Cooper, king of the Gypsies in England. Cooper personally
taught Leland to speak Romany, the language of the Gypsies.
It took many years before Leland was totally accepted by the
Gypsies as one of their own. In a letter dated November
16th, 1886 Leland wrote to Pennell: "...I have been by
moonlight amid Gypsy ruins with a whole camp of Gypsies, who
danced and sang..." Having penetrated their mysteries to
such a degree, Leland went on to author two classic texts on
Gypsies, establishing himself as an authority on the subject
among the scholars of his time.
In 1888 Leland found himself in
Florence, Italy, where he lived out the remainder of his
life. It was here that Leland met a woman whom he always
referred to as Maddalena. Her real name was Maddalena
Taleni, or possibly Zaleni. Some people have mistakenly
attached the name Margherita to her, resulting from
purposeful attempts by Leland and his niece to confuse her
identity in order to protect Maddalena's relatives from
being discovered as family Witches. Maddalena worked as a
"card reader" telling fortunes in the back streets of
Florence, and later married a man named Lorenzo Bruciatelli
with whom she moved to America. Leland soon discovered that
Maddalena was a Witch, and employed her to help gather
material for his research on Italian Witchcraft. In Leland's
biography, Pennell mentions running across his manuscript
notes where he writes of Maddalena:
"a young woman who would have
been taken for a Gypsy in England, but in whose face, in
Italy, I soon learned to know the antique Etruscan, with its
strange mysteries, to which was added the indefinable glance
of the Witch. She was from the Romagna Toscana, born in the
heart of its unsurpassingly wild and romantic scenery, amid
cliffs, headlong torrents, forests, and old legendary
castles. I did not gather all the facts for a long time, but
gradually found that she was of a Witch family, or one whose
members had, from time to immemorial, told fortunes,
repeated ancient legends, gathered incantations, and learned
how to intone them, prepared enchanted medicines, philtres,
or spells. As a girl, her Witch grandmother, aunt, and
especially her stepmother brought her up to believe in her
destiny as a sorceress, and taught her in the forests, afar
from human ear, to chant in strange prescribed tones,
incantations or evocations to the ancient gods of Italy,
under names but little changed, who are now known as
folletti, spiriti, fate, or lari - the Lares or household
goblins of the ancient Etruscans."
Maddalena introduced Leland to
another woman named Marietta who assisted her in providing
him with research materials. Pennell, who inherited the bulk
of Leland's notes, letters, and unpublished materials,
refers to Marietta as a sorceress but Leland's own
description of her in his published works is less clear. At
one point Leland mused, in a letter to Pennell dated June
28th, 1889, that Maddalena and Marietta might be inventing
various verses and passing them off as something of
antiquity. However, Leland seems to have had a change of
heart, as reflected in another letter to Pennell written in
January of 1891. Here Leland writes:
"It turns out that Maddalena was
regularly trained as a witch. She said the other day, you
can never get to the end of all this Stregheria -
witchcraft. Her memory seems to be inexhaustible, and when
anything is wanting she consults some other witch and always
gets it. It is part of the education of a witch to learn
endless incantations, and these I am sure were originally
Etruscan. I can't prove it, but I believe I have more
Etruscan poetry than is to be found in all the remains.
Maddalena has written me herself about 200 pages of this
folklore - incantations and stories."
In another letter dated April 8,
1891 (written to Mr. Macritchie) Leland indicates still
other Witches who assisted him in his research:
"...But ten times more remarkable
is my MS. on the Tuscan Traditions and Florentine Folk Lore.
I have actually not only found all of the old Etruscan gods
still known to the peasantry of the Tuscan Romagna, but what
is more, have succeeded in proving thoroughly that they are
still known. A clever young contadino and his father (of
witch family), having a list of all the Etruscan gods, went
on market days to all the old people from different parts of
the country, and not only took their testimony, but made
them write certificates that the Etruscan Jupiter, Bacchus,
etc. were known to them. With these I have a number of Roman
minor rural deities, &c."
In Florence, Leland spent all of
his spare time collecting Witch Lore, and purchasing items
of antiquity as he chanced upon them. In a letter written to
Mary Owen, Leland says "I have been living in an atmosphere
of witchcraft and sorcery, engaged in collecting songs,
spells, and stories of sorcery, so that I was amused to hear
the other day that an eminent scholar said that I could do
well at folk-lore, but that I had too many irons in the
fire." Leland describes the Italian Witches he met as
"living in a bygone age." It was an age that Leland
apparently longed for himself.
Leland, apparently, did more than
interview Italian Witches, or simply keep in their company.
A passage from his book Etruscan Roman Remains strongly
suggests that Leland was himself initiated into Stregheria,
as indicted in the last sentence of the following:
"But, in fact, as I became
familiar with the real, deeply seated belief in a religion
of witchcraft in Tuscany, I found that there is no such
great anomaly after all in a priest's being a wizard, for
witchcraft is a business, like any other. Or it may come
upon you like love, or a cold, or a profession, and you must
bear it till you can give it or your practice to somebody
else. What is pleasant to reflect on is that there is no
devil in it. If you lose it you at once become good, and you
cannot die till you get rid of it. It is not considered by
any means a Christianly, pious possession, but in some
strange way the strega works clear of Theology. True, there
are witches good and bad, but all whom I ever met belonged
entirely to the buone. It was their rivals and enemies who
were maladette streghe, et cetera, but the latter I never
met. We were all good."
There is another passage given in
the same book. In the chapter titled "Witches and
Witchcraft" Leland is interviewing a strega, and asks her
how a certain priest became a stregone. In doing so he asks
her how he (the priest) "came to practise our noble
profession." Leland seems to be referring to the strega and
himself as being part of something which the priest had also
joined.
One of the most puzzling aspects
of Leland's writings on Italian Witchcraft is the fact that
he goes back and forth between speaking of Witchcraft in
common Christian stereotypes of the period and portraying
Witches as "good" and "noble" followers of the goddess Diana
instead of the devil. His book Aradia; Gospel of the Witches
is certainly a shocking turn from his general theme of the
good witches of Benevento. Was he trying to please both
sides? Or was he laying the foundation for a greater
revelation to come. Perhaps we may never know, as Leland
died without completing his work on Italian Witchcraft. One
of his last wishes was to ask that someone compile all of
the material he had written on the subject into one single
volume. Raven Grimassi is currently working on such a
project.
