There is a lake in the Alban Hills that the Romans called the mirror of Diana.
It lies in the throat of a dead crater, dark and almost round, and the wooded slopes lean so close above the shore that the water carries the trees upside down through the whole white afternoon.
At dusk the surface goes to hammered silver.
In the heat of high summer, so the old accounts run, women walked the road out from the city with lit tapers in their hands, and the lake burned twice over — once with the small flames along the bank, once with their doubles in the black water below.
Hounds came garlanded. Bread was left on the grass. Small clay hands, clay feet and clay infants were pressed into the mud at the spring by people who wanted something and did not always say what.
The goddess of that grove is the same goddess whose name would be printed, many centuries afterward, on the first page of a thin book that changed modern witchcraft.
The Grove at Nemi
The lake is Nemi, and the wood above it belonged to Diana Nemorensis — Diana of the Wood — whose sanctuary stood near the town of Aricia on the northern shore.
Roman writers describe a strange office kept there. The priest of the grove was called the rex nemorensis, the king of the wood, and he was said to be a runaway slave who won the post by breaking a bough from one particular tree and killing the man who held the office before him.
He walked the trees at night with his sword drawn, waiting for whoever came next out of the dark.
That image opens The Golden Bough, the enormous comparative study James Frazer first published in 1890. Frazer built a whole theory of dying kings and sacred groves upon it, and much of that theory has since been set aside; his Victorian framing tells you as much about his own century as about the shore of the lake.
What the ground itself gave up is quieter and more moving. Excavation of the sanctuary turned out heaps of votive offerings — clay limbs, clay infants, lamps, coins, small worked things — left at a spring by ordinary people over a very long stretch of time.
Frazer also linked Diana at Nemi with the water nymph Egeria and with a figure named Virbius, making a triad of the place. Hold that as his reading of the sources, not as something carved into the stone.
Diana in the City: Trivia, the Hunt and the Torch
Away from that black water she is the wider Roman goddess: mistress of wild country and of the hunt, of the moon, and — if the clay offerings are read plainly — of childbirth and the safety of small children.
The Romans matched her to the Greek Artemis, and the borrowed image is the one most people still carry: the bow, the quiver, the short hunting dress, the hounds at heel, the hind, the crescent riding above the brow.
They also called her Trivia, she of the three ways, the goddess met where a road splits. That title belongs to a whole family of powers who stand at crossings and thresholds; the Greek Hecate is her nearest neighbour, and classical writers ran the two names together with a freedom that would horrify a modern card index.
Her temple on the Aventine hill in Rome was traditionally credited to the king Servius Tullius, and Roman memory attached it to slaves and to the plebeian city rather than to the marble of the powerful.
Torch and hound. Deer and cypress. Cold water, and the clean silver edge of the moon on it.
The Women Who Rode at Night
Her name then goes underground for centuries and surfaces in the least likely place of all: a church law text.
The passage known as the Canon Episcopi was set down by Regino of Prüm in the early tenth century and copied forward for hundreds of years, reaching wide circulation through Gratian’s Decretum in the twelfth.
It complains of women who believe that in the dead hours of the night they ride out upon beasts over great distances in the company of Diana, goddess of the pagans, obeying her as a mistress and going wherever she calls them.
Read the complaint slowly, because the shape of it matters. The whole point of the canon is that the night ride does not happen. It is a delusion, and the priest’s task is to preach the women out of it.
Later centuries reversed that judgement, and the reversal cost lives by the thousand.
In some versions and later copies other names stand beside hers — Herodias in the Italian material, Holda further north. By then Diana’s name had become a vessel for a much older story about women who go out under the moon and come back before the bread is baked.
Charles Leland and the Manuscript He Said He Was Handed
Florence, at the close of the nineteenth century. An American folklorist named Charles Godfrey Leland is collecting Tuscan charms, cures and fragments — the work that produced Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition in 1892.
His chief source was a woman he called Maddalena, a fortune-teller who gathered material for him and was paid for what she brought.
Leland said that she eventually delivered something larger than a charm on a scrap: a manuscript, a Vangelo, a gospel of the witches. He translated it and published it in 1899 as Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches.
It is a slight thing. Verse and prose together, a creation story and a handful of workings, under a hundred pages in most printings, the paper of the early editions now gone to the colour of weak tea.
The manuscript itself was never produced, and nobody has seen it since. Everything that follows rests upon that missing page.
What the Gospel Tells
The book opens with a cosmogony, and the cosmogony is strange enough to be worth stating carefully.
Diana is the first created. She divides herself into darkness and light, and the light is Lucifer, the light-bearer, her brother. She desires him. He flees her. She follows, takes the shape of the cat that sleeps upon his bed, and by that shape comes to him. The child of that meeting is Aradia.
The Lucifer of these pages is a light-bearer of the text’s own making, bound up with the sun. Whatever a reader brings to the word from elsewhere, the book is not doing Christian theology with it.
Diana then sends Aradia down to the earth as a teacher, and the pupils are named without any softening: the poor, the beaten, serfs run off from their masters, people who own nothing but the road.
What Aradia teaches them is binding and ruin and poison, and how to be free of the men who own their fields.
Around that spine sit the workings — a lemon stuck full of pins, a supper consecrated over meal and salt and honey and wine, an invocation spoken over a holed stone lifted from a stream.
The Passage That Became the Charge
One speech in the book has travelled far beyond the rest of it.
Whenever ye have need of anything, once in the month, and when the moon is full, ye shall assemble in some deserted place, or in a forest all together join to adore the potent spirit of your queen, my mother, great Diana.
The speech goes on into freedom: that those who gather shall be free of slavery, and that as the sign of that freedom they shall be naked in their rites, women and men alike.
Two habits of modern practice have their printed source in those lines — the meeting held at the full moon, and the skyclad rite. Both were carried onward into the Charge of the Goddess, which is the piece of liturgy most Wiccans meet before any other.
Whatever the book turns out to be, the cadence of that passage is real. It has the weight of something meant to be spoken aloud in a dark field, and it does not sound like a folklorist at a desk.
What Scholars Have Made of the Book
Three readings sit on the table, and they have been argued over for a long time.
The first is that Maddalena wrote what a paying collector plainly wanted, and that the gospel is a made thing from end to end.
The second is that Leland shaped, arranged and heightened whatever came into his hands until the seam between the two is no longer findable.
The third is that genuine strands of Tuscan folk magic run through it — that the streghe of those hills really did tell stories in which the moon has a daughter. Ronald Hutton has pressed hard on the first two readings; Sabina Magliocco has argued for the living folk material inside the third. Mario Pazzaglini’s later edition set the Italian text beside a fresh translation so that readers could weigh the language themselves.
Without the manuscript, nobody can shut the question. Call it a Victorian publication of contested origin and you will not have said anything untrue.
How Aradia Entered Modern Wicca
Half a century onward, in England, the ritual material assembled by Gerald Gardner borrowed from Leland’s pages openly and at length.
Doreen Valiente afterward rewrote that borrowed matter into the Charge as it is now spoken, drawing also on the writing of Aleister Crowley, and the version that came out of her hand is the one that reaches most altars today.
The name Aradia was used as a goddess name in some of the early lines, spoken over a cup and a candle by people who had no idea the ink was so young.
A great deal of what feels immemorial in Wicca arrives through this printed channel, sixty years old rather than six hundred. That is not a scandal. It is only worth knowing which century a sentence walked in from.
Dianic Witchcraft and the Names That Followed
The name fastened itself to something new again in the twentieth century.
Dianic witchcraft, associated above all with Zsuzsanna Budapest and her work in California in the early nineteen-seventies, set a goddess at the centre of the rite and, in its best-known form, admitted women only.
The label now covers several different things. Some lines are initiatory and have doors that stay shut; some are open to anyone who walks up the path; some hold membership rules that have been argued over bitterly and publicly, and those arguments are not settled.
Roman religion is not a closed tradition in the way that certain living initiatory practices are, and the goddess of Nemi is reconstructed from texts and dug earth rather than handed down through an unbroken line. A particular group’s door, however, remains that group’s own to open. Read whose gods are these before assuming any welcome.
Her Symbols, and What They Are Made Of
The bow and the quiver. The hound. The hind that stops at the edge of the clearing and does not run.
The torch above all — the small carried fire that goes ahead of you into the trees, and the same fire doubled in still water.
Cypress and oak. The spring at the foot of the slope. The crescent worn above the brow, thin as a paring of ice.
Later practice has added silver to that list, and white, and the deep green of a wood in shadow. Where a correspondence has no ancient warrant, it is safer to know that it was chosen by somebody recent than to pretend a Roman put it there.
Approaching Diana, and What Is Not Promised
She is met more easily outdoors than in. A window left open on a clear night will do; a lane between hedges will do better; anywhere the moon can find you and the air still carries the cold off the grass.
No god grants outcomes. Diana does not hand over a result because the candle was the right colour or the words fell in the right order, and any page that tells you otherwise is selling something. What devotion offers is relationship, attention and a changed way of standing in the world.
Something is usually given at these meetings — a little bread, water, a flower, a coin at a spring. What to give, where to set it down and what happens to it afterward belongs to offerings to the gods, which treats the whole question properly. If you intend to leave anything outdoors, check what is permitted where you live before you go.
A Full Moon Rite at an Open Window
This rite is used when you wish to keep the monthly meeting the book describes, alone, in a room with a sill and a little cold air.
You will need:
- One white or silver candle in a steady holder
- A shallow bowl of water, dark if you have one
- A pinch of salt
- A small piece of bread, or a spoonful of honey
- A window, doorway or step where the sky is visible
- Wait for the full moon, and for the hour when the house has gone quiet around you.
- Set the bowl where light can reach it. Fill it slowly. Let the surface settle until it stops moving.
- Place the candle well back from the curtains and from the draught of the open window, on a surface that will not scorch.
- Drop the salt into the water and watch it go.
- Light the wick. Name her aloud — Diana of the wood, of the crossroads, of the moon — and say plainly that you have come to keep the night, not to ask a favour.
- Sit with the bowl until the small flame steadies in it. Give it your eyes and nothing else for as long as you can hold them still.
- Speak whatever you brought with you. Grief, thanks, a decision you have been turning over for weeks. Short words are better than fine ones.
- Set the bread or the honey on the sill and leave it there for the night.
- Put out the flame yourself before you sleep. Never leave a candle burning in an empty room.
- Pour the water onto the earth or down the drain in the morning. Water that has stood all night is not drinking water, whatever the moon did to it.
If the Name Does Not Answer
Some readers finish this page with a pull at the back of the ribs and a wish to go outside.
Others finish it having learned an interesting piece of publishing history and feeling nothing whatever, and that is an entirely honest outcome. A goddess who came to you through a footnote is not owed a lifetime. If you are weighing whether any figure is asking for you at all, how to know a god is calling you takes the question apart slowly.
What survives all of it — the disputed manuscript, the dead priest with his sword, the lost gospel, the arguments in the journals — is the picture at the beginning.
A round black lake under wooded hills. A line of small carried flames going down to the shore in the heat of August. The water holding every one of them upside down, and giving them back.