Tradition
Stregheria
A modern witchcraft current centred on the Italian goddess Diana and her daughter Aradia, drawing on Charles Godfrey Leland’s 1899 text Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches and developed into a present-day practice principally by Raven Grimassi from the 1980s onward.
Stregheria (from Italian strega, “witch”) is a modern witchcraft current presented by its practitioners as a continuation of an Italian folk-magical tradition rooted in pre-Christian peninsular religion. Its principal deities are Diana, goddess of the moon and the wild, and her daughter Aradia, framed in the tradition’s foundational text as a messianic teacher sent to instruct the oppressed in witchcraft.
The two principal sources of the modern tradition are the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), which Leland claimed to have received from a Tuscan informant named Maddalena, and the published work of Raven Grimassi (Gary Charles Erbe), who from the mid-1980s onward developed and popularised a modern Italian-American witchcraft practice drawing on Leland and on his own claimed family transmission.
