Origins & history

Leland received the manuscript he published as Aradia from Maddalena (probably Maddalena Talenti) in 1897. He framed the material as the surviving scripture of a peasant witch-cult dating to the late medieval or early modern period, organised in opposition to feudal and clerical authority, and worshipping Diana and Aradia. The text’s historicity is contested: modern scholarship generally accepts that Leland did receive material from a real informant but treats the resulting book as a nineteenth-century synthesis — possibly Leland’s, possibly Maddalena’s, possibly both — rather than as the surviving text of a continuous pre-Christian religion.

Modern Stregheria as a coherent practised tradition dates principally to the 1980s and 1990s, when Raven Grimassi’s books — beginning with Ways of the Strega (1995, later reissued as Italian Witchcraft) and continuing through Hereditary Witchcraft (1999) and Stregheria: The Old Religion of Southern Europe (2000) — established the framework most widely identified with the term today. Grimassi presented his work as both a continuation of Italian family witchcraft (the vecchia famiglia) into which he claimed initiation and a public reconstruction of the older Aradian tradition.

Several other modern Italian-American witchcraft currents exist alongside or in distinction from Grimassi’s work, including the Sicilian Strega tradition associated with Lori Bruno and the Arician Tradition founded by Grimassi in the early 1980s.