As my cousin Donna will tell you, when I was a kid I was fascinated with witchcraft – not in practice, mind you, but in theory. Even then I sensed it was the ruins of an ancient culture.
Ever since my first visit to Pompeii at the age of two, I grew up comparing the world of what is to what had been. From the time I could say “archaeologist,” I wanted to be one.
No surprise: I loved reading about Greek myths from an equally-early age, and devoured books like The Golden Bough and The White Goddess. As I got into Classics in college I learned more about Roman and Etruscan myth and began to see the wicca connections.
Weirdly – considering it’s the hearth of Roman Catholicism – Italy wasn’t quite as hot for the witch-hunting of the Inquisition era as, say, Spain or Germany, and large enough pockets of ancient tradition survived there to offer good ethnographic material for writing novels.
The city of Benevento in Campania was devoted in ancient times to the worship of the goddess Isis and is still strongly associated with witchcraft. Mussorgsky’s supremely-creepy “Night on Bald Mountain” was inspired by a trip to Monte Calvo (“Bald Mountain”), not far from Benevento, where stregheria ran rampant on St. John’s Eve.
Then there is Paroldo (pop. 239) in Piemonte, known for its masche: “white/good sorceresses” a bit like Tomie DePaola’s Strega Nona. Their healing gestures, herbs and methods are still passed down from grandmother to daughter or granddaughter.
These survivals of pagan custom, harnessing the power of herbal cures and the cloud of supernatural beings through sacrifices of cakes or fruit or flowers, blood or milk or wine or the smoke of burnt offerings, gestures or dances, along with words of power, we can call magic.
This is not the “wizardly” magic of Hogwarts. That is based on a medieval memory of Roman law, in which the touch of an ivory rod of patrician command and the speaking of three words had the power to “magically” turn slaves into free people.
...Free people who wore pointed hats as signs of their manumission.
Magic assumes not Christianity’s free grace or the bloodless sacrifice of a contrite heart, but rather what the Romans called do ut des “I give (you this offering) so that you might give (me what I ask for).” It requires sacrifice and the absolutely correct performance of ritual.
Magic makes people carry rabbit’s feet, wash their cars to make it rain, wear amulets of wheat, verbena and salt, wear wreaths of herbs that magically ward off drunkenness, all that.
“Black/bad magic” was frowned upon even in Roman times, though people used it to snare a lover or curse a rival. Etruscans were famous for their magic: whether cursing their enemies or reading the will of the gods through animal entrails and the flight of birds.
Tuscany’s rich heritage of Etruscan magic survived until as recently as a couple of centuries ago. Ethnographer Charles Godfrey Leland collected scores of incantations still offered to spirits still named with their Rasenna (Etruscan) names as recently as the 1860’s.
Illiterate people have excellent memories – they have to! – and are quite capable of handing down poems and songs we literate people find too unthinkably long to learn. We must imagine that the Romagnola incantation Lavinia Bradley-Arnold is asked to turn (in our story) back into the dead language of Rasenna was one of these.
Leland also preserves the remarkable story of a priest surprised by a dying witch into accepting her stregheria in the form of a mouse. Hmmm. Interesting.