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To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.satanism,alt.religion.all-worlds,alt.pagan
From: tyagI@houseofkaos.Abyss.coM (tyagi mordred nagasiva)
Subject: Witches are Satanists (Was Re: are Wiccans, Satanists?)
Date: 30 Sep 1994 01:24:53 GMT

joe 13 <71420.504@CompuServe.COM| writes:

|aradia  gospel of the witches   tells how the daughter of satan/lucifer
|and diana went to earth to teach witches how to gain their freedom.
|"and ye shall be naked in these rites as a sign of this freedom"

Now this is VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION.  Consider it carefully, Witches.
We are talking now about a Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), who
was the author of _Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches_, at least
partial inspiration for 'The Charge of the Goddess'.  Let me quote 
something of your favorite writers to you:

Margot Adler has this to say:

"The controversy that surrounds Leland concerns his meeting with a woman
named Maddalena who claimed descent from an old Witch family.  She brought
Leland what she said was the local Witches book, a mixture of myths and
spells.  Leland called it a translation of an early or late Latin work.  
The myths tell of Diana (or Tana), Queen of the Witches, and two different
versions of her union with Lucifer, the sun.  From this union was born a
daughter, Aradia, who was to go to earth as the messiah of the Witches and
teach the arts of Witchcraft to oppressed humanity.  Leland wrote that this
was a sacred gospel of the Old Religion (*la Vecchia Religione*).  He said
this religion still prevailed in entire villages in the Romagna in Italy.

"...., clearly there are elements from 'Aradia' in some of the rites of
modern Wicca.  Several beautiful stanzas from 'Aradia' appear little
changed in the rite known as 'The Charge of the Goddess.'  In 'Aradia'
this appears as follows:

	'Now when Aradia had been taught to work all witchcraft,
	 how to destroy the evil race (of oppressors), she
	 (imparted it to her pupils) and said unto them:

		"When I shall have departed from this world,
		 Whenever you have need of anything,
		 Once in the month, and when the moon is full,
		 Ye shall assemble in some desert place
		 Or in a forest all together join
		 To adore the potent spirit of your Queen
		 My mother, great *Diana*.  She who fain
		 Would learn all sorcery yet has not won
		 Its deepest secrets, them my mother will
		 Teach her, in truth all things as yet unknown.
		 And ye shall all be freed from slavery,
		 And so ye shall be free in everything;
		 And as a sign that ye are truly free,
		 Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men
		 And women also: this shall last until
		 The last of your oppressors shall be dead...."'

"...

"... it is in 'Aradia', and in Leland's other books, that the phrase
'*la Vecchia Religione*' -- the Old Religion -- appears.  And that
is where the term, now applied so often in the Wicca religion, may
have originated.  And 'Aradia's importance in helping to create the
revival cannot be stressed enough.  In contrast to Murray, Leland as
far back as the 1890's said that women were given an equal, perhaps
superior, place in the religion.  He wrote that whenever 'there is
a period of radical intellectual rebellion, against long-established
conservatism, hierarchy, and the like, there is always an effort to
regard woman as the fully equal, which means superior sex.'  And he
noted that in Witchcraft, 'it is the female who is the primitive
principle.'  Leland's book is most popular with the feminist groups
in the Craft, partly because the myth of the creation of Aradia
and Diana places the feminine principle first and partly because the
feminist Witches -- the most political Crafters -- are very sympathetic
to the idea of a link between Witches and oppressed peoples.  In the
appendix to 'Aradia', Leland wrote:

	'The perception of this {tyranny} drove vast numbers
	 of the discontented into rebellion, and as they could
	 not prevail by open warfare, they took their hatred
	 out in the form of secret anarchy, which was, however,
	 intimately blended with superstition and fragments of
	 old tradition.  Prominent in this, and naturally enough,
	 was the worship of *Diana* the protectress.... The
	 result of it all was a vast development of rebels,
	 outcasts, and all the discontented, who adopted
	 witchcraft or sorcery for a religion, and wizards as
	 their priests.'"

_Drawing Down the Moon_, by Margot Adler, pp. 57-9.
___________________________________________________

And if you still don't think that Witches are linked to Lucifer
directly, have this bit from Doreen Valiente for an encore:

"Yet the cosmology of 'Aradia', this fragmentary collection of spells
and stories received from illiterate Italian peasant women, is of
this ancient matriarchal kind.  Leland says of it:

	'To all who are interested in this subject of woman's
	 influence and capacity, this Evangel of the Witches
	 will be of value as showing that there have been
	 strange thinkers who regarded creation as a feminine
	 development or parthenogenesis from which the masculine
	 principle was born.  Lucifer, or Light, lay hidden in
	 the darkness of Diana, as heat is hidden in ice.  But
	 the regenerator or Messiah of this strange doctrine
	 is a woman - ARADIA, though the two, mother and daughter,
	 are confused or reflected in the different tales, even
	 as *Jahveh* is confused with the *Elohim*.'

"...

"This, then, is the doctrine of the [Gospel of the Witches]: 'Diana
was the first created before all creation: in her were all things; out
of herself, the first darkness, she divided herself; into darkness
and light she was divided.  Lucifer, her brother and son, herself and
her other half, was the light'.  (This is a concept paralleled by some
of the religious thought of the East, particularly that of the religion
of Shiva and Shakti, from which the Tantric beliefs and practices arise.)"

_The ABC's of Witchcraft Past and Present_, by Doreen Valiente, pp. 30-1.
_________________________________________________________________________

There is more about Lucifer detailed within those pages, about his Fall
(yes, just like the Christian concept, only retold in terms of
cosmologic principles).  I suggest to you that Lucifer is not the only
commonality that Witchcraft has with Satanism - that there are others
here such as rebellion, resistance to oppression, and strident political 
adversarialism which constitutes the heart of all satanic practice.

As I'm now going to be following the strands of these two books in review
of Satanism and Neopaganism, I look forward to response to these quotes
and argument as to why this doesn't constitute a rather direct link between
the two religious movements.

Your servant with a wicced smile,

tyagi the evil wiccan 
tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com
The Order of K@s Under Satan (TOKUS)