“I don’t think anything in his life absorbed, enthralled him as did the witches of Florence.” -Elizabeth Robins Pennell Charles Godfrey Leland had never been a stranger to the odd and the out-of-the-way, but when he settled in Florence in the late 1880s, his life took on a distinctly magical bent. Like any newcomer he…
Aradia’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Life of Roma Lister is now available from Hexen Press! Described by Professor Ronald Hutton as providing “important new information concerning the milieu from which one of the foundational texts of modern Paganism emerged”, Aradia’s Hidden Hand presents new evidence that the British-Italian folklorist Roma Lister played a key role in…
“The power of an invocation comes from the force of the soul who invokes it.” – Roma Lister Roma Lister was no stranger to séances. Over the course of her life, she attended dozens of sittings and had multiple occasions to converse with and study other psychics, such as the famed — but controversial —…
“Miss [Roma] Lister has been a close student of the occult and knows well of what she is writing. -Edith Katherine Harper In order to shed a little more light on Roma Lister’s philosophical outlook, I’ve assembled a short selection of quotes from the second volume of her memoirs, Further Reminiscences: Occult and Social…
“It is a curious place — the wood in Villa Doria. I made my first acquaintance with poltergeists there.” -Roma Lister Although — in later life — Roma Lister was described by some as having an “easy familiarity with ghosts”, her earliest experiences with the Unseen were anything but agreeable. During her youth, Lister often…
“Yesterday, I went with Roma Lister to visit Maddalena, the witch…” – Charles Godfrey Leland In the ten or so years leading up to the publication of Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), Charles Godfrey Leland associated with a number of self-professed witches in Florence and the wider Tuscan countryside. “I have,” he wrote…
“It was in one of these periods of strange happenings that I accepted my friend’s invitation, having little fear of ghosts.” – Roma Lister As I’ve written previously, late nineteenth-century Florence was a bona fide ghostland. Following the rise to international stardom of the Fox sisters (who are generally acknowledged as the “mothers” of spiritualism),…
“During my life, I have had occasion to make my own little theories, and, what is perhaps more interesting, I have been able to test them.” – Roma Lister Roma Lister, like many of those in her circle (doctors, bohemians, dressmakers, diplomats, countesses, magistrates) were many-sided. They all had their working-day-world fixations and obligations. But…
Long ignored by scholarship, Lister was a writer, folklore collector, and occultist who served as an inspiration and adviser to the American man of letters Charles Godfrey Leland. Throughout her life, Lister, like her friend Lady Walburga Paget and others, often had strange, visionary experiences.
Aradia’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Life of Roma Lister will be the first-ever monograph on Roma Lister, a British-Italian folklore collector, occultist, and friend of the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland.