Sacred Texts: Wicca and Neo-Paganism

Part One: Chapter I--TINIA

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This is a work of 19th-century folklore scholarship in the tradition of comparative mythology and folk-religion documentation, most likely an excerpt from Charles Godfrey Leland's *Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition* (1892). The author's central argument is that ancient Etruscan deities — particularly Tinia (the Etruscan thunder-god equivalent to Jupiter) — survived into contemporary Tuscan peasant culture not as recognized gods but as feared folk spirits, goblins (*folletti*), and subjects of folk-magical invocations collected from rural women and *streghe* (witches). The framing conceit is an extended analogy between a street vendor's jumble of ancient bronze medals and the similarly mixed, battered, and misunderstood mythological fragments still alive in peasant memory — Roman, Etruscan, and Catholic elements fused indiscriminately. The author is notably urgent about preservation, warning that within a decade the names and invocations of these surviving pagan spirits will have vanished entirely, known only to a dwindling few elderly peasants. What distinguishes the work is its combination of on-the-ground fieldwork (direct conversations with informants, actual incantations transcribed in Italian and translated) with classical scholarship (citations of Müller, Heine), presenting folk practice as living archaeological evidence rather than mere curiosity.

Part One: Chapter I--TINIA

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