A Family Lineage or a Modern Construction

Stregheria takes its name from the archaic Italian word for witchcraft, and its modern shape from one writer. Raven Grimassi's 1995 book Ways of the Strega presented Stregheria as a continuous Italian folk-magic religion, tracing a line back through his own family and through earlier published material, most notably Charles Godfrey Leland's nineteenth-century Aradia, to a pre-Christian Italian witch tradition.

The claim of an unbroken lineage is exactly where scholars stopped agreeing with the popularizer. Folklorist Sabina Magliocco examined the published tradition against the actual ethnographic record of Italian folk magic and found the resemblance thin: what Grimassi published reads, to her analysis, as a modern religious system shaped substantially by Wicca, not a surviving ancient religion transmitted intact. Grimassi himself did not fully dispute this; he acknowledged that Italian-American practitioners of his generation had adapted Wiccan elements into their practice.

Where Magliocco did find something real is narrower and more interesting than the public claim: after meeting Grimassi, she judged it plausible that he had genuinely been initiated into a domestic tradition of Italian folk healing and magic within his own family, the kind of practice folklorists document across many immigrant communities without it constituting an organized religion. Stregheria as a public, organized tradition is a modern construction built partly on that private inheritance and partly on Wiccan borrowing; it remains practiced today by a small but real community within American Neo-Paganism.