[1] In Leland's Gospel, Aradia is portrayed as a messiah who was sent to Earth in order to teach the oppressed peasants how to perform witchcraft to use against the Roman Catholic Church and the upper classes.
[2] Since the publication of Leland's Gospel, Aradia has become "arguably one of the central figures of the modern pagan witchcraft revival" and as such has featured in various forms of Neopaganism, including Wicca and Stregheria, as an actual deity.
It appears that Herodias, the wife of Herod Antipas, in Christianity of the Early Middle Ages, came to be seen as a spirit condemned to wander the sky forever due to her part in the death of John the Baptist, permitted only to rest in treetops between midnight and dawn.
By the High Middle Ages, this figure seems to have become attached to the train of nymphs of Diana, now also seen as a host of spirits flying through the night across the Italian countryside.
Regino reports that there were groups of women who believed that they could go on night journeys where they would fly across the sky to meet Diana and her train.
[11] Leland's Aradia has a chapter containing folklore about the night assembly or banquet, titled "The Sabbat: Tregunda or Witch Meeting", which involves Diana.
[13] Historian Ronald Hutton suggests in Triumph of the Moon that this identification with Herodias was inspired by the work of Jules Michelet in Satanism and Witchcraft.
[20] Aradia is a central figure in Stregheria, an "ethnic Italian" form of Wicca introduced by Raven Grimassi in the 1980s.
Grimassi claims that there was a historical figure called "Aradia di Toscano", whom he portrays as the founder of a revivalist religion of Italian witchcraft in the 14th century.
Instead of Leland's goddess Diana and her messianic daughter Aradia, Kelly's text described mortal human beings.