“Perhaps the strangest moment in life is that when for the first time you come into contact with the unseen.”
– Roma Lister
A few weeks ago, I announced the forthcoming publication of my book, Aradia’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Life of Roma Lister.
In the coming days and months, I’ll be putting out a series of posts — all focused on Lister and her investigations into and exchanges with, as she put it, “the unseen world.”
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.
Today’s post highlights a surreal experience Lister had while walking through the streets of Florence, Italy.
From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, the city maintained a reputation for hauntings and other anomalous phenomena.
Spiritualism was in vogue, and ghosts seemed to be around every corner. Leland, for instance, often compared Florence with Sleepy Hollow. It was, he said, haunted by innumerable goblins and witches.
Lister, as you will see in my book, lived a double-life in Florence. The hidden side of her life involved prying into the “nightside of nature” and learning spells from local witches.
Below, I’ve included an excerpt from Lister’s memoirs, which details a vision she had while shopping in Florence:
I remember a very curious incident that happened to me in the Via della Vigna Nuova at Florence. I had been buying biscuits at the English bakery , and was going on towards the Via Tornabuoni when, without the slightest premonition, the whole scene changed. I was in a street, but the houses were quite different and the crowd around me wore a classic dress. Great charts drawn by white oxen, carrying country produce and led by peasants in the dark tunics and sandals fastened high at the knee, forced their way through the crowd.
All around was an eager clatter of voices, everyone being bent on their own concerns. I felt my breath fail me. I could not understand this uncalled for change in my surroundings. I leant against the wall of a house, and at the same moment an electric shock, or what I felt like one, passed through my body. Involuntarily I closed my eyes. When I opened them I was in the Via Tornabuoni and in the twentieth century again…I can guarantee this episode for it happened to myself, and I can certify that my mind was entirely bent on commonplace shopping. I had not read any classic book or had any thread of thought in my mind which could connect me to this vision. There was no sequence or connection to which I could retrace it. It just happened, and that was all.
For more on Lister, watch this space!
Keep an eye as well on hexen.fr for news on the book’s release.