Diana and the Witches — The Mysterious Women Who Ride by Night

Diana and witchcraft are connected by one of the most intriguing traditions in European religious history. Medieval texts repeatedly describe women who believed they rode by night with Diana or other supernatural female leaders.

This tradition is now associated with the Canon Episcopi, the so-called Society of Diana, witch flight, and the developing witches’ Sabbath. This article traces that history from the Roman goddess Diana through medieval nocturnal societies and Italian witch traditions to Aradia and modern witchcraft.

research and text: Benjamin Adamah 2026

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Diana’s Strange Afterlife in European Witchcraft

Few gods of the ancient world had an afterlife as strange as that of Diana. The Roman goddess of wilderness, hunting, childbirth, and the moon survived the disappearance of the religion that had once sustained her cult, only to reappear centuries later in an entirely different body of literature.

Medieval churchmen repeatedly encountered – or believed they encountered – women who claimed to travel at night in the company of a supernatural female leader. Again and again, that mysterious mistress was identified as Diana.

This medieval Diana is one of the most fascinating figures in the history of European witchcraft. She appears long before the fully developed image of the witches’ Sabbath, before the familiar pact with the Devil had become central to witchcraft accusations, and before demonologists insisted that witches physically flew through the air to nocturnal assemblies.

Around her instead gathers an older and more elusive complex of beliefs: women riding through the night, supernatural processions, female spirit companies, journeys performed while the body apparently remained behind, visits to houses, feasting, animals, fertility, the dead, and mysterious female beings who presided over these activities.

It would be tempting to interpret this material as evidence for the survival of a secret pagan cult of Diana throughout medieval Europe. That conclusion, however, goes considerably further than the surviving evidence allows. Yet the opposite conclusion — that Diana’s repeated association with nocturnal women can simply be dismissed as an invention of medieval clerics — is equally unsatisfactory.

Something considerably more complicated happened between the goddess of Roman antiquity and the witch goddess encountered by Charles Godfrey Leland at the end of the nineteenth century.

The story of Diana and the witches therefore belongs neither exclusively to classical mythology nor exclusively to the history of witchcraft. It lies precisely in the obscure territory between them.

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Diana Before the Witches

Diana was already an ancient Italian deity before her extensive identification with the Greek Artemis. Her functions were never restricted to the moon. She was associated with wilderness and hunting, but also with women, childbirth, fertility, protection, and liminal places. Over time, however, Diana became increasingly identified with Artemis and acquired an increasingly explicit lunar dimension.

One of the most important centers of her worship was the sacred grove at Nemi, beside the volcanic Lake Nemi southeast of Rome. Here Diana Nemorensis — Diana of the Grove — possessed an ancient sanctuary. The strange priesthood associated with the sanctuary, whose holder was known as the Rex Nemorensis, or King of the Grove, later became famous through James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

Like Artemis, Diana was also characteristically represented in the company of nymphs, female divinities or nature spirits associated with forests, mountains, springs, rivers, and other features of the natural landscape. Diana could therefore appear not merely as a solitary goddess of the wilderness, but as the mistress of a female supernatural retinue accompanying her through the wild.

This should not be confused with the much later medieval Society of Diana, yet the parallel is striking: long before medieval clerics wrote of women following Diana through the night, classical mythology and art already portrayed Diana as the divine leader of a company of supernatural females.

Diana also possessed an important temple on Rome’s Aventine Hill, traditionally attributed to the reign of Servius Tullius. Its location outside the original pomerium, Rome’s sacred boundary, reflected the goddess’s broader associations beyond the narrow political center of Roman civic religion. Her festival was celebrated on August 13.

By the Roman imperial period Diana, Artemis, Luna, and Hecate could overlap without ever becoming completely identical. Particularly important for the later history of witchcraft was the convergence of Diana with Hecate, the nocturnal and chthonic goddess associated with crossroads, ghosts, magic, and the boundaries between worlds.

It is here that Diana’s ancient history begins to approach the territory that would later become associated with witches.

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Diana, Hecate and the Night

The association between Diana and Hecate did not suddenly transform Diana into a “goddess of witches.” Such a formulation would impose a much later concept upon ancient religion. Nevertheless, classical and late-antique syncretism created a Diana who could inhabit the night as easily as the forest.

Diana could be celestial as the moon, terrestrial as the huntress, and through identification with Hecate connected with the nocturnal and chthonic world. Ancient authors and later commentators could consequently move between Diana, Luna, Artemis, and Hecate according to context.

This flexibility became important after Christianization. The temples might disappear and the theological framework might change, but names, stories, local customs, supernatural experiences, and fragments of older cosmologies did not necessarily disappear at the same moment.

And centuries after the official cult of Diana had vanished, churchmen were still writing about her.

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The Women Who Ride with Diana by Night

The crucial document appears around 906, in the Libri duo de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis of Regino of Prüm. The work was intended as a practical handbook for episcopal visitation and ecclesiastical discipline.

Among the beliefs that clergy were instructed to oppose was an extraordinary one. Certain women supposedly believed that during the night they traveled over great distances while riding animals in the company of the pagan goddess Diana and a multitude of other women. They obeyed Diana as their mistress and were supposedly summoned to her service on particular nights.

This passage became known as the Canon Episcopi.

It is sometimes still stated that the text originated with the Council of Ancyra in 314, but this cannot safely be maintained. The famous Diana passage is first securely attested in Regino’s collection around 906. Its ultimate textual ancestry remains debated, but attributing the surviving passage directly to the fourth-century Council of Ancyra gives it a provenance that cannot presently be demonstrated.

The correction matters. Instead of possessing an uncomplicated fourth-century reference to an already established “Society of Diana,” we possess an exceptionally important early tenth-century witness to ecclesiastical concern about women who believed themselves to participate in nocturnal supernatural journeys.

That is already remarkable enough.

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The Canon Episcopi and the Reality of Witch Flight

Even more revealing than the nocturnal journey itself is the Church’s explanation of it.

The Canon Episcopi does not present these women as physically mounting animals and literally flying across Europe. Their error lies precisely in believing that they do so. The nocturnal experience is attributed to diabolical deception, illusions, dreams, or fantastic images produced by demons.

This produces a fascinating inversion of the position taken by many later witch-hunters. In the early medieval model, insisting that the journey really happened was itself an error.

By the late fifteenth century, demonologists increasingly faced the opposite problem. If witches confessed that they traveled bodily to nocturnal assemblies, could such transportation really occur? The Malleus Maleficarum knew the Canon Episcopi and explicitly had to negotiate its apparently skeptical position when discussing the bodily transportation of witches.

The history of the witches’ flight is therefore not a simple history of increasing skepticism. In an important respect, it moves in the opposite direction: an early ecclesiastical tradition classified the nocturnal ride as delusion, whereas important late-medieval demonologists argued for the possibility of its physical reality.

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Burchard of Worms and the Survival of the Night Ride

About a century after Regino, the material was incorporated into the enormous Decretum of Burchard, Bishop of Worms, compiled in the early eleventh century.

Burchard’s collection became an important vehicle through which older ecclesiastical condemnations of magic and superstition entered later medieval culture. His Decretum is generally dated to approximately 1008–1012.

Here again we encounter women traveling at night with a supernatural mistress. The importance of such texts lies not merely in the name Diana.

They preserve an entire constellation of ideas: nocturnal movement, female companies, riding, obedience to a female supernatural being, extraordinary distances, and particular nights upon which these journeys supposedly occurred.

Through subsequent canonical transmission, the passage acquired a remarkably long life. It eventually entered Gratian’s Decretum and remained available to theologians and demonologists centuries later.

A tenth-century description of women riding with Diana could consequently still be cited during the great European debate over witches and supernatural flight in the early modern period.

Diana had become a textual ghost.

But the story becomes much stranger when we look beyond the canonical text.

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Diana, Herodias and the Lady of the Night

Diana was not always the name given to the mysterious leader of the nocturnal women. Medieval sources accumulated alternative names and identities. Herodias became particularly prominent, while elsewhere comparable supernatural female leaders were associated with figures such as Holda or Holle, Perchta, Abundia, and other regional “ladies.”

These names should not simply be treated as interchangeable names for a single surviving pagan goddess. Their histories are different, and medieval authors themselves were capable of identifying unfamiliar vernacular supernatural figures with names already known from learned tradition.

Yet the structural similarities are difficult to overlook.

Again and again there is a Lady. She moves at night. A company accompanies her. Human beings may join her procession. Houses may be visited. Food, prosperity, fertility, blessing, punishment, animals, spirits, and sometimes the dead enter the complex. The experience occupies an uncertain territory between physical journey, dream, ecstatic experience, spirit flight, and supernatural encounter.

The result is something broader and more interesting than a hypothetical underground “Church of Diana.” It suggests a widespread family of European beliefs concerning nocturnal female processions and supernatural mistresses, onto which ecclesiastical writers could impose names such as Diana and Herodias.

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Perchta and the Central European Lady of the Night

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In the German-speaking Alpine and Central European world, Perchta (often fused with Frau Holle) occupies a position strikingly comparable to that of Diana in the medieval nocturnal-women tradition. She is not simply a regional name for Diana, nor should the two figures be collapsed into a single goddess.

Yet their functions overlap in revealing ways. Perchta appears as a powerful female supernatural being associated with the midwinter period, nocturnal movement, household visitation, the enforcement of customary behavior, and the distribution of reward or punishment.

In several traditions, households left food or offerings for her and her company during the nights around Christmas and Epiphany, especially the Perchten nights or Rauhnächte.

Perchta’s relationship with the household is particularly important. She may inspect whether spinning and domestic work have been properly completed, reward the diligent, punish the negligent, and enter homes during the liminal nights of the year.

Food left for her could function both as hospitality and as protection. This places her within the broader European pattern of the supernatural female visitor who crosses the boundary between the otherworld and the human household at a calendrical threshold.

In later folklore and antiquarian interpretation, Perchta also became associated with nocturnal processions, spirits of the dead, and the Wild Hunt. Here again the parallel with Diana becomes suggestive.

The Canon Episcopi tradition presents women riding by night with Diana; Central European folklore preserves Perchta as a female leader moving through the night with a supernatural company.

The resemblance is structural rather than proof of identity. What it demonstrates is that the motif of the Lady who leads a nocturnal host was not confined to one name or one region.

This is precisely why medieval and early-modern clerics could so easily interpret local supernatural female figures through the inherited framework of Diana or Herodias.

A vernacular being such as Perchta did not need to be historically derived from Diana in order to be assimilated to the same learned category. The Church already possessed a model for dangerous or illicit nocturnal female companies; local traditions supplied their own Ladies.

Perchta therefore helps clarify one of the central problems in the history of Diana and witchcraft. The persistence of the motif does not require the survival of a single organized cult.

Instead, it may reflect a wider and deeply rooted European complex of female supernatural leadership, calendrical visitation, household offerings, spirit companies, nocturnal movement, and the crossing of boundaries between the living and the otherworld.

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The Society of Diana

The expression Society of Diana or societas Dianae consequently requires caution. It is extremely evocative, but it does not automatically identify an organized religious institution comparable to a church, coven, or initiatory order.

Nevertheless, by the later Middle Ages references become increasingly intriguing because they no longer occur only as inherited passages copied from older canonical collections.

A particularly striking example comes from northern Italy in 1457. Nicholas of Cusa preached at Brixen about women from the Fassa Valley who claimed association with a supernatural “good lady” named Richella. In retelling the case, Nicholas explicitly described two of the women as belonging to the societas Dyane — the Society of Diana — and identified their bona domina, or Good Lady, with Diana. Significantly, the identification with Diana appears to belong to Nicholas’s interpretative framework rather than necessarily to the women’s original terminology.

This distinction is crucial.

When a medieval churchman calls a supernatural female figure “Diana,” we cannot automatically conclude that the people he questioned themselves used that name. Learned ecclesiastical tradition had possessed a ready-made Diana paradigm since Regino and Burchard. An unfamiliar nocturnal Lady could therefore be interpreted through it.

But neither does this make the underlying belief disappear. Richella remains.

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Madonna Oriente and the Game of Diana

Perhaps the most extraordinary evidence comes from Milan approximately seventy years earlier.

Two women, Sibillia Zanni and Pierina de’ Bugatis, appeared before the Inquisition in 1384 and again in 1390. Their testimony concerned a mysterious supernatural mistress known as Madonna Oriente, the Lady of the East, around whom gathered a nocturnal company. Surviving documentation associates their meetings with a societas and with what ecclesiastical interpretation called the Game of Diana.

Their accounts contain motifs that seem simultaneously familiar and alien to the later witches’ Sabbath.

The company assembled under the authority of a female supernatural figure. People and animals participated. The company visited houses, where eating and drinking could occur. Madonna Oriente was credited with supernatural knowledge and powers, including the restoration of animals that had been eaten. In the surviving descriptions we are still some distance from the standardized image of the Sabbath dominated by Satan.

What makes the case particularly revealing is its development.

When Sibillia and Pierina first came before the authorities in 1384, their beliefs were treated comparatively leniently. When they appeared again in 1390, the situation had become much more dangerous. They were condemned as relapsed heretics and handed over to secular authority. The surviving Milanese documentation explicitly records the societas of Oriente and the gioco di Diana.

Here we can almost watch two interpretative worlds colliding.

The women’s supernatural Lady is being drawn into the increasingly demonological conceptual universe of the inquisitors.

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From the Lady’s Company to the Witches’ Sabbath

This is one of the most important transformations in the history of European witchcraft.

The fully developed witches’ Sabbath did not simply appear intact. During the later Middle Ages, elements that had previously existed in different contexts increasingly converged:

nocturnal assemblies, supernatural travel, female spirit leaders, magic, heresy, animal transformation, feasting, sexual transgression, demons, renunciation of Christianity, and eventually the Devil presiding over an organized anti-Christian society.

By the fifteenth century this synthesis accelerated dramatically. The concept of a structured diabolical sect with defined rituals became increasingly important in demonological literature and prosecution.

The older nocturnal company did not necessarily “become” the witches’ Sabbath through a single evolutionary line. Regional folklore, learned demonology, judicial interrogation, theological assumptions, actual magical practices, dreams and visionary experiences all interacted.

This distinction matters because the historical actors did not necessarily understand their experiences in the same terms as their interrogators.

A woman might speak of a Good Lady.

The inquisitor might hear Diana.

A later demonologist might see the Devil.

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The Strange Persistence of Diana

This makes Diana’s persistence particularly difficult to interpret.

There is an undeniable textual continuity. From Regino onward, medieval and early modern learned writers could encounter Diana as mistress of nocturnal women simply by reading earlier ecclesiastical authorities.

There is also a much broader continuity of motifs. Night journeys, female supernatural companies, spirit processions, riding, visits to houses, special nights, supernatural feasts and mysterious female leaders occur in numerous European contexts.

What cannot presently be demonstrated is institutional continuity: an organized, secretly transmitted religion of Diana surviving unchanged from pagan antiquity through the Middle Ages.

Those three forms of continuity should not be confused.

Recognizing that distinction allows us to avoid two equally simplistic histories. We do not need to imagine an uninterrupted underground pagan church in order to take the evidence seriously. Nor do we need to assume that because medieval clerics possessed literary models, everything they recorded was therefore invented by clerics.

The relationship between inherited interpretative language and living vernacular belief is precisely what makes the evidence so valuable.

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Diana and the Witches of Benevento

Italy provides another important chapter in Diana’s witchcraft afterlife. Benevento, in southern Italy, became one of Europe’s most celebrated centers of witch legend. Its famous walnut tree was said to serve as a meeting place for witches, later known especially as the Janare.

The Beneventan traditions developed over many centuries and cannot simply be projected backward into Roman antiquity. Nevertheless, Diana again enters the written tradition surrounding nocturnal assemblies, magical women, and the legendary walnut tree.

By the early modern period, writers discussing Benevento were operating in a world in which the older ludus Dianae, the witches’ Sabbath, demonology, surviving popular beliefs, and local legends could interact and reinterpret one another.

This Italian material deserves to be read alongside rather than collapsed into the Canon Episcopi. The resemblance is important precisely because the traditions are not identical.

For the complete Benevento tradition, see the separate article on The Witches of Benevento — Janare, the Walnut Tree and the Witches’ Sabbath.

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From Diana to the Devil

By the great period of European witch persecution, the supernatural hierarchy had changed dramatically.

The Devil increasingly occupied the position of master of the witches’ assembly. The Sabbath became an inversion of Christian society and worship: witches renounced Christianity, entered demonic pacts, performed obscene or sacrilegious rites, engaged with demons and incubi, and gathered under Satanic authority.

Yet the older material never disappeared completely.

The night ride survived. The supernatural journey survived. Animal riding survived. Female spirit beings survived. Feasting survived. Certain nights retained special significance. Even Diana herself remained available in learned discussion because the Canon Episcopi had become part of the canonical tradition.

This produces one of the great ironies of witchcraft history: the Church helped preserve the memory of pagan Diana as leader of nocturnal women by repeatedly condemning belief in her.

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Margaret Murray and the Problem of the Witch-Cult

In the twentieth century, Margaret Murray famously argued that the people prosecuted as witches represented, at least in significant part, the survival of a pre-Christian fertility religion. Her reconstruction of a coherent and organized European witch-cult extending across centuries is no longer generally accepted by historians.

But rejecting Murray’s complete reconstruction does not dispose of the historical material that prompted such questions.

Diana and Herodias really do occur in medieval texts concerning nocturnal women. The societas Dianae really does appear. Madonna Oriente, Richella and other supernatural female leaders really do occur in judicial and ecclesiastical sources. The methodological challenge is therefore not to decide between “Murray was right” and “there was nothing there,” but to determine what kinds of continuity — textual, folkloric, visionary, ritual or institutional — the individual sources can actually support.

That question remains considerably more interesting than either extreme.

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Charles Godfrey Leland and the Return of Diana

At the end of the nineteenth century, Diana reappeared with astonishing force in the work of the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland.

In Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), based upon material Leland said he obtained from an Italian informant whom he called Maddalena, Diana is no longer merely the distant pagan goddess named by medieval clerics. She stands at the center of an explicitly magical and witchcraft-oriented religious mythology, while her daughter Aradia is sent to teach witchcraft to humanity.

The historical status and transmission of Leland’s material remain disputed. It cannot simply be used as proof that the religion described by Regino had survived intact for a thousand years. Nevertheless, its appearance within Italian folklore collected in the nineteenth century gives Diana an extraordinary final chapter.

Leland’s Diana subsequently became enormously influential upon twentieth-century occultism and modern witchcraft. For his sources, Italian research and influence on later witchcraft, see the separate article on Charles Godfrey Leland.

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Diana and Modern Witchcraft

Modern witchcraft brought Diana out of the demonological archive and returned her to the status of a deity.

Leland’s writings, Margaret Murray’s witch-cult theory, nineteenth-century folklorism, ceremonial magic, classical mythology and eventually Gerald Gardner and Wicca all contributed to a new religious environment in which ancient goddesses could once again be consciously invoked and worshipped.

Diana became particularly suitable for this reconstruction. She was already a goddess of nature, wilderness and the moon. Classical tradition connected her with Artemis and Hecate. Medieval texts had mysteriously preserved her as the mistress of women who rode through the night. And Leland had explicitly presented her as a goddess of Italian witches.

But modern Diana worship should not be projected unchanged backward through history. The Diana of contemporary witchcraft, Leland’s Diana, the Diana of Nicholas of Cusa, Regino’s Diana paganorum, and Diana Nemorensis belong to different historical environments.

Their relationship is a history of transmission, reinterpretation and revival, not a demonstrable unbroken institutional lineage.

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So Was There Really a Society of Diana?

The most accurate answer is both more cautious and more intriguing than a simple yes or no.

There is strong evidence for a textual tradition in which Diana was associated with women traveling at night. Beginning at least with Regino around 906, this tradition passed through medieval canon law and remained influential for centuries.

There is equally compelling evidence for a much wider family of European beliefs involving nocturnal journeys, supernatural female leaders, processions, spirit companies, animals, household visitation and extraordinary assemblies. Some of the people questioned by medieval authorities appear to have possessed beliefs of this kind independently of the terminology imposed upon them by educated churchmen.

What we do not possess is evidence demonstrating an uninterrupted, centrally organized Society of Diana secretly preserving Roman religion from antiquity into the witch trials.

But perhaps that is asking the wrong question.

The historical importance of Diana lies precisely in the intermediate territory. An ancient goddess survived in texts, names and interpretative categories while European vernacular traditions continued to produce mysterious Ladies of the Night who did not always fit comfortably within Christian cosmology. Medieval clerics identified some of them as Diana. Later demonologists increasingly absorbed nocturnal supernatural journeys into the developing witches’ Sabbath. Folklorists rediscovered the material, and modern witches eventually reclaimed Diana as a goddess.

Across nearly two millennia, Diana repeatedly appears at the threshold between accepted religion and forbidden supernatural experience.

That is a considerably stranger history than the simple survival of a pagan witch-cult.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Diana and Witchcraft

Was Diana really worshipped by witches?

Medieval sources repeatedly associate Diana with women who supposedly traveled at night, but this does not prove the existence of a single organized witch religion devoted to Diana. In some cases Diana may represent an ecclesiastical interpretation of vernacular supernatural beliefs rather than the name actually used by the women themselves.

What was the Society of Diana?

The Latin expression societas Dianae refers to the supposed company or society associated with Diana and nocturnal supernatural journeys. It occurs in medieval ecclesiastical contexts, but should not automatically be interpreted as the formal name of an organized pagan religious institution.

What does the Canon Episcopi say about Diana?

The Canon Episcopi condemns the belief of women who supposedly thought that they traveled at night riding animals in the company of Diana and a multitude of women. Crucially, the text treats these journeys as demonic illusion rather than literal physical flight. The passage is first securely attested in Regino of Prüm’s work around 906.

Did the Canon Episcopi originate at the Council of Ancyra in 314?

This traditional attribution should be treated with caution. The famous passage concerning Diana is securely known from Regino of Prüm around 906, and it cannot simply be presented as an authenticated canon issued by the Council of Ancyra in 314.

Who was Herodias in medieval witchcraft?

Herodias, the biblical figure associated with the death of John the Baptist, acquired an extraordinary folkloric afterlife and appears in medieval traditions alongside or instead of Diana as leader of nocturnal women. She is part of a wider complex of supernatural female leaders rather than simply another historical name for Diana.

Is Perchta the same as Diana?

No. Perchta and Diana belong to different historical and regional traditions. However, both can appear as powerful female supernatural leaders associated with nocturnal movement and companies of spirits or women. Medieval and later writers sometimes interpreted local female figures through the older Diana/Herodias framework, which helps explain why structurally similar traditions could become linked without being identical.

What was Madonna Oriente?

Madonna Oriente, or the Lady of the East, was the supernatural female figure described in the cases of Sibillia Zanni and Pierina de’ Bugatis in late-fourteenth-century Milan. Their nocturnal society was associated in inquisitorial documentation with the Game of Diana. Both women were ultimately condemned as relapsed heretics in 1390.

What is the connection between Diana and Hecate?

Diana became increasingly identified with the Greek Artemis, while Artemis/Diana could in turn overlap with Hecate, particularly in lunar, nocturnal and chthonic contexts. This ancient syncretism later made Diana particularly compatible with European traditions of night, spirits and magic, although it would be anachronistic simply to call the ancient Diana a “witch goddess.”

Did witches physically fly according to the medieval Church?

Not originally according to the influential Canon Episcopi. It regarded the nocturnal ride as a diabolically induced illusion. Later demonologists increasingly defended the possibility that witches could actually be transported bodily, producing an important change in the intellectual history of witch flight. The Malleus Maleficarum explicitly wrestled with this earlier canonical problem.

Is Diana connected with the witches of Benevento?

Yes, Diana became part of the literary and folkloric complex surrounding Benevento, its legendary walnut tree, nocturnal witch gatherings and the Janare. The individual traditions, however, developed over long periods and should not be treated as evidence of an unchanged Roman cult surviving at Benevento.

Is Aradia the daughter of Diana?

In Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), Aradia is presented as the daughter of Diana and is sent into the world to teach witchcraft. Whether Leland’s text preserves an established Italian tradition, heavily reworked folklore, or material shaped in transmission remains debated.

Did Margaret Murray prove that witches belonged to an ancient Diana cult?

No. Murray’s theory of an organized pre-Christian witch religion surviving through the Middle Ages cannot be regarded as demonstrated. Her failure to prove that larger reconstruction, however, does not invalidate the medieval evidence for Diana, nocturnal female societies and related supernatural traditions.

Is Diana worshipped in modern witchcraft?

Yes. Diana became important in several currents of modern witchcraft, particularly through the influence of Leland and later Wiccan and neopagan traditions. Modern worship represents a revival and reinterpretation of Diana rather than demonstrable institutional continuity with her ancient Roman cult.

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