Lucas Angitiae: The Grove of the Wild Snake Goddess of the Abruzzo

A reader, Toni Guanciale, contacted me and told me that Luco dei Marsi, a town in the Marsi region of the Abruzzo was worth the trip if I was interested in the Goddess Angitia. I certainly was and at the time happened to be planning a trip to the Abruzzo.

I had encountered and written about Angitia through the years, the Snake Goddess of the Abruzzo. In the village of  Cocullo, her rites are carried on in the May 1 celebration of the feast of San Domenico. Snakes are collected in the spring and readied through the next months to be offered to the statue of San Domenico as he is processed through the village. In the modern incarnation of this tradition, San Domenico is said to protect against snake bites, toothaches and rabies.

In similar trend to the rites of Feronia shifting from honoring and protecting the wild and its Goddess to petitions for protection from the wild, so too in this modern ritual of San Domenico in Cocullo, rites are enacted to protect one from the snakes rather than honoring the serpent, her Goddess and the life-force, as was its original articulation.

Read my recent post on Feronia:
Feronia—Italian Goddess of the Feral and the Wild

Right before Toni contacted me, I had read about Luco dei Marsi, a place in the Abruzzo where Angitia was worshipped for over 3000 years, where her name remained and was yet spoken. Toni also told me how, upon inquiry, one villager told her they believed that Angitia “rose from the lake” and was still very actively prayed to there. Toni Guanciale is of Abruzzo descent. One of her many talents is making glass beads and glass bead jewelry. Check our her works, many with an Italian inspiration, at Blue Light Stones, bluelightstones.com. You can even make a special request of a necklace or bracelet of your dreams. The timing of Toni’s communication seemed more than coincidence, and so on my recent trip to the Abruzzo, after checking out of our B & B in Tivoli, we traveled a short distance off the highway to Luco dei Marsi to find Angitia.

In Luco dei Marsi her name is spelled Angizia and there is a piazza named after her. Angitia is spelled many ways depending on location and local dialect. Rauri, my niece and co-author of The Oscan Oracle: from the Ancient Janarra of the Moon, was told long ago in a channeling session with Aradia that it was Ana-gitia and indeed the Samnites called her Anagtia, to the the Peligni she was Anaceta. (https://www.sabinamagazine.it/il-santuario-della-dea-angizia-ad-anxa/)

We arrived at Luco dei Marsi, a town literally built into the side of a hill. It has a maze-like quality due to the steep inclines and sudden, unexpected staircases in the center of many roads. It is not surprising that a town dedicated to the Snake Goddess would have a labyrinthine feel. There is also an undercurrent of darkness or shadow, also unsurprising. Many descriptions of Angitia describe her as having an underworld component.

It was Sunday and most shops were closed, most importantly the restaurant Toni recommended.

Feeling disoriented, we parked at Piazza Angizia and walked toward the Piazza Umberto with the Church of San Giovanni Battista. There was an event happening with with white tablecloth tables spread about. The Piazza Umberto overlooks the town below. Looking out over the balcony, we understood most of the restaurants were on the flats below and made our way down. We eventually found a place to eat and reorient ourselves: Locanda del buongustaio/caffe Mokambo.

When we walked in the door there was a sculpture of Pan from the movie Pan’s Labyrinth. When I saw him, it took my breath away for I felt I received an answer to a question I had asked the week before. “Is the god of the Janarra Pan?” I had been trying to feel into the male side of this lineage and wondering who the god of the wild might be or who the male adherents may emulate and honor. When I asked the question I had no idea how I would receive an answer. But here he was standing in front of me in a town dedicated to Angizia. It felt like a big “yes.”

We enjoyed a delicious meal in this place. I ordered local lamb skewers, the local arrosticini. My fellow travelers ordered homemade pastas. Of course there were  bruschetta and antipasti first. The restaurant was charming, the food fresh and homemade by the very person who served it to us. The town was pretty shut down so I didn’t get to scout for much about Angizia—trinkets, images, books, information or otherwise— but we saw that the ruins were up the road and so after lunch we drove to them.

In these kinds of searches, it is the land that is holding the memories. It is the land that must be interacted with to feel into what is there and what was once there. It is the earth, the rocks, the mountains and the water that hold the lineages, and wait for their practitioners to return.

After driving through impossibly small two-lane streets, the road opened to a country lane leaving town and ascending a hill toward the ruins of Tempio della Dea Angizia. The ruins of the temple complex eventually appeared unassumingly on the side of the road. Unfortunately they were fenced in and the gates of entry were locked. I could not get in. Though I looked for possible stealth entries, it was pretty secure. There was no notice about hours when it is possible to enter. I had read about these temple ruins before so I understood what I was seeing, albeit from a distance. Also there were a few signs that if I tried really hard, I could read. They were saying mostly the same things that I had read beforehand.

Here in the late 1990s into early 2000s were excavated two temples on the shore of what was Lake Fucino. The site is on a steep mountain slope with woods frequented in ancient times by devotees of Angitia whom Adele Campanelli in her article on the Prehistory of Italy site “Angizia, nature  e magia,” calls the “ancient mother deity of the Marsi” (https://www.preistoriainitalia.it/en/2020/11/02/angizia-natura-e-magia/).

Here I was at the Lucas Angitiae: The sacred grove of Angitia.

Apparently this temple complex, buried by a mudslide, was lost to obscurity until now.

It was part of a settlement of the Marsi people. This fortified village with a temple, grove and acropolis to Angitia, built on the site of Mount Jenna dates to the Iron age (1200-550 BCE)  and has remnants of a Bronze Age (1300-1200 BCE) settlement under that. This was a very important, if not the most important, location for the Marsi people. In Roman time the village was named Anxa.

As discussed previously, lucas is a word used to describe a sacred grove in a forest dedicated to a certain entity in which rituals took place.

“The sanctuary dates to the 3rd century BC and is visible today, together with the terracing wall of the sanctuary and the traces of the large Iron Age wall enclosure, the ruins of the three access doors to the temples, the traces of the forum and the artisan quarter. The sanctuary-city is dominated by the acropolis of Monte Penna.

Excavations conducted since the early seventies and from 1998 brought to light the two temples, the Italic one consisting of two cellas and the Roman era one which has three rooms. Doric columns, furnaces and burials have also been discovered. In 2003 research revealed other important finds, in particular in the area called the Sacristy the three fine statues came to light: one, which according to some scholars could be connected to the figure of the goddess Angitia, is in terracotta and from the 3rd century BC; the other two marble statues (one of Venus) are from the 2nd century BC and attributed to Rhodian workshops.

Other statues, bas-relief sculptures, small bronzes etc. are exhibited in the Marsica museum of sacred art and kept in the Paludi museum in Celano”(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucus_Angitiae).

The site also yielded ex voto offerings and rectangular clay masks of faces with no mouth perhaps indicative of oracular practices.

There were picnic tables across the street. After putting my snake bracelet and other magical tools inside the fenced area, I sat on one of the picnic benches and, looking into the temple site, rattled while calling upon on the priestesses of Angitia from the temple and from all time in this place. I received a powerful vision of the temple center as it had once been looking out over the huge Lake Fucino.

Lake Fucino was once the largest body of water in the Abruzzo and the third largest lake in Italy. It provided fish and rich soil for farmlands but, having no natural outlet, the lake was problematic with seasonal flooding and marshy waters thought to be a source of malaria. Attempts were made to have it drained in Roman times with no success. Finally it was accomplished by a wealthy banker in 1878 who subsequently bought the land it exposed. In the 1950s the land was divided by the government into many small plots for farms. That is what it is today: farmland. Many of the famous towns that were on the banks of Lake Fucino are on the edge of this basin now, including Luco dei Marsi, Celano and  Avezzano.

While rattling, I turned around and viewed the landscape. For the first time I saw where the huge lake must have once been. The depression is still obvious and it is massive. It must have been magnificent and it must have held an amazing reflection of the full moon.

It occurred to me that this was another lake of the Mirror of the Moon. I began to understand that this formation and combination, lake, mountain, sanctuary to the Goddess, was likely more common than I had previously thought and that it seemed to be an important part of ancient women’s medicine in many places.

To try to even imagine the power of this place and lake in its time was overwhelming: forests full of wild trees and animals surrounding a huge body of water encircled  once again by many mountains that surely reflected in the lake along with the changing phases of the moon.

Currently, with everything deforested and wildness far removed from the cities and villages, it’s hard to remember the wildness that humans lived in and with in ancient times.

But now, overlooking the vision of the lake from the location of the temple and imagining doing ritual before it on the full moon, feeling how the lake rose and fell with the seasonal cycles, and how, for the priestesses of Angitia, it was alive and breathing, I understood their deep relationship with these cycles and this life-giving, rhythmic pulsing.

Pre-Roman Marsi people are an Italic peoples famous as herbalists, healers, oracles and snake charmers.

Cesare Letta writes that human groups lived in the area from the late Paleolithic with evidence of Bertonian culture. In 8500 BCE the population moved to locations around the lake and in the Neolithic age agriculture and ceramics were introduced. The first villages were introduced at this time as well.

“In 2200 BCE there was a peaceful fusion of the pre-existing peoples with groups of metal-workers perhaps from Aegean-Anatolian area, who founded an agricultural economy supplemented by fishing from the lake. The Chalcolithic villages survived into the Bronze Age, marked by connections with the Apenninic and Sub-Apenninic cultures, with some contributions from Terramare and Villanovan cultures” (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781614513001-026/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOopuSiSjhQor_tGAJYk4kx_Ai-GNbg_8UMUeWSWswBOR8mmwUwc7).

I continued to shake my rattle and bell while turning back to face the temple ruins. Once again I had a vision of the temple. I saw women who resembled the Snake Priestesses of Minoan Crete in a Minoan style temple that I had spent so much time with while writing my two novels in that setting.

I asked them to tell me if they are indigenous to this place or if they came up from Crete. Could they give me a sign in the next few days? I immediately received a firm, clear answer. “We came from Crete.” I confirmed this by asking with my two shells. And then I understood that Snake Priestesses came a long time ago and mixed with the local indigenous population sharing their medicine, worldview and temple rituals which evolved over the millennia to become a local strand in the Abruzzo.

I had been wondering about possible connections between Minoan Crete and Southern Italy for some time and had even bumped into unsolicited evidence of it in recent research into my Strega/Janarra lineage.

Initially it seemed implausible to me but the evidence revealed to me made it less and less so.

It seemed implausible to me because I had stumbled upon Minoan Crete (6000-1450 BCE), or so I thought, thirty-three years earlier when first introduced to the Goddess through the work of Marja Gimbutas. As I have written about in other books, this happened after an encounter with the Goddess Lilith in the form of an owl on my twenty-ninth birthday.

Wanting to write a book about Lilith, my research led me to Minoan Crete and I fell helplessly in love with the culture and worldview. I subsequently wrote two novels set there with a Snake Priestess as the lead protagonist. Both novels felt more like a remembering than a telling.

After completing my second Crete novel I went on the path of discovery toward finding and returning my own spiritual biological lineage —that of the Italian Strega—to myself. I had assumed these were two different things—Cretan Snake Priestesses and Italian Streghe—loosely connected through worldview and shared indigenous belief, but it was becoming evident that Minoan Crete may very well be an actual part of my biological Italian medicine lineage, even one of its deepest roots.

I was receiving slow but clear confirmation that priestesses from Minoan Crete and the broader Aegean had travelled up into Italy and settled into many places in the Abruzzo, integrating with local customs and peoples. Medicine rites including the snake and Snake Goddess were potent signatures.

The feeling of implausibility is that when I set out to find my own lineage, I didn’t realize I had already found it in Minoan Crete. I wouldn’t know it until thirty-three years later when I sat on a picnic table across the street from the Tempio della Dea Angizia in Luco dei Marsi, Abruzzo and the priestesses came to me and held my hands in theirs saying, “Welcome Home.”

© Theresa C. Dintino 2025

Snake woman image embedded in featured image by HANSUAN FABREGAS from Pixabay