The Society of Diana: Witch-flight and the Mysteries of the Night Queen – Caroline Tully (Signed Pre-Order)

PRE-ORDER – SIGNED COPY
Title: The Society of Diana: Witch-flight and the Mysteries of the Night Queen
Author: Caroline Tully, PhD
Publisher: Theion Publishing
Format: Fine Hardcover Edition
Publication: 2026
Pages: 192
Size: 165 × 235 mm
Edition: Limited to 530 copies
Expected Astaroth Books dispatch: Early November 2026

Astaroth Books pre-order copies will be signed by author Caroline Tully.

Across the history of European witchcraft, fragmentary accounts speak of nocturnal companies travelling beyond the ordinary world under the leadership of a mysterious female power: Diana, Herodias, Holda, Perchta, Abundia, and other sovereign figures of the night.

In The Society of Diana: Witch-flight and the Mysteries of the Night Queen, Caroline Tully, PhD, follows this shadowed current from the ancient cult of Diana and the sacred landscape of Nemi through medieval folklore, ecclesiastical prohibitions, witch-trial testimony, the mysteries of Aradia, and the re-emergence of magical witchcraft in the modern world.

Rather than explaining away the strange and supernatural dimensions of these traditions, Tully places them at the centre of her enquiry. Witch-flight, dream travel, spirit encounter, shape-shifting, blessing, healing, cursing, divination, feasting, and passage between worlds emerge as signs of an ecstatic and experiential witchcraft existing at the unstable boundary between Pagan memory, folklore, visionary experience, and the Christian imagination.

Diana stands at the heart of this labyrinth: lunar and chthonic, huntress and protectress, goddess of wilderness, crossroads, birth, death, liberation, and sorcery. Around her gather the Night Queen’s many masks and companions, from Herodias and Aradia to Hecate and the spectral societies said to roam by night, entering houses, bestowing prosperity, punishing neglect, and carrying their followers into the Otherworld.

A Practical System of Witch-flight

Central to the book are forty-five pathworkings, forming a practical initiatory journey through Spirit, Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Through Diana, Aradia, Herodias, the Rex Nemorensis, the Golden Bough, Egeria, Holda, Perchta, the Benandanti, Venusberg, the Watchers, and numerous other figures and mysteries, the practitioner is invited to cultivate visionary perception, magical agency, and direct encounter with the powers of the Night Queen.

These workings are not presented as exercises in passive symbolism, but as methods of approach: ways of entering liminal terrain through imagination, trance, dream, ritual, and disciplined attention, allowing the practitioner to discover what waits beyond inherited forms and received authority.

Three substantial appendices extend the practical work further: “Moon Rituals”, exploring Drawing Down the Moon and ritual structure; “Underworld Journey”, a visionary descent through the crossroads into the underworldly dimension of the Night Queen tradition; and “Rituals to Hecate Chthonia”, approaching Hecate in her ancient chthonic and liminal character.

Scholarly in foundation yet resolutely practical in purpose, The Society of Diana opens a path into a witchcraft of sacred groves and crossroads, nocturnal flight and Otherworldly encounter, liberation and danger, blessing and curse. It invites the reader not merely to study the company of the Night Queen, but to approach its mysteries directly—and discover where the night road leads.

The Fine Hardcover Edition is bound in black Peyer Duchesse fine linen cloth with silver cover embossing and silver lettering on the rounded spine. It includes metallic blue Peyer Surbalin endpapers, headbands, ribbon marker and a custom dust jacket featuring a detail from Sean Jefferson’s The Necromancer. Printed on 115 gsm wood-free cream-white Lessebo paper.

Theion Publishing is an independent fine-edition press founded in 2011 by David Beth and Jessica Grote, specialising in occultism, metaphysics, esotericism and Gnostic spirituality. Its editions place particular emphasis on both the intellectual content and the physical craft of the book.

Pre-order information: The publisher expects the Fine Hardcover Edition to begin shipping in October 2026. Our copies will then travel from Europe to Australia and are expected to be dispatched by Astaroth Books in early November 2026. This is an estimated date and may change due to publisher or international freight delays. Orders containing other items may be held until the pre-order is ready to dispatch.