Italy, the unchallenged fiefdom of Catholicism until World War II, has gradually seen the emergence of a new religious landscape in which non-Catholi… - Cecilia Gatto Trocchi

Positivist historiography defined the belief in witches as a mass psychosis that happened to mix Christian ideas and relics of ancient paganism. The premises rested on the one hand on fear-laden ideas about the Devil, who really existed for Christian culture, and on the other on fantasies such as the magical capacity for malefiction, the possibility of harm with the help of demons, flying, animal metamorphoses and sexual intercourse with demons in the famous Sabbath.

Spiritualism opposes reasoning with the force of its conviction, its facts, its miracles, its supernatural. It is the religion of the 19th century, without rituals, without priests, and wrapped in an envelope of scientificity. Imagination and sentiment find their place there, and rituality is represented by invocations, prayers, evocations and continuous revelations.

While Positivism was founding the social sciences (proclaiming the death of theology) and Marxism was instigating the proletariat to leave institutional religion branded as the ‘opium of the people’, thousands and thousands of people were attempting to communicate with the spiritual worlds through mediums and seers.