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

The complex process that has led to the current spread of magic and esotericism is constituted on the one hand by secularisation and secularism, and on the other by the alternative gnosticisms heavily advocated by secular, ‘disenchanted’ and progressive thought. Such is the humus on which thrives the new magism, as weel as the "supermarket occultism" of our times that journalists and mass communicators ennoble and repropose in the dominant cultural vacuum.

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.

Eusapia Palladino's popularity went into crisis in Cambridge, where during a séance the medium was caught moving an object with her hand that should have levitated by occult force. Accused of fraud, she defended herself by declaring that she had only acted because she was driven by an unconscious and irresistible impulse.