If you’re interested in Spiritism, its underlying conceptualization of magic and the possible influence on Satanism, stay tuned because you’re just about to find out a specific Spiritist, an Italian Spiritist that had a very interesting concept of magic.
Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magic, Paganism, Shamanism, Satanism, and Spiritism, apparently, and all things Occult. This video is going to be the recording from the paper, the conference paper I gave at the conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions which was held at the University of Pisa.
I was in the panel on Esotericism. Actually, the theme of the conference is Resilient Religions and our panel was on Resilient Esotericism. And the paper is going to be on a specific Medium called Fulvio Rendhell. And yeah, I hope you enjoy it and stay tuned until the end.
Hello everyone I’m Dr Angela Puca as I was now I was introduced by Manon and first off, thank you, everybody, for being here and thank you to Marco, and Eric too, for putting together this very fascinating set of panels on Esotericism. As you know the conference theme is Resilient Religion but now we are talking about resilient Esotericism and more specifically, in the case of my paper, I will be talking about one Spiritist called Fulvio Rendhell and the survival and adaptation of Spiritism in Italy. So he’s a Spiritist but we will see that the matter is complex and he has had an interesting influence on the Italian esoteric milieu.
So, first off, let’s clarify terminology. So Spiritism, Spiritualism and the Italian “Spiritismo”, which is obviously the one that I’m talking about. But in the conference in English, I’m gonna use the word Spiritism. So “Spiritisme” is the French term often translated by English speakers as Spiritualism and in French, the term Spiritualisme is a philosophical term referring to the belief that the human spirit or soul exists as opposed to materialism which denies the existence of the spirit.
So now a few precursors of the Spiritism including the Italian Spiritism. The first one being Franz Anton Mesmer and because he talked about and he conceptualized the idea of animal magnetism and also he talked about mesmerizing and this concept was also found in patients, which were mesmerized, and by being mesmerized they would often get in contact with the spirits of the dead. So that’s quite interesting because it is a bit of a precursory towards the idea of Spiritism.
Then another key moment in history was that from the Fox sisters. The Fox sisters are quite interesting because they… you know, the main events around them are from the mid 18th century and they saw spirits manifesting in their house and elaborated and that’s, I guess, the interesting things. They elaborated a system to communicate with these spirits that were appearing. So it wasn’t just the spirits appearing but also that they developed a system to communicate with these spirits and it was a system of rapping. So it’s like, you know, you have one for yes and two for a no and they had a system to communicate in that way. And so that was an interesting moment because it determined, it kind of set the stage for the idea that you can communicate, you can create a system to communicate with the spirits.
And then we have Allan Kardec and he’s the father of Spiritism as a system with its own philosophy. So you have a systematized understanding of Spiritism since Kardec. So I’d say these three are the three main precursors.
There are different attitudes towards Spiritism you have a religious one, which is less common and it is related to religion or religious figures, more specifically, or linked to a specific religion. It is embedded in a specific religion but that is very uncommon. The most popular form of Spiritism is the secular one and it is associated and became… it got associated in the late 19th century and early 20th century with political revolutions. So, for instance, we have the notorious case of Guiseppe Garibaldi who is also a leading figure of the unification of Italy. And this secular Spiritism is also associated with this rebellious attitude towards the dominant religion and the dominant culture.
Now on to Fulvio Rendhell. One thing, that is quite interesting, is that during the period between the two world wars we see that there is sort of an interruption in the interest and practice of Spiritism and then it is just after that, in the 1970s, that, in Italy, you start having Spiritism again. You start seeing that again and one of the main figures that we find in these years is Fulvio Rendhell. He was born in Rome around the 1930s. I don’t know exactly his date of birth. He tends to be very proud about it but we know that he is in his 90s. I know because I conducted interviews with one of his disciples, which I’m going to cover later in the paper.
So he was the founder of the Spiritic Circle “Navona 2000” which is called like that because it used to take place in Piazza Navona in Rome and it was founded in 1969. And it went on for quite a long time and one of the main traits of this Spiritic Circle was that it was open to everyone. And so that meant that everybody could go there and experience the contact with spirits or rather to see Rendhell and other mediums there to see how they would interact with spirits. He is the author of several books on the theoretical understanding of magic, High Magic and spiritual evocation.
So he is famous for the evocation, in 1973, 100 years after its first appearance, of the ghost of the so-called, Katie King, evoked in London in the 19th century by the medium Florence Cook in the presence of the scientist William Crooks. He’s always been keen on being tested so he got, you know, lie detector tests and photographs, he got photographed and filmed. There are lots of these things that you can also find quite easily online as well to show that he wasn’t deceiving people. So there is something that he kind of remarked a lot.
Similarly to Arthur Conan Doyle, he deems Spiritism akin to science in that you can prove, through experience, instead of relying on faith. And this is actually one of the interesting aspects of Rendhell’s Spiritism, this idea, this connection to science and I’d say that by reading his books and talking to his disciple and all the research that I did for this paper, what emerges is that it is an interesting, perhaps ambivalent, relation to science. Because on one hand, in terms of methodology, there is a search for a scientific or a science-like methodology in order to prove the Spiritism and the contact with spirits is something that is factual, that is real but equally, he also acknowledges that science has its limits. And it’s not like he’s claiming that Spiritism can be fully explained or fully proven by science. However, the methodology provided by science is considered quite valuable, because Spiritism doesn’t really rely on faith.
So spiritualism, for Rendhell, is not really the core of the system even though he got famous, he became famous, because of his spirited practices. What he was really about was magic and its conceptualization. So these aspects were actually more important to him than the actual practice of Spiritism. In fact, he even prefers the term “Mediumship” over the term Spiritism to describe what he does and in this case, Mediumship translates Italian “medianità” and that’s the term that he prefers over Spiritism. He sees himself more as a Magician, a “mago,” rather than a Spiritist and because he’s always retained control over spirit possessions.
So it wasn’t like he lost control during all the different experiences that he had with spirits but he would always retain control. And also magic is seen as a science, as I mentioned, that involves the self, the being, and the transformative relations between them. There is also a secular view of the magical endeavours, including Spiritism, where the manifested phenomena and experiences prevail over religious beliefs. So, in this case, you can have a kind of a phenomenological approach, so you have this idea that the experiences come first and then the beliefs come after. So it’s more like theory comes as a result of what you experience rather than experiences having to match a specific theoretical framework or a specific belief system.
Now let’s see Rendhell’s system of magic. So this is an image taken from one of his books and this represents magic according to him. So magic doesn’t need deities, as every person is a god, and so, for this reason, magic is not dependent on religion according to him. Magic is symbolized by the Triad. Science has a positive pole, which is creation-destruction and even though it leans more towards the creation side he argues that everything has a bit of its opposite within it. So even though science is a creative force it also contains a destructive element. And so art is the negative pole which is a creative destruction and here, by art, he means imagination. The imagination that the Magician has to have in his or her practice. And this is the negative pole and as you can see it’s associated with the symbol of the moon where science is associated with the symbol of the sun and it is a creative destruction linked to the death-life-death circle. And then we have the Cosmic Religion here as a whole of synthesis that overcomes cause and effect. So one thing that he says, quite often, is that one of the things that are altered completely during the magical act, including Spiritism, is the relation between time, space, and logic. So these are the three elements that get altered in the magical state and during the magical practice. So and here as you can see, so you have Mercury representing the Cosmic Religion. And then you have the true… these are meant to be the two zeros which become the infinite because it’s like the combination of plus and minus and it becomes, one zero here and the other zero here, and getting here, the infinite. Because that’s how human beings can reach the way in the infinite.
So he distinguishes between High Magic and Low Magic, favouring the first. So for him Spiritism, he’s part of High Magic but, as I said, actually Spiritism is part of his magical system rather than being the centre of his practice. And he favours High Magic. Magic, according to him, predates religion is Trans-religious, so you can find it across religions and it comes before every religion. And goes beyond institutionalized religions as well. So there is a relation between magic and religion but it’s not like magic has to be part of religion. He criticizes those authors that argue that magic is part of, necessarily part of the religious system, that magic needs a religious setting. So he thinks that there is a religious component to magic but that is more like magic is the source that contains the religious element rather than the other way around.
Also, magic has no dogma as it’s based on, and adjusts to, what reason and an analytical study of experience suggest. And also the ritual, as I was mentioning earlier, alters the triad of space, time, and logic experienced in non-ritualistic studies. So you have this, you know, you have the ordinary state where we follow certain rules of time, space, and logic and then in the magical state those three get altered.
Also magic works with the opposite poles which I consider to be causal conductors. He theorizes a lot when it comes to magic, he theorizes a lot about these different forces which are of a binary nature but then they interact and they get synthesized. So magic works with the opposite poles or conductors and the neutral ones, which hold the transformative power represented by the synthesis. Also, the self is composed by the I the anti-I and the synthetic-I. So this idea of magic is also applied to the idea of the self because the Magician, as the person engaging with the magical practice, is also part of this, you know, this cosmology.
Although, as I said, this system, the theoretical system, is based on his experiences. For instance, one of the things is that the I is the self that we project outwards, the one that we know and we experience materially. The anti-I is the part of ourselves that can engage with spirit communication. So, for instance, he writes that when the ectoplasm takes shape it is because it is using the anti-I of the Magician. So it’s kind of borrowing part of the substance of the Medium in order to take shape and take material form. And then the synthetic-I is the mixture of the two and when this synthesis occurs the Magician is, you know, a full full-formed human being and full-formed Magicians.
So this is the philosophy represented in graphic form and this distinguishes between the Be and Being, it’s difficult to translate, and there is this dynamism that also involves the self. Also, the evocation works, by acting on the Ego, to manifest the Being. So like here, like we see here in the image. So we have from the Entity as universal. Then Being as particular, objective, and mutable. Then you have the Dynamism relating to existing by means of reason. And then you have the Ego which is general, subjective, and stable. So there is this dynamism between these opposing forces, between the universals and the particulars and the objective and the subjective. And these are all part of… sometimes he has called this whole process an illusion. Not because he deems that magical practices are real but because everything that we see is, to a certain extent, a form of illusion.
This is the person that I interviewed. Her name is Ahsife Oscura and she’s a Satanist and one of Rendhell’s disciples. She was born in 1992 and lives in Rome. And it’s interesting because she and I had an interview regarding Rendhell and how his form of Spiritism and his conceptualization of magic revealed to have an influence on the contemporary occultic milieu. And she said that Rendhell is first and foremost a Magician, which we clarified earlier as well.
He’s been called a Satanist but he isn’t one. And this comes from a Satanist although Satan has been re-valued by him in recent years. But I’m not going into too much detail as I don’t have time. Rendhell’s work has been indirectly influential on contemporary Satanism and that is in Ahsife’s words. Because, as for the link between Spiritism and Satanism I believe the connecting link is the concept of Occultism.
Occultism was born with the advent of Spiritism and modern Satanism was born with Occultism. Spiritualism cannot be reduced to communicating with the dead, as it entails a dialogue with other spirits such as demons, deities, and so on. It’s not a coincidence that one of the best-known definitions of Satanism is occultist Satanism. Personally, I see a rather obvious connection. Mediumship, in general, is a fundamental trait in Satanism since it is based precisely on the communication with entities. I do not mean, of course, that Spiritism is a form of Satanism but rather than Satanism uses spiritistic practice by concentrating it purely in the direction of certain entities of worship.
So how is Rendhell’s Spiritism resilient then? So, as the title of his book suggests, it’s not Spiritism as much as it’s Spiritic Magic.
So Rendhell made working with spirits accessible to anyone. At a time… well first off he allowed for the revival of Spiritism to occur after the interruption between the period of two world wars and then he also made the communication with spirits accessible to anyone because everybody could really go and attend his Spiritic Circle. Also, he created a complex system of magic based on Hermetic and Renaissance philosophy, which, with influences from 18th and 19th-century French Occultism. And his Trans-religious and magic-centred system has been influential for other traditions as well because it gave, you know, you have different traditions in Italy that engage with some kind of magic but they usually have some religious connotation like with Paganism or Wicca and other such forms of traditions. Whereas, with this form of Spiritism, it kind of provides a theoretical and practical tools and a tool-kit for those who want to engage with spirit communication but don’t want to get the religious component that you find in other traditions that are also made with magic and so, yeah, it’d be fascinating to explore it further. Especially in relation to a contemporary modern Satanism because it seems that there is more to be found there.
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REFERENCES (Primary Sources only available in Italian)
Fulvio Rendhell’s ‘Magia spiritica’ https://amzn.to/3DxG9Aa
Fulvio Rendhell: Una Vita Nel Mondo Degli Spiriti E Della Magia’ https://amzn.to/3DHfp0k