A Case of Failed Syncretism? Animal Magnetism in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, between European Science, Magical Tradition and Catholic Reaction

After the success and the hostilities they arose in France at the end of the ancien régime, the doctrines and therapeutic practices of animal magnetism returned to vogue during the Restoration and circulated throughout Europe and the entire world. Today, their spread is of growing interest to historians. For quite some time, it was believed that animal magnetism did not reach southern Italy until after Unification, in 1861. However, a small but significant corpus of texts published in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies shows that as early as the beginning of the 1840s there was interest in the concept of universal fluid theorized by Franz Anton Mesmer and in the astonishing feats attributed to magnetic sleepwalkers. From these written texts, a series of questions emerge regarding the degree to which the ideas surrounding the European debate on magnetism circulated in southern Italy, the political and religious implications it assumed in that particular historical-geographical context, the possible interactions that it had with local tradition and its elements of magic, the diffusion of the therapeutic practices of magnetism, and the reactions that it provoked among the political and religious authorities. These are questions that concern not only the cultural dynamics of pre-unification southern Italy but also the multiple issues raised by magnetism, as an international phenomenon.