Naples and the Different Kinds of Body in Modern Spiritism

In the second half of the 19th century, the puzzling cultural movement known as “modern Spiritism” spread from America to Europe. Somewhere between a new religion and a new science, it claims to provide evidence of an afterlife and argues that the dead can, and do, return to some extent to prove it. But exactly how do they return? Or rather, in what form do they come back? If, on the one hand, Allan Kardec, who codified the Spiritism, ventured a redefinition of the notion of “resurrection” and insisted on the tripartition of man into soul, body, and perispirit (an intermediate principle between the spiritual and material dimensions) to answer these questions, on the other hand, some men of science also ended up questioning the “substance” of spirits, suggesting new interpretative frameworks. Among them was the materialist Cesare Lombroso who, after conducting his first investigations into mediumship in Naples, at that time the main centre of the Italian spiritualist movement, in the last years of his life would attempt to «sketch out a biology of spirits». What emerged would be singular and bizarre redefinitions of the concepts of “body” and “matter”.