In this article, we design a preliminary genealogy of yoga in Italy, showing its positioning within the growing field of “contemporary spiritualities”, their premodern, esoteric and theosophical roots and Catholicism. Our main claim is that yoga and contemporary spiritualities as practiced in XXI-century Italy are neither entirely new nor are they clearly an alternative to more established...
At the start of the twenty-first century Catholicism is still the prevailing belief system of most Italians, but a recent project on Italian religion and spirituality, carried out in 2006, has found that Italians are now more interested in spirituality, that they might describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, and that they privilege the ‘God within’ rather than the transcendent...