The Most Famous
OCCULTISTS from Italy
This page contains a list of the greatest Italian Occultists. The pantheon dataset contains 41 Occultists, 2 of which were born in Italy. This makes Italy the birth place of the 5th most number of Occultists behind United States, and Russia.
Top 2
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Italian Occultists of all time. This list of famous Italian Occultists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Alessandro Cagliostro (1743 - 1795)
With an HPI of 70.11, Alessandro Cagliostro is the most famous Italian Occultist. His biography has been translated into 34 different languages on wikipedia.
Giuseppe Balsamo (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe ˈbalsamo]; 2 June 1743 – 26 August 1795), known by the alias Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (US: ka(h)l-YAW-stroh, Italian: [alesˈsandro kaʎˈʎɔstro]), was an Italian occultist. Cagliostro was an Italian adventurer and self-styled magician. He became a glamorous figure associated with the royal courts of Europe where he pursued various occult arts, including psychic healing, alchemy, and scrying. His reputation lingered for many decades after his death but continued to deteriorate, as he came to be regarded as a charlatan and impostor, this view fortified by the savage attack of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in 1833, who pronounced him the "Quack of Quacks". Later works—such as that of W. R. H. Trowbridge (1866–1938) in his Cagliostro: the Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic (1910), attempted a rehabilitation.
2. Joachim of Fiore (1135 - 1202)
With an HPI of 65.36, Joachim of Fiore is the 2nd most famous Italian Occultist. His biography has been translated into 28 different languages.
Joachim of Fiore, also known as Joachim of Flora (Italian: Gioacchino da Fiore; Latin: Ioachim Florensis; c. 1135 – 30 March 1202), was an Italian Christian theologian, Catholic abbot, and the founder of the monastic order of San Giovanni in Fiore. According to theologian Bernard McGinn, "Joachim of Fiore is the most important apocalyptic thinker of the whole medieval period." The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri is one of the most famous works possibly inspired by his ideas. Later followers, inspired by his works in Christian eschatology and historicist theories, are called Joachimites. On June 27, 2024, Pope Francis, in his message for the World Day of Creation, described Joachim of Fiore, saying that "Joachim was able to propose the ideal of a new spirit of coexistence among people" and thus marks a turning point in history, as this had not happened in more than eight centuries since the death of the Florensis monk.
People
Pantheon has 2 people classified as Italian occultists born between 1135 and 1743. Of these 2, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased Italian occultists include Alessandro Cagliostro, and Joachim of Fiore.
