Italian occult conference whitewashes protofascist

Italian peddlers of pricey occult courses and conferences, LaSocietà dello Zolfo (LSDZ), are pushing an esoteric event titled L’Alba d’Occidente (“The Dawn of the West”) that gives a mystical makeover to one of Italy’s most toxic historical figures. The target of the incense-and-symbolism treatment is Gabriele d’Annunzio, a protofascist icon whose ideas and methods fed directly into Mussolini’s bloodstained regime.

La Società dello Zolfo has spent years building international credibility by surrounding itself with well-known Italian and English-speaking occult figures. Names such as David Rankine, Stephen Skinner, and Christopher Warnock regularly appear in connection with the society’s activities, events, courses and social orbit. Their presence at other LSDZ gatherings gives the group street credibility and an aura of legitimacy.

That international sheen now buffers an event that strips d’Annunzio of his political reality and repackages him as a poet, a Mason, a Martinist, and a lofty spiritual inspiration. What is carefully omitted is the part where he helped invent the style and psychology of fascism.

The event takes place at the Vittoriale degli Italiani, d’Annunzio’s monumental self-shrine, often referred to locally as a fascist theme park. LSDZ promotional post gushes that this is where he “transformed life into a work of art and work into ritual,” as if he were a harmless eccentric with a taste for costumes and incense, rather than a political arsonist with a poet’s pen.

D’Annunzio peddled war as spectacle. Before and during the First World War, he preached violence as destiny, purification, and masculine theatre. His rhetoric glamorised mass death and national sacrifice, helping push Italy into a catastrophic conflict that scarred the country for decades.

In 1919, he led an armed seizure of Fiume in defiance of the Italian state and international agreements. He ruled the city by intimidation, cult loyalty, and aesthetic intoxication, styling himself Duce, governing by decree, and crushing dissent through humiliation and force.

Nearly every ritual later associated with Italian fascism was rehearsed under his rule, including balcony speeches, mass chanting, call-and-response slogans, Roman salutes, uniformed paramilitaries, and politics staged as sacred drama. Mussolini copied D’Annunzio’s rule in Fiume.

D’Annunzio treated brutality as an art form. His followers used ritual humiliation as a political weapon, famously forcing opponents to ingest castor oil to sicken, degrade, or sometimes kill them. Mussolini’s Blackshirts later made this standard practice. 

Even D’Annunzio’s romanticised Carta del Carnaro enshrined elitism, creating a special class for “heroes, poets, prophets, and supermen.” Equality before the state was replaced by aesthetic worth, and authoritarian hierarchy was written into the constitution itself.

La Società dello Zolfo seems to be embracing this legacy, calling the Carta del Carnaro its “North Star” and praising it as a shimmering mix of political utopia, anarchic poetry, and mysterious spiritual tension. That document originated in Fiume, where crowds were trained to obey emotion, cheer political spectacle, and follow a leader who promised destiny through theatrical display.

The event invites participants to wander through “symbols, secret doctrines, and the music of things,” inside rooms where “every object is a talisman.” Strip away the constructed halo of holiness and artistic legacy, and you are left with worshipping a man who normalised ritualised violence and mass emotional manipulation, now being peddled as spiritual heritage.

There are no blackshirts or marching songs in the LSDZ post. But dressing up a protofascist as a mystical figure, backed by borrowed international credibility, is ideological whitewashing. One wonders why the likes of Steven Skinner, David Rankin, and Christopher Warnock would want to associate with this outfit. 

Leaders of the La Società dello Zolfo see themselves as supermen based on their "North Star" D’Annunzio’s Carta del Carnaro