Il soprannaturale dei luoghi come orizzonte accomunante della ‘civiltà mediterranea’. Una prospettiva antropologico-filosofica e antropologico-giuridica a partire da Simone Weil.

The paper draws inspiration from an insight by Simone Weil, based on a reflection on the crusade against the Cathars between the 11th and 13th centuries. According to the philosopher, this historical event constitutes a little-studied but decisive watershed between opposing conceptions of man, society, and law, which resolve themselves into a single dichotomy centered on the relationship of the individual with the sacred in his irrepressible search for meaning: on the one hand, an idea of an intimate, immediate, and uncompromising relationship with the supernatural; on the other hand, a vision based on the need for institutional (political and/or religious) mediation. The outcome of this dispute, which was metaphysical rather than cultural and theological, was a precise genesis of the self-awareness of modern Europe, a result that would have stifled, or at least obscured, another line of cultural development that could have led instead to a Mediterranean civilization. This article aims to investigate the conditions of possibility of such a hypothesis, starting from the theoretical resources raised by Weil, but developing them in an empirical direction, focused on the residual forms of the type of religiosity highlighted by Weil: authentic, immediate, unofficial; forms that can still be found today in various shrines shared in the Mediterranean context. In this dispute between personal religiosity and official religions, what emerges as decisive is the possession and control of the symbolic resources that the supernatural brings with it, and which the political sphere has proven capable of successfully requisitioning and manipulating. For this reason, the empirical part of the study aims to focus onsacred places as spaces of symbolic aggregation, in which the power of symbols manifests itself in terms of supernatural efficacy and magnetism. The method employed aims to bring together the philosophical-metaphysical dimension opened by Weil with the relevant legal-political areas of study. Given the complexity of this framework, an interdisciplinary approach anchored in anthropology was favored, as it is a gnoseological tool open in both theoretical and empirical directions, and capable of bringing together the issues of the relationship with the sacred, authority, power, and the sense of law within the prism of a single fundamental question concerning the human subject and its symbolic status, capable of dominating the power of symbols as well as succumbing to it.