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This essay aims to reexamine the debate on the impact of Fascism on religious studies, by reconstructing what Raffaele Pettazzoni, one of the founding fathers of this field of research in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century, meant by “religion of the state.” His research on the origin of the religious state in Iranian history and in the Greek polytheistic prototype of thepolisoffers a key to the interpretation of his further analysis of the religious Fascist phenomenon. Mingling approaches of both political science and history of religions, this study constitutes an introduction to a new understanding — which remained hidden in Pettazzoni’s texts — of Fascism as a degeneration of state religiousness. While Fascism is an example of the sacralization of politics (according to one of the leading historians of Fascist ideology, Emilio Gentile), Pettazzoni showed how in other ways Fascism perpetuated the pre-Christian crisis of the religious state.

In 1959, the president of the International Association for the History of Religions, Raffaele Pettazzoni, wrote the last notes of his life. Among these documents, there is a group of unpublished remarks: an attempt to outline the possible task of a unified study of religion, bridging the two dimensions – historical and phenomenological – as two facets of a single and general science of religions named ‘sacrology’. Pettazzoni had this new name in mind to meet the challenge of the Conference called by the IAHR at Marburg (1960). The questions raised in this essay – which deal with the discipline's nature and with its programme – let us see the symptoms of the Italian storicisti's interest within the framework of the problems connected with the controversial notion of sacred.