From Cosmos to Chaos

Dante’s Divine Comedy

O you possessed of sturdy intellects,
observe the teaching that is hidden here
beneath the veil of verses so obscure
(Inferno, IX. 61-63)

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At the end of The New Life, Dante declared that he had reached the “admirable vision”. That work is the account of his inner journey, starting from the initiatic rebirth to the ever higher inner experiences, cadenced by periods symbolically represented by the number nine, up to the actual realization of the level of perfect master. On the other hand, the “admirable vision” corresponds to the universalization of such individual perfection. Dante’s Comedy ¹ describes this universalization that leads the Poet not only to “indiarsi” (in Italian: to become one with God), as he writes, but also to return to the earth of men (sskrt. mānuṣa loka) with a mission to restore order in the West. In fact, the Divine Comedy is entirely woven by recurrent allusions to the Cross, symbol of Spiritual Authority (sskrt. brāhma), and to the Eagle, symbol of Temporal Power (sskrt. kṣātra) ². In the Western Middle Ages, the former was represented by the Church and the latter by the Empire. However, it was already for several centuries that the papacy had usurped the authority of the Church, which, after turning its attention to earthly power, had lost both the sacred knowledge and the monastic initiation.
It had also gradually lost interest in theology, increasingly transformed into a rationalistic philosophy, neglecting even the simple responsibility of herding the souls towards their posthumous salvation. The only evident purpose of the papacy was to supplant the Empire in the leadership of the temporal things of Christianity. The Empire had been weakened by the subversion carried out by the papacy and the centrifugal tendencies of many kingdoms and princedoms, starting from France. The Empire maintained a direct relationship with chivalric and artisan initiations, but paid a serious price for maintaining its formal loyalty to the Spiritual Authority, although this was already unworthy and completely profane. Even the Order of the Temple, which represented the initiatic link between the Church and the Empire, had been affected, having to religiously obey a papacy that had become increasingly hostile. Even its initiatic relations with the Empire were complicated by the continuous politically motivated excommunications inflicted on the Emperors. This destabilized position of the Templars also explains their spiritual and military weakening. The Templar elite, represented by the Holy Faith, remained the only intellectual bulwark for the initiatic ways of Christianity. However, the constant threat of persecution was pushing the Faithful of Love to take increasingly critical positions towards the Spiritual Authority, which only erroneously was identified with the corrupt papacy (Morte Villana, i.e. Rude Death)³.
This was not what Dante, Imperator of the Catholic esotericism, from the height of his wisdom considered to be the solution to the serious crisis of the western tradition. His plan, or better his mission, entailed a repair action to be carried out in two stages: firstly, to restore the power and prestige of the Empire, cutting off the claims to the temporal supremacy pursued by the papacy⁴; to bring the independence ambitions of the national Kings back to their natural borders; to restore the legitimate aristocratic governments in the cities and villas, taking them away from the greedy and intrusive administrations of the nascent bourgeoisie. Secondly, once this part of the project had been carried out, it would have been the responsibility of the Holy Faith to fill the spiritual void left in the heart of the Church. To be precise, Dante was ready to transmit his Holy Wisdom (Beatrice) to the ecclesiastical hierarchies in order to rectify the Church. Thus, he would have restored an authentic Spiritual Authority in place of that form devoid of any content to which the Church had been reduced, which for too long had been breeding ground for all sorts of deviations. If any Faithful of Love with poor understanding did not intend to follow him in this endeavour, he was ready to “be part with himself” and go on alone ⁵. However, to implement the divine plan, it was first necessary to identify a prince who could follow the directives of this sacred project and who possessed, at the same time, the necessary power to act. This character manifested in the person of Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg. Thus was found the Emperor able to implement the designs of Dante the Imperator. We will illustrate the historical events of that enterprise in the following chapter.
Unlike The New Life, which focuses on the Poet’s personal realization (sskrt. adhyātmika kṣetra), the Comedy describes the possible consequences of his internal experience on the human (sskrt. adhibhautika kṣetra) and divine domains (sskrt. adhidaivika kṣetra). Therefore, it was no longer the mere account of his spiritual journey starting from the initiation, received from his master Guido Cavalcanti, to its completion; here the same journey was exposed as a mission call. For this reason, in the Comedy, Dante’s initiation and his entire inner path were represented as the effect of a divine will. This had provided him with the means to reach God (indiarsi, i.e. entering God) so that he later could operate the rectification of the Tradition the West. In this universal perspective, Dante completely abandoned the stereotypical and artificial troubadour style of jargon (trobar cloz) to use true traditional symbolism. This is what the poet called “dolce stil novo” (sweet new style). It is not our intention to condense such a vast, complex and articulated poem into a few lines. We will just give a brief summary underlining the most salient points.
Midway upon the journey of his life, at the age of thirty-five⁶, Dante found himself lost in the dark forest of secular life. He could not get out of it because a lynx, a lion and a she-wolf barred his way. The three beasts represented incontinence (greed), mad bestiality (violence) and fraud (bad faith), origins of all other sins⁷. The ravenous she-wolf, in particular, proved aggressive. At the same time Virgil appeared to him, the great Latin poet of the Augustan circle, representative of the Roman imperial initiation that had been conveyed to Dante through the Holy Roman Empire. Virgil offered to bring Dante to safety. However, this route had to include a descent into hell and then an ascent along the cosmic mountain of Purgatory, until reaching the highest of the heavens (sskrt. Brahmaloka). This “long path” was unavoidable, because the Veltro⁸ who would have driven the she-wolf to hell, opening thus a “short path” or direct way to Paradise, had not yet descended from heaven.
Pleading unworthy of such honour, Dante replied that far more important people than him had gone to heaven alive: Aeneas, progenitor of Imperial Rome, and Saint Paul, founder of the Church of Christ⁹. Virgil’s answer is more than surprising: Dante was equally worthy of making the otherworldly journey. By the will of God, the Virgin Mary had commissioned Saint Lucy to ensure that Dante could get out of the dark forest to climb to the highest heaven after passing through Hell, Purgatory and the terrestrial Paradise. In turn, Lucy¹⁰ had delegated this mission to Beatrice, and the latter, the Holy Wisdom, had commissioned Virgil to act as teacher and guide to the poet. Dante was still not aware¹¹ that he was destined for the very high mission of bringing back to humanity the meaning of his “admirable vision”. For this reason, he did not realize that he himself was the Veltro mentioned by Virgil, who from heaven had to return to earth to drive the she-wolf back to hell. The mission Dante was destined to fulfil is confirmed in two other passages of the Divine Comedy.
The second confirmation comes from Beatrice when she met Dante in the Terrestrial Paradise. She heralded the arrival of a divine envoy, whose name would have been “five hundred, ten and five”, that is, in Roman numerals, D X V. The third confirmation is comes from Cacciaguida, great-great-grandfather of Dante, a knight who died in the Holy Land during the second crusade¹². He said that envoy, completely detached from the lust for power and wealth, would have lived at the court of Cangrande della Scala¹³. However, the magnitude of his mission was not yet evident in that year of 1300 AD, because he had entered a new phase of life (or vita nova) for only nine years¹⁴. Cacciaguida also provided Dante with further information regarding his family. The surname Alighieri¹⁵, which would later supplant Dante’s original family name, that is Elisei, derives from the surname Allighieri of Cacciaguida’s wife, an illustrious family. She was originally from Val di Pado, near Ferrara¹⁶, which remained exactly halfway between Feltre and Montefeltro. Here, then, is explained why Virgil had claimed that the Veltro was originally from a place located between Feltro and Feltro (literally, between Felt and Felt). Furthermore, all this information¹⁷ gives us the key to correctly interpret the Latin acronym DXV as Dantes Xsti Veltris¹⁸, Dante Veltro of Christ. Some may wonder why such a high mission has not produced any results. Indeed, historically it seems to have been a real failure. In reality, Dante’s legacy to the western world remains as a unique monument owing to his height. Its spiritual content is by no means exhausted and has assumed an ever-greater eschatological relevance over time. If this were not the case, all the envoys of God to mankind should be equally be considered as failures for having fallen short in touching all humankind and in establishing the lasting kingdom of peace and justice as promised.
We will not enter into the detailed narration of the Comedy. The subject is well known and its reading within everyone’s reach. Furthermore, the description of its space-time cosmology and of the events reported would result so complex as to be impossible to cover in a few lines. The first part of the journey consists in passing through hell. For the uninitiated, this is the place the damned receive their punishment. But for those who are making the descent into hell during the course of their lives, Hell is the secular life, which must be overcome through initiation. This is why several characters who were still alive in Dante’s time are already in hell, including numerous kings and popes. In this case, the descent into hell corresponds to the recognition of the faults and the motivations leading to sin (sskrt. saṃcita karma). If on the one hand the motivations are summarized in incontinence, mad bestiality and fraud, on the other hand the corresponding actions are articulated in the sins of Lust, Gluttony, Avarice-Prodigality, Wrath-Sloth, Heresy, Violence and Fraud¹⁹.
The traitors of the Empire and of Religion are the worst among the fraudulent. Lucifer resides in the depths of hell, at the centre of the Earth, cast out from the heavens and thrown there over his sin of rebellion against God. Lucifer has three faces. In his right and left mouths, the traitors to the Empire Brutus and Cassius²⁰ are constantly chewed by the fallen angel. In the central mouth Judas, the traitor to Religion²¹, is devoured. Using the gigantic body of Lucifer as a ladder, Dante and Virgil climb up from the centre of the earth through a tunnel to the island-mountain of Purgatory, located in the Ocean of the southern hemisphere. From there the two poets clambered up the cosmic Mount of Purgatory, on whose summit is the Terrestrial Paradise. The Purgatory is a place for atonement made up of seven frames ²². Upon entering, an angel marked Dante’s forehead with seven Ps (sins, in Italian peccati) on. For each of the seven frames passed, a P was erased from his forehead. It is clearly a path of mental purification which results in the restoration of the primordial state, the one in which Adam was before the original sin. Once reached the Terrestrial Paradise, after drinking the water of the oblivion of sin, Dante found himself in front of Beatrice who was waiting for him there. Then Virgil, his first master, discreetly stepped aside.
From that moment, Beatrice, no longer a human person (sskrt. amānava puruṣa), left the Earth behind, led the Poet through the Heavens to the Empyrean or Celestial Paradise²³. There are nine Heavens (sskrt. loka or svarga) to be crossed, named after the seven planets representing the seven virtues²⁴ and governed by different angelic hierarchies²⁵. That of the Fixed Stars is the eighth Heaven. Whereas as ninth is the Crystalline or Primum Mobile. During Dante’s ascent, he met with increasingly contemplative souls who instructed him to continuously higher doctrines. Once crossed the extreme limit of the Primum Mobile, the entire perspective turns upside down. The Earth, instead of being at the centre of the Ptolemaic system, becomes the extreme periphery, and the heavens become more and more spiritual as one proceeds towards the centre. The entire universal manifestation then appears as a “Snow-White Rose”²⁶, which has at its centre the mysterious presence of God. At that point, Dante turned to Beatrice hoping for an explanation, but she had already disappeared in silence, replaced by St. Bernard, the last contemplative monk of the Latin tradition and patron of the Order of the Temple. It was St. Bernard who led Dante towards the final vision to “indiarsi” (in Italian: to become one with God). The poet beheld the divinity which seemed to be made up of three coinciding circles of different colours. One of those circles mysteriously seemed to have human form, in which Dante recognized himself. But his mind was inadequate to understand how this could be. It would seem that Dante was unable to square the circle of this vision, when, suddenly, his mind obtained a dazzling intuition of the divine reality, exceeding any capacity for imagination and description. After this supreme vision, desire and will reappeared, but this time they belonged no longer to Dante the individual, but to the very “Love who moves the sun and the other stars”²⁷. Universalization had taken place. Dante was now ready to undertake his mission by returning to the world of men.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

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1. Dante called Comedy his opus magnum referring to the classic meaning of this term. By “comedy” it is meant a narrative that, starting from a negative prelude, it reaches a happy outcome in the end. “Comedy” is opposed to “tragedy”, which, differently, is a story that starts well but ends “tragically”. And what better outcome than to become a Universal Man? However, to understand the exceptional nature of Dante’s creation, it must be added that his universalization took place in life, as will be seen below. This highlights his exceptional qualifications, since a path of non-supreme knowledge usually leads to universalization only after death.[↩]
2. Luigi Valli, Il segreto della Croce e dell’Aquila, nella Divina commedia. Bologna, Zanichelli, 1922.[↩]
3. In reality, the corrupt Church was the result of a usurpation. Dante, therefore, wisely distinguished the principle of Spiritual Authority from its historical degeneration. The confusion between the two is only an error of estimation; the same that occurred during the 18th century, when the Freemasonry, cornered by the two papal excommunications, reacted by assuming an increasingly secular and anti-religious position.[↩]
4. Boniface VIII in the Unam Sanctam bull (1302 A.D.) dared to affirm that the imperial dignity was prerogative of the pope, who delegated part of his power to the various sovereigns, including to the Emperor himself! With this act, the pope no longer recognized the imperial transmission from the Roman Caesars, fraudulently confusing it with the apostolic religious one.[↩]
5. Many Faithfuls of Love did not understand Dante’s high purposes. They believed he had abandoned the Holy Faith to pursue fame among the powerful of the time or to ingratiate himself with the Church of Rome. Among these we find also Cino da Pistoia, one of the Poet’s closest friends. Cino reproached Dante for having made Beatrice the symbol of his own Wisdom, while instead, according to him, she was the knowledge common to all the Faithful of Love.[↩]
6. The symbolic duration of life, seventy years, is encapsulated in the seven days of the Poet’s otherworldly journey, from entering hell to the vision of God in Paradise. Pythagorean numerology makes his initiatic journey coincide with the 1300 A.D. That year fell halfway through the 13,000 year-long biblical cycle, that is to say 6,500 from the creation of the world. In turn, the biblical cycle corresponds to a half precession of the equinoxes. Thus, Dante renders his inner experience a cosmic event of universal significance. Paolo Vinassa de Regny, Dante e il simbolismo pitagorico, Genova, F.lli Melita ed., 1988 (I ed. 1956).[↩]
7. Hell is divided into three increasingly deep underground parts, which correspond precisely to greed, violence and fraud.[↩]
8. A fast and big hound used mainly against larger prey, such as bears and the wolves. Most commentators, deceived by easy assimilation, identified this mysterious character with Cangrande (i.e. “Granddog”) della Scala, Imperial Vicar for Italy. We will immediately see that this is not the case.[↩]
9. In truth, the western tradition had known several other characters who had descended into hell and then gone up to heaven alive. Among them are Orpheus, Theseus, Hercules, Odysseus, Saint Patrick, Saint Brendan, the knight Tungdalus and the Benedictine monk Albericus da Settefrati. But for Dante, the most important were Aeneas and Saint Paul, on account of the two sacred institutions they had founded.[↩]
10. Saint Lucy’s Day falls on December 13th, when the sunlight is enveloped in the long solstice night, thus heralding the birth of the sunlight symbolizing the Christ. Saint Lucy (i.e. Holy Light) represents the principle that leads to enlightenment. It is the power that raises the mind to cross the world of action and leads to the heavens. For this reason, Lucy is the symbol of the imperial wisdom. It appears in the form of an eagle that takes Dante on his wings to the entrance of Purgatory. Note the alternation of delegations in the divine will: The Holy Virgin Mary (Madonna, my Lady) or the contemplative wisdom, Lucy or the active wisdom, Beatrice the contemplative wisdom, Virgil the active wisdom.[↩]
11. As in all traditions, the “missioned” people (sskrt. adhikārin) acquire awareness of their cosmic function only at a certain age, in the mid path of life, when they recover innate knowledge (sskrt. vāsanā).[↩]
12. In his youth, Dante also participated as a knight in various feats of arms, such as, for example, the Battle of Campaldino (1289).[↩]
13. Dante was exiled from Florence under papal pressure. He found hospitality with the Marquises Malaspina, the da Polenta, lords of Ravenna and with the della Scala, lords of Verona.[↩]
14. According to the calculations of the Dantists, the “initiatic death” of Beatrice, viz. of Dante himself, had occurred precisely in the year 1291 AD. However, Benini rightly pointed out that Cacciaguida spoke of the ten years of the planet Mars revolution, corresponding to 16 years, 11 months and 3 days of Earth time. Therefore, this date refers to May 1283, when the Poet’s New Life in fact began. Hence, the “nine years old missioned” of the year 1300 was none other than Dante. Rodolfo Benini, Dante tra gli splendori de’ suoi enigmi risolti, Roma, A. Sampaolesi ed., 1919, pp. 154-158.[↩]
15. Both Dante’s father and his great-grandfather were called Alighiero by name.[↩]
16. The Allighieri were from time immemorial numbered among the patrician families of Ferrara. Pio Rajna, “Il casato di Dante”, Studi danteschi, Firenze, Sansoni, 1921, pp. 59-88.[↩]
17. The Dantists have never been able to understand the meaning of the so-called three prophecies of the Divine Comedy. In fact, they have never linked them together in a single thematic sense. However, Dante, through numerical symbolism, has drawn a clear connection between them. The Veltro is mentioned in verses 101-102 from the beginning of Inferno; DXV is in verses 101-102 from the end of Purgatorio; Cacciaguida’s revelations are exactly in the middle of Paradiso, between verse 2372 from the beginning and the verse 2372 from the end of the cantica. Benini, cit. p. 138.[↩]
18. Where Xsti stands paleographically for Christi.[↩]
19. Giovanni Pascoli, Minerva Oscura, Livorno, Raff. Giusti ed., 1898, pp. 18-53.[↩]
20. The assassins of Julius Caesar.[↩]
21. Recently, the most prominent exponents of the Vatican are trying to rehabilitate Judah in the hope of absolving themselves, having an ominous awareness of sharing the same guilt with that most traitor.[↩]
22. The existence of Purgatory was formalized during the council of Lyon (1272). However, Catholicism owes Dante its final formulation. The absence of the Purgatory in the Islamic conception greatly weakens the theory of the origins of Dante’s afterword from possible Hispano-Moorish sources as advanced by Asin Palacios and Cerulli. However, it does not completely dismiss it. In fact, there are several convergences between the Comedy and the account of Muhammad’s Mir‛aj. Indeed, Dante’s and his contemporaries’ alleged ignorance of Arabic and Greek languages is unproven and based exclusively on the prejudice of the Enlightenment against the Middle Ages.[↩]
23. Two Paradises exist, the Terrestrial and the Celestial. The first is at the summit of the earthly world. The second, also called Empyrean, sits ablaze (sskrt. taijasa) beyond all heavens. Both Paradises share a vegetal symbolism. The Terrestrial Paradise is a garden, the Celestial one a White Rose. The heavens are places of fruition for the saved, whereas the Paradises are obtained through the initiatic way. It is not by chance that these are accessible in life. By totally ignoring what initiation is, catholic theologians have always confused Paradises and heavens as if they were the same thing.[↩]
24. The virtues still depending on the action are: prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. Whereas, the contemplative virtues are faith, hope and charity.[↩]
25. From bottom to top: Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones and, in the spheres of the Fixed Stars and in the Crystalline, the Cherubim and the Seraphim. They correspond to the deities of Hinduism who rule the lokas.[↩]
26. Note the terminology characteristic of the Faithful of Love. However, this Rose or White-Flower far exceeds the meaning attributed to it in the knightly way of the troubadours.[↩]
27. Last verse of the Comedy.[↩]

Vita Nova, Dante’s “New Life” – II

Since no one had been able to explain his spiritual situation¹, Dante began pondering over the meaning of his swings of mood, so erratic and contradictory. With an introspective investigation, he lucidly described his persistently alternating shifts of attraction and repulsion for Beatrice-Holy Wisdom. With a burning desire, Love constantly drove him to meet his Dame. This happened through an inner vision and by meeting Beatrice in person (i.e. the teacher surrounded by the satsāṅga). As soon as the vision appeared (sskrt. darśana), the spirits responsible for the sight (sskrt. cakṣus) were strengthened, almost as if they were coming out of their natural organs (sskrt. netra golaka). The other exhalations and powers of the soul, on the contrary, suffered as if they were about to die. Love, then, forced him to move away from the vision to keep him alive². After sending to his master these reflections in the form of three sonnets, Dante realized that, as a result of that clarification, he could then dominate these contrasting sensations. He had already overcome that obstacle and was now able to conceive a higher spiritual domain.
Being summoned before a Court of Love, the Faithfuls requested him to better explain his inner state, encouraging him to abandon reticence and modesty. The river of wisdom that filled him with such grace inspired him to write about the intimate union between his own intellect and the Active Intellect, Beatrice. Thus, he addressed the sonnet “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’Amore (Ladies that have intelligence in Love”) not to any Faithful of Love, “but only to those who are gentle and who are not simple females”; that is only to the most qualified among them. The love between the Poet and his Dame was so sweet that, by talking about it, he would have been able to make people fall in love. According to the secret language, Dante thus affirmed that he had reached the spiritual grade of master (sskrt. gurutva). Although his knowledge of her was much deeper, henceforth he would have spoken of Beatrice in a simpler form, so as to be understood by the other initiates. Through Dante, Beatrice-Holy Wisdom had descended from heaven to earth to bestow the miracle of the spiritual influence (sskrt. anugraha)³. The Faithfuls of Love should have take advantage of this divine grace until possible. In fact, according to Dante, Beatrice would later be called back to heaven for a much higher mission, anticipating in this way the overcoming of his magisterial experience to carry out a more universal role.
The troubadours of the Court of Love answered him with the canzone “Ben aggia l’amoroso e dolce core” (“Be blessed your loving and noble heart”); in this way not only was he absolved of every suspicion and recognized as a teacher, but also emerged their enthusiastic recognition for his great inner experiences. Through other sonnets addressed to the Faithfuls of Love, the new master urged them to let their women (intellects) follow the example of Beatrice. Meanwhile, the Poet addressed the sonnet “Amore e’l cor gentil sono una cosa” (“Love and the gentle heart are one thing”) to his best friend, Guido de’ Cavalcanti, expressing how Love had taken total possession of his heart. It is a humble yet firm statement on the surpassing his own master. From that moment on Cavalcanti began to withdraw himself from the scene, leaving the command of the Holy Faith to his best disciple. It was not a consentient parting. Guido was embittered and left his spiritual family forever. For the sadness caused to the Florentine initiates, the abandoning of their old master was lamented as the “death of Beatrice’s father”.
Having fallen ill for nine days, Dante had an agonizing vision of his own death, immediately followed also by that of Beatrice. Thereupon, his vision became more and more sweet⁴. He saw his Dame lying dead and then ascending to the heavens carried by a cloud of angels singing “Glory in the highest heaven”⁵. The certainty that this vision would assure him inner peace took over in his heart. The quotation from the Vita Nova testifies to the prophetic nature of his vision. Death indicated a coming qualitative leap in his initiatic experience. The death of Beatrice was indeed his own death, which allowed the ascension of his soul⁶ to the highest of the heavens, source of every peace. After a few days Dante had a new vision. He saw Love joyfully taking possession of his heart. This God pointed to two noble Ladies who seemed to be approaching. The first one was Primavera (Spring), also called Giovanna (Joan)⁷, followed by Beatrice. Primavera was the Dame of Guido. The meaning of the vision was that Dante had indeed surpassed his master. Therefore, he received the enthusiastic recognition of the Faithfuls of Love.
Although Dante had proposed a triumvirate for the conduction of their initiatic family⁸, Guido politely refused on the grounds that he had already assumed the gurutva of another esoteric organization⁹. Left alone at the helm of the Florentine group, Dante infused it with such great power and spiritual wisdom that soon other “Women” (sister initiatic organizations, probably from the Templar circle) turned to him as their Grand Master¹⁰. In this period of intense teaching came the “death of Beatrice”. Dante preferred not to comment this subject, citing, among other reasons, that he did not wish to become “a praiser of myself”. It is evident, therefore, that the “death of Beatrice” was in reality the apotheosis of the Poet’s interior realization. Furthermore, he deemed such effort unnecessary as his realization had transcended in every way the level of understanding of the other Faithfuls of Love. With the purpose of better explaining this concept, we will refer again to the miniature by Francesco da Barberino presented and explained in chapter 43 of this series. Beatrice, the soul of the Poet, had left the earth where she had lived until then with Dante in the form of the androgynous “wife-husband”, to ascend to the sky riding on the white horse of Love¹¹.
Although difficult to understand, the initiates of the various organizations recognized that the Poet had achieved an incomparable spiritual eminence. No doubt that at that moment Dante was recognized as Imperator, spiritual leader of the Latin Christianity initiatic paths. This extraordinary experience of “dying in life” occurred in 1291, coinciding with a historical event that put the Order of the Temple in grave danger. Therefore he decided to inform the Princes of the Earth with a letter about his new dignity and on the difficult coming times. As always, Dante quoted Jeremiah’s first Lamentation¹² to allude to the danger of destruction of the Temple. In that same year, in fact, the Muslims conquered St. John of Acre, massacring all the Templars who defended the city. With this defeat, the Holy Land was lost forever and, at the same time, the myth of the invincibility of those knight-monks collapsed¹³. Dante’s new responsibility, therefore, coincided with a particularly serious historical contingency. He sent the canzone “Gli occhi dolenti per pietà del core” (“The eyes which mourn the sorrow of the heart”) to the initiates, with which the new Grand Master invited everyone to “cry”, that is to say to simulate, to hide. And at the same time, he exhorted them to “sigh”, to deepen their knowledge and to strengthen the practice of virtues. His friend Cino da Pistoia, the only Faithful of Love who always recognized Beatrice as the most perfect Dame, declared himself available to assist in this task. For this reason, Dante called him “Beatrice’s brother” recognizing in him an inner reality very close to his own.
One day the Poet was concentrated drawing the image of Beatrice assumed into the sky. The form that he had spontaneously depicted was that of an angel. He then noticed that someone was watching him. These men were neither “gentle” nor “dames”, but he had to honour them nonetheless. It was clearly a control by the Inquisition. However, since his sketch corresponded to the canons of the religious iconography of the angels, they could not allege anything. For this reason, he decided to take on a new outward appearance, accepting the love of a young noblewoman, and very beautiful Lady. In the Convivio¹⁴ he described her as the beautiful and very honest daughter of the Emperor of the Universe¹⁵, called Philosophy by Pythagoras¹⁶. In fact, he had already completed the entire initiatic path of Pythagorean wisdom (gr. Σοφία, read sofìa), and thus he assumed the exterior philosophy as a tool for arguing, partially giving up the use of the trobar clus¹⁷. This is the reason why Dante still appears today perfectly in line with the theology of St. Thomas and with the philosophy of Aristotle, despite having spiritually transcended both these exoteric perspectives. Therefore, Love requested Dante to lower the level of his doctrinal expositions so as not to be noticed by the spies of the King of France and the Inquisition. And the Poet adapted himself unwillingly. The art of philosophical rhetoric gave him satisfaction, but at the same time he regretted the use of such an external instrument. Before being completely influenced by the philosophical temptation, Dante recalled the vision of Beatrice. In this way he abruptly rejected the allurements of philosophizing and his thoughts recovered the true sapiential sense that, through the spirits, oozed from his heart¹⁸.
The Vita Nova continues with a sonnet enigmatic only in appearance. Dante turns to some “pensive” pilgrims who travel through Florence heading for Rome. He emphasizes that they were going there to see the Veronica, without mentioning any interest at all in obtaining the vision (sskrt. darśana) of the pope in a collective audience. The latter was generally the purpose of the Romeos, as were called those who went on pilgrimage to Rome. Instead those “pensive pilgrims” (not Romeos!) were going to see only the Veronica (from the Latin vera icona, true icon), the true face of Christ¹⁹. In them we recognize the defeated Knights Templar on their return from the Holy Land, eager to find the true image of Christ after having lost his Holy Sepulchre. Dante turned to them asking to stop in Florence. From there, in fact, Beatrice, the wisdom of the Poet, had risen to the highest of the heavens. If they agreed to share his tears, those pilgrims could have recognized in the heart of Dante the true face of the Savior. The pilgrims sent two representatives who requested him to illustrate his true inner height, in order to decide whether to or stop there or continue to Rome.
To this request for clarification Dante replied with the last sonnet of his work. Here he affirms that the knowledge (the spirit) dwelling in his heart had gone beyond the highest sky. A new awareness had pushed him beyond that limit. There, he had the vision of a self-luminous Dame, that he was unable to describe with the faculties of the mind (sskrt. antaḥkaraṇa). However, the mind, in its limited capacity, maintained the feeling that the gentle light reminded him of Beatrice. This was all he could perceive, and this was the answer to the two pilgrims. However, as soon as he concluded his confession on the inadequacy of the human mind to “remember” what he had known directly, Dante declared that he had the “wonderful vision” of the divine mystery. With “wonderful vision” Dante did not mean a new spiritual experience, but the project of narrating his knowledge in the Divine Comedy. So, he concluded the Vita Nova by assuming the commitment to spend the rest of his earthly life explaining what had never been said before; that is to say that his soul, in the glory of Beatrice, had the eternal direct vision of the One who is always blessed. This epilogue, therefore, is the prelude to the Divine Comedy.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

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1. The other Faithfuls of Love, including their master, showed little understanding, and mocked the Poet for his sudden samādhis.[↩]
2. This experience is well known in the way of Bhakti as the pain of “union and separation” (sskrt. saṃyoga-viyoga).[↩]
3. The active and the possible intellects (Mahan Ātman and the individual buddhi) were thus united in spiritual marriage, as stated in the Convivio (II.2.2). Beatrice and Dante had since been integrated into the primordial androgynous, the “wife-husband” of Francesco da Barberino, that is the identification with Love, the only dweller of the heart.[↩]
4. The Poet refers to it as the sweetest death, in clear antithesis with the “Rude Death” sentences issued by the Inquisition.[↩]
5. Thus, an inner rebirth followed this death. Similarly, the angels had sung “Hosanna in the highest heaven” when the Christ was born. This was the first sign indicating that Dante was in the process of identifying himself with Jesus the Messiah, or that he would have achieved the same level of realization. This allusion would soon be followed by other confirmations.[↩]
6. The imminent pacification of his soul (śānta Ātman) was now possible since Dante had transcended the alterity of his individual buddhi and Mahan Ātman-Beatrice.[↩]
7. Love explains that Primavera (in Italian “prima verrà”) means “she who came first”; and her name was Joan because, like John the Baptist, she had announced the advent of the Saviour. On the other hand, Beatrice, who follows Joan, is declared identical to Love. Thus, the God declared the His identification with Dante through Beatrice. It is another confirmation that Dante represented a second Christ. In this imaginative way the Poet confirmed that he had universalized his magisterium.[↩]
8. A proposal expressed in the sonnet “Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io” (“Guido, I wish that Lapo you and I”).[↩]
9. Much has been discussed on this matter. In fact, this initiatic organization called Mandetta or “the Dame from Toulouse”, must have had characteristics identical to those of the Florentine Court of Love, which excludes the recurring hypothesis that it was a Cathar sect. Rossetti interprets the name of Mandetta as if Guido had received the “mandate” to save that initiatic family of Toulouse from internal and external threats.[↩]
10. This is openly stated in the two splendid sonnets “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare la donna mia quand’ella altrui saluta” (“My lady looks so gentle and so pure when yielding salutation by the way”) and “Vede perfettamente onne salute chi la mia donna tra le donne vede” (“He sees an affluence of joy ideal who sees my lady, in the midst of other ladies”).[↩]
11. The account of this experience will be included in the Paradise, the third canticle of the Divine Comedy.[↩]
12. Some scholars claim that these quotations from the Old Testament testify a Jewish-Qabalistic influence exercised on Dante, forgetting that for Christians the whole Bible is a sacred text. This claim is in line with the very recent idea that Western civilization allegedly has Jewish-Christian origins. The truth is that before Marx, Freud and Einstein the Jewish communities were entrenched in their ghettos, with little or no cultural exchange with the external environment that they considered “impure”. Their influence began to be exercised secretly, as we shall see, only since the Renaissance, and finally spread in the 19th century. Dante, in line with the Christian traditional positions recognizing the responsibilities of the Jews for the capital condemnation of Jesus, exhorting the Christians wrote of them: “Men be, and not like sheep gone mad, so that the Jew who lives among you not deride you” (Paradise V.80). And, not surprisingly, he calls Judecca (ghetto) the deepest of the hells. Who sustains a Judaizing reading of Dante’s work is Sandra Debenedetti Stow, Dante e la mistica ebraica, Firenze, La Giuntina, 2004, closely followed by Gian Maria Molli, La Rinascita di Dante, Roma, Arkeios, 2010. The latter also relies on the “authority” of occultists such as Max Heindel, Rudolf Steiner, Dion Fortune etc., demonstrating his lack of discrimination. The studies of Giorgio Battistoni (for example, Immanuello Romano, L’Inferno e Paradiso, G. Battistoni, (ed. by), Florence, La Giuntina, 2000) are of a completely different weight. His works are interesting, written with great thoroughness and rigor. However, this scholar forgot to report that it was Immanuello Romano who drew his inspiration from Dante and not vice versa, thus contradicting the thesis on the alleged Jewish influences on the Divine Comedy that he set out to disprove.[↩]
13. The historical exposition of that critical moment will be covered in a forthcoming chapter dedicated to the Order of the Temple.[↩]
14. Convivio II.15.[↩]
15. That is Love. Note the title of ‘Emperor, which alludes to the initiatic function of Dante (Imperator), by then identified with Love.[↩]
16. Philosophy simply means “desire for wisdom”; a useless distraction for one who has already identified himself with sofìa.[↩]
17. In fact, Guittone d’Arezzo and Bonagiunta degli Orbacciani, both Faithfuls of Love in their youth, had publicly revealed the existence of the secret language of the troubadours. Thus, expressions incomprehensible for those unfamiliar with this jargon had become a source of suspicion for meddlers and adversaries. The definitive abandonment of the trobar clus will take place in the Divine Comedy.[↩]
18. We remind the reader that, in the secret language, spirits or breaths represent the virtues and the knowledge dwelling in the heart.[↩]
19. Veronica is a veil on which the face of Jesus Christ was miraculously imprinted, still presently preserved in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.[↩]

Vita Nova, Dante’s “New Life” – I

Guido Guinizzelli was master (sskrt. guru) to a young Florentine aristocrat, Guido de’ Cavalcanti (1255-1300)¹. Blessed with a strong personality, acute intelligence and wisdom, Cavalcanti succeeded Guido Guinizzelli in the magisterium (sskrt. gurutva). A group of young troubadours² formed around him; among them there was Ser (Eng. Sir) Durante son of Alighiero degli Alisei³, better known as Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). The latter soon became the most important rhymer and due to the perfection of his poetry, universal wisdom and elevate doctrine, he has to be acknowledged as the greatest exponent of the medieval Christian initiation.
For our purpose we will examine two of his most important works⁴: Vita Nova (the New Life), where Dante describes his initiatic experiences and the progress of his inner realizations (sskrt. ādhyātmika anubhava); and the Divine Comedy, a vast poem that describes the correlations among his inner path (sskrt. sādhaka anubhava), the worldly events (sskrt. ādhibhautika vikāra) and the divine reality (sskrt. ādhidaivika sattā). First, we will summarize the Vita Nova; in this way our Indian readers will be able to recognize the similarity between the initiatic path of the Holy Faith and those of Tantricism and Bhakti⁵.

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The book’s title reveals that it is the narration of the events leading Dante to his inner experiences on the path to realization. The New Life, in fact, follows his initiatic rebirth (sskrt. dvijanman). Dante begins his narration from that moment; he actually stated that his life before initiation (sskrt. asādhaka bhava) was not worthy of remembrance. Nine years⁶ after his initiation, i.e. after having received the mercy, his also nine-years old Dame⁷ appeared for the first time to him⁸ in a red dress. She was called Beatrice by those who did not know her real name. This event announces Dante’s achievement of the first degree of inner experience. At that sight the vital soul residing in the heart (sskrt. jīvātman) trembled and said: «Here is a God stronger than me coming to dominate me». The mind and the senses (sskrt. antaḥkaraṇa) in his head recognized: «Your blessedness appeared». On the contrary, the breaths (sskrt. prāṇa) that bind the soul to the bodily functions complained: «Now we will be under control». From that moment Love dominated the soul of the Poet by making their two wills one and same; and Love was always urging him to look inside himself for that Angelic Woman. It was as these fleeting and repeatedly inner experiences (sskrt. antaranubhava) that pushed Dante towards Love, were induced by her image always present in his heart. And he followed this attraction towards Love inspired by Beatrice, always under the guidance of reason⁹.
After another symbolic nine years, along his path, Dante had a new apparition of Beatrice, wrapped in an immaculate white dress¹⁰. For the first time Beatrice addressed her salute to Dante (Provençal salut; it. saluto). This symbolised the achievement of a higher spiritual influence (sskrt. anugraha); the salute in fact charges the initiate (sskrt. sādhaka)¹¹ with new power, virtue and wisdom. In a state of spiritual tension, Dante retired at home in solitude. During the night he had a vision in dream: he saw Love, joyful and ardent as the very sun, with the flaming heart of the Poet in his hand. He was holding in his arms a sleeping Beatrice, wrapped in a blood coloured cloth. Once the woman woke up, Love forced her to devour Dante’s flaming heart. Then, while crying¹² and still with Beatrice in his arms, he climbed up into the sky. The vision seems a summary of Dante’s entire initiatic journey. It starts with his first experiences as a neophyte (marked by the red dress of Beatrice), and it continues with the prediction of Dante’s reaching the highest of skies¹³. Shocked by the message received in dream, Dante wrote a sonnet to the wisest troubadours of his circle (sskrt. kula) asking them to explain its meaning.
Only Cavalcanti was able to interpret his dream. Guido, his guru, recognized in Dante’s dream the premonition of the achievement of the most perfect realization by his extraordinary disciple. However, he expressed this opinion with incertitude, since even he, the master, had not experienced it and could not aspire to such a high spiritual level. After that vision, Dante engaged in a more severe asceticism to obtain Love’s blessings. In everyone’s eyes, he became thinner and looked distracted. To those who asked him what he was suffering from¹⁴, he answered by playing with words that it was heartache for some lady in Florence. One day while he was in a church preying, he saw a girl staring at him and he seized the opportunity to choose her as screen to hide the truth. In this way the curiosity of the people was satisfied. However, after a few years the “screen-woman” left Florence and Dante could no longer hide behind that alleged earthly love. He pretended to be desperate for the absence of his “screen-woman”, but the beatitude that he felt in his heart often emerged in attitudes of pure joy. These contradictions increased the suspicion of the curious. His bizarre behaviour could rightly be interpreted as a trance (sskrt. samādhi) induced by initiatic practices.
The danger was above all represented by the Inquisition; this institution, administered by the Dominican Order, willingly confused¹⁵ the initiatic schools with some clandestine folk pseudo-religions, such as the Cathars and Waldesians present at that time in Florence. The need to hide his state of intense initiatic rapture from the outsiders, coincided in fact with a period of persecution of esoteric organizations. Dante alerted not only the troubadours of his initiatic family, but also other organizations that were derivations or branches of the knights of the Order of the Temple’s ¹⁶. As expected, the Inquisition, named “Rude Death”¹⁷, hit right at that moment. A Faithful of Love, that Dante does not name and who was spiritually very close to Beatrice, was sentenced to death. The same ‘representative’ of Love, Guido de’ Cavalcanti, was crying for the terrible crime. But in their jargon to cry also meant “to hide”: it was an alert to all troubadours. Dante, in order to escape persecution, fled the city in search of the “screen-woman”. In his narration, a character dressed in rags joined him in his escape. It was Love, also on the run and disguised as a pilgrim. And thus, the path they took together turned into a realization journey. The Grace of Love covers that path and the fountain of teachings became as vast as a river.  During this period of concealment Dante evidently obtained unexpected spiritual gifts. Love, in order to protect him, advised him to find another “screen-woman”: this was the exterior religion¹⁸.
Our Poet rode back to the city to take on the new disguise that Love recommended during the apparition. He began to see a circle of Franciscan friars and in that period he became a member of the St. Francis Third Order¹⁹. Despite having assumed that burdensome external cover with seeming enthusiasm, Beatrice, the active Intellect (sskrt. Mahan Ātman) continued to dialogue intensely with his buddhi, filling him with graces and knowledge. At this point, in the Vita Nova, the meaning of “Beatrice” becomes double. She represents not only the Universal Intellect, but also the sampradāya of the Holy Faith, the initiatic family of the Faithful of Love, including those who had not understood the height of the last inner states reached by Dante. The troubadours, outraged by his sanctimonious behaviour, denounced him of treason for having renounced the initiatic path and for having become a profane devotee of the exterior Church. He was therefore denied participation in the rituals (of the salut) of the initiatic assembly (sskrt. satsaṅga). This interdiction weakened the Poet: in fact, when witnessing those periodic rites of salute, he was wholly pervaded by Love and each time he acquired new power from it. After this exclusion, Dante kept apart sad and lonely. Then Love appeared to him like a child dressed in white clothes. God explained to him that the Holy Faith, probably through the convocation of a Court of Love, had judged tedious (it. noioso²⁰) his behaviour. He still could not assume any exterior conduct at his will, because the other Faithfuls of Love would not have understood it. Only those who, like Love himself, stood at the centre of the wheel of becoming (bhavacakra), could completely transcend the forms.
However, being Dante close to that spiritual degree, Love suggested him to write a ballad defending himself, to permit the Beatrice-Court of Love (sskrt. satsaṅga) to be aware of his inner situation. Dante wrote to the master of the Holy Faith explaining the reasons of his behaviour, reaffirming that in his heart he was always a true Faithful of Love. Soon after, another knight took Dante to a gathering for a wedding. As soon as he arrived there, he understood from the sudden trembling of his heart and from the agitation of all the other vital breaths, that he was at a meeting of unknown initiates. Fearing he had been brought to a Court of Love to be officially expelled, Dante instinctively tried to hide his inner excitement²¹. Suddenly he saw Beatrice and other members of his own initiatic family. At that moment he became unable to retain his sudden, ecstatic transfiguration. These rapid behavioural changes were so visible that everyone started to laugh at him, including Beatrice²². Returned home, Dante sent a sonnet to Beatrice (his master) and to the other troubadours, trying to explain what had happened during that meeting. He declared that just by looking at them (sskrt. darśana) he felt filled by an uncontrollable power as if he was attending a ritual satsaṅga. Love had possessed him and granted him that overwhelming ecstasy. For the first time, in that instance, Dante stated that to really understand his inner state, his fellow Faithfuls of Love should have reached his same level of realization.

Maria Chiara de’ Fenzi

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1. Cavalcanti was also disciple of the Florentine Ser Brunetto Latini, who referred directly to the initiatic line (sskrt. paramparā) of the Provençal troubadours. He was also influenced by the troubadour Ser Rustichello Filippi from Florence (1235 ~ 1295), Ser Bonagiunta degli Orbicciani from Lucca (1220 ~ 1290) and from Guittone del Viva d’Arezzo (1230-1294). The latter, however, in the second half of his life, abandoned the Holy Faith and entered the order of the Gaudenti Friars (frati gaudenti). This was an exoteric religious order that expressed itself in the Trovadoric style to turn Love towards the Church and the Papacy, in clear opposition to the Faithfuls of Love.[↩]
2. Among these we can mention Gianni degli Alfani, Lapo Gianni, Cino de’ Sigilbuldi from Pistoia, Dino Compagni, Francesco da Barberino, Dino Frescobaldi, Dante da Majano and others. Like Guido and Dante, many of these had Roman patrician origin.[↩]
3. The Alisei family descended from the gens Anicia; among the ancestors of Dante there were the Roman Emperors Petronius Maximus and Flavius Anicius Olibrius, Severinus Boethius, St. Benedict of Norcia, Pope Gregory the Great (Carlo Padiglione, L’Arme of Dante Alighieri, Napoli, Nobile ed., 1865).[↩]
4. In addition to the already mentioned Il Fiore, Dante wrote: Detto d’Amore [Statement of Love], a short remake of the Roman de la Rose; using Tuscan vernacular he wrote the Rhymes, or rather his initiatic correspondence with different Faithfuls of Love; the Convivio [Banquet], inspired by Plato’s Symposium, an unfinished treatise in vernacular written by Dante with the purpose of instructing the ruling class on how to govern. The Convivio wanted to be an exoteric application of the principles of the Holy Faith, expressed following the Aristotelian arguments. In this treatise Dante explains that like the Sacred Scripture, his writings must also be interpreted on four levels: the literal sense; the moral sense, a sum of instructions on initiatic behaviour and actions (sskrt. karman); the allegorical sense, that is its symbolic interpretation; and finally, the anagogic, namely the doctrinal one. In De Vulgari Eloquentia, he explains the reasons why it was time to abandon the Latin language, by then an exoteric and ecclesiastical language, and to use instead the vernacular. He describes how the Faithfuls of Love language had to be: illustrious, purified from the coarseness of the daily common language; courtly, suitable for topics proper to the imperial power; curial, apt to illustrate theological themes; and, finally, cardinal, convenient to describe the doctrines that are the key of Reality. In the Monarchia, Dante presents how the world should be governed. He writes about the origins of the Empire that dates back to a Roman, and even earlier, tradition; about the Church, which dates back to Christ and his ancestors, kings David and Solomon. For Dante Emperor and Pope are the two suns that illuminate Christianity (someone mistakenly said that one is the sun and the other the moon). The Emperor rules for the sake of the living, the Pope leads the souls of the dead to the heavens. Both are interdependent, and both had been in a poor state for centuries: the Empire must recover its universal power, the papacy must stop with its cravings for earthly power. Two Eclogues in Latin, on Virgil’s style, in which Dante, with the pseudonym of Mopsus, takes up the poetic symbolism of the Augustan era, already in use at the Court of the Merovingians and Charlemagne. The Questio de Aqua et terra, a Latin treatise on the structure of our planet Earth, which was foundational for the three-world conception of the Divine Comedy. Finally, the Latin Epistles in which Dante calls on the Emperor Henry VII, admonishes and reproaches the great Italian feudal lords he was acquainted with, and scolds bishops and cardinals exhorting them to restore peace and justice in Christianity, by reviving the Imperial power and purifying the Church from earthly vices.[↩]
5. We deliberately distance ourselves from any profane interpretation, be it literary, philological, historical or ideological, made by the academic scholars of Dante. Like the cherub with the flaming sword at the door of Eden, they turn their backs to it to keep away those who want to enter. But they have an opposite nature to the sapiential one of the cherubs and their weapon is only obtuseness. Even the rare comments written by esotericists are better. However, they are limited by their exclusively bookish knowledge or having participated in initiatic ceremonies devoid of any effectiveness, which prevents them from understanding the realities described in the Vita Nova, also because they never had those same experiences. An example is the book by Marcello Vicchio, Dante l’iniziato, Arcireale-Roma, G.E. Bonanno, 2015. Many of our śākta Indian readers, on the other hand, will be able to fully recognize the summed-up interpretation that follows.[↩]
6. “This woman was accompanied by the number nine, in the sense that she was a nine, that is, a miracle [the divine action in the world], whose [square] root is only the admirable Trinity” (VN, XXIX.10).The number nine is the symbol of everything pertaining to Beatrice, the “Beatifying One”. In fact, Dante’s Dame is nothing but the Active Intellect, radiance of Divine Reality in the manifested world. The Active Intellect (sskrt. Mahan Ātman) is the principle that operates in the subtle world and that brings the graces of the three Persons of the Christian Trinity. This last conception, as it has been already pointed out in this Site, corresponds very closely to Sacciddānanda in the Hindū doctrines. What expresses the non-agent triplicity of the Trinity in the three-worlds (sskrt. tribhuvana), is symbolized by the number nine (3×3), which is actually the true name of Beatrice. In fact, in Latin the name of this most gentle Lady is Beatr-IX, the nine (IX) which beatifies. The individual or possible intellect (sskrt. buddhi) is the receptacle of spiritual influences, knowledge and virtues, and they are all useful to it when it will eventually be reunited with the universal or Active Intellect, Mahan Ātman as jīva ghana or Hiraṇyagarbha. This, inter alia, wipes out the tenacious idea of the medievalists who see everywhere the influence of Avicenna and Averroes. These Arab philosophers, in fact, supported the absurd opinion that the passive intellect (sskrt. buddhi) was a supra-individual principle present in the individuality. On the opposition of Dante to this opinion see Francesco Perez, La Beatrice svelata, Palermo, Flacconio ed., 2001 (I ed. 1865), pp. 127-142.[↩]
7. Jacopo da Lentini had also stated: “The mercies [the initiations] must be reduced [rarely granted], they must not be spoken of anywhere, because they must appear as joys afresh; not even the Faithfuls of Love must find them before nine years have passed”. In the Order of the Temple it took nine years of apprenticeship for a squire to be initiated as knight. (L. Valli, Il Linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei “Fedeli d’Amore”, Rome, Optima, 1928, p. 274). However, these temporal quantities based on the symbolism of the number nine must not always be understood in a literal sense. Nine, in Dante’s thought represents ‘the appropriate time, the necessary time’ (sskrt. ṛtukāla), the ‘time prepared by Providence or Divine Will’ (sskrt. daivakṛta). It is evident that the two “nine-year-old children” represent the degree of “child and maiden” of Francesco da Barberino, which was discussed in the previous chapter, the 43rd of this series.[↩]
8. Unlike other circumstances, in which Dante met on the street, in church or elsewhere the human woman who had been assigned to him to represent Beatrice, as required by the knightly tradition, in this case this is a true apparition, as the Poet himself insists to describe.[↩]
9. Dante never specifies the method (sskrt. prakriyā) he had used. This constant evoke of the image of Beatrice to the mind would allude to an interior visualization technique (sskrt. dṛṣṭi or darśana). We know, however, that Dante also utilized the divine names ‘I’ and ‘El’, traditionally used as mantras.[↩]
10. In the hermetic symbolism, which we will discuss later, death to profanity was represented by the black colour, the initiatic rebirth by red, while white indicated the higher purity. See the colours of the three guṇa of Hinduism. The white colour, the sāttvika one, is the symbol of having reached the highest limit of beatitude as also Dante states.[↩]
11. It could have been a passing of grade ritual with the granting of a more powerful technique for initiates who had already reached high levels of realization. It is possible that also Lapo Gianni took part to the same ritual together with Dante (Valli, cit. p. 185)[↩]
12. In the parler cloz to cry means to simulate, to act in such way that others do not understand the true meaning.[↩]
13. We will later examine Dante’s journey towards the highest of the heavens and its conclusion once beyond them. It was a true devayāna accomplished in life.[↩]
14. Certainly, these were not only the profane (sskrt. adīkṣita) or his adversaries, but also the other knights of the Holy Faith who had not understood the grade of Dante’s realization.[↩]
15. Typical confusion of the profanes, both in the past and in the present times, who do not know, or want to distinguish between false religions, sects, heresies, witches’ covens and all that transcends religious exotericism. By deliberately confusing what is superior with what is inferior, the external religion purposely tends to misunderstand the terms “esotericism” and “gnosis” (sskrt. jñāna), passing them off as synonyms of luciferianism, satanism or worse. In the 5th sonnet of Il Fiore, Love thus exhorts the knight: “I am your God and every other belief set aside; do not believe neither Luke nor Matthew nor Mark nor John”. Instead of seeing the overcoming of the external scriptures in favour of a higher knowledge, exotericism claims to see it as an act of rebellion.[↩]
16. In a sonnet, Dante reminds the Faithfuls of Love of the words of the prophet Jeremiah about God’s command to protect the Temple of Jerusalem. In this case he alludes to the Order of the Temple and all its branches. Among those, the Holy Faith was clearly the most important for the transmission of wisdom. In many parts of the Poet’s works, “to contemplate” means “cum Templo” (in Latin: with the Temple), to indicate, with wordplay, the identity between con-templation (sskrt. dhyāna) and Order of the Temple. This means that the initiatic knowledge and the organization which was keeping it were the one and same thing. On the Holy Faith as a tertiary order of the Templars see Robert L. John, Dante Templare, Milan, Hoepli, 1987.
    In a sonnet, Dante reminds the Faithfuls of Love of the words of the prophet Jeremiah about God’s command to protect the Temple of Jerusalem. In this case he alludes to the Order of the Temple and all its branches. Among those, the Holy Faith was clearly the most important for the transmission of wisdom. In many parts of the Poet’s works, “to contemplate” means “cum Templo” (in Latin: with the Temple), to indicate, with wordplay, the identity between con-templation (sskrt. dhyāna) and Order of the Temple. This means that the initiatic knowledge and the organization which was keeping it were the one and same thing. On the Holy Faith as a tertiary order of the Templars see Robert L. John, Dante Templare, Milan, Hoepli, 1987.[↩]
17. “Rude Death” is the exact opposite of “Gentile A-mor” (Noble Love – In-mortality’): it indicates the plebeian Church which is the enemy of noble immortality.[↩]
18. Cavalcanti, alluding to this historical emergency that led Dante to the simulation, states: “Let the Religion be kept to one side, making sure not to be disliked”. The important thing is to preserve the quintessence in your heart![↩]
19. The Third Order was reserved for lay people who assumed the rule of St. Francis remaining married and living in their private homes. Around the end of the 1280s the Dominicans were more influential in Florence, but since they ran the Inquisition, it was more prudent for Dante to choose Franciscanism.[↩]
20. The medieval Tuscan word noioso (tedious) derives from the Provençal ennoi and this, through the ancient Lombard inodio, takes its origin in the Latin form in odio (in hate). Hate vividly represents the aversion against Love (the God Amor), of the ecclesiastical exotericism of that period.[↩]
21. The text says that he “leaned on a painting to hide”, which means that he assumed an ostentatious mask of indifference.[↩]
22. The curious phenomenon of rapture is easily recognized as a samādhi. This saṃskṛta term has been translated by Eliade with the senseless neologism of “enstasy”. Indeed, the various kinds of samādhi represent precisely an artificial displacement of the individual consciousness out of its ordinary condition. Therefore, these are simply ecstatic states. It is precisely the ordinary state of waking consciousness that should rather be called “enstasy”.[↩]

Novels of Love and the Holy Faith in Italy

Troubadours and Faithfuls of Love used to write sonnets, songs and ballads in rhyme. They communicated with each other in a hidden way, responding in kind (literally “responding in rhymes”). The answer was recognizable as it reproduced exactly the same pattern of rhymes of the received message. We report as an example, two well-known exchanges among Faithfuls of Love of the Florentine school of the thirteenth century¹:

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Such correspondence had the most varied subjects: requests for advice on how to use the method (sskrt. prakriyā); questions about the doctrine; declaration on the achieved degree of realization; injunctions (sskrt. vidhi) by the master to the disciples; warning of imminent danger; convocation of the Court of Love; accusations of doctrinal deviations of some fellow disciples, etc.
In the Holy Faith, however, there was also another literary vernacular genre: the novel. This mixed form of prose and poetry referred directly to the novel tradition of the cycle of King Arthur and the Grail and, indirectly, to the Latin treatises of Love which, through Andreas Capellanus (De Amore), went back to Severinus Boethius (De consolatione Philosophiæ) up to Ovid (Ars Amatoria)². The first novel that we know of was Le roman de la Rose (The novel of the Rose). It is an allegorical tale begun in 1237 by Guillaume de Lorris, that remained unfinished. After forty years, a second poet, Jean de Meun, continued and completed the narration. In the novel the protagonist decides to look for an unknown woman he fell in love with in a dream. This Lady is mysteriously identified with a white rose, pure and fragrant, locked in a castle³.
It is quite clear that the Rose-Lady represents the holy wisdom, the initiatic knowledge that reflect itself in the “fountain of teaching”⁴. The protagonist of the Roman enters the kingdom of Love, led by Cupid and accompanied by the contrasting fairies Venus and Chastity. The knight is continually hindered along the way by Poverty and Papelardie (Lard-eater). Poverty is the personification of the mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans; in particular the last one who led the activities of the Inquisition. The second term, on the other hand, is a derogatory nickname for the Papacy desire of fatten up on earthly goods. The continuation of the quest, and eventual success, is narrated by Jean de Meun. In this second part of the Roman de la Rose, the knight must overcome the obstacles that False Appearance (Faux-Semblant) puts on his way, until he finally conquers the Rose-Holy Wisdom. This first narration of the conquest of the Rose, or of the Whiteflower, is characterized by a blunt satire towards the exoteric Catholicism, a characteristic that will continue and become more and more scathing in the following novels of the same genre.
The most important book of this kind⁵ is Il Fiore (The Flower), by Sir Durant Florentine, which according to all the critics, is Dante (contraction of Durante) Alighieri. In this allegorical novel the protagonist is introduced in the garden of Love by his Dame Bel Acuel (Nice Welcoming) and attains to kiss the Flower. Bel Acuel is evidently the master (sskrt. guru), the garden is the initiatic organization (sskrt. kula), and the kiss is the initiation rite (sskrt. dīkṣita kriyā), as already mentioned in the previous chapter. From that moment on, the knight is opposed by Malebouche (Badmouth) and Jalusie (Jealousy), who represent respectively the false accusation of heresy, and the profanity that considers Love as an earthly passion. During the journey to conquer the Flower, the protagonist runs also into False Appearance and Compulsory Abstinence, who represent the hypocritical clergy and the new pauperistic orders, Franciscans and Dominicans. After having overcome all these obstacles, the knight eventually achieves to pick up the Flower. This symbolic narrative of the conquest of knowledge is so full of polemical hints against the exotericism that many academic scholars wrongly see it as a proof of heresy or even of Catharism.
This indeed is not the case in Dante’s Il Fiore⁶. In the novel, the difference between the persecuted by the Inquisition is actually quite clear: on one side the simple followers of Catharism and “perfect” Cathars (who obtained the consolamentum) and, on the other, those who rebel against the exoteric impositions of the Church⁷. After the crusade against the Albigensians and because of the hostility unleashed by the papacy towards the Emperor Frederick II, the initiates of the different esoteric currents had to increasingly hide themselves. From this moment on they had to hide behind a profane appearance (Mal Sembiante, viz. Ugly Appearance), or an assumed cover. Even the initiates therefore disguised themselves as Falso Sembiante (False Appearance). During and after the crusade against the Cathars, troubadours and Faithfuls of Love took refuge in the Courts of the Sovereigns who sympathized with them or who were themselves initiates. It was particularly important the welcome that Emperor Frederick II granted to the Provençal fugitives in his kingdom of southern Italy. Troubadours gathered around him and henceforth the Sicilian school of the Faithfuls of Love was founded. The Sicilian poets sang in the Provençal manner the Dame, the Flower and the Rose, using now the Italian vernacular of Sicily⁸.
Frederick II of Swabia, who was raised by the Templars of Apulia and the bishop of Troia, received since young age a profound and vast education. He spoke six languages: Latin, Sicily Italian, German, Provençal, Greek and Arabic. He was a very refined poet, soon to become one of the most popular troubadours of his kingdom. He founded a court of intellectuals called Magna Curia in Palermo, the School of medicine in Salerno, the University in Naples and the school of rhetoric in Capua. The master (sskrt. dīkṣā guru) of the poetic school, which was also a Court of Love and initiatic school (sskrt. gurukula), was the great troubadour Jacopo da Lentini⁹. The greatness of the Emperor’s wisdom, that stimulated such an important cultural growth, made him known to all as Stupor Mundi (Wonder of the World, sskrt. lokādbhuta).
The popes who succeeded one another during Emperor Frederick’s reign undertook a hostile policy towards him. The papacy did not tolerate the Emperor’s control over Germany, northern Italy and the south of Italy, the Church State being thus completely surrounded. On the other hand, Frederick II did not hide his desire to take over Rome as Roman Emperor. Hence, he was repeatedly excommunicated, in order to dissolve the oath of loyalty his vassals had with him. Frederick II led the sixth crusade against the Islamic occupation of Palestine. While in the Middle East, the Emperor met with Malik al-Kamil, Sultan of Syria and Egypt. The two sovereigns recognized each other as initiates of their respective religions, sympathized and reached a compromise¹⁰.
In this way the Emperor obtained the return of Jerusalem to the Roman Empire without a fight. This success was used as pretext for a new papal excommunication. Due to these continuous expulsions from the Catholic community, even the Order of the Temple had to distance itself from Frederick II. This led to several disagreements between the Templars and the Imperial cause. Among the monk-knights only the Teutonic Order maintained rather good relations with the Emperor, as their Grand Master Hermann von Salza was a close friend and counsellor of Frederick II. The political events caused by the continuous papal hostility prevented the prestigious wisdom of the Emperor to reach the rest of Europe. But he represents one of the cornerstones of the initiatic tradition and after his death, he remained into the legend¹¹.
As previously mentioned, the Provençal troubadours had a warm welcome not only in Sicily, Spain and Portugal, but also in northern Italy. They gave birth to a school of Faithfuls of Love which had its main centres first in the city of Bologna and then in Florence. In Bologna Guido Guinizzelli (1235-1276) was the master of the Faithfuls of Love of central Italy and without any doubt he was one of the most important poets. His poem “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre Amore” is a true doctrinal statement outside the parler cloz (hidden language), which we paraphrase here:

Love always takes refuge in the noble heart, as the bird shelters in the green of the forest. Nature did not create Love before the noble heart, nor the noble heart before Love: when the sun was created, its splendour shone immediately and not before the creation of the sun. Love takes its place in nobility in such a natural way as heat in the light of fire. The fire of Love lights up in the noble heart as the power in the gem. This power does not descend from the [corresponding] star¹² before the sun has not ennobled it: when the sun, thanks to its strength, has expelled what is vile in it, the star charges it of its own power. Thus, the heart that was by nature chosen, pure and noble, makes him fall in love with the Dame who is similar to the star. Love dwells in the noble heart as the fire in the torch; there, clear and subtle, it shines at its will. It is so indomitable that no other receptacle could accept it. Instead, an ignoble birth is contrary to Love, like water, which by nature is cold, is opposite to the heat of fire.
Love takes dwelling in the noble heart, as if this place was similar to itself, like the diamond in the iron mine. The sun hits the mud all day long: yet it remains worthless and the sun does not lose its heat; the proud man says: “I am noble by birth”. He is similar to mud, and the virtue of nobility is like the sun, because it should not be believed that inherited nobility can be deprived of a virtuous heart. If the noble heart has virtue, it is like the water that lets the sunbeam pass through and like the sky that shines of the light of the stars it contains. God, the Creator shines in the angelic intellect, more than the sun shines before our eyes: it [the intellect] has knowledge of its Creator beyond the movement of the heavens and it obeys Him¹³ by making them move. In truth, the beautiful Lady should inspire him in the same way he fulfills the divine plan; after she has shed light in the eyes of her lover, the desire rises of never disobey her. The moment my soul will stand before Him, God will tell me: “Dame [i.e. the Faithful of Love], what was your presumption? You have crossed the heavens and have come to me vainly thinking of Love as if it were Me. Praises are only suited to Me and to the Queen of the true Kingdom [the Virgin Mary], before whom every illusion vanishes “. I will be able to answer him: “She had the appearance of an angel of Your Kingdom; it was not a mistake if I placed my love in her”.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. We will write more on the content and meaning of these rhymes in the following chapters.[↩]
2. This literary current was partly inspired by Prudentius’s Psychomachia (348-405 AD), where vices and virtues are represented as characters in an epic struggle between them; and by the anonymous De Jherusalem la cité (11th century), in which Jerusalem, considered an initiatic centre, is depicted as a woman threatened by evil forces, while virtuous knights try to reach her; we would also like to mention the Pamphilus de Amore, by a Spanish anonymous of the 12th century and Li Fablel dou Dieu d’Amours, in the Oc language.[↩]
3. It is evident the resemblance between this allegory and the novels on the search for the Grail. The white Rose-Lady corresponds to Blanchefleur, daughter of the Fisher King, who lives in the castle of Corbenic and who marries the knight conqueror of the Holy Grail. In India this archetype can be found in the Rāmāyaṇa, the epic that tells the expedition of Rāma, perfect King and avatāra of Viṣṇu, to free Sītā who is held captive in the fortress of the demon Rāvaṇa. With many variations, such as Kālidāsa’s Mālavikāgnimitram, this allegorical story was perpetuated until the very time when Guillaume de Lorris wrote down his novel. In fact, in the middle of the 13th century, in India the rājaput Prince Ratan Singh went to Ceylan to free Princess Padmavati (which means white lotus). In that contingency, the forces of evil that hindered the quest were represented by the Muslim hordes. Three centuries later the oral narration was put into words in the famous poem Padmavāt by the sufi Malik Muhammad Jāyasī (1477-1542). This pīr of the tariqa Chištiyya continued to depict the Muslims of India as obstacles to the search for Padmavati, the sacred wisdom.[↩]
4. Following the chivalrous customs, the Faithfuls of Love devoted themselves to a Lady belonging to the same initiatic tradition, acting as a ‘devoted admirer’. The Dame is the symbol of the wisdom that the knight wanted to achieve, and in the same way his ardent desire for knowledge was concealed behind an earthly love. On this note it is not justifiable that a serious scholar like Alfonso Ricolfi constantly and insistently underlines the carnality of these Dames. He even finds lubricious hints in the Rose of Jean de Meun (A. Ricolfi, Studi sui “Fedeli d’Amore II. – Dal problema del gergo al crollo d’un Regno”, Genova-Roma-Napoli-Città di Castello, Soc. A. Ed. Dante Alighieri, 1940, pp. 25-26). Obviously, the ordinary historians of Italian literature share this idea of an underlying lust in these writings, which indeed is a inclination existing only in their minds.[↩]
5. The erudite Tesoretto of ser Brunetto Latini and its version in the language of oïl, Li livres dou Tresor, also belongs to this current: these poems tell of an initiatic journey to the top of Mount Olympus.[↩]
6. Given the traditional importance of the Greatest Poet, we will not write about him at this point, but we will dedicate more space to Dante in the next chapters.[↩]
7. So Dante makes Badmouth talk: “Sed i’ truovo in cittade o in castello / Colà ove Patarin [cataro] sia riparato / credente ched’ e’ o consolato, / od altri uom ma che sia mio rubello…” (If I find in a city or in a castle where a Cathar took refuge, whether he is a simple believer or one who has obtained the consolamentum, or anyone else who is rebellious to me…[the Church]) (Il Fiore, CXXIV).[↩]
8. Some argue that it was a Sicilian vernacular. But “Rosa fresca aulentissima ch’appari in ver l’estate, le donne ti desiano pulzelle e maritate…” wrote by the jester Cielo d’Alcamo looks nothing like Sicilian dialect.[↩]
9. The most important disciples of Jacopo were, in addition to the Emperor himself, his sons King Enzo and Manfred, Pier della Vigna, Ruggieri d’Amici, Odo delle Colonne, Rinaldo d’Aquino, Arrigo Testa, Guido delle Colonne, Stefano Protonotaro, Filippo da Messina, Mazzeo di Ricco, Jacopo Mostacci, Percivalle Doria, Tommaso di Sasso, Giovanni di Brienne, Compagnetto da Prato, Paganino da Serzana, Folco di Calavra and Pietro da Eboli.[↩]
10. Malik al-Kamil was a disciple of the sufi master ‘Umar ibn al-Farid, also a poet of love. The Sultan had met twice the greatest of the sufi masters, Muḥiddin Ibn ‘Arabi. Saint Francis tried to convert Malik al-Kamil to Christianity, but he had the misfortune to face a character of a very superior stature.[↩]
11. Frederick II, like his grandfather, the great Emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’, Charlemagne and King Arthur, is one of the characters who are said to be sleeping and waiting to return at the end of the cycle. When the time comes those great warriors will awaken to establish the universal kingdom of peace and justice. No doubt that Stupor Mundi was not only a Holy Roman Emperor, but also an Imperator of the initiatic paths of the Western tradition. Antonino de Stefano, Federico II e le correnti spirituali del suo tempo, Parma, Ed. all’insegna del Veltro, 1981, pp. 145-158; A. de Stefano, L’idea imperiale di Federico II, Parma, Ed. all’insegna del Veltro, 1981, pp. 223-234; Nuccio D’Anna, Il segreto dei trovatori. Sapienza e poesia nell’Europa medievale, Rimini, Il Cerchio, 2005, pp. 72-76.[↩]
12. Exactly as in the Indian conception, the virtues of the nine planets [sskrt. navagraha] are reflected in the powers of the nine precious stones [sskrt. navaratna].[↩]
13. The Dame is like a sunbeam of Love that makes the sunlight shine on the surface of the purified intellect in the noble heart. Note the similarity with the ābhāsavāda (doctrine of the reflex) of Brahma vidyā taught in Hinduism.[↩]

Knights, Troubadours and Faithful of Love

Who were in reality the authors of the novels of King Arthur and the Holy Grail? They were poets who belonged to a category usually known as troubadours¹. They were all of noble or clerical-monastic descent². As already demonstrated, the troubadours were the initiatic knightly brotherhood of the Faithful of Love³. At the beginning they were errant knights, but towards the middle of the 12th century they were integrated in the ranks of monastic-knightly Orders, in particular among the Templars and the other branches derived from the Order of the Temple⁴. They represented the true initiatic structure of the Latin chivalry and they gathered in certain castles, meeting in the so-called Courts of Love.
As it was customary at the time, every morning the Lord of the castle would administered justice for his subjects. As Judge of the fiefdom, he was advised by a Law Court composed of his wife the chatelaine, noble vassals, knights, clerical advisers and some monks. The Court of Love was similarly structured, but all the members had to belong to the same initiatic organization, called the Holy Faith. In the eyes of a profane or of the spies of the Inquisition, the Court of Love had to appear as the convocation of the internal fief’s Law Court. In reality, it was something else. During the Court of Love sessions, the Judge proceeded to initiate the aspirants. The phases of this ritual took place as follows: the master who presided over the Court and who represented the God of Love, verified the chivalrous quality of bravery⁵, the determination and the sincerity of desire of the aspirant to Love⁶.
As it has already been said, Love was the name that the Faithful of Love used to call God. In Latin ‘Love” (Amor) meant “Immortality”, the state that the knights wanted to reach by uniting themselves with God.

‘A’ means ‘without’ and ‘mor’ means ‘death’: if we assemble them together, we will obtain ‘without death’⁷.

​Once verified the sincerity of the aspirant’s desire, the master chose a person who could represent his soul. If the applicant was a knight, the master would point out a lady, or a knight if the aspirant was a lady. This alter ego could had never been the husband or wife of the aspirant, because between married nature wants them to be unite in one flesh. Instead the knight had to love the lady with exclusively spiritual love, since she had to represent for him his own purified soul⁸. After this, the master cast his Dolce Sguardo (Sweet Look), sharp as a spear, into the applicant’s chest, piercing his heart. The ‘Sweet Look’ then ripped the knight’s heart from his chest and handed it to the lady. This ritual, loaded with symbolic meanings, was called ‘mercé’ (mercy), which means initiation or grace⁹. The ritual ended with the seal by a kiss between the two parties, the only bodily contact between them. The representative of the God of Love, then assigned to the new initiate a heavenly fiefdom, a domain that he had to conquer by means of rituals and their corresponding virtues.
This fiefdom, in the aftermath of the knight’s inner experience, had to grow bigger and to advance up to the status of a heavenly Empire. Unlike terrestrial fiefdoms, heavenly fiefs could never be lost if one upheld those virtues¹⁰. The importance and expanse of the heavenly fiefdoms were commensurate to the stages of the inner journey of the initiate. The steps were seven, as described by Francesco da Barberino, a Faithful of Love, in one of his famous drawings¹¹. The first two steps marked the transition from the external Catholic religion to the esoterism by means of a dual initiatic death (represented by the figures of a ‘he religious-dead’ and a ‘she religious-dead’). The third degree was the rebirth as a ‘child’ and ‘maiden’ (corresponding to the state of bāla in the hindū initiatic ways). It followed the ‘fearless squire-of-honour’(donzel) and the ‘perfect damsel’, corresponding to the degree of spiritual adolescence; then, ‘common man’ and ‘married woman’, i.e. spiritually adult ones. The sixth grade depicts the ‘merited¹² knight’ and the ‘widow’. The last and supreme spiritual degree corresponded to ‘wife-husband’, the realization of the primordial androgyne. It is quite evident the resemblance to the seven cakras of the Tantrism: moreover, the ‘wife-husband’ coincides with the same androgynous union between Śiva-Śakti, the ārdhanārīśvara¹³ that in the seventh cakra is represented by the thousand-petalled lotus. When the initiate had reached the highest level of the chivalrous way, he was recognized as identical to Percival, since he had the vision of the Holy Grail¹⁴.
The God of Love offers immortality to all who know him:

​Then, who has Love and dwells in Him is without death; whoever has Love has life, and who has envy has death¹⁵.

​For this reason, the Faithful of Love, ladies or knights, they all are women in relation to God, who is the only absolute male¹⁶. However, with ‘Dame’ they defined, in addition to themselves, several other things that we briefly list here: 1) ‘Dame’ was the name used to call the initiatic organization; 2) More commonly, a ‘Dame’ indicated their soul, their intellect and their achieved degree of understanding; 3) ‘Dame’ or ‘Madona’ represented the Virgin Mary, understood as a mediator between the devotee and God¹⁷, in the sense of divine omnipotence; 4) ‘Dames’ were also the powers and virtues that acted and were acquired as inner experiences during the initiatory path¹⁸; 5) This word also designated the lady who had been appointed by the master to represent, for each individual knight, all the senses listed above, namely his virtues, behaviours and words; 6) “Dame or knight” in general indicated an initiate (sādhaka).
This introduces a new subject: the Faithful of Love, in fact, preferred to write their rhymes in spoken language, because they considered that Latin had become fixed, with precise meanings consecrated by its use for almost two thousand years. However, in this spoken language they hid secret meanings, allusions and symbols that could be understood only by the initiates. They called this language parler cloz, secret language¹⁹. In addition to ‘Dame’ some other words of this coded language were: 1- ‘Love’, the God to whom the initiate can identify himself by means of the knightly rituals. 2- ‘Master of Love’, the one who represented Love, (sskrt. guru). 3 ‘Rose, Flower or Whiteflower’, the knowledge of Love that had to be obtained. 4- ‘Gentle’, which means gentilitial²⁰, noble, that is the minimum qualification required to obtain the knightly initiation. 5- ‘Greeting, to greet’ the rite of initiation (sskrt. dīkṣā), to initiate someone. 6- ‘Mercy’, the spiritual influence (sskrt. anugraha) conveyed by the initiation rite. 7- ‘Sigh’, the initiatic teaching or the achieved knowledge. 8- ‘Sweet Look’, the ability of the master to recognize the qualifications in an aspiring disciple. 9- ‘Pride’, the haughtiness, the innate inclination among the nobles, which must be overcome to access initiation. 10- ‘Envy’, ‘ice’ and ‘jealousy’, the profane environment²¹. 11- ‘Without Mercy’, the uninitiated (sskrt. adīkṣita). 12- ‘False Appearance’, the papal authority that pretends to be spiritual to affirm itself as a worldly power. 13- ‘Sigh’, the danger or threat arising from the profane environment. 14. ‘Death’, the enemy of Love, the Inquisition. And many other words, whose meaning has remained secret.
Initially the Holy Faith mainly flourished in Provence, where the ancient Roman-Celtic transmission interacted with the Imperial Catholicism²². From the 10th century in the nearby duchies of Aquitaine and Occitane, a heresy began to develop spreading from the Balkan domains²³ of the Byzantine Empire. It was the Catharism, a religion of Gnostic origin, completely devoid of any esotericism. The secrecy of this religion, which many confuse with the initiatic confidentiality, was motivated by fear of repressions. The structure of Catharism was modelled on that of the Church: in addition to the simple believers, there was an ecclesiastical hierarchy of “perfects” or Cathars (gr. Καθάρoi, read cathàroi, the ‘pure ones’), headed by their bishops. The Cathars were dualists: they considered that the bodily world was created by an evil God, Satan, identified with the Yehovah of the Old Testament, while the good God, preached by Jesus in the New Testament. The development of the world was the consequence of the eternal struggle between the two principles of good and evil. The intellectual lack of the Cathar doctrines and their exclusively moralistic interpretation breached into the lower strata of the population. The Catholic Church initially tolerated the spread of Catharism, in many ways so similar to the Pataria that the papacy had supported for anti-imperial purposes and to reduce the autonomy of the bishops. However later, due to the generalized apostasy of the Aquitan and Occitan masses, the ecclesiastical hierarchy began a repression that led to the crusade of 1209. The crusade gathered a group of feudal lords of Northern France, eager not to suppress heresy, but to conquer new territories²⁴. In fact, it became a war between feudal lords, interspersed also with brutal episodes of massacres of Albigensian commoners²⁵. The crusade ended in 1244 with the last extermination of Albigensians after the conquest of Montségur, the last heretic fortress. In truth, the nobility of Occitane and Aquitaine at first had expressed a lukewarm hostility towards the Cathars.
Feudal lords, knights, troubadours and Templars became very alarmed in front of the ravenous hordes of conquerors from northern France. They realized that the true purpose of the crusade was to seize their territories, so at first, they tried to defend themselves from that aggression. For this reason, they were accused of being Cathars or Cathar protectors²⁶ and therefore reported to the Inquisition. As already mentioned, apart from the fight against the heresy promoted by the Church, the crusade was exploited by the French feudal lords and the King of France as an opportunity to invade the South. Provence was also involved in the invasion, even though there the presence of Albigensians was minimal. This is how Provence eventually was taken away from the vassalage towards the Holy Roman Empire, passing in 1245 under the dominion of the French royal House of Anjou²⁷. The knights and troubadours of the vast territories invaded by the barbarian hordes of northern France fled elsewhere. They found refuge in Sicily, at the Court of Emperor Frederick II, in Castile (Spain) near King Alphonse X the Wise, in England under Henry III and other rulers who were excellent troubadours and perfect knights²⁸.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. Troubadours and the trobairitz (women) in langue d’Oc or Occitan language; trouvères in Oïl language or ancient French; trovadores in Spanish; trovatori in Italian; minnesänger (singer of Love) in German. Generally, that etymology of the Romance languages is related to the verb tróbar, to find. The glottologists hypothesize its meaning according to their capacity to understand. Therefore, for them, ‘to find’ means to invent a poem, a song. Instead, as we will see later, for those knights the tróbar was related to the quest for the Grail. Therefore, much more plausibly the ‘to find’ dealt with the path that led to Love.[↩]
2. They were composers of ballads, songs and sonnets in rhyme. The ones who were not noble by birth could become a minstrel or jester, and wander to different castles singing the works composed by the real troubadours. Only later the phenomenon of the bourgeois imitators of the troubadours, appeared in the Communes. They were called with contempt ‘reveller friars’ (frati gaudenti) or ‘mayor troubadours’ (podestà-trovatori).[↩]
3. Fiés d’Amors in Occitan language. The term Faithful of Love (Fedeli d’Amore) was very widespread in Italy to define this brotherhood of knight-rhymers. Only in Dante’s Vita Nova (New Life) they are evoked seven times with this name. The abuse perpetrated by literary critics is indeed incredible: in the Italian Literature History texts this denomination is almost never found. In its place the critics use the term ‘stil novo’ (new style) to define this literary current, although the term ‘dolce stil novo’ (sweet new style) appears historically only once, and precisely in Dante’s Purgatory, XXIV.57. In this context it is clear that this formula applies only to the stylistic change made by Dante, who abolished the parler cloz of the troubadour poetry. Instead, literary critics broaden its use to wrongly include both the predecessors of Dante (the Bolognese troubadour poetry current) and his Tuscan successors. In fact, previously the Fiés d’Amors used a cryptic language, understandable only among the initiates. Dante, from a certain moment, decided to speak openly, aware that the profanes of his time were completely incapable of understanding even the most clearly exposed things. This is similar to what those who collaborate with this website have decided to do.[↩]
4. Such as the Teutonic, the Calatrava and the Alcantara knights. “The consequences arising from having determined the ‘Faithful of Love’ as the direct descendants from the Saint Grail knights, will direct the attention of scholars to the possible relations between these ‘Faithful’ and the Templars” (Alfonso Ricolfi, Studi sui “Fedeli d’Amore” 1. Le «corti d’Amore» e i «Fedeli d’Amore» in Francia, Milano-Genova-Roma-Napoli, Soc. An. Ed. Dante Alighieri, 1933, p. 78).[↩]
5. That meant that he had to be like Lancelot, of the strongest and most skilled knight of the Round Table (A. Ricolfi, Studi sui “Fedeli d’Amore”, cit. p. 66).[↩]
6. Namely to have “the intellect, the will and the ‘appetite’ of good” (Luigi Valli, Il Linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei Fedeli d’Amore, Roma, Optima, 1928, I vol. p. 248).[↩]
7. “’A‘ senefie en sa partie, ‘sans’, et ‘mor’ senefie ‘mort’: Or l’assemblons, s’aurons «sans mort»”. Jacques de Baisieux, Fiefs of Love [Fiez d’Amor], vv. 94-96.[↩]
8. It follows that an already initiated lady was assigned to the aspirant initiate, to help him to overcome the first degrees of initiation. The Dame, therefore, symbolically represented an angelic principle, similar to the ḍākinīs and yoginīs in the Tantrism. The human representatives of ḍākinīs, in certain tantric currents are called bhairavīs. However, the latter are actually used as lovers in the paths of the left hand (vāmācāra mārga); it does not seem, however, that in the initiatic organization of the Holy Faith something comparable to the pañca makāra had ever been practiced. Only among some of the oldest Troubadours there are more crude amorous allusions, as in Guilhèm IX of Poitiers, duke of Aquitaine (1071-1127). This was an imitation of the Latin lyrics on rural loves with peasant girls and shepherdesses following the style of Virgil and other poets of the Augustan Age such as Horatius, Ovidius and Propertius. In this case we can compare them with the love affairs of Kṛṣṇa with the gopīs, which, although they appear as erotic narratives, they actually must also be considered highly symbolic. However, it is important to emphasize that these poems of folksy loves reveal an uninterrupted initiatic transmission of Roman origin.[↩]
9. A. Ricolfi, cit, pp. 66-68. At the beginning of the 13th century, simultaneously with the end of the production of the Grail novel, the Courts of Love began to hide. They were reserved only to members of the same organization, especially after the ecclesiastical condemnation in 1277 of the book De Amore, by Andreas Cappellanus, (Andrew the Chaplain) (1150-1220). This book, written by the chaplain (sskrt. purohita) of the Court of Love chaired by the Countess Marie de Champagne, represented the fundamental doctrinal text for all the Faithful of Love.[↩]
10. Jacques de Baisieux, Fiefs of Love [Fiez d’Amor], vv. 139-159. Love always remained the Lord of the fiefs, and He gave to the Faithful of Love only temporary possession of that dominion; this happened similarly with the terrestrial feuds, whose Lord was the Emperor. It is interesting to note that the etymology that philologists attribute to the word ‘feud’ is completely inadequate to its true meaning. This is due to the anti-medieval bias of the bourgeois Enlightenment ideology, which considers feudalism a barbarian state system of the “dark ages” compared to the “enlightened” regime like that of the Terror produced by the French Revolution. In fact, they fantasize about an origin from a Gothic word ‘faihu’, which would mean ‘property of cattle’. The fiefdom, on the other hand, has nothing to do with cattle and even less with the concept of ‘property’. Instead the Occitan ‘fiez’, feuds or fiefs, closely resembles the term used for ‘Fiés’ d’Amors. Since the feudal system was based on the concept of fidelity (lat. fides), we believe that this was the true meaning of ‘feud’. If someone then considers this as a “false etymology” and relies on the inadequacy of “scientific” etymologies, he is free to do so in harmony to his degree of intelligence. The same holds true for the Nirukta of the Hindūs, ridiculed as a “pseudo-etymology” by Sanskritists and Indologists who are incapable of understanding its use and meaning.[↩]
11. The drawing is found in his work I documenti d’Amore (The documents of Love). The six figures on the left and right of the viewer, respectively represent the stages on the path of the dames and knights, being the seventh common to the two genders.[↩]
12. ‘Deserved’ means that he has fully realized the Mercy, the spiritual influence, and thus obtained the rose of wisdom that he carries in his hand. On the symbolism of the rose at the Faithful of Love we will return in the next study.[↩]
13. The image proceeds from A. Ricolfi, cit., p. 38.[↩]
14. A. Ricolfi, cit., pp. 78-80. The identification with Love still remained to be fulfilled. The God is represented in the drawing as a child standing on a celestial horse, well above all the degrees of the chivalry initiates. As we will see later, only a historical figure has been able to obtain that supreme degree, personifying in this way the Galahad’s function of the Grail novels.[↩]
15. J. de Baisieux, cit, v. 101.[↩]
16. In this aspect the Holy Faith closely resembles the Kṛṣṇa bhakti. All the bhaktas of this particular current, in fact, consider themselves as gopīs, the beloved shepherdesses of God Kṛṣṇa, who is the only male (puṃdevata). Thus, the Christian knightly initiation resembles both bhakti and śakta mārgas of medieval India.[↩]
17. In this sense, according to the Templar ideal of Saint Bernard, Madona manifests an intermediary function very similar to that of the Śakti towards Lord Maheśvara[↩]
18. We have already pointed out the similarity between these ‘angelic women’ and the yoginīs and ḍākinīs of the tantric paths.[↩]
19. Even in this case it is surprising a further analogy with the sādhu bhāṣā, the secret jargon used by sādhus and sants of medieval India. Luigi Valli, in the quoted book, did a great job to identify words with a hidden meaning. Unfortunately, his ignorance, of what initiation indeed is, so widespread in the West, did not make him grasp the more spiritual meanings. In fact, he considers the parler cloz to be just a conventional jargon, comparable to that of the underworld, assumed by sectarian knights or anti-papal heretics, in order not to attract the Inquisition’s attention. Without completely denying this political-religious interpretation, the real purpose of the secret language was to not divulge spiritual secrets to ignorant and profane people.[↩]
20. In ancient Rome only the patricians were recognizable for belonging to one of the gentes (clan, sskrt. gotra). Therefore, the gentle man has nothing in common with the ‘gentleman’ in modern English, who just designated a client of the aristocracy who, without being noble, imitates its behaviour.[↩]
21. For the Faithful of Love the use of the terms gelo and gelosia is a wordplay between ice/cold -that refers to the profane world- and jelousy as opposite of love – the sacred dominion.[↩]
22. Provence was then directly part of the Holy Roman Empire, represented by its third crown, that of the Kingdom of Arles.[↩]
23. In Bulgaria and other Balkan countries these heretics were known as Bogomils, “friends of God”.[↩]
24. Count Simon de Montfort himself, leader of the crusade, who had lost his fief of Leicester, usurped as many fiefs as possible during the ruthless war.[↩]
25. This is how the Cathars were known as they were very numerous around the city of Albi,[↩]
26. There is a literary current, both of the past and todays, that obstinately identifies the Faithful of Love with the Cathars. This confuses an initiatic elite path of high intellectual profile with a plebeian religious movement, seriously contaminated by anti-traditional concepts (Eugène Aroux, Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste, Paris, Jules Renouard et C.ie, Lib. Éd, 1854; Otto Rahn, Kreuzzug gegen den Grail, Die Geschichte der Albigenser, Freiburg, Urban Verlag, 1933, Maria Soresina, Libertà vo cercando. Il catarismo nella «Commedia» di Dante, Bergamo, Moretti & Vitali, 2009).[↩]
27. This was possible because of the great difficulties that the Emperor Frederick II had while reigning, provoked by continuous intrigues carried out by the Pope and his allies.[↩]
28. Some writers claim that the Christian Faithful of Love was an initiatic derivation of Sufi origin. To force this interpretation, some, including Henry Corbin, went so far as to call also the Persian love poets Faithful of Love. They give the example of the excellent relations between the Emperor Frederick II and Malik al-Kāmil, Sultan of Egypt, as their only supporting proof. Similarly, on the basis of the openness of the Court of King Alphonse X, others claim that the Faithful of Love derived from the contemporary love poetry of the Spanish Arabs and Jews. The mutual recognition of belonging to an initiatic school, however, is not at all a proof of the derivation of one tradition from the other. It is curious that precisely those who, rightly, criticize the “theory of cultural lending”, then use it to support the subordination of the Christian initiatic tradition to the Islamic one. The only non-war contacts between muslims and crusaders on which they lean, however, are late and do not necessarily involve initiation exchanges. They even supposedly happen at the same time with the concealment of the literary production on the Grail and the retraction of the ‘Courts of Love’. Not even the sporadic military alliance between the islamic heretical sect of the “assasins” and the crusaders can be invoked to demonstrate the passage of any transmission to the Faithfuls of Love. These alliances do not prove anything about the alleged initiatic dependence of Christian chivalry on the Muslim one (futuwwa). It is instead a fact that there is no trace, neither written nor oral, of transmission and monitoring of Sufism towards the Christian initiation paths. Instead it would have been better to wonder about the appearance on the contemporary historical proscenium of the tantric and bhākta love poetry that involved all traditions, from the Far East to the Far West, during what is conventionally called the Middle Ages. It is an authentic cyclic change that has provoked an adaptation of the different forms of the universal Tradition.[↩]

The Round Table and the Quest for the Grail – II

The whole Arthurian narrative is an allegory, whose knots must be solved by interpreting the symbols. So far, we have described the adventures of the Round Table as the normal turn of events in the course of the life of knights. To be clearer, the aspiring knight arrives at the presence of King Arthur and presents his nobility by birthright, specifying his father’s name and lineage.  He then sets firth his request to receive the knightly initiation. The King then either keeps him close by his side or entrusts him to some other castellan, earl, duke or King, who is well-known for his knowledge on the art of chivalry. The aspiring knight passes his early years  at the service (sskrt. sevā) of the Lord of a castle, learning the rules, virtues and behaviors required by the chivalry order. He, then, advances to squire and is entrusted to an experienced knight who trains him in the use of weapons and the art of war. Once his intellectual, moral and physical abilities are proved, the King, or another master on his behalf, initiates him to knighthood. The transmission of rituals (sskrt. prakriyā) and invocations (sskrt. japa) follow immediately after. Finally, the knight sets out to venture from castle to castle, from monastery to monastery, putting into practice his righteousness and his fighting skills in order to accumulate experience and merits.​
In the case of the Grail’s quest, the narrative is apparently similar. However, it must be interpreted in an internalized form. Wandering from one castle to another must be understood as an inner path. Each castle is a stage that corresponds to the conquest of a knowledge, a virtue or a domain over the elements. In each castle the knight enjoys the love and care of a Lady. Often, between stages, he is taught new knowledge and higher virtues by a wise hermit. Each stage presents initiatic tests, such as the fight with ghost-knights, dragons, giants, witches, which the errant knight must overcome and dominate. It is evident that each castle represents a subtle center (sskrt. cakra) and that in each castle he is helped in the search by a loving fairy (sskrt. yoginī, ḍākhinī).​ Hermits symbolize the deities (sskrt. devatā) who teach new invocations (as bīja mantra) and impart the corresponding knowledge (sskrt. mahāvidyā) to the knight. Eventually, the initiate reaches the summit of the mountain of salvation, corresponding to the highest ventricle of the heart. Up there stands Corbenic Castle, whose literal meaning is ‘the site black as the crow’s wing’. But what appears as darkness inside the heart is actually the blinding light of the Grail guarded there¹.​ The initiate concludes his quest by satiating his eyes with  the divine essence contained in the sacred vessel. The supreme Reality, in this initiatic tradition, is called Love (lat. Amor). This explains the importance of the love that the knight obtains from the Ladies encountered at every step along the path to the Grail. Those loves are gradual anticipations of the infinite Love that the knight will conquer with the conclusion of his quest. The Ladies are therefore fairies or divine powers (sskrt. Śaktis) that help the inner master, the Fisher King, leading the sādhaka to his goal². It is for this reason that in the chivalrous path the Lady is often considered as an initiator.​ But the symbolic name of the Divinity sought by the knights has another meaning. Amor must also be interpreted as a-mors (sskrt. a-marta or a-mṛta), which in Latin means non-death, immortality. After the conquest of the Holy Grail, the knight can remain at Corbenic Castle; or, if he has a special mission, can return to the outer world to straighten tradition in virtue of his new knowledge. After his death, he ascends to the Kingdom of Heavens at the court of God, which in this perspective is identical to the Brahmaloka of Hinduism. The Brahmaloka is the celestial transposition of Montsalvat. Given the importance of the female role in this initiatic path, it is evident its resemblance to a tantric sādhana, in particular to Śrī Vidyā³.
Parsifal, for example, after being initiated to chivalry by Arthur, departs to the castle of Sir Gornemant de Gohort⁴ to be educated. This experienced knight, considering Parsifal’s questions overly naive, advises him never to ask for explanations again so not to appear foolish. After marrying the noble Lady Kondwiramur⁵, he embarks in the quest for the Grail. Along his journey, he comes across many adventures, duels and loves, and wandering from one castle to another he eventually reaches a lake near Montsalvat. There he runs into the King of the Grail under the guise of a simple fisherman.​ While conversing with the King Fisher, Parsifal sees a wonderful procession of ladies and knights passing by and carrying a vessel blazing of light. Intrigued, but made prudent by Gornemant’s advice, he does not enquire with the Fisher King on that prodigy. Having not asked the question, Parsifal fails in his mission to seize the Grail. Thus, the land remains waste and the King wounded. The necessity of the question illustrates the importance for the initiate to invoke knowledge from his master. If the disciple does not ask the question, the teacher does not give the answer and, therefore, the symbol remains without explanation.​
Bors and Galahad, on the other hand, having chosen a caste life (sskrt. brahmacārya), are not limited to the contemplation of the symbol of the Grail. They ask the question and, therefore, gain access to the contemplation of what is contained in the vessel. Galahad, surrendering to the Supreme Mystery contained in the vessel, merges with it and leaves his body. Then, along with the spiritual Grail, ascends to the highest of heavens where he remains forever immersed in bliss⁶.
Bors also conquers the Grail and, thus, heals the wounded King. He then decides to bring the sacred vessel to Camelot. But it was too late to establish the Universal Empire. A civil war had broken out devastating even more the Waste Land. The conflict ends with the death of the rebel Mordred. Also Arthur is mortally wounded and transported prodigiously to the island of Avalon⁷, in the middle of the Ocean. There, he remains between life and death, waiting to return and bring back the tradition to the West⁸.
Although connected to each other, the tales on the quest for the Saint Grail are distinct from those of Arthur and the Round Table. The search is the representation of the inner path of the initiates of chivalry, of their endeavors and their acquisition of knowledge and virtue. For some knights, the initiatic path stops at some initial or intermediate stage. In this case, the knight remains madly in love with a beautiful chatelaine and neglects to continue his search. In other tales, he is taken prisoner by an evil fairy, an ogre, or a ghost-knight, thus prematurely ending his inner quest. Others renounce their quest and return to lead a worldly life in Camelot Castle. Few among them, however, reach Corbenic Castle and obtain the vision of the Grail. Only two heroes (sskrt. vīra) eventually drink at Holy Wisdom. After accomplishing this, they have two possibilities: they can either remain there until death to contemplate the divine vessel as King or knights of the Grail⁹, or they can return to the exterior world radiating the benefits of the divine wisdom. Therefore, the tale of quest for the Grail can be considered as a handbook on the path of inner purification, leading all the way up to the highest spiritual goal.
Instead, the narrations of the Round Table, which are the introduction to the search for the Grail, are the description, in the exoteric domain, of the efforts for the restoration of a Universal Empire to replace the collapsed Roman Empire. Arthur, following the guidance of his druid-master Merlin, establishes a kingdom of peace and justice and founds the initiatic order of the knights of the Round Table. However, unless a knight realizes the inner knowledge of the Grail, the grandiose restoration design cannot be spiritually completed. Arthur, therefore, is a figure in which one can recognize Charlemagne and those successors of his who were most aware of the imperial mission.
Unfortunately, Arthurian novels testify to the partial or even complete failure of the Imperial restauration dream. The foundation of the Holy Roman Empire could not be completed due to a lack of knights qualified to reverberating the divine light into the outer world. Even though certain Emperors and feudal Lords possessed high knowledge, adverse circumstances and personalities hindered their efforts to realize the religious, political and social order. The Empire remained an unachieved esoteric project for the foundation of a complete Tradition. The lore concerning Arthur’s unconscious state following the fatal wound suffered in battle, hints to the possibility of a return to complete his universal dream, however, testifies to an undying awareness that not everything was lost.​
Thus, these literature appeared in the described historical period and served as written guides indicating how the Imperial Christian tradition could have been properly established. On several occasions, the prophetic vision narrated by these novels and tales was nearly realized. But, once again, Galahad-Bors arrived too late. The last “world’s best knight” was embodied by Dante Alighieri, master of the complete wisdom of the warrior esoteric tradition. But even he, as we will see soon, arrived too late to restore the Empire.​
It is interesting to note the behavior of the Catholic Church towards the legend of the Grail. The Cistercian monk Hélinand of Froidmont (1160-1229), who first reported the story of Joseph of Arimathea and the Grail, wrote:

“That basin or vessel, which is called the Grail, is a large and quite deep bowl, in which, according to its own rituals, precious foods are presented with solemnity […] I have been not able to find this story in Latin, but only in French, written by some noblemen; it was not an easy task, but, as they say, [seeking, at last] you can find everything.”¹⁰

“Despite its definitely religious character¹¹, the legend was not recognized by the Church and the clergy. No ecclesiastical writer tells us about the Grail. In the so rich ecclesiastical literature available, nowhere can we even recall mentioning the name of the Grail, except in work of the chronicler Hélinand. However, they could not have ignored the wonderful tale of this symbol of faith. Rather, they must have perpetuated a conspiracy of silence around the legend.”¹²

As we said at the beginning, the texts relating to the Grail appeared in a short period of time and then retracted as if a precise obstacle or danger had been felt.​
At the Council of Verona in 1184, pope Lucius III instituted the Inquisition against heretics and schismatics. At once, however, the Inquisition was also used by the papacy for other purposes; on the one hand to strike the Empire, seen as a threat to the temporal power of the pope, on the other hand to repress the initiatic organizations that, being above his religious authority, escaped his control. The consequence was that from that moment the initiatic ways of Western Europe, although protected by Imperial favor, had to hide even more in order to operate and survive.

Gaṇapati

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1. “[…] In this citadel of Brahmā [Brahmapura] which is like a palace, there is a little lotus who has inside a small space. That, in truth, must be sought to get the Knowledge” (Chāndogya Upaniṣad, VIII.1.1); “There the sun does not shine and neither does the moon and the stars, nor do the flashes of lightning shine. How can this fire light it? He [the Ātman] shining all these shine, through his lustre all these are variously enlightened” (Kaṭha Up. II.2.15; Śvetāśvatara Up. VI. 14; Muṇḍaka Up. II.2.10). It is well known that vessel and lotus are interchangeable symbols. In the macrocosmic perspective, the citadel of Brahmā is situated on the top of Mount Meru (Viṣṇu Purāṇa, II.21).[↩]
2. To the knight who conquered the Grail is given in wife the daughter of the Fisher King, whose name Repanse de Schoye, ‘full of joy’ (sskrt. pūrṇānanda) epitomizes her true nature. Parsifal, when in his second attempt becomes King of the Grail, offers her in marriage to his pagan half-brother Feirefiz. Since the state of decay of the Waste Land is beyond repairing, the newlyweds take the sacred vessel to India, considered as home of the Primordial Tradition (G.G. Filippi, “La Cerca del San Graal e il suo significato”, Parsifal, Venezia, ed. Gran Teatro La Fenice, 1983, pp. 46-55.). He who has successfully completed the spiritual quest forever joins the state of bliss (sskrt, ānanda). In the Mahābhārata the king Śantanu, during an unaccompanied hunt (in Hindū tradition the quest is often replaced by the hunt motif), runs into Satyavatī, the daughter of the Fisher King (sskrt, dāśarāja), with whom he falls in love and marries. Satyavatī means ‘full of Truth’. In a tale of the 11th century (Somadeva, Katharsaritsāgar, V.2) the Fisher King (here named dāśapati) is identified to Manu Satyavrata, as he was called before the last flood.[↩]
3. It is also true that Saint Bernard, whose relationship with the Templars is well known, was the founder of a Christian current which can well be called tantric. This current was based on veneration of the female element represented by the Virgin Mary, considered as a mediator (Lat. advocata nostra) between the human worshippers and God. He was the first to mention her as Madame (my Lady) and to call himself the ‘Knight of the Virgin’. The presence of Tantrism in the West is, however, much older, as it is testified in ancient Greek epics, where the main steps of the initiatic journey of Odysseus are marked by loves with different Goddesses or Nymphs.[↩]
4. ‘Ornament of the Cohorts, i.e. ‘Glory of the Army’.[↩]
5. ‘Leading to Love’.[↩]
6. In other accounts, Gawain, conquers Lady Orgueluse and makes her his wife. That is, he overcomes the sin of pride, the most common sin among the knights. Transcending his inclination to pride, he is able to ask the question and, finally, becomes King of the Grail.[↩]
7. The island of Apollo or Belen, the Sun God of the Celts.[↩]
8. It is generally said that Arthur will come back at the end of the current human cycle to bring back the order and to prepare the future cycle.[↩]
9. In the Parzifal and in the Titurel of the Templar Knight and great poet Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170-1220) the knights who reside and guard the castle on the Montsalvat, are named Templists. A historical allusion of great importance, which makes us understand the initiatic function of the Order of the Temple for Western Christianity.[↩]
10. Edward Strachey, Le Morte d’Arthur, Plano Tx., Digireads.com, 2017 (I Ed. London- New York, 1876), addendum.[↩]
11. Rather than ‘Religious’, it would have been more correct to define ‘initiatic’ the character of the legend of the Grail. It is evident that in these tales there is no trace of the clergy. Only monks and hermits appear, performing magisterial functions both in doctrine and conduct. It is no coincidence that the only ecclesiastic (Hieromonk, the Byzantines would say) who has spoken of the Grail, Hélinand of Froidmont, was a Cistercian like Saint Bernard. Ibid.[↩]
12. Eduard Wechssler, Die Sage vom heiligen Gral in ihrer entwicklung bis auf Richard Wagners Parsifal, San Bernardino, California, Ulan Press, 2012 (I Ed. Hall 1898), p. 9.[↩]

The Round Table and the Quest for the Grail – I

From the historical point of view, the novels of both the Round Table and the Grail suggest an underground current that emerged at a given moment. Soon, however, it retracted to become invisible, almost as if an obstacle or an imminent danger had been felt¹. In fact, these novels appeared in a short period of time between approximately the last quarter of the twelfth century and the end of the first quarter of the 13th century², a period marked by the first decline of the tradition in Europe.​
Where did this underground current come from? All the characters and events present in this literature appear in precise geographical areas: Ireland (Iweriu, lat. Hiberia or Scotia), Wales (Cymru, lat. Cambria), Scotland (Caled, lat. Caledonia), England (Prydain lat. Britannia Major) and Britany (Prydain, lat. Britannia Minor or Armorica). These lands represent the heart of the Celtic Tradition. Those who passed on these legends to Christianity were the Druids (corresponding to the brāhmaṇas of India), particularly the Bards, the priestly caste (sskrt. jāti) responsible for maintaining the relations with the knights (as purohitas). The Bards were the performers of royal rites, the composers of the epic and the mythological poems and to the keepers of the warrior genealogies (sskrt. kṣatriya vaṅśacarita)³. Although the vessel of the Grail is an esoteric symbol of Christian origin, in the Druidic tradition the “Caldron of the Daghdha”⁴ performed a similar function, being the receptacle of the beverage of immortality.
The chronicle of these tales⁵ starts with the collapse of the Roman Empire. The earth was devastated by violence and disorder caused by the marauding barbarians. The cosmic order needed to be restored with the foundation of a new Empire of peace and justice. Arthur⁶, the illegitimate son of King Uther Pendragon was destined to such feat His youth passed anonymously until he drew a sword stuck vertically into a rock. a sign universally recognized as worthy only of the legitimate King of Britain. It is self-evident that the sword in the rock is the symbol of the polar axis crossing the globe. Its extraction represents the change of the polar star on which the earth axis points.​
In fact, the previous ruler, Uther Pendragon, whose name means ‘Head of the Dragon’, represents the period from 4000 to 1000 BC, when the earth axis pointed towards the previous polar star, α Draconis (Thuban⁷). Arthur, therefore, represents the new polar star, α Ursæ Minoris⁸.​

 “Now a first philological observation is required. The exact form of the name given by the manuscripts in ancient French is Artus (subject) and Artu (in inflected cases) leading to the root Art, true philological basis of the name.
The testimony of Celtic languages is formal: it is an ancient name of the bear [sskrt. atri].”⁹

​The bear (gr. Ἄρκτος, read àrctos) in astronomy corresponds to both the constellations of the Ursa Major and Minor (sskrt. Sapta ṛkṣa) and its symbolism is closely related to “polar mountain” (Meru), which represents the axis mundi¹⁰. The polar-priestly element and the zodiacal-regal element converge in Arthur in an ambiguous fashion. In fact, we must keep in mind that, as Nennius¹¹ explained, “Artur latine sonat ursum horribilem” (Arthur in Latin sounds like ‘horrible bear’).​ In his fierce and violent appearance, he was however accompanied and guided by the Druid (sskrt. brāhmaṇa) Merlin, the true architect and creator of Arthur’s reign.​ Therefore, in this symbolic tale is described the emergence of the dualism between the royal and the priestly functions corresponding to the medieval Emperor-Pope diarchy. This division of powers will lead to a mutual competition and destruction. In Gaelic, Myrddin (latinized into Merlinus Ambrosius, Merlin the Immortal)¹² is the name of a type of hawk. One can easily appreciate the discordance between the two powers, as hawk (like the eagle), represents the warrior caste. In fact, he is also known as the ‘boar of Brocéliande’, a typically priestly attribute¹³. At the beginning of the tale, Merlin is the purohita of the King and Arthur’s guru. Following his instructions, Arthur founded in Camelot¹⁴ the Round Table, around which the twelve purest, bravest and most loyal knights of the kingdom¹⁵ were to sit.​
If on one hand the Round Table in change of the restoration of the order and the prosperity in the kingdom, as well as in the world, on the other it also represented an initiatic center¹⁶. Arthur gave the chivalry initiation to the most qualified warriors.​  As errant knights they wandered from castle to hermitage where feudal lords and monks instructed them in the inner practices of the method (sskrt. prakriyā). At the same time, they continued devoting themselves to the protection of the weak, the orphans and the widows from the oppression of the wicked, accumulating merits (sskrt. puṇya), consolidating the order of the Kingdom reestablishing the peace. The center of the Round Table was holed. At the very center was the ‘perilous Siege’, a throne destined to the purest and most highly qualified knight.
Anyone who sat without possessing such qualifications would have sunk directly into hell. Only he ‘the world’s best knight’, he who had passed the trial and concluded the initiatic path would be able to restore the Empire, take Arthur’s place and transform the Kingdom of Britain into a Universal Empire¹⁷. Three were the knights who proved to be worthy of the summum bonum of the knightly (chivalrous) initiatic path: Parsifal (or Perceval)¹⁸, Bors¹⁹ and Galahad²⁰. Their final trial was the quest for the Holy Grail. The Grail is a complex symbol, because different traditional currents converged into it. As we have already mentioned, the Druids used a bronze or silver cauldron in which they boiled several sacred plants, among which the main one was the mistletoe, obtaining in this way the beverage of immortality offered in oblation to the Gods and distributed among the initiates²¹.
Differently, the Christian esoteric tradition tells of a vessel²².​ When Lucifer, the highest of the angels, rebelled against God, a great divine emerald, the lapsit exillis, fell from his crown down to earth, where angels sculpted it into a vessel. Whoever drank from it would acquire the knowledge of God.​ The vessel, handed down from generation to generation, was then used by Christ during the last supper to consecrate the Eucharist. Joseph of Arimathea kept it secretly and used it to collect the blood spurted from the chest wound Jesus during his crucifixion.​ Consequently, the ‘Saint Grail’ has been interpreted as Sang Real, the ‘Real Blood’ or the ‘Royal Blood’. Later, the two secret disciples of Jesus, the cohen-priest Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, representing respectively the spiritual authority and the temporal power, carried the Grail to Britain. The sacred vessel was covertly preserved by the descendants of Joseph, known as the Kings of the Grail, in an inaccessible castle located between two seas and in the middle of wild mountains²³. The knights who succeeded in beholding the Grail, became disciples of the King, living there for a long time in an Edenic state.​ Over the centuries, the number of arrivals declined dramatically due to the degeneration of the world and humanity. Thus, the King of the Grail, strived in transmitting the holy wisdom of the miraculous vessel and in generating a sufficient number of disciples. For this reason, the last Kings were described as sick or wounded in their generative faculty. The latest Kings idled in the mountain lake near the castle, fishing all day long²⁴. The title of Fisher King, obviously, alludes to the fact that he was fishing for new disciples²⁵, often leaving the walls behind, that is breaking the esoteric discretion. The Fisher King expected the arrival of the ‘world’s best knight’ destined to become his beloved disciple and his successor as King of the Grail. This spiritual son will heal him and bring the sacred vessel to the Round Table where, sitting on the thirteenth dangerous place, he will make the Terre guaste flourish again²⁶.

Gaṇapati

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1. J.L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail, G. Bell & Sons, London 1913, p.4.[↩]
2. Julius Evola, Il mistero del Graal, Ed. Mediterranee, Roma 1972, p.61. Except for the Evola’s serious doctrinal error, which absurdly considers action above knowledge, this book is an excellent collection of symbols, often brilliantly interpreted.[↩]
3. Françoise Le Roux, Christian J. Guyonvarc’h, I Druidi, Ecig, Genova 1990, pp 563/564.[↩]
4. “Most divine”, name of the God-priest of the Druids, the lord of knowledge, similar to the vedic Bṛhaspati.[↩]
5. For the sake of the reader we will not present all the sources and versions of the account that are often contradictory. We only want to draw the general sense emerging from these novels. Many of these tales were written by poets and troubadour who recited secret information without having full awareness of their deeper meaning. Among the most discerning, however, we remember Chrétien de Troyes, Robert de Boron and Wolfram von Eschenbach. Thomas Malory (1415-1471), although aware of what he wrote, must be included in a hermetic current rather in association with the medieval chivalry. Ultimately, the analytical and philological reading loses sight of the spiritual meaning transmitted.[↩]
6. The hypothesis that Arthur was the historical Lucius Artorius Castus cannot be taken for certain. Artorius lived in Britannia in the mid-4th century and was in command of the Sixth Legion in Armorica. A simple similarity of names cannot be considered a historical proof.[↩]
7. From the arab thuʿbān, monstrous python, dragon.[↩]
8. This corresponds surprisingly to the myth of Dhruva as the new polar star in Indian mythology[↩]
9. P. Walter, Artù l’orso e il Re, Arkeios, Roma, pp. 73/74. Arthur, l’ours et le roi, Paris, Imago, 2002[↩]
10. The adjective ‘arctic’, which derives from ‘bear’, is synonymous of ‘boreal’ This term is also closely related to the German bär and the English bear. However, it is also possible that in more ancient times Borea (gr. Βορέας, read Boréa, the North) derived from the term ‘boar’, (sskrt. varāha). This is certainly due to a reversal of the polar symbolism with the zodiacal one occurred with the beginning of the kaliyuga. In fact, even today the star called Arcturus is located near the zodiac, that marks the correct astrological position of the bear before the kaliyuga. Only after were the two bears identified with the two neighbouring constellations of the Pole. Inversily, Libra (sskrt. tula) was associated to the zodiacal level. Prior to that, Libra was the polar constellation and the present two Ursæ were the plates of Libra.[↩]
11. Nennius was the author of one Historia Brittonum composed between the 8th and 9th centuries.[↩]
12. In the Historia Regum Britanniæ of Geoffrey de Monmouth, Merlinus Ambrosius is overlapped with Ambrosius Aurelianus, half-brother of Uther Pendragon. It is an ambiguity full of hidden meanings. In fact, the semi-historical figure of Ambrosius Aurelianus, winner of the Saxons, is in many ways symbolic. He was the last governor of Rome in Britain, son of a Roman patrician father and a Druidic mother. In him, therefore, converged the Christian-Latin and the Celtic sapiential traditions. Mortally wounded, he anointed Uther as the first King of Britain.[↩]
13. In some tales Merlin is said to be the son of the devil, and in others it is described as a wizard. At the end of the Arthurian adventure, Merlin abandons his disciple Arthur to his fate to pursue love with Vivien, a fairy or nymph (sskrt. yakṣiṇī); a most inappropriate behaviour for a sage. Therefore, Merlin represents a priestly wisdom in decline, attracted to powers (sskrt. siddhi).[↩]
14. Probably this name derives from the first Roman capital in Britain, Camalodunum. Plinius, Naturalis Historia, II.75.118.[↩]
15. From the point of view of the cosmic order, we can say that, symbolically, the twelve knights represent the twelve forms of the sun, the Ādityas of Hindū Tradition, in correspondence with the zodiac signs. In fact, every knight excels in a peculiar science and virtue. The same shape of the table recalls the symbolism of the wheel, in particular for the social and initiatic functions of the Cakravartin. In the vājapeya rite, as in the Arthurian cycle, the chariot race and the wheel affixed at the top of the sacrificial pole (sskrt. stambha) become symbols of the World in perennial movement. As we will see, however, Arthur represented only the royal function without ever being able to fulfil the imperial role of Cakravartin.[↩]
16. This is reminiscent of the historical organization of the twelve Palatine Counts (or Paladins) founded by Charlemagne to restore the Western Empire[↩]
17. Actually, Arthur ambition was to conquer the entire world. However, he committed himself to this endeavour only with exterior means of war, neglecting the initiatic path that would have led him to become the esoteric Imperator. Only then he could have aspired to become the Emperor also in the temporal sense (as it happens in India with the ritual of sacrifice of the horse, aśvamedha). According to the legend, with several expeditions he conquered Spain, Scandinavia and Germany and was preparing to wage war to what remained of the declining Roman Empire. However, he had to return to Britain to fight against his nephew, the usurper Mordrein (‘the death bringer’, also called Modred, ‘the limiting’, ‘he who hinders’).[↩]
18. ‘He who opens the way’[↩]
19. It could mean ‘boar’, which defines him in a priestly manner. He is the only one of the three knights who returns to Britain after the quest for the Grail. Sometimes he is replaced by the figure of Gawain, whose name indicates another type of hawk.[↩]
20. ‘The intrepid’.[↩]
21. It is evident the analogy with the spontaneous ‘boiling’, the fermentation of the Vedic Soma in the oblatory bowl, to obtain the amṛta. This last Sanskrit term is etymologically identical to ambrosia (gr. ἀμβροσία, read ambrosìa, immortality), the liquor of immortality of the Greek gods. Obviously, it is not by chance that Merlin was called Ambrosius, the immortal.[↩]
22. The most accredited etymology for Grail is the Latin gradalis, vessel or bowl. “The term graaus (subject form; in the complements, graal) is attested, in oïl language, not as a proper name, but as a common name…” (G. D’Aronco, “Un romanzo per l’Europa”, La Grant Queste del Saint Graal, Udine, Amm. Comunale, 1990, p. 23.) However, being a sacred knowledge, Grail could also derive from gradualis, which in Latin designates a sacred text, especially intended for acting or chanting. In fact, according to some novels written words miraculously appear on the surface of the vessel.[↩]
23. The place where the Grail castle stands is called Montsalvasch, wild mountain, occasionally Montsalvat, saving mount. In following chapters, we will explain the initiatic meaning of these terms. The castle of Corbenic is placed on the peak of Montsalvat.[↩]
24. “In the Brahmaloka, in the third level, the heaven [in tribhuvana], starting from this earth, there are two seas called Ara and Nya, where there is a lake full of delicious food, where there is a banyan that oozes ambrosia, where is seen the citadel of Brahman called Aparājitā (the impenetrable) and where is located a golden palace made by the Lord himself” (ChU VIII.5.3).[↩]
25. In consonance with the evangelical passage, “…I will make you fishers of men.” (Gospel of Saint Mark, I.17).[↩]
26. The barren land, the disordered situation of the world caused by humanity’s spiritual decline in this period of darkness. This spiritual decay was the very cause of the “initiatic” sterility of the Fisher King.[↩]

The Military-Monastic Orders

The events that occurred during the 11th century had important repercussions on the civil structure of Latin Christianity. The feudal system, which had shaped the structure of the Empire on the hierarchy of the initiatic paths of the warrior caste, had entered in crisis. The Roman Catholic Church, restored by the will of the Emperors, became the main rival of the Holy Roman Empire on the political and secular levels. The denial of the imperial sacredness, disseminated through bishoprics and parishes with the help of monasteries that by then had fallen subordinate to the papal authority, allowed the dissolution of the oath of loyalty that bound the imperial subjects to the Emperor. Driven by ambition, the great feudal lords exploited the situation to loosen their ties with the Empire. First were the sovereigns of the national kingdoms who took advantage of the moment to create domains under the direct ownership of their crowns. This was the first step towards the phenomenon known as ‘absolutism’. Soon enough, also dukes and princes followed their example, bringing divisions and civil wars to the very heart of Christianity. Increasingly attracted by the temporal power, the rebellious vassals became oblivious of their sacred functions, particularly of the initiatic ones, which were the very reason for their magisterial position towards the nobles who wished to follow the initiatic path of chivalry.
More and more rarely did the aspiring knights find true masters in castles and palaces. In light of this, some groups of knights gathered around a knight-master, forming orders on the model of the monastic ones, thus freeing themselves from the feudal system in force up until then¹. The first, and rather ephemeral, orders were the Saints Cosmas and Damian’s Knights (⁓1030) and the Knights of the Tau (⁓1050). However, it was only at the outset of the Crusades that the most important chivalrous orders with initiatic functions in favour of the entire Latin Christianity were founded².
Attacked in Anatolia by the hordes of the Seljuk Turks³, Alexios I Komnenos, Emperor of the Eastern Empire, requested military assistance to the pope and to the Western Empire. Consequently, in 1095 Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in order to free the sepulchre of Christ and the places of his earthly deeds from the infidels’ yoke⁴. Henry IV, who was then Holy Roman Emperor, weakened by the constant conflicts with his sons and the elector princes provoked by the political manoeuvres of the popes, was unable to take command of the massive expedition that was preparing to march towards the Holy Land. It was, therefore, not a coincidence that the lords who took advantage of the imperial absence were in large part Norman, French and German rebels.
The very best of Western aristocracy flooded the Near East, easily liberating those territories of the Byzantine Empire from the Islamic invasion⁵. However, in the absence of a supreme sovereign authority, the various princes soon began to rival for the conquered territories. Naturally, no land was returned to the Basileus, as the leaders of the expedition were instead carving out new fiefdoms, resulting in dangerous fractures in the Crusaders’ army.
With the liberation of Jerusalem (1099), the massive influx of pilgrims from all over Europe was resumed. Due to the rivalry among the leaders of the Crusade, the pilgrimage routes continued to be insecure and infested by bands of brigands and vulnerable to Turkish-Arab raids. To protect the pilgrims, three groups of knights decided to organize themselves into militias. The first of these Knightly Orders was that of the Holy Sepulchre (1099), which garrisoned the homonymous Basilica. The second Order was that of the Hospitallers of Saint John (1113). The third was the Order of the Solomon’s Temple (1118). These last two devoted themselves to receiving the pilgrims arriving on the shores of Palestine and to escorting them safely to Jerusalem. The Templars formed the vanguard, the Hospitallers the rear-guard⁶. In all three Orders the knights could also assume the priesthood, becoming canons according to the rule of Saint Augustine⁷. The Order of the Temple soon obtained the transmission of the Benedictine monasticism from Saint Bernard, who also wrote the rule De Laude Novæ Militiæ (1129).​
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) was the last of the great figures of Latin monasticism and the last of the Fathers of the Church. Born into a family of the high Burgundian nobility⁸, at the age of twenty-two he became a Cistercian Benedictine monk. Far from being a mystic⁹, Saint Bernard was one of the last initiates in Latin monasticism, well aware of both the depth of the esoteric doctrines that he had received and of the sad historical period in which he lived.​
His doctrinal authority and his holiness of life led him to perform very high initiatic functions, as well as, external actions of great responsibility in an attempt to straighten the situation in which Catholicism had plunged¹⁰. His authority was recognized by popes and Emperors, by bishops and Kings, by monks and knights. He was often distracted from the contemplative life to settle disputes between sovereigns, popes and bishops, spiritual authority and temporal power.
Well aware of the state of retraction of the Catholic monastic initiation and of the crisis of feudal chivalry, he wanted to commission the Order of the Temple to become the new chivalry (Nova Militia) for the transmission and the defence of initiation in the Latin context¹¹. He brought together in the Order of the Temple the two transmissions (paramparā) that he, as a monk and a knight, had united in his person. Therefore, the Temple became the ark that for a couple of centuries preserved all the Latin initiatic paths from the investigations, abuses and persecutions carried out by the secular powers at the service of papal hegemony. In fact, the Templars enjoyed complete autonomy from both the Empire and the papacy, as was the case in ancient times for monastic orders¹².​
The legendary military prowess of the Templars, their severe asceticism and their crusade activities at the frontier of Christendom in the attempt to reconquer and submit vast areas invaded by Infidels, the Holy Land, the Iberian Peninsula and Eastern Europe, have long gone down in history. To this end, the Order of the Temple gave origin to local filiations, equally famous for their self-denial and courage, namely the Orders of Alcantara, of Calatrava and of Santiago in Spain, as well as, the Teutonic Order and Livonian Brothers of the Sword in Germany.
If on one hand these adaptations preserved the initiatic tradition, on the other hand marked the failure of the Carolingian and Ottonian project to establish a comprehensive Western Tradition. The four-caste social system was never brought to fulfilment. Only the aristocracy was stably structured by birth-right, while the other social classes remained confused in their characteristics, completely inadequate to constitute an organic society. The priesthood could be accessed by individuals from the most diverse origins. The clergy never identified itself institutionally with wisdom, but instead represented a bureaucratic hierarchy of functionaries of the temporal power of the popes. Monasticism, which for centuries had been the repository of knowledge, became secularized between the 10th and 11th century, thus becoming a useless duplicate of the secular clergy. The new mendicant orders of the Dominican and Franciscan friars devoted themselves only to activities of social utility¹³. Only in the Universities was theology cultivated, but of a philosophical nature, completely detached from authentic gnosis. The members to the third state, the citizens or bourgeois, were censured as such only based on their wealth. A loss of wealth corresponded to a loss in social status. Inversely, had a commoner enriched himself, he could have obtained the citizenship. This made possible to move from one craft guild to another, thus encouraging competition, the struggle between classes and the social chaos that later came true in Western civilization.​
The initiatic domain, which was previously present within all the social components, became even more withdrawn in an esoterism that was increasingly seen with malevolence by the representatives of the external religion. Nevertheless, thanks to the Order of the Temple, the Latin world was still able to produce some grandiose monuments of initiatic wisdom.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

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1. It goes without saying that this innovation further weakened the bond between feudalism and initiation. Notwithstanding, many coming personalities, especially in the imperial sphere, not infrequently manifested great awareness and doctrine; occasionally making their social function coincide with the initiatic-knightly function of Imperator. Among these we will mention Frederick I Hohenstaufen, his grandson Frederick II and Henry VII of Luxembourg.[↩]
2. Aristide Michel Perrot, Storia degli Ordini Cavallereschi, Milano, Tip. Libr. Pirotta, 1837.[↩]
3. The Seljuks had already settled in Persia. In fact, having embraced Sunni Islam, they took control of the Abbasid caliphate (Peter Frankopan, The first Crusade, Rearsby (U.K.), W.F. Howes Ltd, 2012).[↩]
4. Certain romantic literature has indulged in possible ‘initiatic’ exchanges between Christian chivalry and the futuwwa of Islamic Sufism (Pio Filippani Ronconi, Ismaeliti e “Assassini”, Il Cerchio, San Marino, 2004). In fact, there is no record of these exchanges, neither from Western nor from Islamic sources. The doctrinal influences exercised by Sufism in favor of the Christian knightly initiation are just as fleeting, as will be seen when we discuss Dante and the Fedeli d’Amore. As for the supposed influence exerted by the Ismaelites, the Nizaris, the Druzes or by other similar groups, this is be a matter of grave suspicion, considered the heterodox inspiration of these Middle Eastern sects. At most, there is often to recognize a mutual chivalrous behavior, which, however, can be explained by the mentality of that time, inadequate to prove anything else.[↩]
5. Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, Oxford, Blackwell, 1988, pp. 69-70.[↩]
6. It is interesting to note that in India the Nāgā bābā order of saṃnyāsin fighters perform a similar function of protection for the pilgrims. To be precise, the vanguard is composed of the śaṃkarian Nāgā, while the rāmānujan form the rearguard. Due to the greater prestige of the vanguard, scuffles often occur when the rāmānujan Nāgā try to supplant the other order. Similarly, the Hospitallers often tried, sword in hand, to supplant the Templars in the vanguard.[↩]
7. In truth, the Hospitallers initially followed the rule of Saint Benedict, but soon assumed the Augustinian canonry, a less strict monastic rule.[↩]
8. He was third cousin of the Duke of Burgundy. Recently we read an ecclesiastical biography of the Saint that traces his origins back to a family of the small nobility. Evidently, in the eyes of today’s proletarian church such illustrious origins must be a matter of shame. Something similar has happened for Dante, who is often passed off as a Florentine bourgeois.[↩]
9. René Guénon, Saint Bernard, Paris, Les Éditions traditionnelles, 1929.[↩]
10. Previously, only Saint Boniface exerted the same charisma and undisputed authority in the religious, political, initiatic and cultural domains. In some ways, such personality can be compared in modern India only to that of Svāmī Kārapātri (L’Uomo e il sacro in India: Svāmī Kāraptrī, a cura di Gianni Pellegrini, Venezia, Indoasiatica 5/2009, Cafoscarina).[↩]
11. San Bernardo, De Laude Novæ Militiæ, I Quaderni dell’Excalibur, Roma, Ist. Romano di Ricerca Interdisciplinare, 1977.[↩]
12. Over the time, the Order of the Hospitallers became increasingly subject to papal authority. Differently, the Order of the Holy Sepulchre operated, since its establishment, under the dependence of the Catholic patriarch of Jerusalem, and only from the XV century under that of the Pope of Rome. This Order, rooted in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre, participated to a lesser extent in the war events and remained always in the shadow of the other two more prominent Orders.[↩]
13. Gli ordini mendicanti e la città. Aspetti architettonici, sociali e politici, J. Raspi Serra (a cura di), Milano, Guerini Studio, 1991.[↩]

Deleterious results of the Church’s secularization

The serious disturbances of the Imperial Ecumene caused by the reckless reforms of Catholicism promoted by the popes of the 11th century caused unpredictable consequences.
These are the protagonists of such ruin: the popes of the early 11th century were largely puppets or exponents of the Counts of Tusculum family. Of plebeian origins, they intermarried with the rival Roman patrician family of the Crescencii, becoming increasingly influential in Rome. They became the schemers behind the papal election and the dismissal of the imperial popes. Sergius IV, born Boccadiporco (i.e. Pig Snout!) (1009-1012), son of a cobbler, was the first of the long list of popes imposed by the Tusculum; Benedict VIII, Count of Tusculum (1012-1024), was the first reformer of the Church in a secular sense; John XIX (1024-1032), Count of Tusculum, passed into history for his concession of religious favours in exchange for money (sin of simony) in benefit of his own family; Benedict IX, Count of Tusculum, was pope three times (1033-1044; 1045; 1047-1048). He bought and sold the papal throne, until he was deposed. Saint Peter Damian said of him: “wallowing in immorality, a devil from Hell disguised as a priest, […] an apostle of the Antichrist, arrow from the quiver of Satan, rod of Asur, son of Belial, stench of the world, shame of humanity.” Sylvester III (1045), of the patrician Crescencii family, reigned only three months; Gregory IV (1045-1046), uncle of Benedict IX, bought the papal throne from his nephew for 2000 liras. After collecting, Benedict requested back the papal charge. Gregory was a pious and naive man who called at his side the diabolical Hildebrand of Sovana, beginning in this way his climb to the papal throne; Clement II (1046-1047), Lord of Morsleben and Hornburg, was elected pope to rescue Rome from the evil influence of the Counts of Tusculum. Faithful to the imperial ideal, he was poisoned by order of Benedict IX. He was succeeded by Damasus II (1047-1048), of the de’Curagnoni family of Brixen, a pro-Imperial pope, who was probably poisoned by Hildebrand of Sovana by order of Benedict IX. Leo IX (1049-1054), Count of Egisheim-Dagsburg, was elected with the Imperial support. Initially he tried to correct the grave faults of his predecessors: he promoted the collaboration of the two greatest powers of Catholicism, the Church and the Empire. He approached the Eastern Empire to reconstitute the increasingly divided solidarity of Romanity. He tried to contain the rising of the Normans, unscrupulous barbarians who had settled on the southern borders of the Patrimony of Saint Peter. However, he soon suffered the influence of Hildebrand of Sovana, betraying the Imperial ideal, excommunicating the Orthodox Church causing the schism, allying himself with the Normans and favouring the new nationalisms of the kingdoms of France and England against the Empire. Victor II (1054-1057), Count of Calw, Dollnstein and Hirschberg, initially committed to remedy the serious damage caused by his predecessor, soon fell under the manipulative sway of  Hildebrand of Sovana who induced him to continue in the anti-Imperial programme of his predecessors, leaning on the Normans, on the Canossa and on other rebel feudatories. Stephen IX (1057-1058), of the House of Gozzelon, dukes of Lorraine, was the last pope who tried to re-establish the unity of Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire, to resume the relations with the Greek Church and to expel the Normans from southern Italy. He tried to remove Hildebrand of Sovana from the papal court, but his sudden and suspicious death thwarted the realization of his project. Nicholas II (1058-1061), a Cluniac monk, used Saint Peter Damian to remove the ancient prerogatives of independence from the archbishop of Milan by leaning on the Pataria. He supinely followed the advice of Hildebrand of Sovana, investing the Norman chiefs of the Italian fiefdoms in exchange for their vassalage and military support. Alexander II (1061-1073), also a Cluniac monk and a creature of Hildebrand of Sovana, became pope despite the Imperial veto. All his activity was characterized by a fierce struggle against the Holy Roman Empire. To this aim, he even tried to ally himself with the Byzantine basileus to deny any legitimacy of Roman succession to the Western Emperor. His successor was the infernal Hildebrand of Sovana, “Saint” Gregory VII (1073-1085); who has already been presented in these pages. It should be noted that the Catholic Church continues to consider such series of scoundrels as legitimate popes, punctuated only by two or three respectable personalities who, however, were soon eliminated¹.
It can be said that the distortion of the modern world in the West began there and spread worldwide. We would like to concisely list the immediate and mediated effects of the Latin Catholicism reforms:

1. The Roman Church opposed the Empire by claiming its supremacy over the temporal power of the West. Contrary to the sacral ideal of the Holy Roman Empire which was ruling Christianity in the name of God, the Church undertook a profane political activity in order to affirm the system of power of the Pope-King².

2. While the Empire maintained a fundamentally initiatory structure, still connected to the esoteric knightly ways that continued to be transmitted in the ambit of Latin Catholicism, the Church took on an increasingly worldly and anti-initiatory orientation. If the Holy Roman Emperor continued to be initiated into the mysteries of chivalry, sometimes even identifying himself with the esoteric function of the Imperator, the popes came less and less from the ranks of monasticism. The only monks who had become popes proceeded from the reformed Benedictine Order of Cluny, which had already abandoned contemplation to devote itself to active politics. The Empire was based on an orderly hierarchical conception, very similar to the Indian caste system, according to which both religion and temporal power had to be administered by the optimates (aristocrats). On the contrary, the Church of the XI century favoured the social ascent within its ecclesiastical hierarchy of the lower social classes or of the felon members of the false nobility³. With the passage of time, the Roman Church assumed an increasingly hostile attitude towards esotericism, which will degenerate, as we shall see in the continuation of our excursus, in the most violent persecution.

3. Perhaps the most serious consequence of the 11th century’s reforms has been the secularization of monasticism and the progressive disappearance of the contemplative Hesychast initiation from the Latin Catholicism. As we already wrote, it still survives in the Orthodox Church. It should also be remembered that the Normans, who had invaded Southern Italy, carried out in that area a real hunt of the Hesychast with the pontifical blessing⁴. To the deviation and loss of initiation in the Cluniac Order corresponded the degeneration of the ideal of poverty in the remaining currents of the Benedictine Order. As always happens, the “search for the original evangelical purity” has only led to spiritually poor results with the overestimation of moralism. Thus if, for example, the reformed Cistercian Benedictine Order declined from its contemplative purpose more slowly than the rapid deviation of Cluny, there is, however, no doubt that the latter was seriously infected by the heretic and anti-religious movement of the Pataria. Therefore, it can be noted that the Cluniac monks abandoned contemplation and the initiatory inclination to mingle with the politics of the mighty, especially with the popes of Rome, the King of France and the Norman dukes, later Kings. On the contrary, the Cistercian monks left their hermitages to preach to the populace against the wealth, power of the oppressive aristocrats and the high clergy. Thus, even the Cistercians in the course of a couple of centuries eventually turned their backs on initiation. Once this was abandoned, the monks subordinated themselves to the popes and bishops, losing their true raison d’être and becoming instrumental to the social activities of the secular clergy.

4. The secularized Roman Church supported the policy pursued by the monastery of Cluny. It declared that the temporal power of the Emperor was not of sacred origin, but purely secular. In this way, all feudal lords who had obtained their authority from the Empire, Kings, Princes, Dukes, Counts or Barons, were also simple lay people. Be removing any sacred acknowledgment, the subordinates of every order and degree were empowered to rebel against their superiors and break their oaths of loyalty. Thus, the authoritativeness of nobles, patricians and knights resulting from the warrior initiation which was the source of their acknowledged power, was completely disregarded. Later on, however, the popes corrected their plan of secularization of the function of the Kings. They realized that the national Sovereigns like the Kings of France, of England, of Castile, of Leon, of Hungary and so on, sought to make themselves independent from the universal Catholic Empire. Thus, while maintaining the dispute over the sacredness of the Holy Roman Emperor, they recognized that a King, in his own Kingdom, draws his power directly from God. In this way, the national Kings became the faithful vassals of the popes for anti-Imperial purposes⁵. Later the Roman Church proclaimed France “the Church’s firstborn daughter”, subtracting this prerogative from the Empire⁶. This was the same France that later would have forced the popes to the Avignon captivity and that would have humiliated the papal “legists” of Bologna with their lawyers from the Sorbonne to demonstrate its total autonomy from the Church in virtue of  the “anointing” of Reims that made the King depend directly on God only⁷.

5. The papacy supported and encouraged paupers’ movements, relying on the social envy of the lowest strata of the urban population. Particularly, it used the Pataria to destabilize the social order of the cities governed by the patriciate of Roman origin and by the bishops who had made the cities the administrative centres of their dioceses. The ancient rural patrician villæ, preserving centres of the Roman tradition, had developed in villages with the progressive aggregation of artisans and merchants, becoming venues of markets, palaces of justice and militias to protect from external foes and to maintain the internal order. The villages that developed and became important nodes along the ancient Roman road network were promoted to cities by Imperial decree or by the great feudal lords. Based on the model of the Roman Senate, the city was administered by a patrician council (if made only of patricians) or a noble council (if the representatives of the feudal aristocracy residing in the city also participated). In the centre of the city were built the Palace of the Lords and the cathedral, that is the church of a bishop (or archbishop or patriarch). The episcopal chapter was represented in the council. Each bishop based his autonomy from Rome on their faithful citizens and was traditionally elected by the chapter with the approval of the council, the acclamation of the people and the Imperial placet. The city also reflected the feudal order in an oligarchic rather than a monarchical form and, as a result, it swore allegiance to the vassal on whom it depended or directly to the Emperor. By unleashing envy and jealousy in the lower strata of the population, which befittingly did not enjoy citizenship rights⁸, the Church became responsible for acts of “spontaneous” violence. The aim was to remove the rule of the city from the urban nobility, thus to eliminate its loyalty to the Holy Roman Emperor, and to lead to submission the bishops who still did not recognize the new role of the pontiff as the sole ruler of the Church.

6. As always happened throughout history, the populace was used to destabilize the order. But failing to replace the aristocratic ruling class, the Church incited the third state of the citizens, known from that historical moment on as bourgeoisie, to take power in the city. Composed of traders and artisans, they represented the wealthy layer of the population, with a basic experience in the administration of their goods and earnings. The cities in which this overturning of the order was successfully actualized were called “communes”. The exponents of the urban aristocracy had no choice but to abandon the cities for their rural castles and villæ or to adapt to live in the “new order” in order to keep their palaces and possessions within the walls. In exchange, however, they were forced to join the guilds or crafts of the bourgeoisie, becoming merchants, doctors and apothecaries, wool producers, weavers and dyers⁹. This communistic social flattening was, however, destined to a rapid failure as the corporations that corresponded to the most profitable professions (Major Arts) immediately took the political upper hand over the weaker fringes of the bourgeoisie (Minor Arts)¹⁰. An economic and professional hierarchy soon appeared within the guilds, dividing their members into masters of art, workers and apprentices. City militias made up of merchants and artisans were also formed. However, the nobles who remained in the towns immediately took the leadership. The municipal experiment lasted for two or three centuries, soon reabsorbed in the larger order of the Princedoms. The city returned to be governed by the noble council; however, the subversive experience of the communes had left an indelible imprint in the mentality of the third state, the bourgeoisie.

7. The pauper’ tendencies of the Pataria, fundamentally anti-religious, blended with the dualist Balkan heresy of the Bogomils, known in Northern Italy and in Occitanie with the name of Cathars or Albigensians¹¹. As we have already said, the Cistercian current of the Benedictine Order, pursuing the false ideal of a return of the Catholic Church to a presumed evangelical poverty¹², was instead instrumental to the realization of the subversive plan against the feudal system. Many Cistercians abandoned their hermitages and monasteries to rush to the cities and communes to carry out a “social” action in favour of the poor people, thus completely betraying the rule of Saint Benedict and the ideals of isolation and contemplation. It is following their footsteps that later the orders of the Friars Minor, the Franciscans, and of the Friars Preachers, the Dominicans, were founded. Long in suspicion of heresy, these orders marked the end of Latin monasticism¹³.

8. The “social” activism of the mendicant orders was not limited to providing food, health and economic assistance to the poor. The friars gave great importance to the education of the populace. The convents first became schools for children in order to help them find employment in the different municipal guilds. However, the Franciscans and, above all, the Dominicans eventually founded the universities, initially in cathedrals and convents, in order to form a predominantly ecclesiastical and bourgeois ruling class inspired by their anti-feudal ideology. In the beginning, only the disciplines of canon law and Roman law (utrumque jus) were taught, but soon the faculties multiplied, opening up to the most profane and scientific disciplines. The schism from Byzantine Orthodox Christianity prompted the Catholic theology taught in universities to abandon the Patristics and to create a Scholastic philosophy supported by Aristotelian logic. With the passage of time, Scholasticism became increasingly rationalistic, also with the contribution of the Arab philosophy of Avicenna and Averroes, to the point of exiting its accepted dogmatic limits¹⁴. With Abelard, Duns Scotus and Occam, scholastic Aristotelianism eventually translated into nominalism or naturalism. In such a grave way have the paupers and mendicant orders contributed to the creation of a secular and, ultimately, anti-religious culture.

9. Indeed, the mendicant orders, despite their pauperism, were the expression of the third state, of the bourgeoisie to which both Saint Dominic de Guzman and Saint Francis¹⁵ of Assisi belonged. The transformation of the cities into communes led to a complete revolution of the world view in a mercantile and economic perspective. It continues today and has invaded the entire terraqueous globe like a pestilence. The concept of possession has been replaced with that of property. Possession was the feudal conception, whereby all the goods belonged only to the Divinity. The Divinity temporarily conferred on the Emperor (sskrt. Samrāṭ), his earthly representative, the possession of the universe. Similarly, the Sovereign then temporarily granted, based on merits and needs, large or small parts of his dominion to his subjects, in order to administer them, improve them and grow them to the greater glory of God¹⁶. Property, on the other hand, proclaims the complete belonging of the good to the individual. This last conception was adopted, practiced and spread by the mendicant orders. The theory and the practice of the free market in fact sprouted, well before Adam Smith, in the Catholic world and not in the Protestant one. Scholastic philosophers were attentive to the communal economy, anticipating some fundamental theoretical acquisitions such as the subjective conception of value. The Dominicans Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) and his great pupil Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), as well as the later Scholastics, thought that the right price of a good did not depend on some intrinsic quality, but was that determined by the communis opinio or communis æstimatio, that is by the market request. Likewise, the Provencal Franciscan Pietro Giovanni Olivi (1248-1298) was the first true proponent of the theory of the subjectivity of the value-based price. On the threshold of the Renaissance, Saint Bernardine of Siena (1380-1444), another Franciscan, in addition to providing a masterful analysis of the virtues and function of the entrepreneur, brought to the fore once again the theory of subjective value developed by Olivi¹⁷.

10. The religious, political and social upheaval that began in the 11th century, together with the disappearance of initiation in Latin monasticism, could not fail to influence art. In contrast with the Romanesque, which had its roots in the sacred Roman and Byzantine imperial art, a new style was imposed, the Gothic. The ideologist of the new style was the Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis. His conception of the sacred building implies that the transcendent God illuminates from the outside the interior part of the church through large windows¹⁸. Light, a symbolic representation of divine love, penetrates the interior illuminating the darkness of the human heart. Great opponent of Suger was Saint Bernard, who challenged him with the idea that God is actually already present even inside¹⁹. Indeed, the tenebrous church represent the heart of man in which God is always there in his real presence in the Eucharistic form. Therefore, according to Saint Bernard, the church is a hortus conclusus, a representation of both the entire universe and the body of man, at whose centre is located the all-pervading Divinity²⁰. The concept that God would only be external to the human individual entails a dualistic idea that is incompatible with the deification (theosis). Thus, a western monk who was still practicing the initiatory contemplation, as was Saint Bernard, denounced the loss of a metaphysical point of view. He also lamented the default of the essentiality of the Romanesque forms, suitable for inducing meditation, denouncing the adoption of complex and wonderful shapes and rich ornaments, typical of the Gothic style, as a source of distraction. But things were falling. Despite the opposition of the great abbot of Clairvaux, the Gothic became established in the wave of the embourgeoisement of the Catholic Church. To build Gothic cathedrals within the communal walls, the mason guilds were called. Until then, the masons had been employed only in the construction of castles and palaces, in harmony with their belonging to the Ars Regia. Previously, the Romanesque abbeys, monasteries and basilicas had been built by the monks themselves, as the building of places of worship was a prerogative of the Ars Sacerdotalis.²¹ Earlier to that, the adoption of a complex hermetic symbolism²² in the construction of new cathedrals was unusual. It was considered belonging to a too naturalistic perspective of the tradition, and therefore was censored by Saint Bernard and his disciples. They concluded that this symbolism came from the domain of intermediary and magical sciences (goetia) and not from theology. For this reason, that art was called Gothic²³.

11. The schism of the Catholic Church from the Orthodox one provoked a further distancing and a renovated hostility towards the Byzantine Empire. The crusades, with the passage of numerous “Frankish” armies through the domains of the Eastern Empire, impoverished and weakened Byzantium. The fourth crusade was a real stab in the back of Eastern Christianity. The Latin conquest of Constantinople, carried out above all by Venice, constituted a blow from which the Byzantine power could never be restored. After the failure of the various crusades, when the Catholic Europe abandoned the Near East to its fate, the Byzantine Empire was practically offered on a silver platter to the Islamic invasion and conquest. This must be considered as one of the most obscure pages in the history of Christianity. The crusades, however, had a positive aspect, as they represented an incentive for the rebirth of the chivalrous and imperial ideal. We will return to this subject further on.

As one can infer from the last lines, despite the devastation of the Empire produced by the 11th century ecclesial reform, the Imperial and chivalrous ideal still had several cards to play. For three centuries the initiates in the warrior ways of the Latin world were still able to emerge with surprising tenacity, parrying the repeated blows that the Holy See continued to inflict.

Petrus Simonet de Maisonneuve

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1. Carlo Rendina, I Papi, Roma, Newton Compton, 1983, pp. 359-394[↩]
2. Massimo Montanari, Storia Medievale, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2002, p. 140.[↩]
3. The same Hildebrand of Sovana, son of a peasant, spread the word of being a scion of the ancient patrician Aldobrandeschi family.[↩]
4. On the Norman persecution in southern Italy see:37. Catholicism and Orthodoxy: The Split of the Church:about Barlaam Calabro see: Initiation and method of Hesychasm.[↩]
5. Nevertheless, the prestige of the Empire sacredness did not induce the rulers to aspire to the imperial throne, advancing their candidacy until that Institution was not suppressed by Napoleon in 1806.[↩]
6. It is often read that this title had been attributed to France to the conversion of Clovis. In reality it is a manipulated news since at that time there was no territory called France. It appears for the first time at the time of Pepin the Short, when Gaul was now called Francia, so, in principle, it would have been a title to designate the Empire. However, the Holy Roman Empire never adorned the title which implied a subordination to the papacy. In any case, the formula “the eldest daughter of the Church” was historically used for the first time by Sixtus V in 1576 to designate the Kingdom of France during the civil war unleashed by the Holy League account King Henry III.[↩]
7. Jacques Le Goff, Il re nell’Occidente medievale, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2006, pp. 5-10.[↩]
8. The city inhabitants were divided in the three states: the first state, namely the ecclesiastics; the second state, the patricians and nobles; the third state, the bourgeoisie. The populace had no right to citizenship, as was the case in ancient Greece and Rome.[↩]
9. The other arts or corporations were those of the cobblers, fishermen, butchers, painters, millers, masons, carpenters, roofers and chimney sweeps, tailors, bakers, saddlers, blacksmiths, furriers and tanners.[↩]
10. The merchants and owners, more similar to the social functions of the vaiśyas, imposed their authority on the śūdra mining corporations[↩]
11. Paul Labal, Los Cátaros. Herejía y crisis social, Barcelona, Ed. Crítica, 1984.[↩]
12. In reality, even when Jesus, in the last three years of his life, lived in community with his apostles, he never embraced poverty or mendicancy. He lived of generous donations from his followers. In fact, Judas Iscariot was commissioned to be the treasurer of the group.[↩]
13. Many people confuse the monastic order with paupers’ orders. Monasticism, which originated as early as the second Christian generation, pursued the ideal of silence and solitude in order to surrender to the contemplative experience. By rule,  the monk lived far from society, in a hermitage or in a coenobium-monastery. This lasted until the year 1000 AD. Monasteries and abbeys were built in inaccessible places far from castles and villages. The friars of the mendicant or paupers’ orders, on the other hand, built their convents in the cities in order to actively participate in the building of the municipalities and in favour of the less fortunate strata of society. The degeneration in the social sense of monasticism had in fact sanctioned its annulment, overcome as it was by the activism of the Dominicans and, in particular, by that of the Franciscans.[↩]
14. Our Indian readers, belonging to a knowledge-based tradition, may find difficult to understand the dogmas of a faith-based religion. The dogma, in fact, is an invisible reality (adṛṣṭi sattā) difficult to understand for unripe minds, which is therefore imposed as a truth of faith. Every deviation from the dictates of the dogma is therefore a reason for heresy. Even heresy is unknown in the Hindū context, precisely because of the absence of the concept of dogma; however, “heretic” may partially correspond to the idea of nāstika, which designates those who contradict what is declared in the śāstra.[↩]
15. The nickname Francis, whose real name was in fact John, was given to him by his father who had made his fortune by selling merchandise in Southern France. Thus, the paupers’ sympathies of the Bernardone family indeed originated from its business trips made in that Cathar region (Jacques Le Goff, Saint François d’Assise, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, pp. 9-17).[↩]
16. Conception that reflects the parable of the talents (Gospel of Saint Matthew, XXV.14-30)[↩]
17. Murray Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Auburn-Alabama, Mises Institute, 1995, pp. 47-64. The contemporary detractors of the Templar Order have instead accused the Templars of being the devisers of capitalism based only on the fact that they were first to use the letters of credit![↩]
18. Erwin Panofsky, “Suger abate di Saint-Denis”, in Il significato nelle arti visive, Torino, Einaudi, 1999, pp. 109-145.[↩]
19. Lia Pierluigi, L’estetica teologica di Bernardo di Chiaravalle, Firenze, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007.[↩]
20. This coincides greatly with the conception of the Hindū Temple as described in all the Śilpa Sūtras.[↩]
21. The guilds of Roman origin (collegia fabrorum) were actually perpetuated during the barbarian invasions in the patrician villæ and feudal castles. Differently, the sacred craftsmanship that had been preserved in the monasteries was carried out by the same monks who specialized in the different sciences of the trivium and the quadrivium and in their corresponding Artes sacerdotales.[↩]
22. We will dedicate a chapter to Hermeticism in conclusion of the medieval period.[↩]
23.  As it is well known, this definition has nothing to do with the people of the Goths.[↩]

Catholicism and Orthodoxy: The Split of the Church

The first important sees of Christianity were those of Jerusalem, Rome, Alexandria of Egypt and Antioch of Syria. These wealthy cities of the Roman Empire had become the residence of the most influential bishops: Saint James, brother of Jesus the Christ and chief of the church¹, was bishop in Jerusalem. This was the main and most prestigious seat as it was the city destined to be the capital of the Messiah and the place where his martyrdom was set to take place. Saint Paul was the first Christian authority to settle in Rome, the caesarean capital of the empire, It was he who, probably, designated Linus² as his successor. Alexandria was the episcopal see of Saint Mark the Evangelist that, at the time of Jesus, was just a young boy, but whose reputation was soon to be consecrated as he became the redactor of the earliest of the four canonical gospels. Antioch, instead, was the episcopal see of Saint Peter the apostle. However, his certain association with the Antiochian the see seems to contradict the  widespread belief that Saint Peter had become bishop of Rome and the first pope. In fact, there isn’t any document proving that Saint Peter had ever traveled to Rome, that there he joined Saint Paul to evangelize the Romans and that he was then crucified on the same day that Saint Paul was beheaded. The Romanity of Saint Peter appears for the first time through the rumours that began to spread supporting the primacy of the bishop of Rome over the others.
Thanks to the shifting of the capital of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople³, the bishopric of the latter, founded by Saint Andrew, rose to new importance. In 431 AD the council of Ephesus elevated these five cities to Patriarchal status, assuming a leading role in guiding Christianity. The five patriarchates were remembered with the acronym CARJA: Constantinople, Alexandria, Rome, Jerusalem and Antioch.
From the 5th century to the 10th century, Christianity was therefore governed by the pentarchy of the patriarchs. As repeatedly stated in the previous chapter, the patriarch of Rome, the pope⁴, had often claimed a primacy of representation that was at times recognized in virtue of its coexistence with the imperial seat. It was therefore natural that, with the translation of the Imperial capital to Constantinople, the patriarch of the ‘New Rome’ boasted the rights that were then due to him.
Afterwards, Mauritius (539-602), the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, in admiration of the ascetic holiness of Saint John Nesteutes the Faster, bestowed him with the title of ‘Ecumenical Patriarch’. In Greek this title simply meant “patriarch of the whole empire”, but it was translated in Latin as patriarcha universalis.
Saint Gregorius I the Great was at that time Pope and Patriarch of Rome and, misinterpreting the Greek sense of the title protested as follows:

Consider, please, that for this imprudent presumption of yours, the peace of the whole Church is disturbed and that this [title] is in contradiction with the grace that has been granted equally to us all. In this grace without doubt you have the power to grow if you have the will. You will undoubtedly become greater if you refrain from bearing such superb and senseless title; you will grow to the extent that you abstain from wanting to prevail over your brothers. Certainly Peter, who was the first apostle and  member of the holy and universal church, and Paul, and Andrew, and John, what were they, if not the chiefs of distinct communities? All them were, under the same Chief, limbs that made up the Body of the Lord, since they were members of the Church.
And none of these ever claimed to be called universal […] To the bishops of this apostolic see, where I’m a servants by divine will, the Council of Chalcedon had offered the honour of being called “universal”, but none of us accepted to be addressed with such title because, if any of the pontiffs had arrogated the honour of uniqueness for himself , he would have thus denied that to all his peers⁵.

​This demonstrate that, in spite of the claims and usurpations of some ancient popes, personalities of great spiritual depth such as the pope-monk Gregorius the Great recognized that the primacy of the bishop of Rome was entirely honorary and did not imply any primacy in religious matters. However, over the centuries the Latin bishops ended up considering the only patriarch of the West, the bishop of Rome, as a primus inter pares (first among equals) and to refer only to him and not to the other patriarchs. Moreover, the use of two different liturgical and spoken languages, Latin and Greek, contributed to the separation between the Roman Empire of the East and that of the West.
During those five centuries, the exoteric theologians proposed different interpretations on the position of the Holy Spirit (corresponding to the sskrt. Ānanda) in regard to the Trinity. Two doctrines prevailed: according to the first one, which referred to the formulation of the Creed as established by the Council of Nicaea, the Holy Spirit would proceed directly from the Father-Being (corresponding to the sskrt. Sat) in order to intervene inside the creation and bring the divine grace (corresponding to the sskrt. anugraha). The second doctrine stipulated that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but also from the Son (doctrine of the filioque) as Divine Intellect (corresponding to the sskrt. Cit).
The Fathers of the Church⁶ thought that both perspectives were acceptable: it was the same problem considered from two different angles. However, it was not acceptable to opt for one in opposition to the other⁷.
Charlemagne imposed the addition of the filioque to the Nicene Creed, to emphasize the importance of the Son’s function as the representative of the interventions of the Holy Spirit inside the Creation⁸. This was coherent with the theological position of eminent Latin Fathers, such as Saint Hilarius, Saint  Ambrose, Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine, without being in opposition to the Greek Fathers. Over the centuries other differences of theological opinion joined in.  One of these was the belief of the conception of the Virgin Mary free from original sin. This act of faith was more widespread among Catholics⁹ than Orthodox. These last claimed that the absence of original sin (that is the lack of a past karma, to use the terms of the Sanātana Dharma), would not have permitted Mary to obtain a human birth.
Ultimately, the real reason for the separation of the two Churches was the more political than religious claim of the primacy of the pope of Rome over all other bishops and sovereigns of Christendom¹⁰. This claim is based on the passage of the Gospel of Saint Matthew that affirms:

You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church¹¹.

For the Latin Church this affirmation of Jesus would identify Peter with the foundation stone of the Church. The Orthodox interpret this sentence differently, since in a lot of passage of the New Testament it is Christ who is defined as the foundation stone or cornerstone. Therefore, the Church would be founded not on an apostle, but on Christ himself¹².
Under the impulse of Gregory VII, the Catholic Church, moved away progressively from the Patristic theology and elaborated a new theology inspired by the Aristotelian logic, which took the name of Scholasticism. The Orthodox Church, however, continued to take inspiration from the Patristics. Moreover, it has always attributed the highest religious importance to monasticism. Thus, the monastic initiation continued to flourish there and, a result of to this, the Hesychasm could reach the culmination of the apophatic doctrine with Saint Gregorius Palamas (1296-1359), considered a new Origen¹³.

Petrus Simonet de Maisonneuve

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1. From the Greek ecclesia (ἐκκλησία); at the beginning of Christianity the term meant “meeting, assembly”. Later this took on the sense of administrative and hierarchical organization of external religion.[↩]
2. St. Paul mentions Linus among his closest collaborators (II Letter to Timothy, IV.19).[↩]
3. The original name of the city was Byzantium. Was then called Constantinople or Nova Roma when, in 330 AD, the Emperor Constantine the Great transferred there the Imperial capital by operating the “Etruscan rite”.[↩]
4. The title of “pope” is not exclusive to the bishop of Rome. Since 231 AD also the patriarch of Alexandria legitimately carries this title, despite the fact that since 451 AD a monophysite (Coptic) bishop sits on that chair.[↩]
5. Saint Gregorius the Great, Registrum Gregorii, V.18.[↩]
6. The Fathers of the Church are the theologians who wrote the fundamental texts of Christian doctrine. The Patristic period generally ends in the 5th century, although some rare and exceptional late Greek and Latin thinkers were admitted to the ranks of the Fathers. The last Greek Father was Saint John Damascene (675-749). The last of the Latin Father was Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153).[↩]
7. These two points of view are admirably illustrated by Vladimir Lossky, La Teologia Mistica della Chiesa d’Oriente, Bologna, EDB, 1985 (1st Ed.: Théologie mystique de l’Eglise d’Orient, Paris, Aubier, 1944), pp. 51-52.[↩]
8. The Council of Lyon in 1274 declared dogmatic the filioque doctrine, thus excluding the Nicene interpretation. This led the Greek patriarchs to consider heretical the decision of the Latin church, increasing in this way the distance between the two churches.[↩]
9. It must be said, however, that even great Catholic theologians were averse to the Immaculate Conception, among whom are Saint Anselm, Saint  Bernard, Albertus Magnus, Saint Thomas and Saint Bonaventure. The declaration of the dogma was in fact very late and dates back to 1854.[↩]
10. The Orthodox church always remained Imperial even after the fall of the Roman Empire. Even today, the Greek Church invokes the spiritual protection of the Basileis of the past. Then, when then Russia converted to Orthodox Christianity, Moscow was called “the Third Rome” and the Emperor of all the Russias assumed the title of Caesar (Czar). With the recent collapse of the Communism, Russia is now returned to an Imperial form of religious worship.[↩]
11. Gospel of Saint Matthew, XVI.18.[↩]
12. Even after the 1059 proclamation of the papal primacy over all the other earthly powers, the archbishop of Milan, of Ambrosian rite. and the archbishop of Ravenna, of Greek rite, both Catholic, continued for at least three centuries to reject any subordination to Rome.[↩]
13. Gregorio Palamas, Atto e Luce divina, (E. Perrella, a cura di), Milano, Bompiani, 2003, pp. XXXIII-CXXIX.[↩]