The Conflict between Empire and Papacy

Rivers of ink have been written on the subject we are about to present. Unfortunately, the prejudicial hatred against Tradition, which has since dominated Western thought, has given it a partisan description. Sometimes, in the interpretation of facts, reality has been overturned. For this reason, we will try to offer a traditional revision, which reflects what really happened. As we said in the previous chapter, the restoration of the Latin Church was an initiative of the Empire for the salvation of Christendom. The chosen instrument was the institution of the monastic orders. Until then, monasticism consisted of cœnobia and hermitages that were completely autocephalous. The only relationship that the monasteries had with the local bishops concerned the celebration of obligatory rituals, since monks carefully avoided being ordered as secular priests¹. They therefore resorted to the liturgical services of the priests that the bishops put at their disposal. The relations between monasteries and bishops were based on mutual respect, without the slightest dependency on each other. This respect was strengthened by the fact that the monks almost always were of aristocratic origins, as the monastic life required an inclination for study and contemplation. Likewise, bishops came from the same noble environment that gave guarantees of administrative capacity and cultural preparation.​
We will remind the reader that a bishop was elected by the prelates of the diocese among the most capable collaborators of his predecessor. To the placet (consent) of the bishops of the same district, followed the delivery of the ring and pastoral stick by the very Emperor or by one of his delegates². In some cases, where the bishop’s diocese coincided with the extension of a fiefdom, the prelate was also invested with the corresponding feudal benefice. What needs to be remembered is that the monastic initiation continued to be transmitted within the monasteries, even though the function of guru did not necessarily correspond to the office of abbot. Similarly, not all monks could become disciples of the Ars sacerdotalis³, but only the most qualified among them. Moreover, in the feudal system the transmission of the warrior initiations was maintained through the institution of the chivalry, which had at its helm the Imperator⁴.​
We have already seen that the Abbey of Cluny, engaged in the rectification of the Roman Church⁵, quickly degenerated in a centre of ecclesiastic-political power. Although less rapidly and under different circumstances, also the Cistercian and Camaldolese branches of monasticism declined, embracing radical forms of pauperism⁶ as the result of the influence exercised by the Lombard Pataria⁷.​
Somehow, these social activities⁸, instead of restoring the Roman Church, reformed the Benedictine monasticism, breaking them down into rival currents increasingly involved in secular affairs. The exteriorization of monasticism backed the worldly ambitions of the papacy and deprived the Empire of its spiritual support. For its part, the Church of Rome, initially hostile to the Pataria, was able to take advantage of the discontent of the lower classes and to unleash them against the Milanese nobility and against the archbishop himself tied to loyalty to the Empire⁹.
The Emperor, like his homologous the Basileus, for centuries enjoyed the title of Vicarius Christi, successor of the Messiah-King¹⁰. Moreover, the Emperor owed his sacred authority to the transmission of the Roman initiatic function of the Imperator. Thanks to this dual charisma he was Rex et Sacerdos, spiritually equated to the bishops. Only Jesus Christ and the Emperor could be portrayed holding the globe of the world in their hands. With Otto I was introduced the practice of the anointing of the Emperor by the pope, a ritual for the coronation of the Kings of France that dates back to the time of Meroveus. Otto accepted with pleasure this modification of the imperial consecration, which made him also successor of the biblical Kings David and Solomon. The Emperor did not realize the trap that had been laid for him. With the rite of anointing he was lowered to a dignity equal to that of the King of France. Furthermore, with the impersonation of David, the biblical King of the Jews, he was implicitly recognizing the supremacy of the priests over the sovereign who was anointed by them¹¹.
Later, both the King of France and the Norman King of England¹² began to support the doctrine that the King was like the Emperor in his Kingdom. It was a declaration of independence from the Universal Sovereign and constituted the first crack in the Christian ecumene. Also, in this case, the pope took the side of the national Kings, knowing that in this way the uniqueness of the Holy Emperor was undermined. Thus, the Emperor became one of the many Kings, losing his prestige as the only defender of Christianity and the sole successor of Christ.​
In 1059, with the Decretum in electione papæ, pope Nicholas II changed the rules for electing a new pope¹³. The cardinals¹⁴, who were directly appointed by the pope, became the only ones to have the privilege of electing the pope through a conclave.
The papacy then waged a subterranean struggle against the high clergy by inciting the lowest classes against them. Leveraging on social envy, the Roman papal court accused the high prelates of two sins: the first, called ‘simony’, consisted in the purchase of ecclesiastical offices in exchange for money or favours¹⁵. The second sin (defined ‘nicolaitism’) consisted in the marriage or the concubinage of the prelates. Pope Leo IX (1049-1054), therefore, definitively decreed that the celibacy of priests had to be obligatory¹⁶.
Leo IX also declared that the pope was no longer to be considered as a simple primus inter pares. The Pope became then the absolute leader of all the bishops, including the patriarchs of the Eastern Empire. His power was unquestionable, and thus he unilaterally assumed the authority to appoint bishops. This claim split Christianity in two, beyond repair¹⁷. The Church of Constantinople rejected these conditions, resulting with its excommunication by the bishop of Rome. The patriarch of Byzantium replied then with an equal excommunication. Since then the two Churches have never come back together. More than the very minimal doctrinal differences it was the claims of political supremacy of the pope that caused what is known as the “Great Schism”.​
All these upheavals of the Christian tradition were carried out patiently, in a sneaky and hypocritical way. The Roman curia, however, was always ready to abandon every claim in case of necessity, as it was in the case when Henry III deposed the three popes contending for the see of Peter and appointed one of his choice. No one, then, had anything to object.
The ambitions of the bishops of Rome, however, shamelessly emerged when Hildebrand of Sovana became pope under the name of Gregory VII (1073-1085). Born of a peasant family, he quickly pursued his ecclesiastical career thanks to the financial help received from his maternal uncle, the moneylender Leo Baruch¹⁸. Scheming as a priest and pretending to be a monk¹⁹, he became the master puppeteer behind five popes before becoming pope himself with an irregular acclamation by the Roman populace influenced by the Pataria. Motivated by a hatred of the Empire, he deviously masterminded for forty years a network of alliances and underhand dealings²⁰, coming to an agreement with the Patarines, with the Kings of France and England and, above all, with the Normans of southern Italy.​
This man possessed such a malicious inclination for subterfuge and hubris that even his contemporaries recognized his traits as “luciferin”²¹. Taking advantage of the young age of Henry III’s successor to the throne of Germany, he fomented the rivalry first among the great feudal lords, then among the feudatory prelates and, finally, between all these and the vacant Imperial throne²².​
He published a Dictatus Papæ in which he declared that the Emperor was a simple layman and that he had no priestly power. Moreover, only the Pope was the true Vicarius Christi with supreme authority over all the sovereigns and bishops of the world. In addition, only the pope had the power to consecrate the bishops²³.
Finally, only the priests, regardless of their rank, had the power to perform rites. This made the clergy the only intermediary between God and the rest of humanity²⁴. Thus, by re-evaluating the functions of the lower clergy, the Pope succeeded in reducing the authority of the other bishops to his advantage. Gregory VII also declared that the pope had the power to release the subjects from the oath of loyalty to their Lords. The results of this will be fatal for the feudal system that was based on loyalty, fidelity and honour.​
When Henry IV, the twenty-six years old Rex Romanorum (i.e. King of Italy), intervened to validate the election of the archbishop of Milan, Gregory excommunicated him and declared him lapsed for having interfered in the affairs of the clergy. This was the first time that a bishop applied excommunication as a political weapon. Since the pope had morally justified disloyalty, many German feudal Lords, especially Cluny-influenced clergymen, rebelled against their sovereign. Henry IV was practically forced to humble himself by going as a pilgrim to ask the pope for pardon²⁵.
Obtained the forgiveness, Henry struck the rebellion of his untrustworthy vassals and regained control of the Empire. However, the humiliation of the sovereign remained as a disgraceful precedent. The Pope excommunicated him again, but this time the Emperor replied by besieging Rome. The Pope then requested the help of his Norman allies. These put Rome on fire and then retreated to their lands dragging the Pope along with them. Prisoner of his treacherous friends, Gregory VII eventually suffered a miserable death. However, an irreparable damage had already been done, and their effects would later manifest themselves in all their harmfulness for the medieval ecumene. By accusing the Emperor of taking possession of priestly prerogatives, the pope in fact usurped the temporal power without reservation²⁶.

Petrus Simonet de Maisonneuve

---

1. If by chance a priest decided to become a monk, his monastery achieved also the ritual autonomy. It has already been explained that when a monk, who was also a priest, was elected abbot by his brothers, he became a mitred abbot, a peer with the bishops, at least from an ecclesiastical perspective.[↩]
2. Until this point, the papal approval was not required in any way. It is also untrue that it was the pope who consecrated the bishops. We must not forget that the Pope was recognized as primus inter pares (first among equals) simply because he was the bishop of Rome, the capital of the Empire. Similarly, also the Patriarch of Constantinople enjoyed, and still does, this formal recognition as the bishop of the Eastern Empire’s capital. Being elected by the prelates of the diocese of Rome, the election of the pope followed the exact same custom of all the other episcopates. Ambrogio M. Piazzoni, Storia delle elezioni pontificie, Segrate, Piemme Religio, 2003, pp. 85-117.[↩]
3. This presence of this initiatic path is still included today in sundry monasteries of the Orthodox Church, both Greek and Slavic ones. It is interesting that a similar organization can be found in the monasteries of the Tibetan tantric tradition.[↩]
4. Not always did the Imperator, the head of chivalric initiations, coincide with the person of the Holy Roman Emperor. Certainly, in the period we are discussing there are many indications of the coincidence of the two functions in Otto I, Otto III of Saxony, Conrad II and Henry III of Franconia. It is important to note that Knut, King of Denmark and England, was present at the imperial coronation of Conrad II. King Knut is mentioned in documents with the Latin title of Imperator. Now, since the Holy Roman Emperor was obviously Conrad II, with Imperator certainly one wanted to recognize Knut’s high chivalric-initiatic function. About a century later, King Alfonso VII of Castile was also recognized as Imperator, although he never sought the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. We will see how, some centuries later, this title will re-emerge in deviated hermetic circles to define the heads of the various magical-occultist currents.[↩]
5. We remind the reader that the secular clergy, headed by the pope, was entirely profane (adīkṣita).[↩]
6. Pauperism is a heretical tendency that maintains that indigence was the main Christian virtue in the teachings of Jesus. In fact, it can be verified that Jesus never assumed a poor lifestyle. Not even once the New Testament affirms the necessity of leading a life in poverty to obtain salvation. Misery is always presented as an object of compassion, but it is never recommended as a condition to be assumed, except during periods of ascesis and penitence.[↩]
7. A parareligious heretical movement of the 11th century, originated in the Milan area among the poorest social strata (patarine = derelict), in open rebellion against the archbishop, the nobility and the “wealthy” of the city of Milan. (A. Zorzi, Manual of Medieval History, cit., pp.173-174)[↩]
8. Until that time, becoming a monk meant giving up the world. The monasteries were built in inaccessible places, far from cities and roads. Therefore, this new social activity forever upset Latin monasticism, thus contributing to the obscuring of the contemplative and initiatic presence.[↩]
9. “No other pope has ever been able to mobilize “the street” again like Gregory VII did. The popular fury that was unleashed in Milan in the form of hatred for the high and rich clergy […] marks the explosion of a widespread latent anticlericalism … “(F. Herr, The Holy Roman Empire, cit., p. 72).[↩]
10. On the contrary, the pope was considered Vicarius Petri (Saint Peter’s deputy), and as such he was subordinate to him (Glauco Cantarella, Il Papa e il Sovrano, Bergamo, Europìa, 1998, pp. 30-31). For this reason, after the rite of the imperial coronation, the pope prostrated himself before the Emperor (proskỳnesis).[↩]
11. In ancient Israel, the Kings came from the tribe of Judah, inferior in dignity to the tribe of Levi from which the Cohanim (priests) came from.[↩]
12. In 1066, following the victory at Hastings, the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror, took possession of all England and proclaimed himself King. The Normans lorded the island by reducing the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes in a shameful state of slavery. Wherever they arrived, these barbarians shook the traditions and the social order. The alliance between the papacy and the Normans in southern Italy was finally sealed in 1130 when the Pope crowned Roger II as King of Sicily. This was the first reign that formally acknowledged vassalage to the papacy, which thus usurped the temporal power of the Empire.[↩]
13. M. Montanari, Storia medievale, cit., p. 138-139.[↩]
14. Until then, cardinals were those bishops, priests or simple lay people who performed auxiliary functions at the papal court. With this reform, which upset the structure of the Catholic Church, they became more important than the bishops themselves. From then until today, every pope has appointed his own followers in order to influence the election of his successor. In 1970 it was decided that the elective power of the cardinals expires at the age of eighty. In this way the cardinals loyal to the previous pope are excluded from the elective right.[↩]
15. Obviously, also the oath of feudal loyalty to the Emperor in return for the beneficium was considered simony.[↩]
16. From the early centuries, celibacy and chastity were required only from monks. These virtues were part of the renunciation of the world. The obligation of celibacy for simple secular priests, apparently only a moralizing measure, had instead institutional ends; that is to say, to avoid the possible formation of a priestly caste in the Catholic tradition. Differently, the Orthodox Church has never imposed celibacy on its priests. It is recommended only for the high clergy as an added virtue. In the Orthodox world there are many prominent families who for many centuries have provided high priests, theologians, hermits and saints to their Church. On the contrary, in the Catholic Church, the tendency over the centuries mostly consisted in recruiting the clergy from the lower strata; a trend that today has reached the bottom of the social hierarchy.[↩]
17. Indeed, not even the Catholic bishops willingly accepted the papal claims. Above all, the bishops of Germany and northern Italy continued to ignore these novelties for at least a century. Against the bishops of northern Italy, the popes unleashed the Patarìa in the squares and streets of their cities, while accusing the German bishops, largely of imperial nomination, of simony for being consecrated as such in exchange for their “subjugation” to the Emperor.[↩]
18. Unsurprisingly, this pope is remembered by historians for his ruthless fight against simony! (Paolo Brezzi, Roma e l’impero medioevale (774-1252), Bologna, Cappelli, 1947 (Istituto di Studi Romani, Storia di Roma, X), praes. pp. 205 ss. In this source, however, the Vatican claim that Hildebrand of Sovana was a descendant of the Aldobrandeschi Counts is entirely refuted.[↩]
19. Gregory stayed at the Cluny monastery as a guest only for a few days. From that moment on he declared to be a Cluniac monk.[↩]
20. His hatred also extended to the Byzantines, whom he fought actively, siding with the Normans. The main reason was not, as one may expect, for being “orthodox schismatics”, but rather because they were “imperial” in their spirit. “Gregory VII devoted himself ferociously to this cause, which in turn triggered nothing but tremendous unrest. He spread more hatred in Europe than any other ruler… “(F. Heer, Il Sacro Romano Impero, cit., P.79)[↩]
21. Moreover, to prevent that monk of the synagogue of Satan [Gregory VII] from escaping the judgment of the Roman laws, which are wholly opposed to him, […] I am sending to Your Magnificence the book where the Blessed Gregory [i.e. pope Gergory I the Great (590-604)] collected both civil and ecclesiastical laws, which he used in the Holy Church. “(“Letter from Petrus Crassus to King Henry”, G. Cantarella, Il Papa e il Sovrano, cit., page 91)[↩]
22. Among the schemers who took advantage of that situation, unscrupulously expanding their power to the disadvantage of others, we mention the Marquises of Canossa and Dukes of Lotharingia and the archbishops of Hamburg, Bremen and Cologne. The latter, Anno II, dared to kidnap the twelve-year-old Henry IV usurping the regency of the Germany’s Kingdom for several years. Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz, Year II, Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL), Band 1, Hamm 1975, columns 179-180.[↩]
23. This reform was not immediately accepted by the other bishops, archbishops and patriarchs who, for many decades, continued to receive the election in their diocese, with the subsequent confirmation by Emperor.[↩]
24. This declaration is of extreme gravity because it denies not only the efficacy, but also the very existence of other rituals, such as the initiatic ones. From this historical period onwards, the Catholic Church assumed an increasingly hostile attitude towards the initiatic traditions.[↩]
25. The Marquis of Canossa’ scheming widow played a blackmail role in that affair, obtaining in return an expansion of her fiefdom.[↩]
26. To usurp the three imperial crowns, i.e. of the Kingdom of Germany, the Kingdom of Italy (or of the Romans) and the Kingdom of Provence, the popes assumed the tiara or “ papal crown”. At first the tiara was adorned by a single crown; then by two crowns, finally by three crowns or triregnum. During the period in question, the popes replaced the horse with the donkey as their usual mount (Agostino Paravicini Bagliani Il bestiario del Papa, Collana Saggi, Torino, Einaudi). Was this, perhaps, a symbolic reappearance of Seth, the cursed God, consistently immanent in the bowels of monotheism? It is no coincidence that a hideous pope like Gregory VII is now object of admiration and praise by historians and considered a revolutionary and enlightened progressist.[↩]

The Apogee of the Empire and the Renovation of Catholicism

The deposition in the year 887 of Charles III the Fat¹, severely invalid, represents the conclusion of the Carolingian dynasty. The Empire, thus, entered a stalemate due to the imperial vacancy². Historians in general, accustomed to joyfully welcoming “revolutions” on every occasion, consider this event a historical turning point from which the Empire underwent a radically change. Nothing could be falser. During those seven decades, the feudal system was consolidated according to the principles established since the time of Charlemagne. Most of the fiefs became hereditary, establishing their bonds of fidelity and benefice with the vassals, Kings and the dukes³ who, in the absence of the Emperor, were his representatives. The same system of government was adopted between the fiefs of the vavasours and the vavasour’s vassals. What we need to understand clearly is that sworn loyalty was mutual. If the superior feudal lord did not respect the contract of benefice conferred on his vassal, the latter had every right to protest before the Diet of Aachen. At best, he could, quite rightly, take up arms against his liege lord to assert his reasons. Due to their inability to understand the sense of honor, fidelity and loyalty of the medieval man, contemporary historians have unequivocally confused such right with rebellion⁴.​
Different fiefdoms were granted to bishops and abbots. In this case, of course, inheritance was excluded. Such concessions came from the Grandees of the Empire, which made the diocese coincide with the fiefdom. In general, the ecclesiastical fiefdom was used to separate the possessions of noble dynasties in historical competition with each other, with the result of maintaining the Pax Imperii. As illustrated in the previous chapter, this system held strong and did not lend itself well to the schemes of the few daredevils who tried to overthrow the Carolingian order to unduly extend their possessions or to unworthily seize royal titles or even the imperial one. In this period, however, the kingdom of West Francia, despite being reduced to a small area around Paris, crushed between the duchies of Normandy, Burgundy, Aquitaine and the counties of Flanders and of Anjou. Despite being governed by a Carolingian branch, this territory undertook then its policy of detachment from the Empire.​
This was the only case of an embryonic rebellion that gained some success over the following centuries. As will be seen hereinafter in our overview, the kingdom of France always played a dissolving role in the medieval Christian ecumene. East Francia consisted instead of four great duchies. In this period of imperial vacancy, the four dukes were elected, by rotation, Kings of Germany.
In 955, Otto of Saxony, a member of a dynasty related to the Carolingians, obtained a definitive victory against the Magyars. Once defeated, this people settled in the present-day Hungary and became vassals of the Holy Roman Empire⁵. The end of the long-lasting threat from the eastern front was a great success for Otto of Saxony, who in 962 was acclaimed and anointed Holy Roman Emperor. With the dynasty of Saxony, the Empire reached the maximum of political and economic stability⁵. However, the greatest feat of Emperor Otto I was to continue the consolidation of the Empire in its spiritual principles. The Ottonian Holy Roman Empire succeeded in encapsulating a universal and sacral conception of the Regnum, assuming the symbols, the doctrines and the rituals of the ancient Roman Empire and of the coexisting Byzantine Empire⁶. Furthermore, Otto descended into Italy to remove the bellicose feudal lords, especially those of Lombard origin, who had devastated northern and central Italy during the previous decades. In southern Italy he reduced to reason the remaining Longobard duchies but showed consideration for the Byzantine enclaves⁷. In France he succeeded in regaining the loyalty of the Kingdom of Burgundy but failed to bring the Kingdom of France back into the imperial ecumene. Furthermore, the duchy of Normandy continued to elude its bonds of vassalage with the Empire.​
However, the imperial interventions in Italy could not disregard the relations with the papacy. Taking advantage of the internal struggles among the great feudal Lords who had troubled the Italian landscape in the period of imperial vacancy, a family of obscure origins, the counts of Tusculum⁸, lorded undisturbed in Rome, illegally appointing five popes of their liking⁹. Otto the Great descended into Rome, put order in the city, deposed the illegitimate pope and finally, in 974, he supervised the regular election of Benedict VII. Together with this new pope, Otto undertook with great energy the work of purification of Catholicism initiated by St. Boniface and Charlemagne.​
The Emperor recognized the pontifical fiefdoms (even those seized fraudulently by previous popes), reaffirming, however, their vassalage to the Empire. He renewed also the validity of his right of confirmation of the elected pope, as it was sanctioned by the Constitutio Romana of Louis the Pious. Finally, he promulgated the Privilegium Othonis, which ratified that the Emperor was the guarantor of the doctrinal, liturgical and pastoral correctness of Catholicism, with the sacred authority to punish the transgressors¹⁰. He was succeeded by his son Otto II, who died prematurely, and by his grandson Otto III. In the five years of his reign (996-1001¹¹), Otto III made the ideal of the Universal Empire ever more charismatic and venerated throughout Christendom, keeping the papacy tightly under control and committing itself to the reform of the Church. The Ottonian dynasty then opened a period of splendor that continued with the following dynasty, though bringing along the invisible germs of its ruin. It was precisely the providential renewal of Catholicism that raised the discontent of the popes and their claims of revenge.
The consolidation of the order in the Empire undertaken by the Ottonians highlighted the inadequacy of the secular clergy¹² and of the papacy itself. Above all, in the period of imperial interregnum, priests and popes fell in the same ignorance and behavioral abjection that had already been affirmed in the Latin Church before the intervention of the Culdean monks¹³. Under the dynasty of Saxony, the Italian, Burgundian and German high clergy, enjoying the feudal benefices, was now an expression of the aristocracy, possessing therefore a higher level of religious education. Those abbots, bishops and the Emperor became aware of the tragic situation of Rome¹⁴ and, in their project of universalization of the Empire, they included also the purification of the Church.​
The strategy chosen was to instruct monasticism to restore the Latin Church. By monasticism we mean the Benedictine order, which had monopolized the style of Catholic anachoristic life. To be able to operate this ecclesiastical correction, the monks began to become priests, thus acquiring their functions. This facilitated their task, diverting, however, their attention from the contemplative goals set forth for by their original Rule.
This happened mainly in the monastery of Cluny, which was founded by the duke William I of Aquitaine. The duke bore all the expenses of construction and installed Berno as abbot, provided that he and his monks made an act of submission to the pope. It was the first time that a monastery gave up its autocephaly¹⁵, accepting direct dependence from Rome. The monks, now almost all priests, became defenders of the most rigorous liturgy, teaching with patience and method the precise way of performing sacramental rites. Their purity of behavior made them appear like angels among the clergy, becoming models to be imitated. They gave a new meaning to chastity, convincing the exterior clergy to become mediators between the faithful and God and to act accordingly. The result of this rectification appeared almost as a monacation of the clergy. This was certainly a success. However, this entailed a clericalization of the Cluniac monks and subsequent decline in spiritual commitment and initiatic transmission.
Not all Benedictine monks, still under the influence of the Culdean wisdom, followed the example of Cluny. In fact, especially in Italy, they responded by renewing the ascetic and eremitical ideals of the ancient monasticism of the desert, of the Thebaid and of Mount Athos. Saint Romuald (born Duke Romuald degli Onesti), disciple of Marinus, a Venetian monk of Byzantine rite, founded the hermitage of Pereo, near Ravenna, which had been the capital of Byzantine dominions in Italy. Later, he founded several small cœnobia and hermitages in central Italy. Among these the most famous remains that of Camaldoli, founded in the early years of 1000.​
This experience, very close to the hesychast esoterism, originated, in the 11th century, the monasteries of Cîteaux in Burgundy, and, among others, the Calabrian hermitage of Santa Maria, all founded by Saint Bruno of Calabria. He spent years in the same cave where, in his time, Cassiodorus had withdrawn and built the Vivarium hermitage¹⁶. Almost intentionally marking a continuity of transmission from Pythagoras, through Cassiodorus, Bruno assumed the initiatic hesychast method, probably learned from some Byzantine anchorite who was still present in the “vertical desert” of Copanello, in Calabria.​
The Camaldolese and the Cistercian monks distanced themselves from the Cluniacs, concluding that the moralizing work the Church had undermined the ascetic aspect of their rule. In fact, the Cluniacs dealt as peers with feudal Lords, Kings, Emperors, bishops and popes. Cluny soon became the richest monastery in Europe thanks to the donations and the feudal benefices received¹⁷. On the contrary, all the other Benedictine orders emphasized the importance of the renunciation of worldly goods in order to heal the Church¹⁸. The joint influence of the two Benedictine tendencies, under the guidance of the Emperors of the Saxon and of the following Franconian dynasties, had an outcome beyond any expectation. Thus, while the Emperors were strengthening the bases of the imperial ideal, keeping the election of the popes under control, they managed to restore the Church without realizing that it would have turned against them the moment its authority was once again restored. Storm clouds thickened on the horizon of the 11th century.

Petrus Simonet de Maisonneuve

---

1. He was the only Roman Emperor, together with Charlemagne, to have united all the kingdoms of Christianity under his crown: he was King of Alemannia and Lotharingia (876-887), King of Italy (879-887), Holy Roman Emperor ( 881-887), King of the Eastern Franks (882-887), King of the Western Franks, King of Aquitaine and, finally, King of Provence. All vassal kingdoms, indirectly participating in the Empire, reaffirmed their loyalty.[↩]
2. From 888 to 924, five feudal Grand Lords succeeded one another, crowning themselves as Emperors by forcefully obliging the Pope to consecrate them (A. Zorzi, Manuale di storia medievale, quot., p.140). Their claims, however, were considered illegitimate because none of them had been acclaimed by the Diet of the barons of the Empire. During the interregnum from 921 to 962, no one declared himself as a pretender to the august throne.[↩]
3. Including also several sovereign marquises and counts.[↩]
4. This incapacity is due to the prejudices imprinted on the European mentality by the nefarious legacy of the French revolution. Not even the other bourgeois revolution, the American one, has come so far as to distort the capacity for understanding the past. The right to raise arms against the US central government is still a cornerstone of certain freedoms “liberal systems”? that are now inconceivable in the “homologated” Europe.[↩]
5. Crypto-Marxism, surreptitiously infiltrated in all fields of academic sciences, has an obvious preference for an economic perspective of history allegedly capable of explaining every phenomenon of this mechanistic cosmos. To this historical period is usually attributed the flourishing of agriculture, a new demographic increase and the revival of the arts and sciences (indeed, all this should be backdated to the Carolingian renaissance). The technological discoveries to which academic historians attribute the prosperity of this period, the noria, the yoke and the metal ploughs, were already known for at least two millennia! Moreover, the apparent demographic and economic depression of previous centuries is a mere ideological reconstruction of modern historiography, since the documentation on which these inferences are based are in fact lacking. In the early Middle Ages, the documents worthy of being transcribed were the liturgical texts, the theological and dogmatic formulations, the transcription of the classical authors, as well as, edicts and decrees concerning feudal donations and benefices, certainly far from the shopping list mentality of modern times. If a demographic decline ever occurred, along with the consequent atrophy of the documentary and artistic production, this must be traced back to the period of barbarian invasions, whose real destructive reach has been hidden during the last two centuries by the increasing political and cultural hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon and protestant peoples, the last heirs of those barbarians, followers of the Arian heresy.[↩][↩]
6. It is worth mentioning that there is an architecture and, in general, an Ottonian art. It developed from the assumption of the Byzantine Christian symbolism reinterpreted in the optics of the ancient classical Roman art, whose ruins were admired almost everywhere in Europe, from which derived the denomination of “Romanic art”. This artistic style spread throughout the Empire, also taking on local connotations and replacing Christian-barbaric art. Hans Jantzen, Ottonische Kunst, Hamburg, Rowohlt Verlage, 1959.[↩]
7. Apulia and Calabria were still provinces of the Eastern Empire. Otto I was a great admirer of the sacredness of the Byzantine Empire. He managed to arrange his son’s marriage, the future Otto II, with a niece of the Basileus. All his policy towards the East was dictated by a strive for a close cooperation between the two Empires to reconstitute the pre-Theodosian status.[↩]
8. This comital title was granted in vassalage by the Pope. The counts of Tusculum, after gaining control of the city of Rome, took possession of the administration of the fiefdom called the “Patrimony of St. Peter”, thus usurping the imperial temporal power. It was under these favorable circumstances that the counts of Tusculum succeeded in raising to the papal throne their own courtiers and even two members of their family. Only the fulfillment of the spiritual duties was left to the popes. Due to the indecent interference of the women of that family (especially of Marotia) and to the repeated cases of bastardization this period is known as the “Roman pornocracy”. (C. Rendina, I Papi, quot. pp. 314-335).[↩]
9. It is, to say the least, surprising that the Church, ever so punctilious in judging the imperial conduct, has always considered these usurpers of the throne of Peter to be regular.[↩]
10. M. Montanari, Storia medievale, quot. pp. 122-123. Otto exercised this power by ousting John XII (C. Rendina, I Papi, quot. pp. 327-332) after a trial before a mixed court of nobles and members of the clergy. The pope was found guilty of the most nefarious sins and vices, including turning the Lateran palace into a brothel full of prostitutes and corrupt youth, committing incest, murder, perjury, and exhibiting a completely godless belief.[↩]
11. The fist millennium A.D. ended during his reign. All the allegations about the superstitious terror of medieval man about that date were invented by the humanists of the 15th and 16th century to discredit what they considered a period of darkness not illuminated by the subversive ideas of individualism and naturalism typical of the Renaissance. These were the same humanists who devoted themselves to the evocation of demons, to laboratory research to produce gold and to the reading of the stars to predict the future. This leyenda negra was later enthusiastically adopted also by the illuminists of the 18th century and, even today, by the fanatical practitioners of the “religion of progress”, even though this thesis has been entirely disproved. See Georges Duby, L’anno Mille. Storia religiosa e psicologia collettiva, Turin, Einaudi, 1976; Dominique Barthélemy, “La mutation féodale a-t-elle eu lieu?”, Annales ESC, 47, (1992), pp. 767-777. The Spanish term leyenda negra refers to an historical falsification fraudulently spread by means of propaganda among the mass population with the sole purpose of defining a long-lasting and irremediably negative image of an opponent, an historical period or a nation. The term was coined to indicate the immense accumulation of slander and lies fabricated by the pirate and heretical regime of Elisabeth I of England to defame the Imperial and Catholic Spain. Such leyenda is still today strongly shared by the Protestant Anglo-Saxon circles and by their servants.[↩]
12. Priests are also called ‘seculars’ because of their proximity to the laity. Monks, on the other hand, having renounced the world are not part of the secular clergy.[↩]
13. The Irish and British Culdeans, however, continued to exercise a doctrinal influence on the Benedictines directly, as was the case of the Scot monk Richard of Saint Victor, or through their presence within the Benedictine Order, as was the case of Hugh of Saint Victor (born Hugh Count of Blankenburg). This action lasted at least until 1188 when, by decree of pope Clement III, the Church of Ireland and all its twin branches in the British Isles were definitively Romanized. In this way the initiatic characteristics of the Culdeans were also abrogated. Thus, disappeared the nocturnal method based on crosfigill techniques (crucis vigilia), similar to those of Hesychasm or Indian haṭayoga that replicated the body postures of Christ according to the sacred iconography, and the use of invocations (sskrt. mantra) and gestures (sskrt. mudrā) to activate the inner “heat and light” etc. (Nuccio d’Anna, Il cristianesimo celtico. I pellegrini della luce, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2010). , This was almost identical to the vigil of the arms of the medieval cavalry, even though the knights adopted the cruciform sword instead of the cross. This was probably a technique borrowed from the initiation rites of the Celtic knights. In fact, we know for certain that the Mithraic initiation of the Roman militia did not feature similar rituals; and there is no evangelical description of Jesus’s nocturnal vigils with his secret disciples.[↩]
14. In Rome even the Senate had in fact been weakened by some bullying families of the feudal nobility that in fat acted on behalf of the Lombard and Norman dukes, influencing, if not controlling, the nomination of the popes.[↩]
15. Until that time, monks were by no means subject to the hierarchic authority of the bishops in whose dioceses their monasteries were located, in which case only a formal respect was observed. However, if the abbot was also mitred the monastery would have been even formally independent. Therfore, until then all monasteries were autocephalous, as they continue to be today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Evidently, Cluny’s purpose was to reform the Church from within, with the consequent “political” contamination that followed. Initiatic authorities undertaking activities of correction of the exterior environment should always remain aware of the risks of exposure so as not to get involved. Too many cases of piloted downscaling of the intellectual level had been operated with the best intentions of correcting the exoteric aspect of a tradition only to eventually lose control and fail the initial objectives.[↩]
16. Gregorio Penco, Storia del monachesimo in Italia. Dalle origini alla fine del medioevo, Milan, Jaca Book, 1983.[↩]
17. Glauco Maria Cantarella, I monaci di Cluny, Turin, Einaudi, 2006.[↩]
18. However, even the holy hermits of Camaldoli and Cîteaux were often distracted from their contemplative life by Emperors, Kings, popes and bishops in order to restore the Roman Church. The historical record we received from that period often speaks of their suffering when trying to intervene in worldly transactions and their relief for returning to meditation and solitude.[↩]

Crisis of the Carolingian Empire and New Barbarian Invasions

We must now dedicate a few words to the historical chronicle necessary to explain the great changes that preceded the collapse of Tradition in the West.

Following the custom of the earlier Frankish rulers, Charlemagne divided his dominions into three parts. His son Pepin (or Carloman) received the Kingdom of Italy, which included all the domains that had previously belonged to the Lombards and to the Byzantines, as well as, the Patrimony of St. Peter¹ and the Kingdom of Burgundy that were both direct vassals. Louis the Pious inherited the Kingdom of the Western Francs, which included much of current France, the Spanish Marches(Aragon) and the vassal Kingdom of Asturias. The third son, Charles the Younger, was bequeathed the Kingdom of the Eastern Francs (current Belgium, Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Hungary). Pepin and Charles the Younger, however, died before his father, so the entire territorial legacy ended up in the hands of Louis the Pious. The latter, therefore, became King of Italy, King of France, King of Germany and was eventually acclaimed Emperor².
Charlemagne was an Emperor who proved to be a skilled warrior, a fair judge and a farsighted administrator. He was also able to conduct relations with the Church with firm hand and organized his Empire on the model of the initiatic organizations of which he was at the helm. Louis, on the other hand, was mainly concerned with the relations between the Empire and the Church, confirming his sacral authority and intensifying the spiritual relationship between the state and the kṣatriya initiatic organizations. Due to his predominantly spiritual commitment, he went down in history with the byname ‘the Pious’³. Louis had three sons of the first bed, and Charles the Bald of the second bed. Lothair, the eldest of the three inherited the title of King of Italy. His kingdom divided the empire vertically and included Italy, Provence and the Lotharingia (Lorraine) up to the mouth of the river Rhine. He was later acclaimed Emperor by the imperial barons and by the people and the Senate of Rome⁴,where he was crowned in 823. Pepin, the second son of Louis the Pious, was bequeathed the kingdom of Aquitaine, that is of western Francia, which included a large part of the present France. Finally, the third son, Louis II the German, received the kingdom of eastern Francia, approximately corresponding to present Germany.
The three brothers did not get along with each other or with their father, the Emperor. To this climate also contributed the plots of their half-brother Charles the Bald, who succeeded in replacing Pepin as King of Aquitaine. On Lothair’s death, Louis the German was designated Emperor, and from that moment on the imperial title almost always fell on the kings of Germany and Italy. The frictions among the Carolingian heirs prevented the imperial succession from becoming dynastic. If from one hand such elective characteristic of the imperial office⁵ made its actual power lesser than that of established regal dynasties, on the other hand conferred on the Emperor of the Christianity a greater prestige as a result of the publicly recognized merit and an unparalleled sacral charisma.
The discord among the descendants of Charlemagne undermined the defensive structure of the Holy Empire, although the regular transmission of the imperial title was always preserved through cadet or connate branches of the Carolingian dynasty, at least until the beginning of the 10th century. This period of crisis coincided with new barbarian invasions⁶. Certainly, these imminent threats were never serious enough to endanger the existence of the Empire, as it was in the case of the fall of Rome in the days of Alaric. The first incursions were made by the Normans, or Norse Vikings, who attacked the Empire from the North Sea, often sailing upstream the rivers of France and Germany and bringing devastation to their fluvial cities⁷. The raids of the Normans were, for the most part, of hit-and-run nature. These marauders usually returned to the Scandinavian shores from which they came after accumulating enough spoils on their ships. Only from 880 did the Normans occupy permanently the region of Normandy, in northwestern France⁸.
The second barbaric threat appeared on the eastern border of the Empire. After the repeated attempts by the Slavic peoples to break into the Empire throughout the 8th century⁹, a new warrior population of Siberian origin appeared at the borders. After seriously threatening the existence of the Eastern Empire, they became federated with the Byzantine army and employed by the Basileis to contain the expansion of the Holy Roman Empire towards the Balkans. However, their conversion to Catholicism promoted at the beginning of the 11th century by their King, St. Stephen, eventually attracted them into the orbit of the Holy Roman Empire.
The third barbaric threat was represented by the Saracen¹⁰ pirates. A contemporary complaisant historiography is accustomed to describing the Islamic society of that period as highly civilized. This is certainly true, especially with regard to the Near East, Morocco and Spain. But it is too often forgotten to mention that North Africa was dotted with small independent emirates and city-states that thrived only by raiding, piracy, brigandage, and the slave market. In the year 843 the Saracens had the audacity to sack Rome and, later, to establish piratical ports and dens almost everywhere in southern Italy and on the islands of the Mediterranean Sea. Also in this case, the Empire’s inability to plan an adequate maritime strategy and control over the seasturned out to be the cause of many disasters.
In these circumstances the popes distinguished themselves for their two-faced policy. At every difficulty that occurred in the Empire they always hastened to squeeze greater autonomy from the crown, drawing up false Decretali and falsifying any documents proceeding from the Imperial Chancellery. However, the popes were ready to withdraw all their claims and to swear loyalty and submission to the Emperor whenever they were threatened by the Arabs and the Byzantines or by Lombard uprisings¹¹.

Petrus Simonet de Maisonneuve

---

1. Comprised of an ensemble of small fiefdoms granted to the Pope by various Lombard and Merovingian Kings and by the Carolingian Empire, of whom, in the secular domain, he was a vassal. Only after seizing the opportunity to proclaim its independence from the Empire would that territory have been known as the State of the Church.[↩]
2. In line with the doctrine of the temporal power of his grandfather Charlemagne, in the year 824, Louis promulgated the Constitutio Romana, with which the pope of Rome was bound to swear loyalty to the Emperor before the coronation rite. See Andrea Zorzi, Manuale di storia medievale, Torino, UTET, 2016, p. 121. This act of vassalage remained unaltered for at least two centuries.[↩]
3. In Latin, pius indicates a person completely devoted to the divine will (the true meaning of bonæ voluntatis), both in the exoteric and esoteric domains.[↩]
4. In place of the acclamation by the legions, as it happened in ancient Rome, in the Holy Roman Empire the first step for the recognition of the imperial dignity consisted in the acclamation by the nobility. It was, therefore, a normal adaptation of elective practice to different historical conditions. The recognition by the Senate of Rome, which conferred on the sovereign the title of Patrician, and that by the Roman population that recognized him as King of Italy (and, for a certain period, of Lotharingia), remained unaltered. At this point the candidate was recognized as a de facto Emperor and worthy of being crowned by the pope.[↩]
5. The imperial electivity survived, at least formally, until the advent of the last Roman Emperor, Francis II of Habsburg (1792).[↩]
6. Friedrich Heer, Il Sacro Romano Impero, Roma, Newton Compton, 1999, pp.33-34.[↩]
7. The Empire, consisting of the Lotharingia, eastern Francia (Germany) and western Francia (France), was a notable military power. However, this was an army of land that was caught unprepared by the raids of the Norse pirates (of Norway and Denmark).[↩]
8. Rollo, the Viking chieftain who invaded Normandy, converted to Christianity; however, at his death, this did not prevent one hundred prisoners from being sacrificed for his funeral rite (John Julius Norwich, I Normanni nel Sud, I vol., Milano, Mursia, 1968, p.16). After numerous war episodes, in 911 the Normans recognized their subjection to the King of France and Lotharingia, Charles III the Simple. The Duchy of Normandy was thus founded. Wherever they arrived, these Scandinavian barbarians upset the previous order, creating anomalous situations. For example, the rigid subjugation of the civilized Scots, Angles and Saxons of the British Isles (Massimo Montanari, Storia medievale, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2002, pp. 145-146); pillages across the north of the Iberian peninsula and the northern borders of the Byzantine Empire (A. Zorzi, Manuale di storia medievale, cit., p. 144); and particularly the conquest of southern Italy, whose grave consequences on the medieval ‘ecumene’ will be illustrated later.[↩]
9. The only Slavic state of a certain consistency, Moravia, collapsed in 907, after seventy years of existence. The Slavs were pushed into Central Europe by other populations from Central Asia, such as the Huns and the Avars. They constituted the lowest castes of these semi-nomadic populations and for this reason they were called Slavs or Serbs (Gr. Σχλαυηνοί, slaves, Lat. Servi, servants or slaves).[↩]
10. For this reason, they were later called “barbaresque” pirates. The Latin term sarraceni is derived from the Aramaic sarqiyīn which means ‘inhabitants of the desert (sarq)’.[↩]
11. The treacherous behavior of the popes has been evident in the cases of Leo III (795-816), Paschal I (817-824), Eugene II (824-827), Gregory IV (827-844), Sergius II (844-847, Leo IV (847-855), the greatest falsifier of documents, Nicholas I (858-867), John VIII (872-882), Adrian III (884-885), another notable forger, and finally in that of the abominable Stephen IV (896 -897) who ordered a macabre trial against the corpse of his predecessor pope Formosus (891-896) who was indicted for having been too loyal to the Emperor. The indignation of the Roman people broke out in a revolt that ended with the strangulation of Pope Stephen IV (Carlo Rendina, I Papi. Storia e segreti, Roma, Newton Compton, 1984, pp. 244-304).[↩]

Feudalism and Chivalry

Charlemagne (742-814) began structuring the Empire on the basis of the Roman military initiatic organization, an undertaking that was completed by Emperor Henry II the Saint, of the dynasty of Saxony (978-1024). Society was divided into four classes: priests, nobles, free men and servants. The monks were not considered part of the clergy, being in all respects outside and above the divisions of Christian-Latin society.
The priests, after the work of correction of the clergy undertaken first by the Culdean monks, then by Saint Boniface and finally by Charlemagne, were allowed to marry. However, severe punishments were inflicted in case of concubinage with one or more women. In the last two centuries of the first millennium AD, thanks to the progressive establishment of the principle of inheritance, the male offspring of the clerics often pursued priesthood. The constitution of a true priestly caste was thus emerging. The upper hierarchies, bishops, archbishops and patriarchs¹, were predominantly assigned to unmarried priests, without this constituting any codified rule. The bishops were the heirs of the apostles and, therefore, only they could fully exercise the priestly ministry. In fact, only a bishop could consecrate another bishop and ordain priests². It will be noted, therefore, that in Christianity the distinction between the high and the low clergy is merely structural and not a social-historical contingency, as claimed from the French Revolution onwards³. The members of the most humble and poor classes often chose to become priests to find some means of sustenance and a more decent social status⁴, thus swelling the ranks of the low clergy.
The second social class, by order of importance, was the nobility. Among the four social classes of medieval Latin Christianity, nobility is the only one constituted as a true caste by right of birth. It is surprising how medievalists have ruffled the documents at their disposal to confound the ideas in this regard. From their studies, nobility emerges as an incomprehensible conception for modern man, even though western aristocracy has been deprived of its powers and prerogatives no more than a few decades ago, although this process began at the end of the 18th century⁵. The nobility, which represented the backbone of the Holy Roman Empire, was such ‘from time immemorial’ in the true sense of the term⁶. That is to say that no specific historical origin could be attributed to it⁷. Two were the traditional origins of western aristocracy. The first is represented by the patricians of Roman descent (of Alban, Trojan and Hyperborean origins)⁸. The second was constituted by the Germanic nobility and by the Celtic knightly class, which represented the barbarized continuation of the hyperborean aristocracy. Nevertheless, these two noble groups, which mutually recognized each other and frequently forged marriage alliances, maintained their distinctive traits for several centuries. In general, the patricians were the keepers of the cities and the villæ, whereas the nobles of barbaric origin administered the fiefs and castles. Since the Holy Roman Empire was structured on the basis of the initiatic organizations of the noble caste, its administrative, juridical and military offices reflected, since their inception, the three main degrees of warrior initiation. The nobles who took the knightly path, in fact, passed through three phases corresponding to their level of realization. The first step was that of ‘baron’: this term derives from the Latin word vir⁹, setting the baron apart from the nobilis homo (later nobil homo, or nobleman), that is to say the noble birth, for the latter was not an initiate¹⁰.
The baron was therefore the grade of ‘apprentice’ in the initiatic path of the Hero. The second step, which already presupposed the attainment of the first inner experiences procured by the constant application of the method (sskrt. prakriyā), was that of count (lat. comes)¹¹, that is to say ‘companion’ of the master. In fact, precisely because of the greater inner experience, by delegation of the master, he could guide the novices in the their spiritual journey¹². The third degree, the one that suitably applied to the teacher, was that of the prince (lat. princeps). Thus the hierarchy that governed the Empire of Charlemagne and his successors corresponded exactly to these three initiatory degrees. Each of these degrees allowed for a further development of power. It therefore happened that the baron who extended his full potentialities was recognized as a viscount; the count who had fully developed the faculties inherent in his degree of realization, became ‘count of the mark’ or marquis¹³. Thus also the princeps, the truly perfect teacher, could have obtained the title of duke (dux, he who leads the disciples)¹⁴. Obviously the Grand Master, prince of the princes and duke of the dukes, head of all the initiatic warrior organizations (sskrt. kula, saṃpradāya), was no one but the very Emperor-Imperator.
The Empire was, therefore, structured as a warrior brotherhood. This means that, originally, the barons who administered the baronies, the counts who governed the counties, the marquises who ruled over the borderlands, etc., were indeed initiates of different degrees, to which external responsibilities were entrusted for the purpose of raising Catholicism after the barbarian past¹⁵. This explains why at the time of Charlemagne and his immediate successors, at the death of a count (or other noble) the Emperor appointed in his place a count of equal dignity and wisdom, without, however, having any agnate or cognate¹⁶ relations with his predecessor. On the other hand, it was indeed intention of the Empire to consolidate the external structure of the state in a permanent configuration that followed the model of the caste institutions. Thus, in the short span of a few generations, the principle of inheritance eventually prevailed¹⁷. In this way, it happened that the son of a baron was a baron and the son of a duke was duke and so on¹⁸. Such a change was completed only in few generations. It is evident, however, that this regime no longer guaranteed an effective correspondence between the social function and the inner realization of the feudal lords. On the other hand, it guaranteed a perfectly organic form to the state, based on trust and loyalty, and this was the aim of the externalization of the military initiatic way of Roman origin.
This objective was widely achieved with the foundation of the feudal Empire. Thus, the initiatic ways of the noble caste returned once again to the domain of esotericism in the form of Chivalry, with which we will conclude this chapter. As it has already been said, Feudalism consisted of a certain number of vassals, great feudal lords, princes and dukes, who swore an oath of loyalty and tribute to the Emperor, receiving in return the beneficium, the possession of a fief, as well as, the responsibility of its administration and defense¹⁹. Under similar conditions, the vassals granted minor parts of their fiefs to some vavasours, counts and marquises. The latter ones could further cut smaller fiefdoms to the vavasour’s vassals, i.e. barons and viscounts²⁰. In turn, the vavasour’s vassals could grant certain beneficia to the knights, the low clergy and the freemen. Despite the leyenda negra invented during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the feudal system worked wonders thanks to the adherence to strong bonds and to a code of conduct founded on loyalty, fidelity and honor respected not only by the nobility but also by the rest of the population. Contrary to what is commonly believed, the so-called “dark ages” represented one of the periods of maximum splendor of the Tradition in the West. Rather, it was the hypocrisy and the lust for earthly power of the Church, together with the greed of the middle class, to undermine the feudal order.
There is a great deal of literature on the Chivalry that attempts to explain its spirit and its historical origins. Unfortunately, these writings have only produced much misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Both the liberal and Marxist interpretations make the establishment of this institution purely dependent on economic reasons²¹. On the basis of this assumption, whoever had sufficient money to buy a horse and an armor could have the ambition to become a knight²². By ignoring altogether the existence of initiation, they were led to believe that only technological innovations, such as the stirrup and the long spear, can explain the rise of the Cavalry. The explanation, however, is much simpler.  In fact, it is possible to set this subject correctly by simply referring to the traditional record. When the Christian Empire became firmly settled according to the hierarchical structure and the virtues of the warrior initiatic ways of the patricii and the equites of ancient Rome, these same organizations returned to their original reserve²³. Chivalry was simply this. A noble scion who wished to pursue such initiatic path, had to betake himself  to the castle or the villa of a Lord who was also a celebrated master or an upaguru.
There, after having served (sskrt. seva) for a certain number of years as page, he began a hard period of training in arms and the exercise of ‘gentle’²⁴ virtues. At this stage the young man became a squire (shield bearer) of his master, also called ‘valet’ (young attendant). When the master, baron or duke thought his apprentice was ready, the initiation rite of the Chivalry was then organized: “The initiate prepared himself to receive the arms with fasting, prayer and penance, dressing in white, often bathing and cutting his hair on the front, to be more at ease in battle, and to dodge the adversary’s slashes in the event his helmet was lost. He then presented himself to the prince or the nobleman who was to arm him, and this was done with a solemn ritual. In ancient times, the King alone could confer the cavalry, but later all the knights had the right to do the same; and the elect remained bound by a kind of kinship, so that in no case should they raise arms against the Lords who had knighted them, otherwise they would have been considered felons and infamous.”²⁵ The investiture was recognized by the Church as a sacramental, with real spiritual effects.
Neither is it true that the knights (lat. equites or milites) were always the poor cadets of powerful families, condemned to a life of hardships and wanderings due to the fault of the Salic law. Many Lords of castles and villæ were knights and could thus transmit to young prospects, who served them as pages, the same initiation that they had once received. The cadet brothers who lived in the same mansion as their elder brother could also be knights; or, in alternative, they could pursue the ascetic life of the knights-errant. This case is comparable to that of the monks who retired to hermitic life. The knight-errant passed his life wandering in search of adventure, seeking the opportunity to test his virtues and his martial skills in defense of the weak, of the widows and the orphans. His name was preceded by the title of ‘Dom.’ (Dominus), in the Latin form; or by the vernacular ‘Sire’, ‘Sir’, ‘Monseigneur’. He was the defender of religion and his weapon was the cross-shaped sword before which he prayed. The sword was given a divine name that the knight repeated like a mantra, especially when unsheathed in the name of justice. He also had the priestly power to baptize and to bless. The knight, for the rituals of his sādhanā, appealed to the intermediation of a female celestial figure in order to reach the Lord God more effectively. In this way, an unquestionable śākta tendency can be recognized in the chivalric initiatic method. We will come back to this topic of primary importance later when we deal with the Orders of Chivalry founded in the late Middle Ages.
As already mentioned, the Imperial society included also the class of plebeians, later called bourgeois because they exercised commerce, arts and professions in the villages (the boroughs). Often these free men were able to accumulate a considerable wealth. Some of them carried out activities of great utility for the human consortium of the city or of the fief, such as weaving, architecture and jurisprudence, distinguishing themselves among the population and obtaining from the noble council or from the feudal lord the right to blazon a shield without crown²⁶. The freemen were grouped by guilds according to their art or craft (sskrt. śreṇi), within which existed different initiatic ways corresponding to each single craft form. Nowadays, a pale trace of these medieval corporations remains in the Freemasonry and in the Companionage.
At the base of the social pyramid were the peasants and the servants, generally affiliated to the families of their ecclesiastic, noble or freeman masters.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

---

1. The Latin patriarchs of that period were the pope of Rome, the archbishop of Grado and that of Aquileia. Among these, only the patriarchate of Rome is recognized by the Greek Orthodox Churches.[↩]
2. We use here the past tense in consideration of the fact that the Catholic Church is currently only a decomposing corpse.[↩]
3. Nonetheless, although some bishops and popes came from noble families, the social origin of the high clergy was generally the expression of the lower strata of society, often even of servile extraction.[↩]
4. As anticipated in the previous chapters, he who pursued a monastic life was usually someone proceeding from a highly educated stratum, seeking a solitary life and renouncing all worldly things. For this purpose, monasteries and hermitages were built in inaccessible places, far from the worldly mass. Only few monks had also access to the priesthood. In this way it was  guaranteed the fulfillment of the obligatory external rites in the Monasteries. If the abbot elected by his brothers had also been a priest, which by no means was necessary, he would have automatically assumed also the bishop’s dignity (called in Latin Abbas Mitratus for the faculty of wearing the miter, the characteristic headgear of the bishops shaped like a fish head, allusive to the piscatorial power (potestas piscatoria) of the successors of the apostles), without this charge being conferred to him by any superior authority. It should not be forgotten that it is within the monasteries that the true priestly initiations were transmitted, either of Johannite or Druidic derivation. Differently, the uninitiated exterior clergy (adīkṣita) could transmit only the obligatory sacraments, comparable in many ways to the saṃskāra of Hinduism.[↩]
5. The incapacity or refusal to understand the concept of nobility is in many ways comparable to the absolute incomprehension of the moderns with regards to the caste system. Cf. Jean Flori, Cavalieri e Cavalleria del Medioevo, Turin, Einaudi Ed., 2008 (I ed. Paris, Hachette, 1998), pp. 65-76. This cliché finds its origin in both the cultural prejudice of egalitarianism and in the instinctive tendency of recently acculturated scholars and historians of low social origin (Dante explains the meaning of the word nobilis with non vilis). By considering nobility from a plebeian standpoint exemplified by the eternal question “How could one become noble?”, as if it were an activity or a profession, evolutionist historians continue to confuse ‘being’ with ‘becoming’.[↩]
6. It is well understood that when it is said that someone has become noble, it logically implies that before a certain defining event he was clearly not. This type of ‘nobilitatio’ (ennobling) made its first appearance in the second half of the 13th century, when the princes began to bestow with a letter the recognition of nobility to a plebeian. The first case of ennoblement by letter was that of Raoul, silversmith of King Philip the Bold of France in 1270 (Goffredo di Crollalanza, Encyclopedia araldico-cavalleresca. Prontuario Nobiliare, Pisa, Giornale Araldico, 1876-77, p.443, ab). Since the most ancient times, the plebeians were the ‘free citizens’ of Rome; known in Middle Ages with the term ‘burgess’. As a result of the ennoblement, the plebeian was then elevated to a superior status ascribed to certain merits. They used to lend money eventually indebting the true nobles, often obtaining the ennobling in exchange for the extinction of the debt. In this way, unfortunately, many families of usurers  were, therefore, ennobled. With the passing of the centuries and through marriages with authentic aristocratic families, this new noble class was eventually accepted. In this traditional context, we cannot take account of the frequent ennoblements of plebeians granted in the last two centuries by liberal monarchies or even by popular dictatorships, often embellished with fanciful and bombastic titles. It must be remembered, however, that the plebeians were clearly distinguished from the members belonging to the servile class.[↩]
7. Giandonato Rogadeo, Del ricevimento de’ Cavalieri e degli altri Fratelli dell’Insigne Ordine Gerosolimitano, Vincenzo Orfino, Napoli, 1785, p. 98. The ancestor of the family was often identified with a god or a demigod, thus giving rise to the gens (sskrt. gotra). This pushes back the origin of the clan to an even more immemorial, non-human age.[↩]
8. After the conversion of the Empire to Christian religion,  the Roman patriciate, originally eligible to carry out both the priestly and the regal functions, lost its sacral prerogatives (with the exception of the power of blessing). For this reason, during the Middle Ages the patricians of Roman origin were in fact no longer distinguished from the knights (equites), a class reserved exclusively to the warriors.[↩]
9. “[…] some believe that baro is an alteration of vir, and they maintain that its origin comes from the Romanic varo, a severe and powerful man. In fact, as agreed by Menage, in low Latin baro was the ablative of vir, equivalent to viro, meaning ‘brave and valiant man’ […]”.Crollalanza, Enciclopedia araldico-cavalleresca, cit., p. 97, a.[↩]
10. It is no coincidence that in the tantric ways of Hinduism (vīramārgas), the term ārya, or noble by caste birth, indicated an individual that, in spite of his initiation, was still considered a pāśu, a being bound by certain conditions; only later will he become a vīra (hero, Lat. vir). In fact, this is only the first stage of realization of the tantric dīkṣita.[↩]
11. When this degree was reached by a patrician of Roman origin, the title attributed was that of Lord (Lat. Dominus). Lordships and Principalities were therefore part of the feudal system from the very beginning, differently from what has been declared by the official historians who incorrectly relegated these categories of fiefs to the Renaissance period.[↩]
12. Here the distinction between a simple dīkṣita and a sādhaka is easily recognized. The latter in fact is the one who has proceeded in the initiatic path. In the tantric initiatic ways, to the princeps corresponds the degree of divya, ‘luminous or divine man’. The closest collaborators of the Emperor were the Counts Palatine, the paladins, originally twelve in number. They were truly the peers of the sovereign, mirroring the college of apostles around to the Christ-King or Messiah.[↩]
13. It is interesting to observe that in the English Mark Masonry, the fulfillment of the second degree was designated with the title of ‘Mark Man’ (later abusively raised to the rank of Mark Master). In fact, the marquises were those who carried the sovereign’s seal and had the right to coin money on his behalf. It should also be noted that the operative mason apprentice, not being noble by birth, could not be called a vir-baron. Instead he received the title of ‘freeman’, identifying him with  the third class and not with the servile one. In this clearly traditional perspective we cannot take into consideration the numerous aristocrats and wealthy traders who were ‘accepted’ in Freemasonry from the 17th century onwards. In the Masonic language, ‘accepted’ is he who is recognized as an honorary member. This ‘fashion’ consisted in the entry of a great deal of individuals who did not belong to the masonry guild by birth, resulting in the eventual loss of the operability and the method on which this initiatic way was based, provoking the degeneration of this institution.[↩]
14. With regard to the Kings, there is no doubt that in the early Middle Ages they were not very different from the princes and the dukes. They were, therefore, vassals of the Empire. It will be only after the eleventh century that the Kings began to identify themselves with a single nation and thus assumed a competitive stance towards the Empire, claiming that “the King is Emperor in his kingdom”. Also in this case, much of the blame must be attribute to the subversive politics of the Papacy. In fact, the popes, pursuing their policy of usurpation of the temporal power, constantly instigated the Kings not to recognize themselves as subordinate to the Empire.[↩]
15. The true extension of the degree of Master in the above mentioned Masonry is that of ‘Navigator of the Ark’ (Ark Mariner), which alludes to the overcoming of the flood of barbarian invasions.[↩]
16. Familiarity of blood or acquired by marriage alliance.[↩]
17. Heredity followed the Salic law promulgated by Clovis. According to this law, the inherited position belonged exclusively to the first-born male, unless the father foresaw that to dispose of the title was another direct male heir. In this case the father called the non-firstborn son to share his office while he was still alive. This last principle was often followed also in India, not only for the family inheritance in the kṣatriya caste, but also to ensure continuity to an initiatic paramparā of a kula or a pīṭha.[↩]
18. Only that of the Emperor never became a fully fledge dynastic office, since his confirmation required the acclamation by the army, the Roman people or his Electoral Princes. This helped to keep the imperial charisma high, although in practice a weakness of the institution was revealed.[↩]
19. The fief was a possession and not a property. That is to say that the fiefdom was granted in administration and usufruct, whose property belonged to God alone, through the imperial mediation. The assignment of a benefit, or enfeoffment, was ritually represented with the entrustment of a heraldic banner by the prince, whose figures and colors then became the symbol represented on the family’s shield.[↩]
20. It was not uncommon for even Bishops, Archbishops and Mitred Abbots to become enfeoffed with baronies, marquisates or principalities. In this case, the fiefdom coincided with the ecclesiastical diocese. However, only members of the high clergy of aristocratic descent were entitled to such right.[↩]
21. For inst.: Jean Flori, Cavalieri e cavalleria del Medioevo, cit.; Franco Cardini, Alle radici della cavalleria medievale, Milano, Sansoni, 2004.[↩]
22. The cited authors also have in common the tendency to clearly separate Chivalry from nobility, reducing the knights to ordinary men-at-arms of humble birth, skilled in weapons and often devoted to banditry. According to this line of argument, at the end of the Middle Ages,  thanks to their amazing feats, these popular figures became recognized as  knights, as if they were nobles. Later, near the Renaissance, the nobility allegedly poured into the Chivalry, eventually transforming it into a refined elite circle difficult to access. As evidence of this interpretation, they advance some cases of adventurers of bourgeois or even servile birth armed knights after pretending to be descendants of some noble families. This argument, however,  proves exactly the opposite. Why would those boasters pass themselves off as nobles if the Chivalry, as they claim, was open to all social classes?[↩]
23. After Charlemagne, it is not clear which of his successors, besides being Emperor, were also Imperator of the noble initiatory paths. There are various indications to suppose that this was the case of Frederick II Hohenstaufen. On the contrary, thanks to the authority of Dante, we know for certain that the Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg was also the initiatic Imperator.[↩]
24. In the language of Chivalry, the term ‘gentle’ always refers to something pertaining to initiation. We will return to this when we speak about the late Middle Ages, particularly with regard to the troubadours and the Faithfuls of Love (it. Fedeli d’Amore). Therefore, it never assumed the denigratory sense as in the Jewish usage of the word goyim (the gentes), designating those who do not belong to the “chosen people”; nor does it correspond to the British ‘gentleman’, which indicates those who belong to the middle class and enjoy client patronage with the aristocracy.[↩]
25. Crollalanza, Enciclopedia araldico-cavalleresca, cit., p. 166, a.[↩]
26. The use of the crown was the exclusive privilege of the nobility. Only the British, who have excessively widened the gap between the King and any other noble, attribute the crown only to the sovereign, while to the nobles is reserved the ‘coronet’.[↩]

The Holy Roman Empire

With the coronation of Charlemagne, not only did the Roman Empire re-emerged on the surface of the diluvial waters of the barbarian invasions, but also the title of Imperator, which designated the head of the Roman military initiatic organization. As already mentioned in the preceding chapters, Augustus was the founder of the Empire. Under his direction, the initiatic structure of the equites was conveniently laid over the former Republican institutions with the purpose of preserving them. Thus, the head of the chivalry initiatic hierarchy directly assumed ad interim the supreme power of the State, which the exterior political institutions were no longer able to exercise¹.​
The office of Imperator then passed down in an inconspicuous guise within the initiatic military organizations of Roman or Gallo-Roman patrician descent and the Senate of the city of Rome. But on the Christmas night of 800, the Imperator came out into the open to take control of the barbarian Christianity and to superimpose the Holy Roman Empire² to the Frankish and Lombard Kingdoms, to the Saxon, Avarian, Galician, Asturian, Scottish Princedoms and to other domains, unifying different temporal institutions into a universal monarchy.
In ancient Roman tradition, the term Regnum designated the sacred organization of the Republic³. The Regnum, although limited within a specific territory, was considered unique and universal, extending the spiritual benefits of the cosmic order guaranteed by it to the most remote corners of the Earth. The Regnum was the direct heir of the Realm of Saturn, the King of the Golden Age (Satya yuga). With the establishment of the consular government, the title of Rex was reduced to its simple ritual function (Rex sacrorum), annulling all other sacred and temporal powers that originally came with it. In this way, in the traditional functions of the Patricius Romanus began to arise the distinction between the sacred and the “profane” powers, a tendency that with the passage of the centuries invariably diminished the charismatic and spiritual characteristics of the Patriciate in favor of the temporal ones.​
The territorial expansion of Rome, together with the weakening of the role of the Rex sacrorum, made evident the existence of a multiplicity of kingdoms that came to federate under the Roman rule. It was almost as if the primordial Regnum had shattered into a multitude of monarchies that, without any universal function, were instead keeping each other within bounds. With the Empire, Augustus restored the universality of the Regnum. The same happened when the Holy Roman Empire was founded. Thus, the Empire, in Western civilization, was always propelled by a sense of restoration of the primordial Kingdom following the crushing caused by the tribulations of the Iron Age (Kali yuga)⁴.​
The coronation ritual of Charlemagne ended with the act of submission of the Pope. In this way the Pope assumed the role of religious consecrator of the Emperor, privilege of his priestly status, declaring at the same time his submission to the Empire. In turn, the Emperor assumed the role of protector, guarantor of the faith and supreme judge of the Church, putting at the same time faith in the Pope as ritualist. As Protector Fidei (protector of religion), Charles played his function as a warrior who defended Christianity from the Arian barbarians, from the followers of the Germanic and Avarian shamanism, and from the Islamic aggression. As guarantor of the faith, he intervened to defend the Christian doctrine from distortions and heresies. It was he who took the correct stand in the Iconoclastic controversy, even against the confused opinion of Leo III. It was he who intervened in support of the doctrine of the Filioque in the Nicene Creed⁵, overcoming the Pope’s incapacity to take any theological position. Like Constantine before him and his contemporary Basileis of Byzantium, he convened and presided over the bishop’s councils. It was he who, as the supreme justice, judged, punished or absolved Popes, bishops, priests and lay people accused of transgressions, crimes and heresy, carrying on the mission of correction of the clergy and of the re-Christianization of Europe undertaken by St. Boniface. He was scrupulous and loyal to his universal function.​
The Pope, in turn, ritually guaranteed the sacredness of Christendom and of the Empire. However, the bishop of Rome took advantage of the rebirth of the Western Roman Empire to break the bond of dependence on the Byzantine Emperor⁶ that he had maintained until then. But even more, he took advantage of the situation to distance himself from the Greek bishops of the Eastern Empire, whom until then he had to regard as his peers, if not even superior to him in wisdom. In fact, in Latin Europe, the Pope, with the excuse that his see was the charismatic capital of the Roman Empire, had already placed the bishops and archbishops of Italy, Gaul, Germany, Britain and Spain in a state of subjection. In this way the “Petrine primacy” was definitively sanctioned. However, even before the Restauratio Imperii (Empire restoration), the Papal Court had already circulated the so-called Donation of Constantine, that forged document that legitimized the birth of a Papal State, in which the superiority of the Pope of Rome over all Christian ecclesiastical hierarchies and even over the very Emperor was falsely affirmed. Therefore, the declaration of the Pope’s subjection to Charlemagne could not be considered sincere⁷. In fact, in the early years of the 9th century the Papal Court secretly began to circulate other false documents, fraudulently dated to previous centuries, known as Decretales⁸. In these documents it was insinuated that the Imperial Authority depended exclusively on the Papal consecration, therefore the Pope had to be considered superior to the Emperor. In the same way that the Pope could consecrate Emperor a King, so could also deconsecrate him with the excommunication. But until Charles was alive these claims remained prudently concealed. They began to spread slowly only with his successors, who certainly did not show the same determination and interior strength of Charlemagne.​
Finally, Charles began to shape the social constitution of his Empire by modeling it on the structure of the initiatic organization of which he was the Grandmaster (lat. Imperator, sskr. mahāsvāmī). With him and his successors the Empire assumed a new administrative configuration that went down in history with the name of Feudalism.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

---

1. The complete ignorance concerning the nature of initiation has prevented modern and contemporary historians from understanding the true significance of this process. By examining the foundation of the Augustan and the Carolingian Empires on the basis of their profane conceptions and prejudices, they regard these historical developments as “coups d’état” or “institution of dictatorships”, reducing events of universal scope to the extent of their petty mentality and erudition. For them, in fact, the operative continuity of the previous magistracies remains unexplainable and in blatant contradiction with the establishment of what they mistakenly identify as violations of the modern concept of the “rule of law”.[↩]
2. For completely incomprehensible reasons, the medievalist historians have attributed this official definition of the Christian Empire only to the Imperial dynasty of Saxony (962-1024). Other French and Italian historians, especially in an anti-German nationalistic sense, have preferred to call it “Germanic Empire” or “Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic Nation”, in order to reduce its universalistic scope. In truth, this last definition appears for the first time during the reign of Maximilian I (1459-1519), without ever becoming however the official name of the Empire (Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, Volume 1, Oxford, University of Oxford Publs., 2002, p.17). Its abrogation in 1806 requested by Napoleon, who had just emerged from the ashes of the French Revolution, was officially the end of the Holy Roman Empire founded by Charlemagne (James Bryce, Il Sacro Romano Impero, Paolo Mazzeranghi (ed.), Crotone, D’Ettoris Ed., 2017 (I ed .: The Holy Roman Empire, London, Macmillan Ed., 1864), page 204). In reality the name “Empire of the Germanic Nation” must be referred not to the State, but to the secret military initiatic organization which provided its external form. In fact, this was a confraternity of soldiers (lat. milites) whose initiates were “re-born brothers” (lat. natione germani).[↩]
3. In Latin, Res publica never assumed the modern sense of “republic” as an egalitarian elective regime, the sad result of bourgeois revolutions. Res publica, the public matter, indicated the sacred concept of the State understood as the domain of exoterism, independently of its monarchical, aristocratic or democratic form of government. On the contrary, Res abscondita (the secret matter) meant esoterism, the domain of the mysteric initiations.[↩]
4. Obviously, what we are exposing here deals with the Empire in its traditional meaning (as in India is with the Universal Kingdom of Cakravartin) and not with its modern caricatures, such as the Napoleonic empires, let alone the shameless usurpations of this title made by the kings of England (“Empire” of the Indies), of Prussia (“Empire” of Germany) and of Italy (“Empire” of Abyssinia), among others. Finally, we will not waste time in differentiating the traditional Imperium from its liberal, fascist or communist parodies, namely the French, British, Japanese, Soviet, American and Chinese colonial imperialism, which consist of violent territorial expansion with the sole purpose of exploiting economically weaker and smaller nations.[↩]
5. We will return later on the doctrinal differences between the Latin Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church.[↩]
6. Until Leo III, all the elected and acclaimed Popes had to wait for the confirmation from the Basileus before being consecrated. From Charlemagne onwards, the right of veto (Jus Exclusivæ) on the papal election became prerogative of the Holy Roman Emperor, a privilege that later passed down to his last historical heir, the Emperor of Austria. This privilege disappeared with the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War. See Ambrogio Piazzoni, Storia delle elezioni pontificie, Ed. Piemme, 2003.[↩]
7. This deplorable behavior can be explained by the generally low social origins of the Popes of that period, often unworthily raised to a status of great prestige and power. Moreover, in the period between St. Gregory the Great (590-604 and Leo III (795-816) we count with only one monk elected pope: St. Zechariah (741-752). Very little if we consider that in this interval  32 popes succeeded each other (Claudio Rendina, I Papi, storia e segreti, Rome, Newton Compton ed., 1984, pp. 219-222). We must not forget the general conditions of corruption and ignorance combined with thirst for power and wealth of the secular priests of that period. Moreover, only in the monastic circles was the transmission of priestly initiation maintained. Throughout the High Middle Ages in the ancient territories of the Western Empire, monks and the exterior clergy maintained strained relations, being the secular priests and their highest hierarchies incapable of understanding what the esoterism consisted of. This also explains the future poor relations between Emperors and Popes. The former, in fact, were expressions of initiatic organizations, whereas the latter, when they were not monks, generally did not even know what initiation was.[↩]
8. H.C. Lea, Le origini del Potere Temporale dei Papi, Livorno, Bastogi Ed., 1976 (I ed. Mendrisio 1915), pp. 60-83.[↩]

The Franks and Charlemagne

The Franks¹ were distinguished for their warrior and strategic abilities, and not only for the courage and the ruthlessness typical of the other barbarian peoples of Germanic descent. They were first mentioned by Tacitus who placed them in the region corresponding to the present Belgium, Holland and Rhineland. Throughout the period between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD, the Franks exercised a  continuous pressure on the Gaul-Roman frontier, often reporting military successes having quickly learned from the imperial army the refined Roman art of war. In 358 they were eventually defeated by the Emperor Julian who persuaded them to become fœderati of the Empire, thus forming a buffer state with the duty of defending the Roman frontier of the Rhine river. In this way the Franks began to soften their customs by partially Romanizing themselves. In 451 their King, Meroveus, came to the aid of Flavius Ætius, the last great Roman general, and helped him defeat the Huns.​
With the fall of the Roman Empire, Clovis, the third King of the Merovingian dynasty, in 486 expanded his reign to the region of Lutetia Parisiorum (Paris) and then expelled the Visigoths from Gaul², who then retired to Spain. Clovis converted with all his subjects to Roman Christianity, becoming the only Germanic people never adhering to the Arian heresy.
At that time, while Rome and the Italian peninsula were governed by the Heruli and the Ostrogoths, both followers of the Arian heresy, the Pope recognized the Franks as the only Germanic people who had joined Catholicism. The Franks were particularly receptive towards the Latin culture, a sensitivity that produced their rapid civilization after the conquest by King Clovis of the Roman Province of the Gauls, today’s Provence. This marked the beginning of an alliance between the King and the Pope that had important consequences for the history of Western Europe. The Merovingian monarchs, converted to Catholicism, assumed a less warlike and a more priestly behavior. They were anointed Kings by the bishops with a ritual copied from the biblical consecration of the Kings of Israel³. Acting like the Messiah of the Old Testament, they began to bless their subjects and to heal in a miraculous fashion the ill and the possessed⁴. The King’s militar, juridical and administrative functions were therefore delegated to an official governing on his behalf: the Major-domo, the most important (major) figure of the Palace (domus).​
The Royal Court became the place where the Frankish warrior caste met the Culdean monks from Ireland and the Roman patricians from Provence who performed their priestly and sapiential duties⁵.
By the 6th century, the Merovingian Court had already become the meeting place for various initiatic currents, with the creation of a circle reminiscent of that of the Roman Emperor Augustus, also known as the Circle of Mæcenas. Hence, the wise men of the Merovingian Court assumed the names of the Pythagorean poets and writers who had collaborated in the foundation of the Roman Empire in favor of Augustus. As we will see later, this fellowship of initiates of different origins, continued in its work to  resurrect the Empire. Unfortunately, few of their names have survived in the historical record as only a small number of documents were saved from the wrath of the barbarian invasions. Only the work of ‘Virgil Maro Grammaticus’ has remained; a text of difficult interpretation, being deliberately written in sermo obscurus (enigmatic language)⁶. Although the material dealing with this initiatic association is scarce, it can be considered as a forerunner of the Palatine School of Charlemagne and, further on, of the circle of Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg, to which belonged also Dante Alighieri⁷.
With time and the massive assumption of priestly character, the Merovingian Kings completely abandoned their functions of government, devoting themselves exclusively to meditation and rituals⁸.​
After one hundred and fifty years, the Major-domo Pepin the Short directly took over the reins of the Frankish Monarchy. The last Merovingians were forced into a cloistral life  and locked up in monasteries⁹. In 751 Pepin was acclaimed Roman Patrician by the Senate of Rome and anointed King of the Franks by Pope Stephen II. Thus began the Carolingian dynasty. Pepin the Short died in 768 leaving the Kingdom to his two sons Charles and Carloman. The latter died in his twenties, leaving the crown of the great realm to Charles who further enlarged the boundaries of his domain. At the Pope’s request, Charles descended to Italy to fight the Lombards. In 774, following a decisive military victory, Charles became also King of the Lombards, annexing most of Italy. He was crowned with the Iron Crown as King of Italy, thus merging a Catholic consecration, represented by the nail of the cross of Christ inserted into it, with the continuity of the Constantinian imperial tradition¹⁰.​
In the same year he was proclaimed Roman Patrician. At the height of his power, Charlemagne (Charles the Great) visited the most important Latin villas and cities, arming knights the Patricians of Roman origin and surrounding himself with a following of loyal supporters. At the same time, he reorganized his Court and the structure of his realm.​
The Court became a laboratory for the Renovatio Imperii. The group of monks of the Culdean Church, of direct Celtic origin or of more recent Anglo-Saxon lineage, played a fundamental role in such process. Among these surely stands out the figure of Alcuin of York, successor of the Venerable Bede and guru of Charlemagne. He was initially assisted by Eginhard, who later succeeded him as teacher of the Schola Palatina (Court’s School), and by Paul the Deacon, a Romanized Lombard. The ancient Roman-Pythagorean teaching of the Trivium and the Quadrivium was restored and systematized.​
The Trivium was made of Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic, the arts of the mind and speech; the Quadrivium was made  of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music, the arts applied to the external objects through bodily action. Each of these arts was liable to a symbolic meaning and to a methodical and initiatic application¹¹. Above these teachings were taught the doctrines of the cataphathic and the apophatic theologies, intended exclusively for the monks and the Sovereign. The structure of the State, as we will see in the next chapter, was then reorganized in harmony with these arts and doctrines.
Accused of a behavior unworthy of the pontifical high function, Pope Leo III, in serious difficulty, turned to Charlemagne asking for his protection¹². Charles assumed the role of supreme judge of Catholicity, and absolved the Pope from any slander. In Rome, on Christmas night of the year 800, the Pope crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. With this consecration the Roman Empire rose again from its ashes¹³.

Petrus Simonet de Maisonneuve

---

1. The original name of this tribe was Frakaz, meaning “free and courageous”.[↩]
2. From the year 888 , the territories where the Franks had finally settled have been known as France, a term coined after its ruler. However, today’s French population is for the most part descendant of the Celtic Gauls. Only the Provence can be considered Gaul-Roman, having been intensely colonized by Latin peoples. Only few aristocratic families are of Frankish origin. In fact, the Franks only represented the warrior class who ruled over the other peoples of Gaul.[↩]
3. Such recognition was to some extent tolerated by the Byzantine Basileus (King, Emperor), probably with an anti-Ostrogothic and anti-Longobard purpose, granting an Eastern Imperial proxy to the Merovingian Kings.[↩]
4. Marc Bloch questioned the attribution of both the anointment and the thaumaturgical powers to the Merovingians (a dynasty still considered “too Germanic” and “not very French”), in spite of the fact that  the sources he cites say otherwise. Although of Jewish descent, he did not forget his French origins and applied the usual Gallic nationalism even to historical periods in which this concept did not yet exist. For this reason, his book, rich in references and important information, considers France the navel of the world, relegating all other realms of Christianity to a sort of “cultural periphery”. Marc Bloch, I Re taumaturghi, Milan, Einaudi, 2013, pp. 48-49 (I Éd. Paris, Librairie Istra, 1924).[↩]
5. Herbert Augustus Strong, “Über direkte Handelsverbindungen Westgalliens mit Irland im Altertum und frühen Mittalalter”, Classical Review XXV, 1911, pp. 70-71.[↩]
6. In many ways, his Epitomæ evokes a similarity with the etymological explanations of the Indian Nirukta. The conclusions of present philologists, who attempted to interpret Virgil’s writings without having any idea of what is esoteric, are truly exhilarating. G. Polara (edited by), Virgilio Marone grammatico, Epitomi and Epistole, Napoli, Liguori ed., 1979, pp. XXI-XXIV.[↩]
7. In both these Imperial Circles, representing the esoteric intellectual élite of Catholicity in different epochs, the participants assumed pseudonyms borrowed from the Bucolics and the Georgics of Publius Virgil Maro, such as Titirus, Melibeus, Coridon etc. These were aristocratic poets who on many occasions played an important role for the “Renovationes Imperii“.[↩]
8. For this reason they were later called “Lazy Kings”, Rois fainéants.[↩]
9. In the second half of the 20th century, Pierre Plantard proclaimed himself last descendant of the Merovingian dynasty, which in his opinion was then descending from Jesus Christ himself. In this way, he declared to be the pretender to both the thrones of France and Israel. According to him, the occult continuation of the Merovingians allegedly survived under the protection of an “initiatic” organization called “Priory of Sion”. This mystification was believed and spread by a large number of occultists, neo-spiritualists and new-agers such as Gerard de Sède, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln among others. In 1993, Plantard, following a judicial investigation, confessed the hoax. However, his fraud has survived thanks to the worldwide popularization of Dan Brown’s poor novels. Certainly, this mystification was not only an innocent joke, but it reflects the interests of a disturbing network of complicities involving several secret services of nations interested in spreading the idea of a “Franch-Sionist” Great Monarch of the World.[↩]
10. Later, analogously to the triregnum of the popes (the crown corresponding to the hermetic symbolism), also the Emperors had to be invested with three crowns: those of King of Italy, the King of Germany and the King of Arles (Gaul).[↩]
11. The Trivium and the Quadrivium, which will remain throughout the Christian Middle Ages as the base of both worldly (laukika) and sacred (vaidika) knowledge, are closely comparable to the Vedic disciplines called Vedāṅgas.[↩]
12. On that occasion, the Pontiff donated to the King of the Franks the keys of the sepulcher of St. Peter, recognizing him as Defensor Fidei (defender of the Faith). Charlemagne entertained friendly relations also with the Abbasid Caliph Hārūn ar-Rashīd, who, as a sign of sympathy, entrusted to him the keys of the Holy Sepulcher. In this way, Carlo assumed more and more the connotations of a Universal Sovereign (Cakravartin). Another sign of Universal Sovereignty was the spontaneous vassalage of the Kingdoms of Scotland and of Asturias to the newly restored Empire. In this way the Empire of Charles extended to nearly all the territories of western Christianity.[↩]
13. There was still a test to pass: the recognition from the Byzantine Basileus, the Augustus Roman Emperor of the East. At the beginning the Byzantine Court was against the recognition. However, devastated by internal strife due to the usurpation of the Imperial throne by the Basilissa Irene, weakened by the iconoclastic polemics and worn out by the external wars caused by the Islamic expansion, after several protests and even armed clashes with the Empire of the Franks Constantinople yielded and the Emperor Michael in 812 recognized Charlemagne as Roman Emperor of the West.[↩]

The second conversion of Europe to Christianity

Maewyin Succat, later known as St. Patrick, was born around 385 AD in Britain. His father Calpurnius was a Roman patrician and his mother Conchessa a Briton woman of Druidic priestly descent. At the age of sixteen, he was kidnapped by Scots pirates¹ and brought to Ireland. During the period of captivity he became fascinated by the green island and its proud inhabitants.
Ireland was divided into five kingdoms arranged like that number on a game die. There, the flourishing druidic religion was represented by the priestly castes of the druids, bards and filis. In addition to their ritual and sapiential functions, they were fondly dedicated to the arts: music, poetry and chanting above all. The knights, among whom the five Kings of Ireland were chosen, were a bellicose caste, impetuous, fond of every martial art, perpetually at war and, in peacetime, dedicated to piracy².
After a few years of captivity, Patrick managed to escape and made his way to Gaul (today’s France), where, in the city of Auxerre of the Burgundians, he studied to become a Christian priest. Once a priest, he became a monk in the Hermitage of Lérins³ in an island off the cost of Provence, in southern France. His love for Ireland, however, prompted him to return there to preach Christianity. There he expounded his doctrine to the Kings of the island in presence of the druids. They recognized that the Christianity preached by St. Patrick was not incompatible with the ancestral tradition of the Scots. Therefore, the Kings decided to convert together with all their subjects⁴. The druids, the Celtic priests, became monks and assumed all the exterior form of Christian exoterism. However, they kept within them the ancient Druidic initiation. Thus began what was later called the Culdean Church.
The Culdees⁵, like their predecessors the Druids, lived as hermits in areas far from population centres, cultivating knowledge and various forms of sciences and arts. Everyone followed his teacher’s instructions, without there being a common rule⁶. Few of them then assumed the priesthood, regarded as an excessive worldly and secular activity. The metaphysical and cosmological knowledge of the Celtic Druids was thus preserved and handed down in the Christian form. With the Irish conquest of the current Scotland, the Culdean Church began to spread throughout the Briton Isles. When those islands suffered the disastrous invasion of the Anglo-Saxon barbarians, the Culdees played the same function of “ark” for the survival of the Druid-Christian initiatic tradition, just as the Latin monasteries were doing in Italy, Spain and Gaul⁷.
As described in 29th chapter, the situation of the clergy in the Christian Church dependent on the Pope had already lapsed to the maximum of degeneration. The priests often ignored so much as the rite of baptism and the required sacramental formulas. The clergy had no doctrinal formation and their conduct was exceedingly reprehensible. Since the establishing of the tithe system⁸, loafers became priests with sole the purpose of living without working. At that time, the celibacy of priests had not yet become a requisite, therefore they took advantage of the situation cohabiting with numerous concubines.
Moreover, the priests longing for an ecclesiastical career were committing themselves to making friends with bishops, with barbarian leaders, with the lords of the villæ, becoming accomplices of the numerous abuses and crimes of that period of disorder that followed the fall of the Empire. The Latin monks defended themselves against such corruption by cutting relations with exterior clergy as much as possible.
In that way, the Culdean monks undertook a work of re-Christianization of continental Europe. During all the 6th century many Scot monks moved to the continent, thus making an example of a forgotten spiritual life. Like the druids in Ireland who had been closely tied to the knight families, these Scot hermits that settled in Europe tightened relations with Roman families and with Benedictine monasteries, becoming their teachers. Furthermore, with their techniques and artistic skills they contributed in the refinement of the new environments in which they were installed⁹.
In the following century, an action of doctrinal correction of Catholicism was undertaken by Briton monks, disciples of Scot masters, and in the 8th century even by Angles, by then civilized¹⁰. Among these we mention the famous Bede, the Venerable (673-735), a learned saint who knew Greek and Hebrew languages, as well as Latin. His writings were dedicated to the explanation of the initiatic symbolism of the classical texts, of the Bible and of Patristic literature. He also wrote of history, of science, but the most remarkable element is that in his theological writings the apophatic doctrines of Dionysius the Areopagite and the Severinus Boethius’ Neoplatonism were resumed. In this transmission line (paramparā) must be included Scotus Eriugena (810-877), whose metaphysical writings will be followed later by the school of the Franco-Scot masters of the abbey of St. Victor in Paris, and finally by Dante and Meister Eckhart.
The reconversion of Western Europe reached its full success with St. Boniface (680-754) a disciple of the Scot Willibrordus; the Angle Boniface (born Wynfrith) left towards Germany with some Culdean monks to convert the barbarian peoples who had settled there. The King of the Franks, Charles Martel, commissioned him to evangelize Hesse and Thuringia, which had recently become part of his Kingdom. St. Boniface realized that the Culdean monks were disconnected from each other and that therefore their action, even if notable, proceeded slowly. Therefore, he went to Rome and requested the Pope to appoint him as bishop; soon after he entered the Benedictine monastic order. With this new office, and with the Benedictine structure behind him, he went back to Germany. There he organized the Culdees into the order of St. Benedict, enforcing his Episcopal authority. He soon appointed several other bishops and led the subordinated Celt monks with firm hand.
The state of the ancestral religion of the Germanic peoples was severely declining, mainly due to the absence of their own priesthood¹¹. Boniface challenged the German Gods, demonstrating with prodigies and miracles the ineffectiveness of their religion. His action was carried out at all levels. King and Princes bent over his authority; he restored most of the laws of the late Roman Empire, adapting them to the new situation. He swept away the old corrupt clergy and sent his emissaries all over Germany, Gaul, Italy and Spain. In Rome the Popes, who were succeeding one after another, listened reverently to his teachings. And the entire Latin clergy of Europe, recognizing his spiritual supremacy, followed his wise injunctions. In this way also the Catholic hierarchy underwent a certain rectification. Furthermore, from his abbey of Fulda he restored Catholicism from the theological point of view, imposing on Christian exoterism the doctrinal positions derived from his initiatic knowledge. Without his action almost certainly Catholicism would have disappeared. He played a profound function on the esoteric, religious and temporal levels, which only St. Bernard could equal four centuries later¹².
Bringing together Charles, King the Franks, and Pope Stephen II, St. Boniface had carefully planned the resurrection of the Western Roman Empire¹³.

Petrus Simonet de Maisonneuve

---

1. The Celts of Ireland were called Scots by the Romans. In the 6th century, the Scots invaded the north of the Briton Isles, founding a Kingdom known thereafter as Scotland.[↩]
2. Cfr. https://www.vedavyasamandala.com/20-celtic-tradition.[↩]
3. Later the hermitage became a Benedictine monastery, and then part of the Cistercian Benedictine order.
   [↩]
4. In the Gospel, the recognition of the Messianity of Jesus took place through the simple village-to-village exposition of the doctrine. If the villagers accepted the “good news”, then they would all become followers of Christ. If, on the other hand, the village refused the doctrine expounded by the apostle or the disciple, then the preacher would leave without insisting further. Another modality of expansion, which the primitive Church assumed, was the conversion of the Kings, just as it happened in Ireland during the period we are dealing with. Already in the first century AD the King of Edessa and the Emperor of Ethiopia had converted to the Christian doctrine, involving all their subjects in this decision. This second form of conversion became regular and lasted throughout the Middle Ages. The last attempt of this kind was probably that of St. Francis, who in 1219 tried unsuccessfully to convert the Muslim Sultan of Egypt. Subsequently, and with the loss of the initiatic tradition, the Catholic Church put into action the missionary movement, aimed at the conversion of the weak, ignorant and defenseless classes of non-Christian peoples, making unscrupulous use of any cunning means including deception, infiltration and extortion, dishonestly pretending to provide food to the hungry and medicines to the ill, focusing on the “social” and neglecting the “spiritual” domain. Missionarism, which pursues the goal of increasing the number of Catholics without worrying about their quality, represents a real cancer for non-Christian traditions and is, in fact, only an instrument of political and economic penetration in the hands of the most profane Western civilization. This phenomenon has also corrupted the Church from within, diverting ecclesiastics from all interest in God, in transcendence and in the posthumous destinies of their followers.[↩]
5. Term of uncertain etymology: in Irish they are called Ceile De, “the people of God”; in Scottish Keldei, “the Celts”; in English Culdees, “the servants of God” (?); in Latin Cultores Dei, “the devotees of God”. It is probable that the term contains a meaning implying a priestly wisdom. In more ancient times, the use of the title “Chaldeans” was attributed to the priests of Mesopotamia.[↩]
6. For this reason, it has been suggested that they were not really monks. However, before the institution of the first monastic rule in the Western Empire by St. Benedict, every monk followed his own rule, as described by the Greek word μόνος, solitary. As far as Ireland is concerned, St. Finnian, founder and master of the abbey of Clonard, sent his twelve disciples to found other cœnobs in all the Briton Isles. Among them we mention St. Columba of Iona, who founded his school in Scotland, St. Brendan, protagonist of the initiatic journey in the work Navigatio sancti Brendani, St. Columban, founder of numerous cœnobies in the kingdoms of the Franks and the Lombards and, finally, his disciple St. Gallus. All Saints of the Culdean Church are also recognized by the Orthodox Church.[↩]
7. Also the Celtic chivalrous circles served as “arks” to overcome the barbaric flood. Thanks to their contribution, traditions in many ways similar to the bhakta and śākta of India were transmitted to the Middle Ages. In the next chapters, we will return extensively on this subject.[↩]
8. Every believer had to pay one tenth of the annual income to his parish priest to guarantee his maintenance.[↩]
9. Particularly, we remember the decorative elements in the miniated manuscripts and the Gregorian chant.[↩]
10. We remind the reader that the Scots and the Britons were Celts, while the Angles and Saxons were Germans landed on the British Isles with the barbarian invasions. The modern use of the term “Anglo-Saxon” seems to have forgotten its Germanic origin. Now, if the present English population is descendant of the Angles and the Saxons, this term is not appropriate to define the “white americans”; they indeed represent an indistinguishable mixture of immigrants coming from all over Europe.[↩]
11. Strabo testifies to the existence of Druidesses among the Germanic peoples. From his descriptions, however, that appears to be a shamanic and not a priestly category. Therefore the greatest difference between Celts and Germans seems to be the total absence of priesthood among the latter ones.[↩]
12. St. Boniface also instituted the use of the Christmas fir-tree that the today’s catholic pseudo priests oppose considering it, in their ignorance, a pagan symbol![↩]
13. Vita e lettere di san Bonifacio, translation, introduction, notes by Enrica Mascherpa, Noci, Bari, 1991.[↩]

The Flood and the Ark

The barbarian populations, fleeing before the push of the Huns proceeding from the East, sought refuge in the westernmost Roman provinces. In this way the Eastern Roman Empire¹ suffered much less the invasions by the Anglo-Saxon peoples. For the Western Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions represented a universal flood, a real pralaya that ended the glorious historical cycle of Roman rule, which lasted for more than twelve centuries. The invasions were catastrophic: the splendid Latin civilization was struck to the ground, the cities were devastated and burned, the population exterminated, the houses, the temples, the churches, the palaces, looted. The Roman roads passed under the control of marauding raiders.​
Only a few islands of peace resisted this slaughter. Like arks, they managed to ferry the ancient Roman civilization through the troubled waters of the barbaric flood. The first category of peace islands were the monasteries. The orthodox-catholic² monks, who until then conducted a solitary life as hermits or in small cœnobia, began to gather and live in larger communities, protected by strong walls. In fact, the monasteries became real fortresses, capable of resisting the barbarian hordes. Every monk lived in his cell following his ascetic rule of life. With the passage of time, the monks, in order to coexist peacefully, adopted a set of norms to establish the common rule.​ In this way the monks shared tasks both in the manual and in the intellectual activities. Thus, the monasteries became the centres of the monastic initiation schools, which from this period assumed the name of Hesychasm³. As far as was possible in such dangerous times, the monks also dedicated themselves to collecting the manuscripts of ancient knowledge, saving them from the destructive raids of the barbarians, and multiply their copies by the artistic hands of the amanuensis monks. Therefore, it can be said that for several centuries the monasteries transmitted the priestly initiatory wisdom (brahmavidyā) and the knowledge of ancient pre-Christian wisdom.​
Another “ark” that served as mean to survive the barbaric pralaya were the villæ⁴ (villas), the sumptuous farming estates of the Roman patricians who had taken refuge in the countryside fleeing before the pillage of the cities. The villæ were large fortified palaces which later, as the danger of the invaders rose, turned into real fortresses, castra, and castles, castella⁵. During the Empire, the Roman patricians who had fortified villas were usually Army chiefs of staff (principes officiorum militiæ) at the order of a general in chief (dux, i.e. duke) or even of the very Imperator. In addition to these, also senior officers (comites, literally comrades, counts) – who accompanied the general as members of Army chief staff led by the princeps – and the vicecomites (i.e. viscounts) – those who could replace the comes (i.e. count) in his absence – could have possessed such structures. That was how the villæ of the Roman patricians, properties of princes, counts and viscounts resisted the barbarian hordes⁶.​
In the villa the patrician kept the militiæ formed mainly by knights (equites). To maintain the functionality of their possessions (latifundium) the lord (dominus) welcomed within their walls every type of craftsmen, merchants and peasants. In this way, the transmission of the craftsmen initiations (collegia fabrorum, sskr. śreṇi) were also preserved for centuries, along with their techniques and arts. As for the milites or equites (i.e. the knights), they perpetuated the initiation of the warrior classes (sskr. vīra mārga) as well as the martial, tactical and strategic arts of the Roman Empire. It was inside the villæ that the title of Imperator was retained and transmitted, not as head of state, but as master (sskr. guru) of the martial initiatory ways (magister militum, sskr. rājagurutva)⁷.​
The leaders of the barbarian tribes who took control of Italy always remained fascinated by the ancient glory of Rome, the “Eternal City”. They never dared to usurp the Imperial title. They respected the Roman institutions, such as the Consulate and the Senate, even if they were now devoid of any real power. Moreover,  they declared themselves vassals of the Emperor of the Eastern Empire, at least formally. At most, they aspired to be recognized as equals of the patricians. And so it was that Odoacer was recognized as a Roman patrician by the Senate, and when he proclaimed himself King of Italy, the Roman Senate validated his title. However, the ruler of the Heruli eventually sought to expand his dominion in the territories of the Eastern Empire. Therefore, the Emperor of Constantinople ordered Theodoric, barbarian King of the Ostrogoths and general at the orders of the Empire, to march against him. Theodoric defeated and killed King Odoacer and took possession of Italy in the name of the Emperor. Eventually, also Theodoric was recognized as a patrician by the Senate of Rome.​
The barbarian Kings of Italy constantly tried to fit into the Imperial tradition by securing the services of Roman spiritual masters and warrior masters. However, Odoacer and Theodoric eventually came into conflict with the Latin civilization. They were both followers of the heretical Arian Church and, although at the beginning of their reign they got along with the Pope and the other Catholic bishops, with the passage of time they became more and more hostile.​
King Theodoric, for example, went so far as to kill his own spiritual master, the Roman senator and consul Severinus Bœthius, and two Popes after imprisoning them. Even the patrician senator Cassiodorus, who was the military master⁸ of Theodoric, his minister and advisor, had tense relations with the King until he was able to convince him to improve relations with the Catholic Church and with the Senate of Rome. At the death of Theodoric, Cassiodorus remained as councelor of his two successors. When very old, he became a monk and founded the monastery of Vivarium in Southern Italy where he died at the age of ninety-five, not far from where Pythagoras had taught eleven centuries before⁹. During the time when the elderly Theodoric persecuted the Roman population and the Church of Rome, the Eastern Empire launched an armed intervention to free the territories of the ancient Western Empire from the barbarians¹⁰. The Emperor Justinian sent his general (magister militum) Belisarius to Northern Africa, Spain and Italy. The Byzantine expeditions were an extraordinary success: North Africa was subtracted from the Vandals and Southern Spain from the Visigoths. Furthermore, the Italian campaign brought back a large part of the Ostrogoths’ Kingdom under Imperial control. However, the conflict that Byzantium had to endure against Persia on its eastern border made this reconquest ephemeral.
In the mid-sixth century, the Lombards (or Longobards), expelled from the Balkans by the Byzantine armies, invaded Italy¹¹, overthrowing the Ostrogoth Kingdom. A barbarian people particularly infamous for their ferocity and savagery, they suffered the influence and fascination of Rome more than any other tribe of invaders. After a ruinous beginning, the Longobards soon converted from Arianism to Catholicism, assumed the Latin language as their own and reworked and restored the Roman laws. They were also the first to create a Roman-barbarian style of art. The Lombard King of Italy, who resided in the North, made a donation of several castles to the Pope, thus allowing the Church to establish its temporal power. As a result, an independent state began to take shape, of which the Vatican is the last remnant.
To justify the foundation of the papal State, in the 9th century the Pope’s scribes forged several documents, among which the most important is the so-called “Donation of Constantine”. According to these documents, the Emperor Constantine had recognized the Pope as head of all the Patriarchates, of the Bishoprics and of the clergy of the East and the West. The Pope would have also been granted a territory as the initial seed of the future papal Dominion. In addition, Constantine would have recognized the superiority of the papal authority over the imperial one. These documents, unquestionably false, were the pretext for all claims of papal supremacy on all Christian Churches, on the Christian Empire, Kingdoms and Princedoms, which in fact has perpetuated until today.
The situation of the Papacy, of the Catholic hierarchy and of the priests during the centuries of the barbarian invasions was marked by the greatest level corruption and the almost complete ignorance¹² of ritual and doctrinal matters. In particular, the priests hideously neglected their duties, taking advantage of the benefits and donations they received from faithful believers and leading a vicious life.​
Bishops and popes devoted themselves to the most shameless and deceptive policy only to increase their power and wealth. It was this degenerate situation that induced St. Benedict of Nursia to forbid the entry of priests into the monasteries.

Petrus Simonet de Maisonneuve

---

1. The Eastern Empire had as its capital Byzantium, which the Emperor Constantine I renamed Constantinople (the present Turkish city of Istanbul). With the collapse of the Western Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire slowly moved away from its Latin origins, until it adopted Greek as its official language. The same capital, Constantinople, over the centuries, took back the ancient name of Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire still survived for a millennium when, in 1453, it fell under the dominion of the Ottoman Turks.[↩]
2. At the time of the Emperor Theodosius (379-395) the Christian Church assumed the titles of “Catholic and Orthodox”, that is “universal and with right doctrine”. Later, with the separation of the Latin Church from the Greek one, the first preferred the title of “Catholic” without renouncing to consider itself “Orthodox”; on the contrary, the Greek Church redeemed the title of “Orthodox”, without renouncing to consider itself to be “Universal”.[↩]
3. From the Greek ἡσυχία (read esykhìa), the path of spiritual peace (sskr. śānta sādhana).[↩]
4. With the passing of the centuries the villæ gave shelter to a greater number of refugees, transforming into towns.[↩]
5. Castellum is the diminutive of castrum, military base.[↩]
6. The authentic origin of feudalism is to be found in the hierarchical and initiatic structure of the Roman Army. The fabrication divulged by the Enlightenment that attributed the birth of the feudal system to the barbaric kingdoms had the sole purpose of representing it as an uncivilized regime opposed to the most civilized forms of bourgeois government as, for example, that of the Terror, the result of the French Revolution.[↩]
7. We should not be surprised if in the history books there is no mention of the traditional transmission of the villæ, whereas the themes on the monasteries are profusely treated. This is due to the anti-imperial propaganda operated initially by the Church of Rome, later recovered and exacerbated by bourgeois and proletarian ideologies.[↩]
8. He held the office of comes sacrarum largitionum (Count of sacred donations), maintaining relations with the surviving Latin chivalric organizations.[↩]
9. Both Severinus Bœthius and Cassiodorus, although both Catholics, continued to transmit the Roman Pythagorean initiation. Moreover, in his youth Severinus Bœthius studied at Alexandria of Egypt where he was initiated into the Neoplatonic school. Both these masters have left important works, such as De consolatione philosophiæ (Initiation to philosophy: in a future chapter we will explain the use of the Latin term consolatio or consolamentum for initiation) by Boethius, and De Anima (On the Soul) by Cassiodorus.[↩]
10. A specific chapter will be dedicated to the Eastern Empire and the Orthodox Christian religion.[↩]
11. However, the Byzantine presence remained in many parts of Italy throughout the 8th century, which the Longobards had never been able to eradicate. In fact, for several centuries the Republic of Venice remained as a representative of the presence of the Byzantine civilization in the italic peninsula.[↩]
12. There were, of course, praiseworthy exceptions, such as the monk St. Benedict of Nursia, the Pope St. Gregory the Great, the hermit St. Calogerus of Sicily and others[↩]

The Roman Empire and Christianity

As previously described in chapter XIX of this series, the Roman Empire, as an institution, was an initiatic hierarchy that overlapped the Republic, without altering the structure of the latter. The Emperor was the supreme head of the army and, at the same time, was the Grand Master of chivalric initiations. However, only a patrician could become Emperor and, as such, he was also the head of both the priestly initiatic hierarchy and the hierarchy of the exterior priesthood. The first magisterial power corresponded to Rex Sacrorum, King of the sacred, as for example the sacrificial affairs¹; the second charge was that of Pontifex Maximus, head of the minor priesthood hierarchies that included the temple priests (sskr. mahānta or simple pūjārī and arcaka), the àugures and the harùspices. Therefore, the Emperor represented all that was sacred in Roman religion, both at the esoteric and the exoteric levels, embodying both the priestly-patrician function and the warrior-chivalric one as guarantee of the regularity of the Republic. The Emperor was therefore divine (Divus) because he represented all that is sacred².
The Jews’ refusal to honor Rome by making due offers to the images of the Emperor was considered by the Romans to be a rebellion against the mission of the Roman Peace (Pax Romana). The Jews considered that the only King recognized by them was their God Yehovah, rejecting in an exasperated way any recognition of the dominant authority³. The Christians inherited this fanatical attitude from the Jews and therefore incurred the same malevolence of the Empire. What the Romans could not accept was the refusal of the converts to Christianity to pay homage to the Emperor. In fact, they, who first brought flowers and fruit in front of the image of the Emperor and lit incense in his honour, suddenly refused to recognize its authority. This was considered a betrayal.
Even though several Emperors granted to the Jews the abstention from the imperial homage in exchange for the payment of a tax⁴, they never forgave the converted Christians for their stance, considering them as traitors and subversive sectarians. Rome was always tolerant of the religions of the conquered lands. Roman religion never knew neither proselytism nor missionarism⁵, so much so that it did not have the weapons to defend against the invasion of Christian proselytism. This explains why periodic riots broke out against Christians, which the Imperial authorities made their own. However, Christian propaganda greatly exaggerated the scope of these events⁶. We have already clarified that at the time of Emperor Nero the trial against Jews and Christians for the great fire of Rome ended only with the condemnation of those who confessed the crime. The second “persecution” occurred during Domitian’s Empire (81-96 AD). In reality this was a trial against several Senators and a Consul for trying to overthrow the Emperor from the throne. In addition to the various political accusations there were also aggravating circumstances indicating that the accused had assumed Jewish behaviours and that perhaps they were Crypto-Christians. The other “persecutions” actually demonstrated the traditional tolerance of Rome towards foreign cults. The accusations for concrete offences had to be supported by evidence. Furthermore, anonymous complaints were not accepted. This does not mean that in many provinces of the Empire did not arise popular movements against Christians with the undeclared support of the local governors. The real great persecution came under the Emperor Diocletian (284-305 AD).
However one must first understand the reasons behind it. Diocletian became Emperor after a serious institutional crisis of the Empire. In fifty years, twenty-two Emperors succeeded one another after fierce strife and bloodshed. The immense Empire at that time was administered by countless small provincial officials who, in the absence of a strong central power, took advantage of the situation to enrich themselves by indiscriminately exploiting the territories and the resources under their jurisdiction.
When the strong man came to power, that is, Diocletian, he found himself in a disarrayed and bankrupt empire, in the hands of corrupt, treacherous and rapacious officials. The only support he had was from the army that had acclaimed him as Emperor. With an iron fist, he punished the profiteering civil officers, he set price ceilings wherever they had been skyrocketed by speculators. To better govern the immense territory, he divided the Empire into two parts ruled by two Augusti Emperors. In turn the Augusti divided their halves of the Empire into two further parts, sharing the responsibility of government with two Cæsares Emperors. The two Augusti and the two Cæsares were called Tetrarchs⁷.
Among the various actions that Diocletian took to strengthen the Empire there was the resumption of the persecution of the Christians. They continued to refuse homage to the Emperor at a time when a strong restoration of his authority was needed. Moreover, when the Emperor could only rely on the army, those who were Christian declared themselves pacifists and refused to carry arms. The wrath of Diocletian was then unleashed against the structure of the Church, which was seen as a state within the state. It was especially his Caesar, Galerius, who decided to outlaw the priestly hierarchy and the Christian public worship. In some cases there were indeed trials that ended with death sentences, but they were few in number and, in any case, motivated by accusations of treason against the State.
We must also add that in these first three centuries the prevailing Church, the one based in Rome, which also enjoyed the support of the Churches of the most important cities of the Empire, such as Alexandria, Edessa, Antioch, etc., had increasingly moved away from its Semitic origins, often integrating doctrines, rituals and symbols from other religions of the Empire. This had made Christianity more agreeable to the Roman palate, eventually resulting in the baptism of numerous patricians and knights who represented the social elite of the Empire. In addition, the crisis of the Empire of the period before Diocletian coincided with a moment of collapse of the ancient Roman religion. The oracles had gone out, and of the ancient Mysteric sanctuaries only Eleusis survived. The original religion of the Romans evidently had not been able to adapt to the times. No priestly personality (comparable to that function which is represented in India by Veda Vyāsa) had appeared to restore the ancient doctrines and to revive rituals and sacrifices. The Romans turned more and more to the religions and initiatic ways of the peoples they had dominated: the Egyptian religion with the Isis Mysteries; the Chaldean Mysteries; the cult of the Unconquered Sun (Invictus Sol) and the Mithraic Mysteries of Persian origin; the Druidic religion, especially in the northern regions of the Empire.
In short, Roman religion, which had deliberately identified itself with the State with the purpose of creating the Empire, was no longer satisfactory at the intellectual and emotional levels. The persecution of Diocletian did not bring any useful results, and in 311 AD the very Galerius had no option but to declare Christianity religio licita (licit religion).
In 313 AD the new Emperor Augustus, Constantine I, restored to Christianity the total freedom of worship, on a par with the other religions of the Empire. As Emperor of Rome, Constantine⁸ was also the Supreme Pontiff, and in this capacity he hierarchically placed himself above the bishop of Rome and all the other bishops and Christian patriarchs. It was as Pontifex Maximus that Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, referred to in the previous chapter, obtaining the public obedience of all the bishops, including the pope⁹.
The Christianization of the Empire led to a decrease in the number of soldiers in the army, as Christians unwillingly lent themselves to military life. To replace these defections, Rome decided to enlist in its legions the barbarians from the regions at the border of the Empire¹⁰. This was a fatal mistake. By doing so Rome left the security of the State in the hands of its worst enemies.
It was precisely under the weak Christian Emperors successors of Constantine that the barbarians came to control the Roman army. The only attempt at restoration took place with the Emperor Julian, called the Apostate (330-363). Baptized as a child, Julian abjured Christianity, assumed the Roman religion and was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Mithraic Mysteries.
After becoming Emperor he began to purge the Christians from the heart of the State and the army. Great warrior and profound philosopher, Julian wanted to Romanize the barbarians by engaging them in a series of victorious enterprises. In this way he wanted to conquer the loyalty of the barbarians who fought with him. But his adventure did not last long. He was killed in Persia during a battle, struck from behind by a Christian, or so goes the story¹¹.
In 375 AD, the Emperor Gratian refused the title of Pontifex Maximus (Supreme Pontiff). This title was immediately usurped by Pope St. Damasus, without any regular transmission from the imperial side. Damasus, whom the Church calls “saint”, was in fact an individual eager for power, capable of unleashing any violence in order to affirm his authority, which was questioned by many bishops and by their Churches. The truth is that following the edict of Constantine, the exterior hierarchy of the Church quickly degenerated in the pursuit of wealth, privileges and earthly power. This resulted in a decline in the wisdom and transmission of the rites that reached its apogee during the 7th century. True Christian wisdom was limited to hermits and isolated monastic communities¹².
It was under the Emperor Theodosius (347-395) that Christianity was declared official religion of the State. From that moment, all access to the temples of the gods, sacrifices, and Roman religious feasts were forbidden. The ancient Roman religion was contemptuously called pagan, from the Latin word pagus or “rustic” (country or village).
In the early 4th century there was a massive shift of the Asian population of the Huns to the West. The Germanic barbarian populations took refuge in the territories of west Europe, demolishing the administrative structures and defenses of the Western Roman Empire. The Huns came to threaten Italy and its new capital, Milan. The Roman army alone with the help of the barbarian hordes managed to drive the Huns back to the Danube. The welfare of the Western Empire was therefore preserved also thanks to the contribution of the barbarians who were welcomed as saviours, when in reality they were only another invader. Even leaders of the Roman army were often barbarians. And so it was that Odoacer, kKing of the Heruli and general of the Roman Empire, deposed in 476 AD the last Emperor Romulus Augustus, assuming the title of King of Italy¹³. Thus, the collapse of the Imperial power in the West allowed the barbarian peoples to seize vast abandoned territories: first the Angles and then the Saxons in Britain, the Visigoths in Spain, the Vandals in Sardinia and North Africa, the Franks in the north of Gaul, the Burgundians in the center of Gaul, the Swabians in Portugal. The Imperial ecumene in the West was over.

​Gian Giuseppe Filippi

---

1. The flamina (sskr. brāhmaṇa), holders of the sacrificial sciences, depended on the King.[↩]
2. This representation of the sacredness was the guarantee of the protection of the Gods on the State. It is untrue that the Emperor considered himself a God, as the Christian polemists claim. The Emperors knew very well they were mortal, but the protection of the Gods that they guaranteed to the Empire indicated them as “divine”. As a matter of fact, in classical Latin also the Christian saint was called divus. Only in medieval Latin the title of sanctus eventually prevailed over the former. On the other hand, since the title of “saint” is attributed to those who after death has reached heaven, it does not mean that the title of “Holiness” attributed to the Pope assures that he will obtain posthumous salvation. As in Dante’ Divine Comedy, Hell is home to many passed Popes, even if in life they were called “Holiness”.[↩]
3. In truth, they recognized any King, whether he was anointed or not, as long as he was a Jew. This shows that their refusal to pay homage to the Roman Emperor was indeed motivated by simple racial reasons.[↩]
4. This does not mean that Roman authorities did not intervene heavily against the Jews on several cases of religious mystification. For example, when the Jews of Rome tried to spread the cult of Jupiter Sabatius with the surreptitious purpose of having the Sabbath day declared as rest day all over the Empire. Or when the Jews circulated false prophecies of an alleged “Jewish Sybil” who predicted the imminent end of the Roman Empire only with the objective of provoking psychological insecurity and political instability.[↩]
5. Proselytism corresponds to the conviction of one to the doctrine being preached by someone. Once the superiority of that doctrine is demonstrated, the former accept to become proselyte or disciple of the latter who has convinced him. Traditionally, when a sovereign happened to became a proselyte, his people too followed his choice. However, missionarism uses any legal or illegal means to penetrate different populations and to distract them from their traditional cults by corrupting their behavior through economic, health, educational assistance, or creeping into their social and political context, bringing tension and division by means of blackmail and coercive propaganda.[↩]
6. In 2011, Pope John Paul II consecrated the Colosseum to the Christian martyrs who allegedly were given to the lions there. However, there is no historical testimony from either the Roman or the Christian side proving that the Colosseum was the scene of any martyrdom.[↩]
7. Miraculously, this arrangement proved very successful and was never the cause of the disunity of the Empire.[↩]
8. If it is true that the mother of Constantine, St. Helena, was a Christian, the conversion of Constantine is devoid of any serious evidence. He certainly was a follower of the Persian religion of Invictus Sol and initiated into the Mithriac Mysteries. His conversion is affirmed only by apologetic Christian sources. It is significant that these apologists, as for example Lattantius, narrate the conversion of Constantine while they remain silent about his function as Pontifex Maximus, which was the highest authority for all the religions of the Empire and recognized as such by the entire Christian hierarchy.[↩]
9. It is from this period that the bishop of Rome assumed the title of Pope, from the Greek πάπας (pàpas), father.[↩]
10. With the term barbarians, the Romans meant no longer only foreigners, but also populations that belonged to uncultivated civilizations, devoid of spiritual religions and virtuous customs. For the most part, the barbarians were crude warriors dedicated to brigandage and violence. These populations belonged particularly to the Germanic group. Among them the Angles and the Saxons, the Goths, the Alemanni, the Franks, the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Marcomanni, the Gepids and the Heruli. To these must be added the Huns, a Central Asian population of Turkish stock that played a significant role in the crisis of the Western Roman Empire. In contact with the new Christian Empire, the barbarians were converted to the Aryan Church. This was a further reason for friction with the Church of Rome. The barbarian populations had always manifested a spontaneous inclination for heterodoxy. It is not by chance that even today the most mutable forms of Protestantism flourish wherever there are Anglo-Saxons, Germans and Scandinavians.[↩]
11. The Christian legend sanctified the murderer of the Emperor Julian with the name of “Saint Mercury”.[↩]
12. Only rarely were the monks also priests. The divergence between degenerate secular priests and authentically spiritual monks reached its peak when numerous monastic rules (including that of St. Benedict of Nursia) prohibited the access of priests to monasteries.[↩]
13. Romulus Augustus, fatally, bore the name of the first King and first Emperor of Rome. Despite everything, the prestige and sacredness of Roman Empire prevented Odoacer from proclaiming himself an Imperator. He then sent the insignia and the Lares (ancestors images) of the city of Rome to Constantinople, to the Emperor of the East. With this symbolic gesture, the Emperor Zeno returned to be, at least theoretically, the only ruler of both the Eastern and Western Empire[↩]

The esoterism-exoterism separation in the primitive Church

In the epistles, St. Paul shows good knowledge of the Greek Mysteric doctrines. In particular, like the Pythagoreans and the Platonists, in the human aggregate he distinguished three levels: the gross body (ὕλη, read hỳle, the substance), the soul (ψυχή, read psykhé) and the spirit¹ (πνεῦμα, read pnéuma)². In this way, depending on the preponderance of one level on the others, he divided human beings into three categories: carnal, psychic and pneumatic (I Corinthians, 15.44). This corresponds exactly to the Hindū tripartition of the human types in tāmasa, rājasa and sāttvika. By explicit statement, St. Paul taught the doctrine by adapting it to these three levels, according to the disciples to whom he addressed: “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the intellect (noùs) of Christ. And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?”³ (I Cor. 2.12-3.3).
Thus, St. Paul was not only the creator of Christian exoterism in his religious form, but also a master of initiation (dīkṣāguru) for “psychic” and “pneumatic” disciples. Yet, one last problem remains to be solved: if St. Paul never met Jesus Christ, who gave him the transmission of the Christian teaching? The answer is already included in the previous quotation: he received it directly from the spirit (anugrāha) coming from God. We know that after being dazzled by a sudden intuition, he turned to a group of initiates living in Damascus. They, and especially such Ananias, instructed him. There is no doubt that this was an Essene group that took shelter in that city. Therefore, the source of St. Paul was the same that had sent Jesus among the Jews as Messiah⁴. Thus, in St. Paul we find the confluence of two initiatic paths: a Hellenistic Gnostic⁵ one and an Essene one.
A similar function also played the kohen John, the Evangelist. At first, he was a disciple of St. John the Baptist, i.e. an Essene; later he became one of the secret disciples of Christ⁶. His Gospel, although it was the most Gnostic among the canonical ones, was also addressed to the masses of followers of the newborn Christianity. His initiatic work is the Apocalypse, a text that poses unsurpassable difficulties to an exterior theological interpretation. In the Apocalypse we find the concept of the three levels of man and, on that basis, the conception of the transmigration of the souls and the alternation of the cosmic cycles: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.” (Apocalypse, 21.1) Also in St. John is evident the knowledge of the esoteric doctrines of both the Hellenistic Gnosis and the Essenism.
Those who followed an initiatic path of the Christian esoterism of the first centuries had two choices of life: the first one consisted of monastic isolation, especially in desert areas, far from villages and cities. We only know the name of some personalities famous for their teachings, because the life they led preferred anonymity and isolation. Therefore, these monks mainly followed the anachoretic tradition of the Essenes. The other choice of life was that of the schools (similar to the Śaṃkara Pīṭhas) with a fixed location where disciples gathered around a teacher. Among these the most prestigious center for the production of texts of high initiatic content was certainly the school of Alexandria in Egypt. In this case it is easy to rebuild its paramparā. The first important name is that of Dionysius the Areopagite⁷. He was an Athenian citizen, member of the Supreme Court (the Aeropagus) of the city. He was one of the few Greeks to become a disciple of St. Paul. His fundamental teaching is the so-called negative theology⁸ (apophatic, sskr. nirguṇa prakriyā), which Dionysius taught as the highest method to attain the knowledge of God. The method (prakriyā) consisted in a progressive removal of all attributes, considered as limitations to the infinity of God. Completed the removal of any superimposition on God, the evidence of Divinity emerges spontaneously. According to Dionysius the Areopagite the ascent of the soul occurs in three stages: purification, illumination, union. These three stages correspond to three initiatic levels: the purified, the contemplating and “the integrated in the One”; the last degree constitutes the culmination of theosis, the divinization. More precisely, it is through certain “particular rites” that the purification of the “profane” is carried out; a purification that constitutes “the holy rebirth in God”. In the second level “the already purified”, who is “now in the immutable possession of a very pure condition of the mind”, participates in “certain rites” that allow “the illumination and contemplation of certain sacred mysteries”. Finally, he who enters the third degree is considered worthy “to receive a particular consecrating formula of invocation”. This degree implies the “full enlightenment on those mysteries that one had been contemplating” during the second stage⁹.
We ignore the name of his direct successor. However, in his line of masters we find St. Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD). Titus Flavius Clemens, an Athenian of Roman origins, was undoubtedly initiated at first to the Eleusinian Mysteries, obtaining the spiritual experiences mentioned in his writings. As such, he is the richest source of information on this ancient Greek initiatic paths. Once converted to Christianity, Clement began to wander in all the most important initiatic sanctuaries of the Roman Empire. He visited Magna Graecia in Italy, where he came into contact with the Pythagorean schools. He went to Syria where he met the Chaldean priests. In Egypt he became a disciple of an Egyptian priest and there he met some Buddhist monks. He settled in Alexandria where he became a disciple of St. Pantænus¹⁰, who was previously a Pythagorean, then a Christian monk disciple of Ammonius Saccas, the founder of the Alexandrian neo-Platonic school. Pantænus was also associated with the continuers of the Kabbalistic school of Philo (20 BC-45 AD)¹¹. Clement soon became the most important author of the Christian school of Alexandria. He wrote the Paidagogos, the Hypotyposeis and the Protreptikos in which he exposes the teachings of Christ for the community of his believers, and the important book Stromateis which, as he himself said, was addressed to a “small élite of perfect Christians, the true Gnostics”. He is the first Father of the Church who distinguishes the exoteric Christians who follow Christ by faith from the initiates who pursue his knowledge. In the same way he affirms that Christian believers can avoid hell (naraka) after death and aspire to salvation in heaven (svarga) through prayer and participation in Christian rites. On the contrary, through Christian esoterism, the Gnostics (jñāni) can be initiated into the divine Mysteries and eventually obtain the “divinization” (θέωσις, read théosis). However, in order to do so,  the Gnostic would first have to  follow a path of purification or purgatory¹² (κάθαρσις, read kàtharsis) by means of interiorized rituals. After the purification is completed, the Gnostic can obtain the direct contemplation of God (θεωρία, read theorìa¹³) and eventually become one with Him with the “divinization”. Clement was also the first to adopt the terminology of the Eleusinian Mysteries for the Christian esoterism. Following the Mysteric myth of the descent of Dionysus in human form, he affirmed: “God’s Word (Logos) has become man so that you can learn from that man how man may become God”¹⁴.
His successor as ācārya of the school of Alexandria was Origen. Initially, Origen was a fellow disciple (gurubhāī) with Plotinus in the Alexandrian school of Ammonius Saccas. Once he became a disciple of Clement¹⁵, he exposed the Christian version of the doctrine of the transmigration. He explained that the resurrection of the flesh was not unique but repeated. These rebirths take place in a succession of worlds (lokas) and cosmic cycles: “We believe that, as after the end of this world there will be another one, so before this there were others. Both statements are confirmed by the authority of writing. In fact, Isaiah teaches that after this there will be another world, saying: There will be a new heaven and a new earth, which I will make remain in my sight, the Lord saith (Isaiah 66, 22). […] Together, these attestations confirm both points: that worlds existed before and other worlds will exist hereafter¹⁶. Thus, the beings transmigrate without ceasing, improving or worsening their condition at every rebirth. Some who seek the truth continually progress through the efforts of their research until they reach a birth where they can get the access to Gnosis. Then, in that life, only few chosen ones can be reintegrated into the Principle¹⁷.
The influence of Origen on all his successors was very remarkable. He also claimed that the world had not begun in time, since time was part of the world. He also affirmed that Christ was not entirely identical with God, since in the Gospel Jesus repeatedly affirms that he does not know things that only “my Father knows”. Moreover, Origen denied the eternity of the individual soul, of the heavens and of the hells, because everything that had been created must necessarily come to an end. Indeed, he focused only on the initiatic doctrines without paying much attention to the exoteric religious aspect of Christianity. Therefore, he was continually hindered by the exterior theologians who represented the official doctrine of the Church. Only in 400 AD the doctrines of Origen were condemned by the Council of Alexandria. However, Origen remained an unavoidable reference point for all the Christian initiates throughout the Middle Ages, particularly in the Churches of the Greek cultural area. Also his disciples were of a high intellectual level, and through them the initiation continued to be transmitted¹⁸. As it is clear, the Christian esoterism of the origins is the result of the encounter between an Essene and a Gnostic-Mysteric transmission. Later on, other components would be added, such as the priestly and chivalrous Roman initiation, the Hermetism and Druidism. But we will discuss this in a future article.
At the same time as these initiatic developments, the Christian exoterism coming from the Pauline reform found its main field of cultivation among the Latin fathers. Although the Church continued to take root in the most important cities of the Roman Empire becoming the seats of the Patriarchates and the Episcopates, the center of the exoteric organization was established in Rome, the Imperial capital. The most authoritative thinkers, even if they did not completely ignore the initiatory aspect, devoted themselves mostly to establishing the creed for converts and the ecclesial organization with which to administer them. Erma (first half of the 2nd century AD), St. Ambrose (340-397 AD) and St. Jerome (347-420 AD), were versed in Christian Gnosis, but they were better known for their works to organize the exoteric structure of the Church. Tertullian (~ 160-220 AD), St. Hippolytus of Rome (170-235 AD), Lactantius (250-317 AD) and St. Augustine (354-440 AD) disputed with the philosophers and the followers of the Greco-Roman religion in order to impose the Christian Church as the only true religion. In particular, St. Augustine must be considered the founder of the official exoteric theology of the Church. In this way these personalities collaborated to strengthen the outward façade of Christianity, progressively distancing it from esoterism.
In this intellectual and fideistic ferment, the Nazorean Christian Sanhedrin, still linked to Judaism, was completely abandoned to itself. Thus, the Nazorean Church of St. James slowly returned to the bosom of Judaism until it completely disappeared. Only an organization of Ebionites remained, fiercely opposed to the reform of St. Paul, empty of any content and that in the second century AD was unanimously declared heretic by all the Churches of the new religion. The first three centuries of Christianity were troubled by innumerable Christian currents disagreeing with one another. Each of these currents claimed to represent the original teaching of Jesus Christ. Among them many manifested a gnostic tendency, often mixed with magical cults. We remember the Sethian Church, which considered the God of the Jews as a demon and Jesus as the one who had replaced the reign of terror of Yehovah with the kingdom of love of Christ-Seth. This Gnostic Church considered the donkey-headed god to be a bearer of light (Lucifer) who rebelled against the rule of the jealous and vindictive God of the Jews. Another Church was the Docetist one, which considered that if Jesus was God, then he could not have been born with a mortal body. Therefore, the historical Jesus was nothing but an illusory projection, a phantom. The Marcionian and the Manichean Church were dualist: in fact they claimed that the God of love had sent his son to earth to save him from the tyranny of the God of justice. The Arian (the Arius’ one) Church claimed that Jesus could not be both God and man; thus, professing the belief that Jesus was only a perfectly mortal prophet. This heresy was very successful for several centuries. Many other currents multiplied throughout the history of Christianity. Each of these Churches, including the Roman one and those of the other cities of the Empire, based their theories on the authority of texts that appeared in the I-II century AD.
With the purpose of tidying this chaos up, in 325 A.D. the Roman Emperor Constantine summoned the Council of Nicæa. The bishops gathered there and decided which beliefs and behaviors were to be approved and which be rejected:

1. The beliefs approved by the Church had to be followed by all Christians, that is to say, they became dogmas. The main dogmas were: God is one but He is divided into three persons of the same nature, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Son took a human birth in form of Jesus, who died on the cross and then resurrected to show Christians how to reach heaven. Jesus will return to earth at the end of time to judge the living and the dead. Then he will reign forever on earth as Messiah. Jesus has established only one Church as the institution to guarantee the transmission of the rituals leading to salvation. All the other Churches were declared heretical. The efficacy of the rites is guaranteed by the real presence of the Holy Spirit who comes down to them through the mandate of the Father and the Son. By participating in the rituals, the Christian is inserted into the community of the living and dead saints. In this way he frees himself from the original sin and from the sins that he is accomplishing during his bodily life. The created soul of the Christian who has followed all the precepts will enjoy after death an eternal life in the heaven. The Christian who does not follow these rules will go eternally to Hell as the heretics and the infidels. With the passing of the centuries the dogmas multiplied.
2. The obligatory Christian rituals are the following “sacraments”: 1) Baptism, a rite of ablution with which one becomes a Christian; 2) Confirmation, corresponding to the descent of the Holy Spirit in the baptized: 3) Marriage, which unites man and woman in an indissoluble bond; 4) Priestly Ordination, which gives to the Christian who becomes a priest the power to perform the rituals for the community; 5) Confession, in which the Christian unloads himself from sins by confessing them in public or in private to a priest; 6) Eucharist, the assumption of bread and wine as flesh and blood of Jesus ritually sacrificed during the mass; 7) Anointing of the dying, to prepare them for a better posthumous life. The first four sacraments are accomplished once in a lifetime, the other three are repeated at will by the believer.
3. It was decided that the only canonical texts of the Church were the Gospels of the Sts. John, Mark, Matthew and Luke; the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of St. Paul and some other apostles and the Apocalypse of St. John. All the other texts were declared apocryphal (secret) and excluded from the doctrinal and ritual use.
4. Sin is the transgression of divine rules. It is distinguished in:
   a) original sin performed by Adam, the first man, which every human being inherits by birth and which does not depend on personal responsibility. Baptism makes it possible to erase the original sin¹⁹;
   b) mortal sin, produced by voluntary transgressions of divine laws, which entails hell as posthumous destiny. Mortal sin can however be forgiven with confession.
   Finally, c) venial sin, involuntarily committed, which leads to Purgatory after death. Even venial sin can be forgiven with confession. The characteristic of sin according to Christianity is that of entailing repentance and shame; it is an emotionally participated pāpa caused by an oppressive sentimentality.

In Christianity, dogmas, rituals and moral rules have the same validity for everyone: from the Pope to the Bishops, to the Kings, to the humblest of servants, all are obliged to obey the same rules in equal measure, regardless of their different responsibilities, capacities and situations. In the early days, this sort of religious ‘communism’ also regulated the properties of individuals who converted to Christianity. Everyone had to surrender all his goods to the Church. This rule disappeared as soon as the Christian Church became Romanized²⁰.
The Council of Nicæa tried to bring order into that chaos: it established what was officially Christian and what was not. It defined as heresy all the behaviors and beliefs different from those recognized by the Church. All the heretics who did not follow the rules established by the Church were struck by excommunication, according to the ancient Jewish ritual of the herem. The interdict was declared against all villages, cities and states that had colluded collectively in heresy. The excommunicated individuals and interdict communities were suspended from any ritual life and were isolated and discriminated from the rest of the Christian community. Obviously, all this did not concern in any way the sphere of the Christian initiation. However, from that moment on, esoterism underwent the continuous control and persecution by the Church, which, ever more distant from the initiatory knowledge and increasingly ignorant about of authentically spiritual matters, eventually usurped the function of judging the initiates. Everything the Church did not understand, because above its capacity for understanding, began to fall under the suspicion of heresy. For this reason, Christian esoterism increasingly closed itself in a defensive reserve.
We hope this article could help shed some light on the obscure origins of Christianity.

Gian Giuseppe Filippi

---

1. Much of the Greek philosophers who did not belong to the Pythagorean paramparā confounded pnéuma with the intellect (νοῦς, read noùs = buddhi): they attributed to the intellect a semi-divine situation, intermediate between individuality and God. This error of perspective was inherited by exoteric Christian theologians. Instead pnéuma is properly the spirit of God, the Ātman of the Hindūs, which St. Paul also called the “inner man” (antarapūruṣa). It is curious that the Greeks have never used in this sense the word atmòs (ἀτμός), etymologically identical to Ātman. They used it only to indicate the vapors that rise in the atmosphere. Instead they used the formula seautòn (σεαυτόν), meaning “one’s own Self”, exactly identical to the Sanskrit svātman. Even in this case, however, it is not clear whether they meant their true nature (svarūpa) or simply their individual “self”, the aham. St. Paul, therefore, belonged also to the line of Pythagorean-Platonic Mysteries. The fact that he, a Jew of the Diaspora, was also a Roman citizen, suggests that he had received an Hellenic Gnostic initiation.[↩]
2. In the Jewish Bible, only the body (basar) and the vital breath (nefesh or ruah, the prāṇa) are mentioned: both are dissolved with death. There is no trace of psykhé and pnéuma. This explains the total lack of interest of Jewish exoterism in the posthumous destinies.[↩]
3. This perfectly agrees with the teaching of Jesus: “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear. And the disciples came, and said unto him: Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them: Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.” […] All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them”. (Gospel of St. Matthew, 13.9-12; 13.34)[↩]
4. “On the road to Damascus, the apostle Paul had a vision that marks his conversion and his mission of evangelization of the Gentiles; it is in Damascus that Paul is educated by the Essenes: their doctrines were adapted to Christianity.” (Jean Daniélou, Les manuscrits de la Mer Morte et les origines du Christianisme, Paris, Editions de l’Orante, 1957, pp. 36; cfr. 87-88, 94-95, 98, 113) We quote the Cardinal Daniélou, a highly suspect author, only because the references presented by him are of indisputable evidence. An Essene community had taken refuge in Damascus at the beginning of the second century. B.C. to escape the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes. (H. Schonfield, El Enigma de los Esenios, Madrid, EDAF, 2005, p.110)[↩]
5. We remind the reader not to confuse the true Gnosis with Gnosticism. The latter represents a degeneration of Gnosis in a syncretistic, magical and occultist sense.[↩]
6. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, St. John moved to the Greek island of Ephesus where he found a community of Essenes fled from the war. (Daniélou, cit., pp. 89, 99, 102-105)[↩]
7. The oldest written texts of Dionysius the Areopagite date back to the beginning of the 6th century; on this basis, the philologists assumed that these must have been a late production, attributing them to such a “Pseudo-Dionysius”. Philologists clearly ignore the existence of the oral tradition and remain helplessly entangled in their obtuse “scientific” rules. For us, who look at the contents and not at arbitrarily invented rules, those writings are indubitably of St. Dionysius, a disciple of St. Paul.[↩]
8. At that time, Theology meant “knowledge of God” and did not yet refer to the exoteric religious philosophy as it was used during the Catholic Middle Ages. However, the meaning of “knowledge of God” has survived in the Orthodox Church.[↩]
9. Since the union with God is produced by a particular formula of invocation (mantra), it is evident that the Christian priestly initiatic path belonged to the sādhanās of the non-Supreme (aparabrahma vidhyās).[↩]
10. According to the Christian tradition, St. Pantænus left for India to preach the doctrine of Jesus. He never arrived in India, but stopped in Arabia and Ethiopia returning and after a few years to Alexandria in Egypt where he died very old in 216 AD.[↩]
11. Philo is the first Jew who speaks of the existence of the soul. It is significant that it used the Greek term: psykhé. He was also aware of the doctrine of the cosmic cycles. He was the first who offered an allegorical reading of the Old Testament. He is considered the father of rabbinic Qabbalah. Despite being a good knower of the Hellenic Mysteries and Pythagoreanism, Philo maintained the intellectual primacy of the Jewish people by claiming that the Greeks had copied everything from the Bible![↩]
12. Therefore, originally the Purgatory had to be carried out in life. It constituted that intermediate step, which the Bhagavad Gītā defines karma yoga, which leads from outer rites (karma khaṇḍa) to pure knowledge. Instead, later, external Christian theologians made Purgatory a world (loka) intermediate between the hells and the heavens, in which the souls of the dead could purify themselves from the less serious sins before reaching any heaven. For a long time, both conceptions of the Purgatory, the esoteric and the exoteric, coexisted in Latin Christianity. The Purgatory of Dante can indeed be interpreted either ways as a posthumous destiny or as an initiatory purification of the mind to be accomplished in life.[↩]
13. This Greek term with such a high sense was later devalued by Western theologians and philosophers to define a simple mental speculation, if not a mere hypothesis.[↩]
14. Protreptikos, I.8.4. Opposite is the exoteric thesis, well represented by theologians such as St. Augustine, who, reading the biblical passage of Psalms, 82.6: “I said:” You are Gods, you are all sons of the Most High”, comments in this way: “There is one and only one son of God, who is God, and one God with the Father”; that is, only in Jesus there is a double nature, a human one and divine one. Augustine’s interpretation inhibited or at least delayed a subsequent investigation into the doctrine of “deification” in the Latin Church. (Steven Botterill, Dante and the Mystical Tradition, Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 204-206)[↩]
15. Becoming a Christian, Origen changed some of his previous positions. The philologists, who do not understand the change of points of view, hypothesize the existence of two Origenes: one Neoplatonic, the other Christian.[↩]
16. Origen, De Principiis, III.5.3. The passage of Isaiah quoted by Origen was also mentioned in the Apocalypse of St. John (21.1): “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, because the former heaven and earth had disappeared”. On the world-cycle identity: “this world which is also called the cycle (lat.: seculum)”, ibid.[↩]
17. Origen, ibid., I.6.3.[↩]
18. St. Basil and his brother St. Gregory of Nyssa, together with St. Gregory of Nazianzus, collected and organized around various teachings of Origen other texts of initiatic wisdom. The resulting book is the Philocalia, the fundamental text of medieval monastic initiatic pathways and of the orthodox Hesychasm. In the Philocalia are included the instructions to perform the invocations (jāpa), to which subtle centers (cakras) these should be addressed, how to carry out the control of the breath (prāṇayama), the explanation of the visions and the powers obtained following such method (sādhana), etc.[↩]
19. However, the dissolution of the effects of the original sin remains altogether virtual. Before their sin, Adam and Eve were not subject to disease, aging and death. They did not have to work to maintain themselves, since nature spontaneously provided for their livelihood. And they could not even sin. These first ancestors lost all their privileges after the original sin, decaying to ordinary human condition. The qualities of Adam and Eve described above are not restored through baptism: baptism does not confer immortality, immunity from disease, death or sin. In fact, should any sin be committed, even the baptized would receive his punishment in hell.[↩]
20. Nevertheless, to this day an unconfessed tendency of sympathy for ‘communism’ has persisted to this day in the Catholic Church above all, let alone in its numerous Protestant heretical divisions. Not for nothing do Christianity and communism share the same Jewish matrix, and wherever there are converts to Christianity, communism thrives.[↩]