For it is the venerable and mysterious Hermit who was master of the most intimate and most cherished dreams of my youth, as moreover he is the master of dreams for all youth in every country, who are enamoured by the call to seek the narrow gate and the hard way to the Divine. Name for me a country or a time for which the youth—who are truly “young”, i.e. living for the Ideal—has not had its imagination haunted by the figure of a wise and good father, a spiritual father, a hermit, who has passed through the narrow gate and who walks the hard way—someone whom one could trust without reserve and whom one could venerate and love without limit. Which young Russian man, for example, would not have undertaken a journey, no matter how long and of what duration, in order to meet a staretz, i.e. a wise and good father, a spiritual father, a hermit? Which young Jewish man from Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, Ukraine or Romania would not have done as much to meet a Hassidic tsadik, i.e. a wise and good father, a spiritual father, a hermit? Which young man in India would refuse to make every possible effort to find and meet a chela or guru, i.e. a wise and good father, a spiritual father, a hermit?

~ Meditations on the Tarot

In Memoriam to Charles “Cologero” Salvo

Almost two years ago, on the feast day of the Ascension, Cologero, the founder, authority, and genius behind Gornahoor left us behind.  His death was sudden, shocking, and unexpected. For many of us, myself included, Charles was not only a wise voice in the wilderness, but a true sage, a hermetic “spiritual director”, even a “spiritual father”. He was the kind of precious and rare teacher who taught his students not only how to understand metaphysics intellectually, but how to actually experience the higher states of being and achieve real metaphysical knowledge.

More than this, Charles taught the transformation of earthly love into spiritual Love, the kind of Love can fuel the rapid and almost vertiginous ascent of the Lover through the Alchemical Marriage.

In the Fedeli d’Amore, novices were under a rule of silence for nine years, after which they would write a poem in order to be initiated.  This was the model Charles followed with those he taught personally.

The style of Charles’ teaching was unique, and almost “martial”. He was not a follower of the modern platitude that “there are no stupid questions”; holding discussion with him on the matters that concerned us was an exercise in rigor and challenge. Like a fencing master calmly dismantling the tentative, feeble strikes of his pupils, Charles swiftly cut through thoughtless, bombastic, or shallow remarks that lacked real understanding. In a way that was stern, but not hostile, Charles used the edge of his saturnine personality to make you instantly feel your own weakness with just a few choice words, or even a pregnant pause. For me (and my experience is not unique), the many years spent striving to engage him on the highest truths, faltering repeatedly, having my own ignorance and errors laid bare; all of this was a crucible essential to my own growth.

***

Beyond this inner mission of passing on the Hermetic tradition to individual successors, Charles had an outer mission with Gornahoor: to return to the foundations of the Western Tradition and chart a path for its renewal. Gornahoor’s has always maintained that this Western Tradition, the “religion of the Middle Ages”, is the manifestation of the Primordial Tradition, the same Tradition that manifested in the Vedic civilization and in Ancient Greece.  The esoteric core of this tradition is called “The Church of John” and Gornahoor has demonstrated its unbroken (if tumultuous) continuity across centuries.

Charles’ vision for a reinvigorated Western Tradition was a glorious one.  What Julius Evola doubted, Charles, with Guido de Giorgio, dared to hope for:

A Catholicism that is raised up to the level of a truly universal, unanimous, and perennial tradition where faith can be integrated into a metaphysical realization, the symbol integrated into the path to awakening, the rites and sacraments into acts of power, dogmas into expressions of an absolute and infallible consciousness because it is beyond human and, as such, alive in beings unbound from terrestrial chains through an ascesis, and where the pontificate recovers its primal mediating function — such a Catholicism could supplant every “spiritualism”, both present and future.

– Julius Evola, Mask and Face of Contemporary Spirituality

***

This work is not completed. Charles wished for the next generation to carry on his work, and there are those of us who are prepared to do so. In 2025 and beyond, Gornahoor will continue Charles’ mission in the following ways:

• New translations of authors like Luigi Valli and Guido de Giorgio, beginning with Valli’s Key to the Divine Comedy and Secret Language of the Fedeli d’Amore
• New articles
• Expansion to new formats (X, Substack)
• Compilation, preservation, and republication of Cologero’s most important writings

***

In Greek, kalogeros means “beautiful elder”, and originally referred to monks or hermits, men who aged gracefully in wisdom and holiness. Hence “Cologero”, the form the word took when it was adopted in Sicily, the land of Charles’ ancestors. The pseudonym was an exact fit for the man behind it.

Exegi monumentum aere perennius
Regalique situ pyramidum altius,
Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo inpotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum.
(Horace, Odes III: XXX)

Requiescat in Pace.