Now at this point, those issues must be raised, that spiritually—our friend Duke di Cesaro will permit us to be sincere—have a subversive character. We said that in such a placement the very meaning of the opposition between the Olympian and telluric elements remains distorted, since Olympian spirituality is not conceived as it should, that is, as the state of consciousness of a type of solar and regal super-humanity, conserving intact the light and the power of the origins; rather it is interpreted as the state of a dreaming spirituality, external to man, pre-personal, anterior to the sense of the Self, passive because it would have been conditioned by the tie and the heredity of blood, race, family, caste or tradition. A variety of modern interpretations of the evolutionist type on the same lines of Darwinism and Freudianism is therefore fully revealed, since even if, at the origins, the beast or the reign of the forms of the libido is not assumed, one always sees there something “less”, something that, through a development propitiated, by whom nobody knows, (according to Steiner, by disincarnate entities which would only be concerned with the events of men not yet evolved), must be surpassed to lead to true consciousness, to true humanity.

Consequently, the rising of the telluric cult does not have, for Cesaro, the sense of a contamination, rather that of an interiorization: it is the disappearance of the transcendent gods of the Olympian cycle, it is their becoming, as chthonic gods, something immanent to the earth, dwelling at its center as a new interior consciousness of man, as the impulse toward the formation of a human and independent individual Self. It signifies neither more nor less than the sanctification and legitimation of the anti-tradition and the revolution in the spiritual world, that subversion, propitiated by contaminating crossbreeding and by the ferment of inferior races and cults, that already made the ancient Mediterranean world appear here as a world of ruins.

And that this assertion is not extreme results from the fact that Cesaro connects the meaning of evolving stages, also to everything that is critical and rationalist thought, individualism, the destruction of the ties of blood and soil, secular and only warrior civilization, rebellion against every earlier form of authority from above. Behind the symbols are the meanings of the type he seeks to recognize in the Trojan war: the fall of Troy expresses the end of an era, the era of traditional sacred wisdom, a descent from the memory of the ancient stages of a formless participation in transcendent divinity, and the “beginning of a new era, of science conquered by the will and individual reasoning”, of the “Self freed from the chains of consanguinity that lay at the base of the psyche of the collective form of the ancients“. But the germ of ancient wisdom was not destined to perish, but rather to be transmuted, to give rise to a new cycle, and which would be the meaning of the legend of Aeneas, a refugee from Troy who survived its destruction and was the bearer, at its foundation, of the heritage of that of which Troy was the symbol. Aeneas lands in Italy, and from him, according to the legend of its origins, begins a new cycle corresponding precisely to the Roman civilization and to the Roman mission of the history of the world.

Here, naturally, we cannot even mention the laborious exegesis made by Cesaro with the purpose of including all the symbolic and legendary material of the first Romanity, up until the closing of the cycle of the Kings, in a similar scheme. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that he avoids the same possibility of again finding the right way for a type of indirect road, which is that of the improbable, evolutionary views. In fact, even admitting the mistaken premise, he would have been inclined to give consideration to the Roman cycle already as a synthesis, as a surpassing both of the presumed, impersonal and priestly primogenial wisdom, as well as the opposite purely individualistic, critical, and warrior principle, in something higher and solar, that naturally would not have meant a conquest and an evolution, but only a rebirth of the true force of the origins. That would have constituted, let us repeat, in an indirect way, a bases to really discover the deepest and secret meaning of so many solar, heroic, and heroic aspects in the institutions, cults, laws, even in certain simultaneously historical and symbolic deeds of Romanity. But not even that is verified: what there is in Rome that is truly, specifically Roman, Cesaro in fact considered it as a mere preparation, as something valid not in itself, but in so far as it paves the ways to the other, to the Christian gospel, considered by him as the “fulcrum of the evolution and of the history of humanity”. And if one adds that in Christianity itself above all, Cesaro seems to valorize these aspects, for which such a religion presented at the origins of the really revolutionary, anti-traditional, universalistic and subservient traces, one can well imagine where he is going to finish.

Let us let Cesaro speak:

Rome became the instrument through which ancient humanity, divided on vertical lines, according to ethnic groups and descendants of consanguinity, moves, fragmented by individualism, towards a horizontal solidarity, towards a brotherhood that must not take into account distinctions of race, people, and family. The ancient collective spiritual patrimony of men rises up through the will of individuals. Races, peoples, families, through individualism, make themselves humanity. The ancient racial and family conceptions of love, of innate and implicit love in natural communions, are transformed, through egoism, tempered by the forces of individualism in universal love.

In other words, Rome had a historical mission, insofar as it was made the instrument of ethnic chaos, a leveling universalism, and a cosmopolitism deadly for the preceding, differentiated types of civilization: insofar as it was what Gobineau or Chamberlain had called “semitic Rome”. And Cesaro sought to recognize even in roman origins such a blessing, interpreting the legend of the asylum given by Rome to every type of people at birth, and thus to those of a lower class, according to a spirit that would anticipate the Christian preference for the rejected, the disinherited, those without tradition.

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