The Secret Language of the Fedeli D’Amore

by Arturo Reghini (Pietro Negri)

This essay originally appeared in Introduction to Magic, volume 2.
This is the first of two parts. See ⇒ Part 2

Arturo Reghini, Guido De Giorgio, and Julius Evola each tried to recapture the ideal of the Roman Tradition in a different way. For example, where De Giorgio saw in Dante the amalgamation of the Eagle and the Cross through a development, Reghini, as a pagan, Mason, and Pythagorean, sought to cleanly separate the two. In this essay, Reghini, as did Rene Guenon, counts on the work of Luigi Valli to explicate the hidden meaning of Dante‘s Divine Comedy, not to mention the group of poets known as the Fedeli d’Amore.

Reghini reveals that the object of Dante’s “love” is really the Divine Sophia. He brings up the ideas of the active and potential intellect, a topic of great interest at that time in the Middle Ages. Astute readers will be able to relate this to the meditation formulated by Valentin Tomberg in the second letter, which we have mentioned several times. Reghini also points to an interesting correspondence with an idea from the The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Several years ago Luigi Valli published La Chiave della Divina Commedia [The Key to the Divine Comedy] in which, proceeding successfully along the interpretative line divined by Foscolo and then followed by Gabriele Rossetti, Perez, Pascoli, and a few others, he succeeded at highlighting thirty agreements between the Eagle and the Cross in the sacred poem and finds, at least in part, the doctrine hidden under the veil of the strange verses [delli versi strani]. The thought exposed and simultaneously hidden by Dante would be, very synthetically, this: The Cross showed itself impotent to redeem in fact humanity and cannot redeem it alone. The involvement of the Eagle is necessary, i.e., for authority and imperial justice, it is necessary to reestablish the Empire, take away from the Church the unfavorable donation of Constantine; the corruption of the Church and humanity will then certainly have an end, thanks to the double virtue of the Cross and the Eagle and it will actually be able to save itself. Dante proclaimed openly that on the cathedral of Saint Peter stood the unworthy usurpers, the preachers of gossip, who did not possess the genuine intention given by Christ to his first monks; and he covertly added that on the chair of the Church was seated the apocalyptic whore, he recognized the failure of the preaching of the Cross and the necessity of the intervention of the imperial Eagle to save humanity. This bold, and for certain not very orthodox from the Catholic perspective, conception inspired not only Dante’s writings but also his action, understood as carrying out his program first by means of the armies of the Templars, and then of the Emperor.

Following logically the thread of these studies, Luigi Valli next published an extremely important, interesting, and powerful volume, entitled: Il Linguaggio segreto di Dante and dei Fedeli d’Amore [The Secret Language of Dante and the Fedeli d’Amore]. The first centuries of Italian literature and all the history and the battles of those times are the object of this study, and are presented under a light and an aspect that even now is unsuspected and unexpected. With a patient, methodic, scientific, and imposing work, Valli, resuming the misunderstood and neglected work of Rossetti, confirms and demonstrates the existence from the beginning of Italian literature of a secret language, the jargon of the Fedeli d’Amore; he deciphers its meaning, the numerous doctrinal, sectarian, and political allegories and brings back into the light a whole grandiose movement, inspired by the “initiatic tradition” and bitter enemy of the Church of Rome.

Unable to even succinctly summarize the events of this great battle, we will only say how, through this understanding, the poets of love, the writer of the “sweet new style”, who strangely seemed to lose themselves singing of their absurd, self-conscious and inconsistent love, are transfigured into formidable battlers, into ardent champions of their Holy Faith. They dramatically tower over all the most noble figures of Cecco d’Ascoli and Dante Alighieri, who are greater, the more they are understood. We express to Luigi Valli our admiration and our recognition; his work constitutes, as we intended to point out, a “piece of gelatin”, and as much against it as the myopic and lazy misoneism and “positive criticism”, the vestal of pure aesthetic, and the shrewdness of the curious, has coalesced, the light is by now made and will end up by standing out.

The love for which the heart of Fedeli d’Amore was burning, is similar to the mystical love of Persian literature and that of the Song of Songs. Gabriel Rossetti reconnected it above all with Platonic love, which would give a pagan character to the movement. Valli demonstrates that the “rose”, the “flower”, the “woman”, (1) which is under various names the only object of this love, is the active intellect, that loves of itself the potential intellect (2): it is, as Dino Compagni sings:

To the accumulation of the proofs that Valli discovered or brought back in this regard, more of them could be added; this, for example: Dante from the principle of the Comedy speaks of the

He places his “love” in a triad that corresponds perfectly—in the Kabbalah—to the triad of the highest sephiroth: Kether, Chokhmah, Binah, or the Crown, Wisdom, Intelligence.

If this is the woman, the domina, of the Fedeli d’Amore, it is perfectly logical that Francesco da Barberin in his Documenti di Amore puts docilitas, docility (from docere, to teach), first among the twelve virtues that Love must awaken in the novices. The tradition that puts this docility among the first requisites of initiation is transmitted down to us, as is shown for example by what Arturo Reghini writes on pages 106-108 of his book on the Parole sacre e di Passo [Sacred Words and Passage]. Even the world discipline has the double meaning of science and constraint; and the German gelebrig corresponds through its polysemy to the Latin docilis.

The transmission of the secret language of the Fedeli d’Amore in that of later sects and movements was recognized, in addition to Valli and before him, by Rossetti and Aroux, who actually pushed too much on this way and were sometimes led astray by the intent of wanting to recognize the concordance between the various sectarian jargons; but the concordance undoubtedly exists in part, and leads to posing the problem of the transmission, not of only sectarian jargon, but of the same traditional doctrine.

We, too, with Valli, believe that Rossetti, the first systematic discoverer of the sectarian jargon of the Fedeli d’Amore, was led to his interpretation by the knowledge of ancient secret traditions. If memory does not fail us, his Mystery of Platonic Love in the Middle Ages was dedicated to B. L., which is very plausibly Bulwer Lytton, the author of Zanoni, who, beyond having a profound esoteric erudition, was also an expert on Italian language and literature. One could perhaps think that Rossetti was inducted and initiated by Bulwer Lytton into the systematic study of the sectarian medieval jargon, a study happily taken up by Valli, who succeeded in emending, extending, and completing the results achieved by Rossetti in the last century.

We saw that Love is the “Active Intellect”; it is, as Dante says in the last verso of the Comedy: “The love that moves the Sun and the other stars”. In the potential intellect of the Fedeli d’Amore this active intellect is awakened and operative, in the profane it is sleeping and inoperative. According to Valli, in the sectarian jargon, sleeping consistently means to be in error, to be far from the truth and in particular to belong to the Church of Rome. It is the symbolism adopted by Dante in the last cantos of the Purgatorio, in which after the immersion in the river Lethe, the river of the dream and oblivion, the immersion into Eunoe follows, by virtue of which, like a new plant (neophyte) with renewed frond. Dante becomes pure and ready to jump to the stars, that is, capable of rising to the “kingdom of Heaven”. As we noted, it is about a pagan symbolism adopted by Virgil and Plato, and that is found again in the very old Orphism and in the Eleusinian mysteries; here at the river Lethe, which sweeps away the knowledge of men, is in contrast to the fresh arising of Memory or the mnemonic virtue of the pomegranate, that gives awakening and immortality. The Platonic anamnesis, the record, is identified to the consciousness and correspondingly the truth, the aletheia, and is the negation, the passing of Lethe. The attainment of the truth is a conquest of consciousness above the dream and death; it is necessary to maintain the continuity of consciousness even through the dream and death.

Love in the initiatic sense has therefore the capacity to take away the dream and death, giving to the Fedel d’Amore a new life. That is reached through degrees of successive development.