The Secret Language of the Fedeli D’Amore

by Arturo Reghini (Pietro Negri)

This essay originally appeared in the Introduction to Magic, volume 2. This is the second of two parts. See ⇐ Part 1

In the concluding part, Reghini points to several other Hermetic symbols found in Dante and other writings of the Fedeli d’Amore. These include the Arrow, the Rose, the Rebis, the Azoth, and the Phoenix. Finally, he mentions the significance of the analogical or spiritual meaning of such texts, which simply cannot be understood by those not prepared for it.

In Francisco da Barberino’s Documenti d’Amore [Documents of Love], the Fedeli d’Amore is represented in the first degrees as pierced by the arrow of Love and in the last degree with some roses in the hand. The symbolism of the arrow is also found in one of the twelve figures of Basil Valentine’s Azoth. But the similarity between the symbolism of love and Hermetic symbolism and the link between the two traditions again turn out to be shown more through the presence of the Hermetic Rebis in one of the designs that illustrate Barberino’s Documents of Love. The Rebis, or Hermetic androgyne, is a characteristic and very important Hermetic symbol, whose history we briefly treated in another work, Un codice alchemico italiano; the figure of the Rebis reproduced by Valli goes back to Dante’s time and is older by several centuries than what we tracked down in the books on Hermetism.

Other concordances with the symbolism and Hermetic terminology are found in the verses of an obscure poet of love, Nicolo dei Rossi, who in one of his lyrics expresses “the degrees and the virtue of true love”. There are four degrees: the first is called liquefatio which is opposite, says dei Rossi, to congelazione. The second degree is called languor, the third zelus, and in the fourth, love reaches the hierarchical summit by means of ecstasy or excessus mentis. We understand therefore how one of the most important works of the literature of Love, the Romance of the Rose, (whose Italian version, Il Fiore, is due to a Florentine named Durante who is almost certainly Dante), treated alchemy explicitly and is classified in the alchemical literature. This rose sung with such moving harmony by all these poets, starting from Ciullo l’Alcamo, the dantesque rose candida, is clearly similar, if not identical, to the Hermetic rose of the Rosicrucians.

An important confirmation of this assimilation and affinity between Hermetism and the Fedeli d’Amore is given here by the four so-called “Templar degrees” of Masonry which arose in France or in Germany toward the middle of the 18^th century. It is about the Princes of Mercy, called also the Knights of the Sacred Delta, and also designated in another way. Their task, says the ritual, is

to guard with fidelity the treasure of traditional wisdom, always concealing it from those who do not know how to penetrate into the third heaven.

The third heaven is the name of their temple and is, as everyone knows, the heaven of Venus. We note moreover that in Orphism and Pythagoreanism, the third heaven is the last. Philolaus in fact says that there are three heavens: Uranus, the Cosmos, and Olympus. The third heaven, Olympus, is the home of the gods, and Saint Paul referred to this Orphic-Pythagorean classification when he told of having been raptured to the third heaven.

Now the “intellect” of Dion Compagni, writes Valli,

stays in a palace where different locations represent probably degrees of initiation, and in that palace the third place is the salutatorio … referring us back to the frequent allusions to the third heaven or the third degree, that in the material heaven is the heaven of Venus, but in the symbols signified rather probably the worship or a higher degree of his initiation.

The Princes of Mercy by means of their triple virtue succeed in lifting up the veil of truth; and are therefore called beni emeth, the sons of Truth. Among the characteristic symbols of the degree the Palladium of the Order appears, or the statue of Truth, naked and covered with a tricolored veil. These three colors that reappear in the decorations of the Temple and in other symbols of the degree are green, white, and red, the three Hermetic colors with which Dante adorns his Beatrice (Purg, XXX, 31-33).

The numeric symbolism of the degree is based on the number three and its powers: the sacred or luminous Delta is one of its principle symbols. The word emeth, truth, contains three letters, the first, the middle, and the last of the Hebrew alphabet. Its numeric value is 441, or nine. On the throne are nine lights. In the temple are nine columns, each one of which bears a candelabra with nine lights or in all there are 81 lights. The age of 81 years is the ritual age. We will not dwell on recalling the importance Dante attached to three and nine, and with the frequency the number nine recurs in the Vita Nuova: Valli relates some verses in which Giacomo da Lentini proposes that “the mercies are strict… nor by the lovers called finally who completes nine years”.

As to the number 81, Valli already reported the following strange and bold passage from Dante that he writes precisely in the Convivio:

Plato, from whom one can very well say that he had matured … living 81 years … And I believe that if Christ had not been crucified and had lived out the span which his life, according to its nature, might have passed from the mortal body into the eternal in his eighty-first year (IV, xxiv)

that is, if he had reached the ritual age of the Knights of the sacred Delta. Naturally Dante in the Vita Nuova had Beatrice die in the ninth day of the month of June in 1281; and he took care to specify that in Syria the month of June is the ninth, and that Beatrice was dead when “the perfect number was completed nine times” in the third tenth century, or in 1281.

Among the symbols of this degree that are reconnected to the symbolism of the “Fedeli d’Amore” we note again the arrow that was on the throne of the Most Excellent (the president of the chamber), that is obviously the arrow that Francesco da Barberino puts in the hand of Love in the first figure of his Documents of Love. This arrow is of white wood and has feathers colored partly in green and partly in red, with a gold point.

Another symbol of the degree is composed of two arrows, the two arrows of the Love of tradition, one of gold, the other of lead: the two arrows of the dantesque lyrical poem: “Three women have come around my heart”. For fuller information about this topic we refer to the Manual of Andres Cassard. And finally it is necessary to note how the sole Phoenix, about which there is a continual mention in the poetry of the Fedeli d’Amore and that, as Valli shows, represents the organization and the initiatic tradition always being reborn, either one or the other of the most important symbols of Hermetism, the symbol of the Rubedo. The purple Phoenix is reborn and lives among the flames of the “philosophical fire”, as the Fedelt d’Amore, burning with holy zeal (the zelus of Nicolo dei Rossi), is reborn to new life by means of the excessus mentis.

Numerous other comparisons could be established between the sectarian jargon deciphered by Valli and the symbolic languages of the Hermetists, among the symbolism of the doctrine of Love and of similar and derived movements; comparisons that indicate a clue and perhaps a proof of the existence and continuity of an initiatic tradition that arose in the Middle Ages. Unlike Valli, we however have several reservations about the purity of the Christian character of such tradition.

When one begins to recognize the existence of a “false appearance” in a secret organization, beginning by degrees, it is right to doubt that if love and a noble [gentile] heart are one thing, the word “gentile” can also have the meaning that it has in latin: sangue gentile [native blood]; and if Dante takes from Virgil the beautiful style, Virgil can also represent pagan initiation. But we will have the chance to return to these problems; for now, we limit ourselves to note how Boccaccio, who, Valli shows us, glorified the Templars, the same Boccaccio, author of a Genealogy of the Gods in the tenth story of the Decameron, makes jokes of the resurrection of the flesh, typical, i.e., of that same teaching that the Athenians mocked, saying to Saint Paul: “we will hear you about this another time”. We recall, in regards to Boccaccio, that in his third story he has Melchizedek say that between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, “no one knows which is the true faith”. That Boccaccio puts phrases of this type even in Melchizedek’s mouth, who occupies a position of the first order in tradition and in the esoteric hierarchy, is something that can make us reflect and can make us suspect what was the only Phoenix that with Zion joined the Appenines, as a sonnet says that goes under the name of Cino da Pistoia.

One final observation: in our earlier writing on the Knowledge of the Symbol, we had the chance to cite a passage from the Convivio, in which it shows how, according to Dante, the meanings to consider in the allegorical language were four, corresponding perhaps to the four degrees of the rite and of the organization. Of these four meanings, the most important for us, is the last, i.e., the anagogical meaning. Naturally this spiritual meaning, which is related to the process of spiritual development, cannot be understood and sometimes simply imagined, without the personal experience of it: who does not experience it, cannot understand it, says Dante. And it is for this reason that it almost always eludes those who up until now were occupied with secret language of the Fedeli d’Amore, unlike the meaning that we will call synagogic.

For example, to sleep means allegorically to live in ignorance, in the inertia of the intellect; morally, it means not to participate in the work of the organization; anagogically, it is the state opposite to that of initiatic Awakening. Valli thinks that, while the Vita Nuova was written in code, Dante abandoned in the Comedy the sectarian jargon; but if this is true, in part at least, through its moral or political meaning, since in the sacred poem the hostility against the Church is explicit and even extreme, it is not true for the anagogic meaning. This meaning is still and necessarily hidden under the veil of symbolism, in order to interpret it, it is necessary to possess the experience of the stages of consciousness to which it refers, and the knowledge of the symbols traditionally adopted to indicate them. For this reason, the true and higher meaning of the secret language of Dante and of the Fedeli d’Amore remains and will always remain a mystery to all those who “sleep” and will continue to sleep.