The Initiatory Ecstasy. From Giordano Bruno to Arturo Reghini

By Nicola Bizzi

What exactly is ecstasy (from the Greek ἔκστασις, literally "being outside"), that psychic state of suspension and mystical elevation of the mind, which is perceived by those who experience it intensely as "estranged" from the body? What are its links with Philosophy (to be understood as Sacred Knowledge or as love for Divine Wisdom) and above all with mystical death and the initiatory experience of the ancient Mysteries? What is thought and how to control it to rise to higher levels of consciousness?
All the great initiatory schools of the past taught that one must die and be reborn in order to then ascend. But can this ascension be comparable to Philosophical Ecstasy?
Great philosophers of antiquity, from Plotinus to Porphyry, spoke to us about the experience of Philosophical Ecstasy as a reunion with the Absolute, with the Supreme End. And what if it also and above all involved a full connection with the Anima Mundi or with the Akashic Records? From Giordano Bruno to Tommaso Campanella, up to Arturo Reghini and Amedeo Rocco Armentano, some authentic Initiates have attempted to answer these questions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Release date: Mar 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9791255045588

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Τεληστήριον

NICOLA BIZZI

THE INITIATORY ECSTASY

FROM GIORDANO BRUNO TO ARTURO REGHINI

LOGO EDIZIONI AURORA BOREALE

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: The Initiatory Ecstasy. From Giordano Bruno to Arturo Reghini

Author: Nicola Bizzi

Series: Telestérion

Editing, cover and illustrations by Nicola Bizzi

English translation by Umberto Visani

ISBN e-book version: 979-12-5504-558-8

Cover image: Leonardo Da Vinci, Salvator Mundi, circa 1515

(Private collection)

LOGO EDIZIONI AURORA BOREALE

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2024 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

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THE INITIATORY ECSTASY

FROM GIORDANO BRUNO TO ARTURO REGHINI

The theme of the close relationship between philosophy and the mystical tradition, which I have developed at length in my essay Nei penetrali del Tempio¹ and which was quite well understood in the first half of the 20th century by authoritative masters such as Arturo Reghini and Amedeo Rocco Armentano, as demonstrated by the works of great depth and relevance that they left us, was also famously addressed by Julius Evola in 1934 in his essay Revolt against the Modern World².

Despite the undeniable differences in the positions and interpretative visions of Reghini, Armentano and Evola, the latter had rightly understood that Greek philosophy «almost always had its centre not so much in itself, but in elements of a metaphysical and mysterious character, which were echoes of traditional doctrines».³. And, surprisingly, Evola had also intuited, quite correctly, to be honest, the virtues inherent in the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers in relation to Platonism. Nevertheless, and without wishing to offend the Evolians, it must be stressed that the Baron, as an uncompromising advocate of idealistic subjectivism, underestimated the extent of the true and traditional importance of the metaphysical objectivism of the great Hellenic schools of wisdom, whether we are talking about the Platonic-transcendental school of the Academy or the Aristotelian-immanent school of the Lyceum. And, as the late Piero Fenili pointed out in one of his illuminating essays⁴ , Evola’s lack of understanding of the traditional meaning and value of metaphysical objectivism prevented him from recognising how much it represented the positive result – also due to Plato’s initiatory acquisitions of important mystery knowledge from Eleusinity and its Pythagorean derivation in particular – of the movement initiated by Socrates with his efforts in the search for valid definitions and concepts to be applied to any Sophistic arbitrariness. And so the Baron, who also acknowledged the full validity of the Socratic instance, but curiously glossed over the achievements of the Academy and the Lyceum, believed that the Socratic endeavour had only led to a fatal ‘deviation’, in that «thinking instead of trying to give the universal and the being in its proper form – that is, rationally and philosophically – and to transcend it with the concept, constitutes the most dangerous seduction and illusion, the organ of a humanism and, therefore, of a humanism, The most dangerous seduction and illusion, the organ of a humanism, and thus of a much deeper and more perverse unrealism, which was then to seduce the whole of the West».

This view of Evola, as Fenili rightly points out, is essentially incomplete and misleading, because it describes a failure where there was instead a success, because from Socrates’ definitions and concepts we moved on to the objective order of Platonic ideas and Aristotelian forms, by which the whole of reality is disciplined and reduced, as far as possible, from cháos to kosmos, according to the luminous Apollonian instance always present in the highest Greek speculation. On the other hand, in the classical world and in pre-Christian antiquity, man was closer to the gods and at the same time – in a