After a few of his smaller works, I picked up what appears to be Bizzi’s main work. The full title of this book is: From Eleusis to Florence: the transmission of a secret knowledge. Part A: the origin of the mysteries (Vol. 1).
As you may have guessed from my reviews of his other books, we here have an author who claims to be part of an initiation tradition that goes back to the dawn of time. As a matter of fact, Bizzi says that his branch of “Eleusinity” can be traced back to older Gods and the few other initiations that are left, stem from younger Gods.
The deepest roots of Eleusinity lie in the culture and civilization of the ancient Pre-Greek people who inhabited the Aegean lands;
In about 330 page Bizzi starts to sketch who ‘his’ initiation comes “from the Aegean-Minoan era to the entrance of the Elusinians in clandestinity”. In order to do so, you get a lot of ‘alternative history’ about antediluvian civilizations and archaeologists who neglect facts that do not fit their “paradigm”. Bizzi cites theories such as the Templar origin of Freemasony, the ideas of Graham Hancock and other authors which (in my eyes) do not really strengthen his point.
What also does not help, is that everybody that Bizzi admires, had to be an Elusean “Initiated”, such as Arturo Reghini. Now I happen to be reading material of Reghini and even though he frequently says he was a Freemason and he does refer to mysteries of Eleusis every now and then, he does appear to have seen Eleusis as something of the past and certainly does not place himself in that tradition.
So Bizzi sets out to prove that there are initiations thousands of years old, only now coming to the surface. The book is mostly historical. I would have preferred to learn a bit more about what the mysteries entail.
The essay by Nicola Bizzi, […] in the original Italian edition consists of three massive volumes of almost a thousand pages each. For reasons due to it vastness and complexity, Edizioni Aurora Boreale has decided to divide the English edition into several volumes. Each volume has three distinct parts, for a total of nine books, whose publication will continue over several years.
So I guess, five years after the first English volume, we still have got something coming. I am not sure yet if the first volume enthused me enough to buy the next volume when it comes out. We will see.
2019 Edizioni Aurora Boreale, isbn 889863546X
