Massimo
Scaligero

Massimo Scaligero (1906–1980) was born Antonio Massimo Sgabelloni in Veroli, in the province of Frosinone, south of Rome. He received a humanistic education, to which he added the study of logic, mathematics, and philosophy.

A journalist and poet — D’Annunzio, on reading his early poems, exclaimed «here is the new bard of Italy» — a writer, scholar and deep connoisseur of esotericism and Eastern philosophy, he directed the magazine East and West, published by the Institute for the Middle and Far East.

As a young man he had particularly intense spiritual experiences and for decades tried to understand their meaning and nature, until, just after the war, he encountered the thought of Rudolf Steiner. In Occult Science he found described what his soul experienced spontaneously.

«There is no page in his works in which he does not remind the reader of his role as a disciple: not of one Tradition or another, but of knowledge.»

A tireless author and lecturer — in addition to numerous personal meetings, he gave two lectures a week in Rome — he devoted his entire existence to anyone seeking a spiritual path in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, until his death in January 1980.

Scaligero left more than thirty books, mainly devoted to transforming human thought into a genuine instrument of spiritual experience. The summit of this research is the Treatise on Living Thought.

It is the path of thought freed from the senses: not a mental representation or a dialectical content, but the possibility of experiencing thought where it is still spiritual substance.

Aware of the value of freedom and inner independence, he did not want his followers to create an external organisation. The bond between those who serve the Spirit can only be spiritual.