Currents · by Frater Custos · 13-minute read

Scaligero and Italian anthroposophy

The leading Italian anthroposophist of the twentieth century wrote some hundred racist articles between 1931 and 1943, and never retracted them. This page documents that with the dates and the issue numbers — and it also dismantles the most repeated accusation against him, which is false.

In January 2020, for the fortieth anniversary of his death, the municipality of Veroli granted its patronage to a «Tributo a Massimo Scaligero». The ceremony fell two days before Holocaust Memorial Day. A controversy followed in the local press, with a demand that the patronage be withdrawn, and a defensive reply presenting Scaligero as a victim of the regime.

In that controversy true things and false things were said by both sides. This page attempts to separate them, because it is exactly the kind of case in which the method of this atlas is good for something: everything is said, with verifiable references, and one chapter is not allowed to become the key to reading all the rest — nor to be erased.

How anthroposophy reaches Italy

The intermediary is Giovanni Colazza (Rome, 1877-1953), a physician. He meets Steiner in Rome in 1911 through Marie von Sivers; Steiner entrusts him with the leadership of the Italian movement; Colazza founds the «Novalis» group in Rome. He also takes part, under the pseudonym Leo, in Julius Evola's Gruppo di Ur.

The Società Antroposofica Italiana is formally constituted at Trieste on 13 January 1931. The Trieste group, with many Jewish members, dissolves in 1938 with the racial laws; a public security circular of 25 July 1941 orders the dissolution of all Italian anthroposophical groups, in the wake of the German ban. In Italy too, then, the movement was persecuted — and that is a fact to be held together with what follows, not in its place.

Who Scaligero was

His registered name was Antonio Massimo Sgabelloni — with a g, not «Scabelloni» as one reads almost everywhere, a misprint that has propagated for decades. Born at Veroli, in the province of Frosinone, on 17 September 1906; died at Rome on 26 January 1980. His mother died when he was a child and he was brought up by his uncle Pietro, one of the founders of the «Giornale d'Italia». A journalist by trade: chief editor of the monthly «Italia Marinara», the organ of the Lega Navale, from 1932 to 1944.

When and why he adopted the pseudonym, I have found documented nowhere. Those who write that he took it «for initiatic reasons» or «after the war» produce no documents: the earliest «Scaligero» signatures I have been able to date are from the early nineteen-thirties.

The writings, 1931-1943

This is the part that must be documented with the full references, or not written at all. The fullest reconstruction is that of Peter Staudenmaier, who speaks of about a hundred publications by Scaligero on racial themes in the fascist period. The count is his, not mine.

In «La Difesa della Razza», the magazine edited by Telesio Interlandi, at least ten signed articles are recorded:

Omogeneità e continuità della razza italiana, 5 June 1939, pp. 38-40 · Fronte unico ario, yr. IV no. 8, 20 February 1941, pp. 21-24 · La razza italiana e la guerra, 5 May 1941, pp. 16-19 · Dalla razza di Roma alla razza italiana, no. 22, 20 September 1941, pp. 13-15 · Sangue e spirito, no. 24, 20 October 1941, pp. 13-15 · Uomini bianchi, anime negre, no. 7, 5 February 1942, pp. 51-55 · La razza italiana, no. 8, 20 February 1942, pp. 26-29 · Continuità storica della razza italiana, no. 12, 20 April 1942, pp. 15-16 · Il volto autentico della civiltà mediterranea, no. 18, 20 July 1942, pp. 14-16 · Coscienza del sangue, yr. V no. 20, 20 August 1942, pp. 4-6.

Of these I have personally verified the last on the digitised issue: Coscienza del sangue does indeed appear in the contents of year V, number 20, of 20 August 1942, on page 4. The others come from the indexes of the issues and from Staudenmaier's notes: they are consistent and citable references, but I have checked them one by one only in that case. The list is not exhaustive — a complete critical repertory of Scaligero's signed pieces in the magazine does not, so far as I know, exist.

There are then other periodicals, and in one of them the presence is denser than in the Difesa. In «La Vita Italiana» of Giovanni Preziosi: La saggezza «antimoderna» (July 1937), Compito eroico dello spirito nell'azione razzista (September 1939), Razzismo spirituale e razzismo biologico (July 1941), Limiti alla comprensione del problema razzista (September 1941), Per un razzismo integrale (May 1942), Scienza dello Spirito contro sovversivismo occulto (March 1943). In «Il Regime Fascista» of Farinacci: La scuola della gerarchia, 14 August 1938. In «Critica Fascista»: Pericolo di un mito contemporaneo, 15 July 1931 — the earliest signature traced, and it precedes the racial laws by seven years.

In 1941 he also took part in five EIAR radio talks of antisemitic propaganda, together with Evola, Preziosi, Pellicano and Luchini, at the prompting of Alessandro Pavolini.

And a book: La razza di Roma, Tivoli, Tipografia Mantero, «Anno XVII» — the catalogues record it under 1939. It is held, among other places, in the Scuola di mistica fascista collection at the Biblioteca civica di Varese.

What kind of racism

It is not laboratory biological racism, and it is not a harmless spiritualism: it is the avowed synthesis of the two. Scaligero explicitly calls it razzismo integrale — «spiritual and biological racism» together — and founds it on the Steinerian tripartition of spirit, soul and body and on the anthroposophical demonology of Ahriman and Lucifer. In the historiography it falls within the esoteric-traditionalist current of fascist racism, Evola's.

The antisemitism is explicit, not allusive. From the full text of La razza di Roma: «Every metaphysical and cultural expression of the Jews is the result of a usurpation. In art they never reach the heights.» Staudenmaier further documents formulas such as «elimination of the Jewish virus and biological reintegration», and the Jews as bearers of «sub-human Ahrimanic forces»: these last I report as the scholar's attributions, not as quotations I have verified against the original.

To be corrected: the most repeated accusation is false

In the controversy of 2020 it was written that Scaligero was «among the signatories of the Manifesto della razza». That is not true.

The Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti of 14-15 July 1938 has ten signatories, all scientists, and Scaligero is not among them. His name appears instead in a «list of adherents» of three hundred and thirty names, in circulation since September 1995 and taken up by Franco Cuomo in I Dieci (2005). Michele Sarfatti has pointed out that the three hundred and twenty additions to the original ten are accompanied by no indication of source; Wikipedia removed them in August 2013 as historical forgeries. In the list, moreover, the name appears twice — as «Scaligero Massimo» and as «Sgabelloni Massimo» — a duplication that is itself an indication of how that list was compiled.

The point must be handled with care, because it is delicate in both directions: the list is unreliable, and this does not lighten by one gram the ten articles in the Difesa della Razza and the six in the Vita Italiana, which are documented. Anyone who uses the falsity of the lesser accusation to bring down the greater one is performing a conjuring trick. Anyone who repeats the false accusation because «the sense of it is right anyway» is performing the same trick from the other side.

And a second error, more harmless: Razza e civiltà is not a book by Scaligero. It is the monthly magazine of the Consiglio superiore and the Direzione generale per la demografia e la razza of the Ministry of the Interior, published between 1940 and 1942. Confusion with La razza di Roma is frequent.

The post-war years, and the question that matters

Between June and November 1944 Scaligero is arrested by the Allies after the liberation of Rome and held in Regina Coeli for his contacts with the German embassy; he maintained that these were anthroposophical and not political relations. In the movement's internal narrative that detention will become the moment of his cure from tuberculosis through meditation.

From 1945 he joins the Società Antroposofica Italiana under Colazza's leadership. In 1950 Giuseppe Tucci founds for IsMEO the English-language quarterly «East and West» and chooses Scaligero as an editor: five years after the end of the regime, alongside one of the most important Italian orientalists of the century. Then the books, many of them: Iniziazione e Tradizione (1956), Avvento dell'uomo interiore (1959), the Trattato del pensiero vivente (1961), Dell'amore immortale (1963), La logica contro l'uomo (1967), Dallo Yoga alla Rosacroce (1972), down to Kundalini d'Occidente and Iside Sophia in the year of his death.

Did he ever publicly reckon with what he had written? As my checks stand: no. There are no public statements, interviews, prefaces or editorial notes on record in which he acknowledges the nature of those writings. The only place in which he addresses the question is the autobiography of 1972, and there he defends himself without disowning: he maintains that he was never politically involved nor particularly interested in fascist politics. Staudenmaier quotes from that text the decisive sentence — that he continued to believe «the same things about race» that he believed then. If the quotation is accurate, and it would need to be checked against the printed edition, it rules out any reading as repentance.

There is a contrary position and it is to be reported. On an anthroposophical website, an author who states that he saw him weekly for nine years maintains the existence of a letter of 1978 in which Scaligero is said to have disavowed La razza di Roma. The letter is not reproduced, is not precisely dated, is not deposited in any consultable archive: as things stand it is an unverifiable personal testimony. The same source, however, reports a formula of Scaligero's according to which what he wrote then he could republish today «in any newspaper, of the right, the left or the centre» by replacing «fascism» with «social vision» — which is an argument of continuity, not of break.

And the movement? There is no public statement on record from the Società Antroposofica in Italia, nor from the publishers who continue to print him, on Scaligero's racist writings. The internal publications treat the question defensively or do not treat it at all. It is a notable difference from Germany, where Demeter commissioned an independent study of its own past and publicly accepted its conclusions.

There remains the problem this page does not close. A man writes for twelve years that the Jews are usurpers and that an integral racism is needed; then he writes for thirty-five years books of meditation that thousands of people have found useful, and that continue to be reprinted. The two things are true together. Those who keep only the first do not explain why those books are still read; those who keep only the second have to hide ten issues of a magazine with the exact pages.

This atlas has no answer. It has only the conviction that the dates are to be written down, and that the general history of the movement is to be kept distinct from this chapter — without either covering the other.