Tommaso Palamidessi

The English writer and Anglican priest Francis Rolt-Wheeler (1876-1960) also collaborated with Palamidessi.

He became one of the first Italian astrological authors of the 1900s.

In the catalogue of the National Library Service, only six treatises of astrology written by Italian authors appear from 1900 to 1939.

For the most these are general introductions and often mixed with chiromancy, physiognomy and occultism.

In Italy during the 1900s the first volumes were dedicated to two disciplines: World astrology and medical astrology.

At the time, Palamidessi established contacts with exponents of the Hamburg Astrologic School, to whom he dedicated an article in the journal Astral Language.

Among the foreign contacts of Tommaso Palamidessi were French authors such as Alexandre Volguine (1903–1976), Henry Joseph Gouchon (1898-1978) and Jacques Reverchon (1909-1985).

Tommaso Palamidessi (February 16, 1915 – April 29, 1983) was an Italian esotericist.

Drawn to astrology, parapsychology, and yoga-tantric doctrines, he was active in the field of the occult and developed a form of Esoteric Christianity that he called Archeosophy.

Palamidessi was born in Pisa on 16 February 1915 to Carlo Palamidessi, an army officer, and Luigia Tagliata, a poet.

In 1920, Palamidessi moved to Sicily.

As a child, he studied astronomy, astrology, botany, medicine and religion, and as an adolescent he traveled to Tripoli and Tunis to pursue further study in Islamic Sufism.

Beginning in 1933, when he moved to Turin, Palamidessi pursued intensive research into astrology, alchemy and Tantric yoga, extrasensory experiences, Egyptology and the study of hieroglyphs—the latter carried out in collaboration with the director of the Egyptian Museum of Turin, Ernesto Scamuzzi.

He also has out-of-body experiences, bilocations and remembrances of his past lives.

His publications about Tantric yoga include: The Occult Powers of Man and the Indo-Tibetan Tantric Yoga, Sexual Technique of Tantric Yoga; The Erotic Power of Kundalini Yoga; Yoga not to Die.

During these years, he also wrote an extensive unpublished commentary on Egyptian theurgy and the Book of the Dead.

Like Reverchon, Gouchon gravitates around the journal Cahiers Astrologiques (1938-1983) founded by Volguine.

Towards the end of the 1940s, Palamidessi began to teach astrology and yoga.

In these years Tommaso Palamidessi wrote six astrological treatises: The Course of Stars and Man's Diseases; Medicine and Sidereal Influences; Mundane Astrology (1941); Cosmic Influences and the Precocious Diagnosis of Cancer (1943) Earthquakes, Eruptions and Cosmic influences (1943) and not forgetting the Perpetual Effemerides (1941)

In 1947 Tommaso Palamidessi married Rosa Francesca Bordino (1916–1999), with whom he had a daughter, Silvestra (1948–1996).

In 1949 a spiritual crisis drove him to convert to Christianity and consequently he decided to suspend his yoga publications.

In 1953 he moved to Rome with his family and contributed to various newspapers, including Tribuna Illustrata, an Italian weekly magazine for whom he wrote a section about esotericism and astrology until 1969, when the magazine disappeared.

He visited the monasteries of Kalambaka, Thessaly and Mt. Athos in 1957 and Jerusalem in the Easter of 1966, where he allegedly had special revelations on the Mt. Golgotha and in Gethsemane.

In Alexandria, Egypt he visited archaeological sites that he claimed to have already seen during his paranormal experiences, by which he had remembered to have been Origen (185-254), instructor at the Didaskaleyon, school of Christianity founded by the evangelist St. Mark in Alexandria.

The study of Patristics consolidated his faith in what he regarded the authentic Esoteric Christianity.

By this time his formulation of a new doctrinal synthesis for the spiritual awakening of man and woman took shape in Archeosofica.

In 1968 he founded the Archeosophical Society in Rome, which is still active and has several thousand members in Italy and the rest of Europe (mainly in Germany, Portugal, and France).

On 29 September 1968 Tommaso Palamidessi founded Archeosofica, Esoteric School of High Initiation in Rome.

The foundation of Archeosofica was rooted in Palamidessi's spirit of collaboration toward spiritual realizations.

Indeed, Tommaso Palamidessi founded Archeosofica as a free school for free scholars, who must not feel like pupils nor apprentices, but brothers who listen to the living voice of other brothers.[...]

''It is a call addressed to all, and it does not matter if they belong to the different communities (Theosophists, Anthroposophists, Martinists, Rosicrucians, Catholics, Yoghists, etc.).

The Brotherhood is only one, and it can have only one verb: Love one another; only one Master: Jesus the Christ.''

In the following years, he journeyed to India, Kashmir, Nepal, China, and South America, but from 1968 forth his efforts were focused on the archeosophical doctrine and to the organisation of the many groups of study and experimentation that have soon spread all over Italy.

Then in 1973 he founded a cultural association called Archeosophical Society with the aim of developing and diffusing Archeosophy all over the world.

"Archeosophy is the integral knowledge, it is the archaic wisdom or, in other words, the Science of the Principles. As already said, this word stems from the Greek terms archè (principle) and sophìa (wisdom). Archeosophy facilitates the knowledge of the superior worlds through the development in man of new senses defined as spiritual.

Archeosophy is not only a philosophy that explains the origin and the end of man and of the cosmos of which he is a part, but it is first of all a pure experimental method; it never loses sight of the fact that philosophy has been the surrogate, often unreliable, for the moral and intellectual support of man, who watches impotently at his and others' caducity from birth to death.

It holds that philosophy was born when man lost his spiritual contact with the Absolute or Arkè, that is as soon as his dialogue and life of union with God became increasingly obfuscated, fragmentary and doubtful.

Philosophy became, in a sense, the instrument for formulating the working hypothesis, the theoretical way to return to the Arkè, full of strident contradictions.

Therefore Archeosophy, before being a philosophy, is continuous experimentation, deep knowledge of ourselves (gnosis), of nature and of God; it is the reinstatement in the Primordial Tradition, as a true, real and living contact with the supersensible worlds."

The archeosophical ascesis aims at solving the religious problem of a correction of human life that does not rely on either one's whim or on chance, but on techniques of spiritual awakening and interior transmutation.