JuliusEvola.NET

Main views in his own words

excerpts (3)
on Tradition's view

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JuliusEvola.NET

A Verifiable Existential Truth - the Doctrine of Two Natures:
Tradition's Foundation - Divine Kingship & Initiation

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A Verifiable Existential Truth - the Doctrine of Two Natures:
Tradition's Foundation - Divine Kingship & Initiation(from “The Path of Cinnabar”)[...]
I identified the foundation of the world of Tradition with the doctrine of two natures, a doctrine based on the notion of the existence of two opposing orders: a physical order and a metaphysical. The latter order represents the superior realm of 'being' opposed to the lower realm of becoming and of history: an immortal nature opposed to the perishable. The man of Tradition does not perceive this doctrine as merely a 'theory', but rather as a directly verifiable existential truth. Each traditional civilization is thus characterized by an attempt to lead man from the lower order of reality to the higher, along various stages of approximation, participation and effective realization.Originally, at the centre of each traditional civilization, stood 'immanent transcendence': the concrete presence of a non-human transcendent force embodied in higher beings possessing the highest authority. Perhaps the chief expressions of this idea are ancient forms of divine kingship. The most common means of passing from the lower nature to the higher has always been initiation. Contemplation and heroic action represent two great paths based on an approximation to the higher order; loyalty and ritual, two means of sharing in such an order. The higher order of reality has always found a support in traditional law, with its objective and supra-personal character, and has symbolically been expressed by the traditional state or empire: a worldly and historical reflection of that which transcends the world. Such, then, are the foundations of traditional hierarchies and civilizations.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Bhagavad-Gita: the Hero as Divine Manifestation
& Sacrality of War as Highest Tradition

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Bhagavad-Gita: the Hero as Divine Manifestation & Sacrality of War as Highest Tradition(from “Metaphysics of War”)We will conclude our series of essays for the Diorama on the subject of war as a spiritual value by discussing another tradition within the Indo-European heroic cycle, that of the Bhagavad-Gita, which is a very well-known text of ancient Hindu wisdom compiled essentially the warrior caste. [...][...] As soon as we refer to previous times we are effectively in the presence of an ethnic and cultural heritage which is to a large extent common, and which can only be described as 'Indo-European'. The original ways of life, the spirituality and the institutions of the first colonizers of India and Iran have many points of contact not only with those of the Hellenic and Nordic peoples, but also with those of the original Romans themselves.The traditions to which we have previously referred offer examples of this: most notably, a common spiritual conception of how to wage war, how to act and die heroically - contrarily to the views of those who, on the basis of prejudices and platitudes, cannot hear of Hindu civilization without thinking of nirvana, fakirs, escapism, negation of the 'Western' values of personhood and so on.The text to which we have alluded and on which we will base our discussion is presented in the form of a conversation between the warrior Arjuna and the divine Krishna, who acts as the spiritual director of the former. The conversation arises out of the occasion of a battle in which Arjuna, the victim of humanitarian scruples, is reluctant to participate. In the previous article we have already indicated that, from a spiritual point of view, the two persons, Arjuna and Krishna, are in reality one. They represent two different parts of the human being - Arjuna the principle of action, and Krishna that of transcendent knowledge. The conversation can thus be understood as a sort of monologue, developing a progressive inner clarification and solution, both in the heroic and the spiritual sense, of the problem of the warrior's activity which poses itself to Arjuna as he prepares for battle.Now, the pity which prevents the warrior from fighting when he recognizes among the hostile ranks some of his erstwhile friends and closest relatives is described by Krishna, that is to say by the spiritual principle, as "impurity, unworthy of a noble man, not leading to heaven" (II, 2). We have already seen this theme appear many times in the traditional teachings of the West: "Killed you will attain heaven; victorious you will enjoy the earth; arise, therefore, resolved to fight" (II, 37).However, along with this, the motif of the 'inner war', to be fought at the same moment, is outlined: "Knowing what is beyond reason, steadying the mind by your will, kill the lust-shaped foe, difficult to overcome" (III, 43).The internal enemy, which is passion, the animal thirst for life, is thus the counterpart of the external enemy. This is how the right orientation is defined: "Devoting all acts to Me with your mind absorbed in the supreme spirit, free from desire and selfishness, fight without faltering" (III, 30).This demand, for a lucid, supra-conscious heroism, rising above the passions, is important, as is this excerpt, which brings out the character of purity and absoluteness which action should have so as to be considered "sacred war": "Making equal pleasure and pain, profit and loss, victory and defeat, fight for the sake of fighting; in this way you will incur no sin" (II, 38).We find therefore that the only fault or sin is the state of an incomplete will, of an action which, inwardly, is still far from the height with respect to which one's own life matters as little as those of others and no human measure has value any longer.It is precisely in this respect that the text in question contains considerations of an absolutely metaphysical order, intended to show how what acts in the warrior at such a level is not so much a human force as a divine force. The teaching which Krishna (that is to say the 'knowledge' principle) gives to Arjuna (that is to say to the 'action' principle) to make his doubts vanish aims first of all at making him understand the distinction between what, as absolute spirituality, is incorruptible, and what, as the human and naturalistic element, exists only illusorily: "To the non- constant (body, matter) there is no permanence; to the constant (spirit) there is no change. Know that by which all this is pervaded (spirit) to be indestructible. He who thinks it the killer, he who thinks it slain, neither is in knowledge: for it slays not, nor is it slain. It is not killed when the body is killed. But perishable are all these bodies. Therefore, arise and fight" (II, 16, 17, 19,20,18).But there is more. The consciousness of the metaphysical unreality of what one can lose or can cause another to lose, such as the ephemeral life and the mortal body - a consciousness which corresponds to the definition of human existence as 'a mere pastime' in one of the traditions which we have already considered - is associated with the idea that spirit, in its absoluteness and transcendence, can only appear as a destructive force towards everything which is limited and incapable of overcoming its own finitude. Thus the problem arises of how the warrior can evoke spirit, precisely in virtue of his being necessarily an instrument of destruction and death, and identify with it.The answer to this problem is precisely what we find in our texts. The god not only declares: "I am the strength of the strong, divorced from passion and attachment; I am the brilliance in fire, the life of all that lives and the austerity of the austere; the wisdom of the wise I am, and the glory of the glorious" (VII, 11, 9, 10), but, finally, the god reveals himself to Arjuna in the transcendent and fearful form of lightning. We thus arrive at this general vision of life: like electrical bulbs too brightly lit, like circuits invested with too high a potential, human beings fall and die only because a power burns within them which transcends their finitude, which goes beyond everything they can do and want.This is why they develop, reach a peak, and then, as if overwhelmed by the wave which up to a given point had carried them forward, sink, dissolve, die and return to the unmanifest. But the one who does not fear death, the one who is able, so to speak, / to assume the powers of death by becoming everything which it destroys, overwhelms and shatters - this one finally passes beyond limitation, he continues to remain upon the crest of the wave, he does not fall, and what is beyond life manifests itself within him.Thus, Krishna, the personification of the 'principle of spirit', after having revealed himself fully to Arjuna, can say: "Even without you, none of these warriors in the hostile ranks will survive. Therefore, arise, attain glory, destroy the enemy, enjoy a prosperous reign. All these men have already been killed by Me, and you, 0 Arjuna, be but the instrument. Regret not, fight, you shall conquer the enemy in battle" (XI, 32, 33, 34).We see again here the identification of war with the 'path of God', of which we spoke in the previous article. The warrior ceases to act as a person. When he attains this level, a great non-human force transfigures his action, making it absolute and 'pure' precisely at its extreme. Here is a very evocative image belonging to the same tradition: "Life - like a bow; the mind - like the arrow; the target to pierce - the supreme spirit; to join mind to spirit as the shot arrow hits its target."This is one of the highest forms of metaphysical justification of war, one of the most comprehensive images of war as 'sacred war'.To conclude this excursion into the forms of heroic tradition, as presented to us by many different times and peoples, we will only add a few final words.We have made this voyage into a world which, to some, could seem outré and irrelevant, out of curiosity, not to display peculiar erudition. We have undertaken it instead with the precise intention of showing that the sacrality of war, that is to say, that which provides a spiritual justification for war and the necessity of war, constitutes a tradition in the highest sense of the term: it is something which has appeared always and everywhere, in the ascending cycle of every great civilization; while the neurosis of war, the humanitarian and pacifist deprecation of it, as well as the conception of war as a 'sad necessity' or a purely political or natural phenomenon - none if this corresponds to any tradition, all this is but modern fabrication, born yesterday, as a side-effect of the decomposition of the democratic and materialistic civilization against which, today, new revolutionary forces are rising up. In this sense, everything which we have gathered from a great variety of sources, constantly separating the essential from the contingent, the spirit from the letter, can be used by us as an inner fortification, as a confirmation, as a strengthened certainty.Not only does a fundamentally virile instinct appear justified by it on a superior basis, but also the possibility presents itself of determining the forms of the heroic experience which correspond to our highest vocation.Here we must refer to the first article of this series, in which we showed that there can be heroes of very different sorts, even of an animalistic and sub-personal sort; what matters is not merely the general capacity to throw oneself into combat and to sacrifice oneself, but also the precise spirit according to which such an event is experienced. But we now have all the elements needed to specify, from all the varied ways of understanding, the heroic experience, which may be considered the supreme one, which can make the identification of war with the 'path of God' really true, and can make one recognize, in the hero, a form of divine manifestation.Another previous consideration must be recalled, namely, that as the warrior's vocation really approaches this metaphysical peak and reflects the impulse to what is universal, it cannot help but tend towards an equally universal manifestation and end for his race; that is to say, it cannot but predestine that race for empire. For only the empire as a superior order in which a pax triumphalis is in force, almost as the earthly reflection of the sovereignty of the 'supra-world,' is adapted to forces in the field of spirit which reflect the great and free energies of nature, and are able to manifest the characters of purity, power, irresistibility and transcendence over all pathos, passion and human limitation.JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Bhagavad-Gita's Solar Wisdom
& Laws of Manu
(which are for Aryans as Talmud for Hebrews)
Confirm War's Re-Galvanizing Effect
for Race of the Spirit

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Bhagavad-Gita's Solar Wisdom
& Laws of Manu
(which are for Aryans as Talmud for Hebrews)
Confirm War's Re-Galvanizing Effect
for Race of the Spirit(from “Metaphysics of War”)[...]
The first concerns the meaningful relation, in the Bhagavad-Gita, between the teaching which has just been described on the one hand and tradition and race on the other. In chapter IV, 1-3, it is said that this is the 'solar' wisdom received from Manu, who, as is well known, is the most ancient 'divine' legislator of the Aryan race.His laws, for Aryans, have the same value that the Talmud has for Hebrews: that is to say, they constitute the formative force of their way of life, the essence of their 'race of the spirit'. Now; this primordial wisdom, which was at first transmitted through direct succession, "with the passing of the times was lost to the world" (IV, 2). It was not to a priest, but to a warrior prince, Arjuna, that it was revealed again in the way just recounted.To realize this wisdom by following the path of sacred heroism and absolute action can only mean, therefore, restoration, awakening, resumption of what was at the origin of tradition, which has survived for centuries in the dark depths of the race and routinized itself in the customs of successive ages.The meaning that we have already indicated, the re-galvanizing effect which the fact of war in given conditions can have for the 'race of the spirit', is thus exactly confirmed.JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Buddhism Reestablished
Regal Caste's Primordial Knowledge
against Sacerdotal Caste born of Decadence
& Guénon Not Seeing "According to Truth"

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Buddhism Reestablished
Regal Caste’s Primordial Knowledge
against Sacerdotal Caste born of Decadence
& Guénon Not Seeing “According to Truth”(from "The Doctrine of Awakening")[...]
It is not out of place to consider another point. The brahmana caste is habitually thought of in the West as a "sacerdotal" caste. This is true only up to a certain point. In the Vedic origins the type of Brahman or "sacrificer" bears little resemblance to that of the "priest" as our contemporaries think of him: he was, rather, a figure both virile and awful and, as we have said, a kind of visible incarnation in the human world of the superhuman (bhu-deva).Furthermore, we often find in the early texts a point where the distinction between the brahman— the "sacerdotal" caste—and the ksatram or rajam—the warrior or regal caste—did not exist; a feature that we see in the earliest stages of all traditional civilizations, including the Greek, Roman, and German. The two types only began to differ in a later period, this being another aspect of the process of regression that we have mentioned. Besides, there are many who maintain that in Aryan India the doctrine of the atma was originally confined almost exclusively to the warrior caste, and that the doctrine of brahman as an undifferentiated cosmic force was formulated mainly by the sacerdotal caste. There is probably some truth in this view. In any case, it is a fact that in many texts we see a king or a ksatriya (a member of the warrior nobility) vying in knowledge with and sometimes even instructing members of the Brahman caste; and that, according to tradition, primordial knowledge was handed down, starting from Iksvaku, in regal succession; the same "solar dynasty" (surya-varhsa) that we mentioned in connection with the Buddha's family, also figures here.We should have the following picture: in the Indo-Aryan post-Vedic world, while the warrior caste held a more realistic and virile view and put emphasis on the doctrine of the atma as the unchangeable and immortal principle of human personality, the Brahman caste was becoming little by little, "sacerdotal" and, instead of facing the reality, was moving among ritual and stereotyped exegeses and speculations.Simultaneously, in another way, the character of the first Vedic period was becoming overgrown with a tropical and chaotic vegetation of myths and popular religious images, even of semidevotional practices seeking the attainment of this, that, or the other divine "rebirth" on the basis of views on reincarnation and transmigration that, as we have said, had already infiltrated into the less illuminated Indo-Aryan mentalities. Leaving yoga apart, it is worth noting that it was the warrior nobility—the ksatram—that furnished the principal support not only of the Sarhkhya system, which is regarded as representing a clear reaction against speculative "idealism," but also of Jainism, the so-called doctrine of the conquerors (from jina, "conqueror"), which laid emphasis, though with a tendency to extremism, on necessity for ascetic action.All this is necessary for our understanding of the historical place of Buddhism and of the reasons of its most characteristic views.From the point of view of universal history, Buddhism arose in a period marked by a crisis running through a whole series of traditional civilizations. This crisis sometimes resolved itself positively thanks to opportune reforms and revisions, and sometimes negatively with the effect of inducing further phases of regression or spiritual decadence.This period, called by some the "climacteric" of civilization, falls approximately between the eighth and the fifth centuries b.c. It is in this period that the doctrines of Lao-tzu and Kung Fu-tzu (Confucius) were taking root in China, representing a renewal of elements of the most ancient tradition on the metaphysical plane on the one hand, and on the ethical-social on the other. In the same period it is said that "Zarathustra" appeared, through whom a similar return took place in the Persian tradition. And in India the same function was performed by Buddhism, also representing a reaction and, at the same time, a re-elevation. On the other hand, as we have often pointed out elsewhere, it seems that in the West processes of decadence mainly prevailed. The period of which we are now talking is, in fact, that in which the ancient aristocratic and hieratic Hellas declined; in which the religion of Isis along with other popular and spurious forms of mysticism superseded the solar and regal Egyptian civilization; it is that in which Israelite prophetism started the most dangerous ferments of corruption and subversion in the Mediterranean world. The only positive counterpart in the West seems in fact to have been Rome, which was born in that period and which for a certain cycle was a creation of universal importance, animated in high measure by an Olympian and heroic spirit.Coming to Buddhism, it was not conceived, as many who unilaterally take the Brahman point of view like to claim, as an antitraditional revolution, similar, in its own way, to what the Lutheran heresy was to Catholicism; (1) and still less as a "new" doctrine, the result of an isolated speculation that succeeded in taking root. It represented, rather, a particular adaptation of the original Indo-Aryan tradition, an adaptation that kept in mind the prevailing conditions and limited itself accordingly, while freshly and differently formulating preexistent teachings: at the same time Buddhism closely adhered to the ksatriya (in Pali, khattiya) spirit, the spirit of the warrior caste. We have already seen that the Buddha was born of the most ancient Aryan nobility; but this is not the end of the matter, as a text informs us of the particular aversion nourished by his people for the Brahman caste: "The Sakiya" (Skt: Sakya)—we read—"do not esteem the priests, they do not respect the priests, they do not honour the priests, they do not venerate the priests, they do not hold the priests of account." The same tendency is maintained by Prince Siddhattha, but with the aim of restoring, of reaffirming, the pure will for the unconditioned, to which in the most recent times the "regal" line had often been more faithful than the priestly caste that was already divided within itself.(1) This is the point of view held by R. Guénon, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, with which we cannot—"according to truth"—agree. More correct are the views of A. K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism, although in this book is apparent the tendency to emphasize only what in Buddhism is valuable from the brahmana standpoint, with disregard of the specific functional meaning he possesses as compared to Hindu tradition.There are, besides, many signs that the Buddhist doctrine laid no claim to originality but regarded itself as being, in a way, universal and having a traditional character in a superior sense. The Buddha himself says, for example: "Thus it is: those who, in times past, were saints, Perfect Awakened Ones, these sublime men also have rightly directed their disciples to such an end, as now disciples are rightly directly here by me; and those who in future times will be saints, Perfect Awakened Ones, also these sublime men will rightly direct their disciples, as now disciples are rightly directed here by me." The same is repeated in regard to purification of thought, word, and action; it is repeated about right knowledge of decay and death, of their origin, of their cessation and of the way that leads to their cessation; and it is repeated about the doctrine of the "void" or "emptiness," suffnata.The doctrine and the "divine life" proclaimed by Prince Siddhattha are repeatedly called "timeless," akaliko. "Ancient saints, Perfect Awakened Ones" are spoken of, and a traditional theme occurs in connection with a place (here called "the Gorge of the Seer") where a whole series of Paccekabuddhas are supposed to have vanished in the past, a series, that is, of beings who, by their own unaided and isolated efforts, have reached the superhuman state and the same perfect awakening as did Prince Siddhattha himself. Those who are "without faith, without devotion, without tradition" are reproached.A repeated saying is: "What for the world of the sages is not, of that I say: "It is not', and what for the world of sages is, of that I say: 'It is.'" An interesting point is the mention in a text of "extinction," the aim of the Buddhist ascesis, as something that "leads back to the origins." This is supported by the symbolism of a great forest where "an ancient path, a path of men of olden times" is discovered.Following it, the Buddha finds a royal city; and he asks that it should be restored. In another text the significance of this is explained by the Buddha in a most explicit way: "I have seen the ancient path, the path trodden by all the Perfected Awakened Ones of olden times. This is the path I follow." (2)(2) It is interesting that according to the myth, Buddha attained the awakening under the Tree of Life placed in the navel of the earth where also all the previous Buddhas reached transcendent knowledge. This is a reference to the "Center of the World," which is to be considered, in its way, as a chrism of traditionality and initiatic of orthodoxy whenever a contact with the origins was restored.It is quite clear, then, that in Buddhism we are not dealing with a negation of the principle of spiritual authority but rather with a revolt against a caste that claimed to monopolize this authority while its representatives no longer preserved its dignity and had lost their qualifications. [...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Buddhism:
the Historical Context of the Doctrine of Awakening

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Buddhism:
the Historical Context of the Doctrine of Awakening(from "The Doctrine of Awakening")First, a word about method. From the "traditional" point of view that we follow in this work, the great historical traditions are to be considered neither as "original" nor as arbitrary. In every tradition worthy of the name, elements are always present, in one form or another, of a "knowledge" that, being rooted in a superindividual reality, is objective. Furthermore, each tradition contains its own special mode of interpretation and cannot be considered as arbitrary or as proceeding from extrinsic or purely human factors. This particular element tends to vary with the prevailing historical and spiritual climate; and we can find in it the reason for the existence of certain formulations, adaptations, or limitations of the one knowledge—and the nonexistence of others.No one individual, suddenly, and as if inspired haphazardly by some outside agency, ever proclaimed the theory of the atma, for example, or invented nirvana or the Islamic theories. On the contrary, all traditions or doctrines obey, even without seeming to do so, a profound logic— discoverable by means of an adequate metaphysical interpretation of history.Accordingly, this shall be our standpoint when we deal with these aspects of Buddhism: this is also why we consider that critic to be fundamentally mistaken who tries at all costs to pin the label "original" on Buddhism or, indeed, on any great tradition, and who argues that "otherwise" such a tradition would in no way differ from others. A difference there is, as there is also an element in common with what has gone before; but both are determined—as we have said— by objective reasons, even though they may not always have been seen clearly by the individual exponents of particular historical trends.Having said this, we must go back to the pre-Buddhist Indo-Aryan traditions in order to find the precise implications of the Buddhist doctrine, and in them we must distinguish between two fundamental phases: the Vedic and the Brahmana Upanisad.With regard to the Vedas, which constitute the essential foundation of the entire tradition in question, it would not be correct to talk either of "religion" or of "philosophy." To begin with, the term veda—from the root vid, which is equivalent to the Greek ... (whence we have, for example, ...) and which means "I see," "I have seen"—refers to a doctrine based not on faith or "revelation," but on a higher knowledge attained through a process of seeing. The Vedas were "seen": they were seen by the rshi, by the "seers" of the earliest times. Throughout the tradition their essence has never been regarded as a "faith" but rather as a "sacred science."Thus it is frivolous to see in the Vedas, as many people do, the expression of a "purely naturalistic religion." As in other great systems, impurities may be present particularly where foreign matter has crept in, and very noticeably, for example, in the Atharva Veda. But what the essential and most ancient part of the Vedas reflects is a cosmic stage of the Indo-Aryan spirit. It is not a question of theories or of theologies, but of hymns containing a magnificent reflection of a consciousness that is still so harnessed to the cosmos and to metaphysical reality that the various "gods" of the Vedas are more than religious images; they are projections of the experience of significances and forces directly perceived in man, in nature, or beyond through a cosmic, heroic, and "sacrificial" concept, freely and almost "triumphantly."Although they were written considerably later, the fundamental thought contained in such epic poems as the Mahabharata goes back to the same epoch. Men, heroes, and divine figures appear side by side; and as Kerényi said when referring to the Olympian-Homeric phase of the Aryo-Hellenic tradition, men could "see the gods and be seen by them," and could "stand with them in the original state of existence." The Olympian element is reflected also in a typical group of Vedic divinities: in Dyaus (from div, "to shine"—a root that is also found in Zeus and Deus), for example, lord of the heavenly light, the origin of splendor, strength, and knowledge; in Varuna, also a symbol of celestial and regal power, and connected with the idea of rta, that is to say, of the cosmos, of a cosmic order, of a natural and supernatural law; while in Mitra there is, in addition, the idea of a god of the specifically Aryan virtues, truth and fidelity.We also have Surya, the flaming sun from whom, as from the Olympian, nothing is hidden, who destroys every infirmity and who, in the form of Savitar, is the light that is exalted in the first daily rite of all the Aryan castes as the principle of awakening and intellectual animation; or there is Usas, the dawn, eternally young, who opens the way for the sun, who gives life and who is the "token of immortality." In Indra we find the incarnation of the heroic and metaphysical impulse of the first Hyperborean conquerors: Indra is "he, without whom men cannot win," he is the "son of force," the lightning god of war, valor, and victory, the annihilator of the enemies of the Aryans, of the black Dasyu, and, consequently, of all the tortuous and titanic forces that "attempt to climb the heavens"; while at the same time he appears as the consolidator, as "he who has consolidated the world." The same spirit is reflected, in varying degrees, in minor Vedic divinities, even in those tied to the most conditioned forms of existence.In the Vedas we find that this cosmic experience is evoked through the agency of sacrificial action. The sacrifice rite extends human experience into the non-human, and provokes and establishes communion between the two worlds in such a manner that the sacrificer, a figure as austere and majestic as the Roman flamen dialis, assumes the traits of a god on earth (bhu-deva, bhu-sura). As for life after death, the Vedic solution is fully consonant with the oldest Aryo-Hellenic spirit: images of obscure hells are almost entirely absent from the most ancient parts of the Vedas: the crisis of death is hardly noticed as such—in the Atharva Veda it is even considered as the effect of a hostile and demoniacal force that, with suitable rites, can be repulsed. The dead pass into an existence of splendor that is also a "return," and in which they once again take up their form: "Having laid aside all defects, return home: full of splendour unite thyself to [thy] form"—and again: "We drank the soma [symbol of a sacred enthusiasm], we became immortal, we reached the light."The symbolic Vedic rite of "wiping out the tracks," so that the dead will not return among the living, well shows how the idea of reincarnation was almost totally absent in this period; such a possibility was ignored in the light of the high degree of heroical, sacrificial, and metaphysical tension belonging to that epoch.There is no trace in the Vedas of the later significance of Yama as god of death and hell; rather, he retains the outlines of his Irano-Aryan equivalent, Yima, sun king of the primordial age: son of the "Sun." Yama is the first of the mortals and he "who first found the road [to the hereafter]": thus, broadly speaking, the Vedic "hereafter" is bound up in great measure with the idea of a reintegration of the primordial state.About the tenth century b.c. new developments began: they found expression in the Brahmana texts on the one hand, and on the other in the Upanisad texts. Both go back to the tradition of the Vedas: yet there is a noteworthy change of perspective. We are slowly approaching "philosophy" and "theology."The speculation of the Brahmana texts rests chiefly on that part of the Vedas that refers to ritual and sacrificial action. Ritual, in all the traditional civilizations, was conceived neither as an empty ceremony nor as a sentimental and, at the same time, formal act of praising and supplicating a God, but rather as an operation with real effects, as a process capable not only of establishing contacts with the transcendent world, but of imposing itself upon supersensible forces and, through their mediation, eventually influencing even the natural forces. As such, ritual presupposes not only knowledge of certain laws, but also, and more essentially, the existence of a power. The term brahman (in the neuter, not to be confused with Brahma in the masculine, which designates the theistically conceived divinity) originally signified this particular energy, this kind of magic power, this fluid or life force, upon which the ritual rests.In the Brahmana texts this ritual aspect of the Vedic tradition was enlarged and formalized. Ritual became the center of everything and the object of a fastidious science that often became a formalism destitute of any vital content. Oldenberg, referring to the period of Prince Siddhattha, talks in this connection of "an idiotic science knows everything and explains everything, and sits enthroned, satisfied, amongst its extravagant creations." This judgment is excessive, but it is not entirely unjustified. In the Buddha's time there existed a caste of theologi philosophantes who administered the remnants of the ancient tradition, trying with all the means in their power to establish a prestige that did not always correspond to their human qualifications or to their race—if not their physical race, which was well cared for by the caste system, at least their spiritual race. We have used the word "theologists" since the concept of brahman in these circles gradually became generalized and, in a manner of speaking, substantialized, to such an extent that the brahman finally no longer signified the mysterious force that, fundamentally, only made sense in terms of ritual and magic experience; it came to mean the soul of the world, the supreme force-substance of the universe, the substratum, indeterminate in itself, of every being and of every phenomenon. It thus became an almost theological concept.The Upanisads, on the other hand, concentrated mainly on the doctrine of the atma. which largely reflected the original cosmic and solar sentiment of the earliest Aryan consciousness, insofar as it stressed the reality of the "I" as the superindividual. unchanging, and immortal principle of the personality, as opposed to the multiple variety of the phenomena and forces of nature. The atma is defined by neti neti ("not so, not so"), that is to say, by the idea that it does not belong to nature or, more generally, to the conditioned world.In India the speculative current of the Brahmana and that of the Upanisads gradually converged; this convergence resulted in the identification of the brahman with the atma: the "I," in its superindividual aspect, and the force- substance of the cosmos became one and the same thing.This was a turning point of the greatest importance in the spiritual history of the Indo-Aryan civilization. The doctrine of the identity of the atma with the brahman did, in fact, constitute a metaphysical achievement but, at the same time, it initiated a process of breaking up and of spiritual dissolution. This process was bound to take place as shadows began to cloud the luminosity of the original heroic and cosmic experience of Vedic man and as foreign influences gained ground. Originally the doctrine of the Upanisads was considered as "secret," as a knowledge to be transmitted only to the few—the term Upanisad itself conveyed this idea. But in point of fact the philosophical and speculative tendencies became uppermost. This resulted in divergencies of opinion even in the oldest Upanisad—the Chandogya—and the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad—as to the plane of consciousness to be used as the reference point for the doctrine. Is the atma object of immediate experience or is it not? It is both one and the other at the same time. Its substantial identity with the "I" of the individual is affirmed but, at the same time, we often see the unity of the individual with the atma-brahman postponed till after death; and not only this, but conditions are postulated under which it will happen, and the case is considered in which the "I," or rather the elements of the person, may not leave the cycle of finite and mortal existences. In the ancient Upanisads, in fact, no precise solution is ever reached of the problem of the actual relationship existing between the individual "I" of which everyone can talk, and the atma-brahman.We do not consider that this was accidental: it was a circumstance that corresponded to an already uncertain state of consciousness, to the fact that, while for the adepts of the "secret doctrine" the "I" could be equated effectively with the atma, for the general consciousness the atma was becoming a simple speculative concept, an almost theological assumption, since the original spiritual level was beginning to be lost.Furthermore, the danger of pantheistic confusions showed itself. This danger did not exist in theory since, in the Upanisads, following the Vedic concept, the supreme principle was not only conceived as the substance of the world and of all beings, but also as that which transcends them "by three quarters," existing as "the immortal in the heavens." In the same Upanisads, however, prominence is also given to the identity of the atma-brahman with elements of all kinds in the naturalistic world, so that the practical possibility of a pantheistic deviation encouraged by the assimilation of the atma with the brahman was real: particularly so, if we take into account the process of man's gradual regression, of which we can find evidence in the teaching of all traditions, including the Indo-Aryan, where the theory of the four yuga corresponds exactly to the classical theory of the four ages and of man's descent to the last of them, the Iron Age, equivalent to the "Dark Age" (kali-yuga) of the Indo-Aryans. If, during the period of these speculations, the original cosmic and uranic consciousness of the Vedic origins had already suffered in this way a certain overclouding, then the formulation of the theory of the identity of the atma with the brahman provided a dangerous incentive toward evasion, toward a confused self-identification with the spirituality of everything, at the very moment when a particularly energetic reaction by way of a tendency toward concentration, detachment, and awakening was needed.Altogether, the germs of decadence, which were already showing themselves in the post-Vedic period and which were to become quite evident in the Buddha's day (sixth century b.c.), are as follows: above all, a stereotyped ritualism; then the demon of speculation, whose effect was that what ought to have remained "secret doctrine," upanisad, rahasya, became partly rationalized, with the result that there eventually appeared a tumultuous crowd of divergent theories, sects, and schools, which the Buddhist texts often vividly describe. In the third place, we find a "religious" transformation of many divinities who, in the Vedic period were, as we have said, simply cosmically transfigured states of consciousness; these have now become objects of popular cults. (1) We have already spoken of the pantheistic danger. In addition to these points we have yet to consider the effect of foreign, non-Aryan influences, to which we believe are attributable in no small degree the formation and diffusion of the theory of reincarnation.(1) It is essentially of these gods that we must think when we see them assume, in Buddhist texts, quite modest and subordinate parts, transforming themselves sometimes almost into quasi disciples who receive revelation of the doctrine from the Buddha. We are dealing, that is, with the degradation of the ancient gods: and the doctrine revealed by the Awakened One corresponds, basically, with what they once signified, but which at this period, had been forgotten.

As we have said, there is no trace of this theory in the early Vedic period; this is because it is quite incompatible with an Olympian and heroic vision of the world, being as it is a "truth" of non-Aryan races that are tellurically and matriarchally adjusted in outlook. Reincarnation, in fact, is conceivable only by one who feels himself to be a "son of the earth," who has no knowledge of a reality transcending the naturalistic order; bound as he is to a female-maternal divinity found alike in the pre-Aryan Mediterranean world, and in the pre-Aryan Hindu civilization, such as the Dravidian and Kosalian. Into the source from which as an ephemeral being he has sprung, the individual, when he dies, must return, only to reappear in fresh terrestrial births, in an inescapable and interminable cycle. This is the ultimate sense of the theory of reincarnation, a theory that begins to infiltrate as early as the period of Upanisad speculations; it gives place gradually to mixed forms that we can use as a measure of the change in the original Aryan consciousness to which we have referred.While in the Vedas only a single fate after death is considered, as in ancient Hellas, in the Brahmana texts the theory of the double way already appears: "[Only] he who knows and practices ritual action rises again in life and obtains immortal life; the others who neither know nor practice ritual action will continue to be born anew, as nourishment for death."In the Upanisads, however, as the relationship between the real "I" and the atma oscillates, so does their teaching of what happens after death. They speak of the "dyke, beyond which even night becomes day, since the world of the brahman is unchangeable light"; a dyke constituted by the atma against which neither decay, nor death, nor pain, nor good action, nor bad action can prevail."They speak of the "way of the gods" (deva- yana) that leads one after death to the unconditioned whence "there is no return." But at the same time another road is considered, the pitr-yana, along which "one returns," the individual after death being little by little "sacrificed" to various divinities for whom he becomes "food," finally to reappear on the earth. In the oldest texts the possibility of a liberation is not considered for those who go on this second road: they speak instead of the "causal law," of the karma, which determines a man's subsequent existence on the basis of what he has done in the preceding one. We have now arrived at what we shall call the samsaric consciousness (from samsara), which is the keystone of the Buddhist vision of life: the secret knowledge, confided privately by the wise Yajnavalkya to the king Artabhaga, is that after death the individual elements of man dissolve in the corresponding cosmic elements, including the atma, which returns to the "ether," and that which is left is only the karma, that is, the action, the impersonal force, bound to the life of one being, that will go on to determine a new being.In all this can be seen, then, more than just the effect of "free" metaphysical speculation: it is, rather, a sign of a consciousness that begins to consider itself terrestrial or, at the most, pantheistically cosmic, and that now centers itself on that part of the human being that may really be concerned with death and rebirth and indefinite wandering across various forms of conditioned existence; we say "various" since the horizons gradually widened and it was even thought that one might re-arise in this or that world of gods, according to one's actions. In any case, in the epoch in which Buddhism appeared the theories of reincarnation and of transmigration were already an integral part of the ideas acquired by the predominant mentality.Sometimes, and even in the Upanisads, different outlooks became indiscriminately combined so that on the one side was conceived an atma that, although divorced from any concrete experience, was supposed to be permanently and intangibly present in everyone, and on the other side there was the interminable wandering of man in various lives.It is on these lines that practical and realistic currents gradually established themselves in opposition to the speculative currents. We can include Samkhya, which opposed to the pantheistic danger a rigid dualism and in which the reality of the "I" or atma—called here purusa—as the supernatural, intangible, and unalterable principle is opposed to all the forms, forces, and phenomena of a natural and material order. But more important in this respect are the trends of yoga. Based both on Samkhya and on ascetic tendencies already coming to the fore in opposition to ritualistic and speculative Brahmanism, these recognized more or less explicitly the new state of affairs, which was that in speaking of "I" one could no longer concretely understand the atma, the unconditioned principle; that it appeared no longer as direct consciousness; and that therefore, apart from speculation, it could only be considered as an end, as the limit of a process of reintegration with action as its basis. As the immediate real datum there was substituted instead what we call "samsaric" consciousness and existence, consciousness bound to the "current"—and the term samsara (which thus only makes a relatively late appearance) means precisely "current"—it is the current of becoming.It is not out of place to consider another point. The brahmana caste is habitually thought of in the West as a "sacerdotal" caste. This is true only up to a certain point. In the Vedic origins the type of Brahman or "sacrificer" bears little resemblance to that of the "priest" as our contemporaries think of him: he was, rather, a figure both virile and awful and, as we have said, a kind of visible incarnation in the human world of the superhuman (bhu-deva).Furthermore, we often find in the early texts a point where the distinction between the brahman— the "sacerdotal" caste—and the ksatram or rajam—the warrior or regal caste—did not exist; a feature that we see in the earliest stages of all traditional civilizations, including the Greek, Roman, and German. The two types only began to differ in a later period, this being another aspect of the process of regression that we have mentioned. Besides, there are many who maintain that in Aryan India the doctrine of the atma was originally confined almost exclusively to the warrior caste, and that the doctrine of brahman as an undifferentiated cosmic force was formulated mainly by the sacerdotal caste.There is probably some truth in this view. In any case, it is a fact that in many texts we see a king or a ksatriya (a member of the warrior nobility) vying in knowledge with and sometimes even instructing members of the Brahman caste; and that, according to tradition, primordial knowledge was handed down, starting from Iksvaku, in regal succession; the same "solar dynasty" (surya-varhsa) that we mentioned in connection with the Buddha's family, also figures here.We should have the following picture: in the Indo-Aryan post-Vedic world, while the warrior caste held a more realistic and virile view and put emphasis on the doctrine of the atma as the unchangeable and immortal principle of human personality, the Brahman caste was becoming little by little, "sacerdotal" and, instead of facing the reality, was moving among ritual and stereotyped exegeses and speculations.Simultaneously, in another way, the character of the first Vedic period was becoming overgrown with a tropical and chaotic vegetation of myths and popular religious images, even of semidevotional practices seeking the attainment of this, that, or the other divine "rebirth" on the basis of views on reincarnation and transmigration that, as we have said, had already infiltrated into the less illuminated Indo-Aryan mentalities. Leaving yoga apart, it is worth noting that it was the warrior nobility—the ksatram—that furnished the principal support not only of the Sarhkhya system, which is regarded as representing a clear reaction against speculative "idealism," but also of Jainism, the so-called doctrine of the conquerors (from jina, "conqueror"), which laid emphasis, though with a tendency to extremism, on necessity for ascetic action.All this is necessary for our understanding of the historical place of Buddhism and of the reasons of its most characteristic views.From the point of view of universal history, Buddhism arose in a period marked by a crisis running through a whole series of traditional civilizations. This crisis sometimes resolved itself positively thanks to opportune reforms and revisions, and sometimes negatively with the effect of inducing further phases of regression or spiritual decadence.This period, called by some the "climacteric" of civilization, falls approximately between the eighth and the fifth centuries b.c. It is in this period that the doctrines of Lao-tzu and Kung Fu-tzu (Confucius) were taking root in China, representing a renewal of elements of the most ancient tradition on the metaphysical plane on the one hand, and on the ethical-social on the other. In the same period it is said that "Zarathustra" appeared, through whom a similar return took place in the Persian tradition. And in India the same function was performed by Buddhism, also representing a reaction and, at the same time, a re-elevation. On the other hand, as we have often pointed out elsewhere, it seems that in the West processes of decadence mainly prevailed. The period of which we are now talking is, in fact, that in which the ancient aristocratic and hieratic Hellas declined; in which the religion of Isis along with other popular and spurious forms of mysticism superseded the solar and regal Egyptian civilization; it is that in which Israelite prophetism started the most dangerous ferments of corruption and subversion in the Mediterranean world. The only positive counterpart in the West seems in fact to have been Rome, which was born in that period and which for a certain cycle was a creation of universal importance, animated in high measure by an Olympian and heroic spirit.Coming to Buddhism, it was not conceived, as many who unilaterally take the Brahman point of view like to claim, as an antitraditional revolution, similar, in its own way, to what the Lutheran heresy was to Catholicism; (2) and still less as a "new" doctrine, the result of an isolated speculation that succeeded in taking root. It represented, rather, a particular adaptation of the original Indo-Aryan tradition, an adaptation that kept in mind the prevailing conditions and limited itself accordingly, while freshly and differently formulating preexistent teachings: at the same time Buddhism closely adhered to the ksatriya (in Pali, khattiya) spirit, the spirit of the warrior caste. We have already seen that the Buddha was born of the most ancient Aryan nobility; but this is not the end of the matter, as a text informs us of the particular aversion nourished by his people for the Brahman caste: "The Sakiya" (Skt: Sakya)—we read—"do not esteem the priests, they do not respect the priests, they do not honour the priests, they do not venerate the priests, they do not hold the priests of account." The same tendency is maintained by Prince Siddhattha, but with the aim of restoring, of reaffirming, the pure will for the unconditioned, to which in the most recent times the "regal" line had often been more faithful than the priestly caste that was already divided within itself.(2) This is the point of view held by R. Guénon, L'Homme et son devenir selon le Vedanta (Paris, 1925), p. 111 ff., with which we cannot—"according to truth"— agree [(English trans.: Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, [London, 1945)J. More correct are the views of A. K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism (New York, 1941), although in this book is apparent the tendency to emphasize only what in Buddhism is valuable from the brahmana standpoint, with disregard of the specific functional meaning he possesses as compared to Hindu tradition.There are, besides, many signs that the Buddhist doctrine laid no claim to originality but regarded itself as being, in a way, universal and having a traditional character in a superior sense. The Buddha himself says, for example: "Thus it is: those who, in times past, were saints, Perfect Awakened Ones, these sublime men also have rightly directed their disciples to such an end, as now disciples are rightly directly here by me; and those who in future times will be saints, Perfect Awakened Ones, also these sublime men will rightly direct their disciples, as now disciples are rightly directed here by me." The same is repeated in regard to purification of thought, word, and action; it is repeated about right knowledge of decay and death, of their origin, of their cessation and of the way that leads to their cessation; and it is repeated about the doctrine of the "void" or "emptiness," suffnata.The doctrine and the "divine life" proclaimed by Prince Siddhattha are repeatedly called "timeless," akaliko. "Ancient saints, Perfect Awakened Ones" are spoken of, and a traditional theme occurs in connection with a place (here called "the Gorge of the Seer") where a whole series of Paccekabuddhas are supposed to have vanished in the past, a series, that is, of beings who, by their own unaided and isolated efforts, have reached the superhuman state and the same perfect awakening as did Prince Siddhattha himself. Those who are "without faith, without devotion, without tradition" are reproached.A repeated saying is: "What for the world of the sages is not, of that I say: "It is not', and what for the world of sages is, of that I say: 'It is.'" An interesting point is the mention in a text of "extinction," the aim of the Buddhist ascesis, as something that "leads back to the origins." This is supported by the symbolism of a great forest where "an ancient path, a path of men of olden times" is discovered. Following it, the Buddha finds a royal city; and he asks that it should be restored. In another text the significance of this is explained by the Buddha in a most explicit way: "I have seen the ancient path, the path trodden by all the Perfected Awakened Ones of olden times. This is the path I follow." (3)(3) It is interesting that according to the myth, Buddha attained the awakening under the Tree of Life placed in the navel of the earth where also all the previous Buddhas reached transcendent knowledge. This is a reference to the "Center of the World," which is to be considered, in its way, as a chrism of traditionality and initiatic of orthodoxy whenever a contact with the origins was restored.

It is quite clear, then, that in Buddhism we are not dealing with a negation of the principle of spiritual authority but rather with a revolt against a caste that claimed to monopolize this authority while its representatives no longer preserved its dignity and had lost their qualifications. The Brahmans, against whom Prince Siddhattha turns, are those who say they know, but who know nothing, who for many generations have lost the faculty of direct vision, without which they cannot even say: "Only this is truth, foolishness is the rest," and who now resemble "a file of blind men, in which the first cannot see, the one in the middle cannot see and the last cannot see." Very different from the men of the original period—from the
brahmana who remembered the ancient rule, who guarded the door of the senses, who had entirely controlled their impulses, and who were ascetics, rich only in knowledge, inviolable and invincible, made strong by truth (dhamma)—were their worldly successors, who were wrapped up in ritualism or intent on vain fasting and who had abandoned the ancient laws. Of these "there is not one who has seen Brahma face to face," whence it is impossible that "these brahmana, versed in the science of the threefold Vedas, are capable of indicating the way to a state of companionship with that which they neither know nor have seen." The Buddha is opposed to one who knows "only by hearsay," to one who knows "the truth only by repetition, and who, with this traditionally heard truth, as a coffer handed down from hand to hand, transmits the doctrine," the integrity of which, however, it is impossible to guarantee in such circumstances. A distinction is therefore made between the ascetics and Brahmans who "only by their own creed profess to have reached the highest perfection of knowledge of the world: such are the reasoners and the disputers," and other ascetics and Brahmans who, "in things never before heard, recognize clearly in themselves the truth, and profess to have reached the highest perfection of knowledge of the world."It is to these latter that Prince Siddhattha claims to belong, and this is the type that he indicates to his disciples: "only when he knows does he say that he knows, only when he has seen does he say that he has seen." Regarded from this standpoint Buddhism does not deny the concept of brahmana; on the contrary the texts use the word frequently and call the ascetic life brahmacariya, their intention being simply to indicate the fundamental qualities in virtue of which the dignity of the true brahmana can be confirmed.Here, with the aim being essentially one of reintegration, the qualities of the true brahmana and of the ascetic become identified. These notions had previously been distinct, particularly when the Asrama teaching of the Aryan code, according to which a man of Brahman caste was obliged to graduate to a completely detached life, vanaprashta or yati, had practically and with but few exceptions disappeared. By understanding this point we can also understand the Buddha's true attitude to the problem of caste.Even in the preceding tradition ascetic achievement had been considered as above all caste and free from obligations to any of them. This is the Buddha's point of view, expressed in a simile: as one who desires fire does not ask the type of wood that in fact produces it, so from any caste may arise an ascetic or an Awakened One. The castes appeared to Prince Siddhattha, as they did to every traditional mind, as perfectly natural and furthermore, justified transcendentally, since in following the doctrine of the Upanisads he understood that birth in one caste or another and inequality in general were not accidental but the effect of a particular preceding action. Thus he was never concerned with upsetting the caste system on the ethnic, political, or social plane; on the contrary, it is laid down that a man should not omit any of the obligations inherent in his station in life, and it is never said that a servant— sudda (Skt.: sudra)—or a vessa (Skt.: vaisya) should not obey higher Aryan castes. The problem only concerns the spiritual apex of the Aryan hierarchy, where historical conditions required discrimination and revision of the matter: it was necessary that the "lists" should be reviewed and reconstructed, with the traditional dignities being considered real only on "the merits of the individual cases." The decisive point was the identification of the true Brahman with the ascetic and, thence, the emphasis placed on what in fact is evidenced by action.Thus the principle was proclaimed: "Not by caste is one a pariah, not by caste is one a brahmana; by actions is one a pariah, by actions is one a brahmana." In respect of the "flame that is sustained by virtue, and lighted by training," as in respect of liberation, the four castes are equal. And again: as it is not to be expected in answer to a man's invocations, prayers, and praises, so it is not to be expected that the brahmana who, although they are instructed in the triple Veda yet "omit the practice of those qualities that make a man a true brahmana can, by calling upon Indra, Soma, Varuna and other gods, acquire those qualities that really make a man a non-brahmana." If they have not destroyed desire for the five stems of sense experience, they can as little expect to unite themselves after death with Brahma as a man, swimming, can expect to reach the other bank with his arms tied to his body. To unite himself with Brahma a man must develop in himself qualities similar to Brahma. This, however, in no way prevents the consideration in the texts of the ideal brahmana, in whom the purity of the Aryan lineage is joined with qualities which make him like a god or a divine being; and the texts even go so far as to reprove the contemporary Brahmans not only for their desertion of ancient customs and for their interest in gold and riches, but also for their betrayal of the laws of marriage within the caste, for they are accused of frequenting non-Brahman women at all times from mere desire "like dogs." The general principle of any right hierarchy is confirmed with these words: "In serving a man, if for this service one becomes worse, not better, this man, I say, one ought not to serve. In serving a man, on the other hand, if for this service one becomes better, not worse, this man, I say, one ought to serve."This shows that there is no question here of equalitarian subversion under spiritual pretexts, but of rectification and epuration of the existing hierarchy. Prince Siddhattha has so little sympathy for the masses that in one of the oldest texts he speaks of the "common crowd" as a "heap of rubbish," where there takes place the miraculous flowering of the Awakened One. Beyond the ancient division into castes, Buddhism affirms another that, deeper and more intimate, mutatis mutandis, is not unlike the one that originally existed between the Aryans, those "twice-born" (dvija) and other beings: on one side stand the Ariya and the "noble sons moved by confidence," to whom the Doctrine of Awakening is accessible; on the other, "the common men, without understanding for what is saintly, remote from the saintly doctrine, not accessible to the saintly doctrine; without understanding for what is noble, remote from the doctrine of the noble ones, not accessible by the doctrine of the noble ones." If, on the one hand, as rivers "when they reach the ocean lose their former names and are reckoned only as ocean, so the members of the four castes, when they take up the law of the Buddha, lose their former characteristics"—yet on the other they form a well-defined company, the "sons of the Sakiya's son." We can see that the effective aim of Buddhism was to discriminate between different natures, for which the touchstone was the Doctrine of Awakening itself: a discrimination that could not do other than stimulate the spiritual bases that originally had themselves been the sole justification of the Aryan hierarchy. In confirmation of this is the fact that the establishment and diffusion of Buddhism never in later centuries caused dissolution of the caste system—even today in Ceylon this system continues undisturbed side by side with Buddhism; while, in Japan, Buddhism lives in harmony with hierarchical, traditional, national, and warrior concepts. Only in certain Western misconceptions is Buddhism—considered in later and corrupted forms—presented as a doctrine of universal compassion encouraging humanitarianism and democratic equality.The only point we must take with a grain of salt in the texts is the affirmation that in individuals of all castes all possible potentialities, both positive and negative, exist in equal measure. But the Buddhist theory of sankhara, that is, of prenatal predispositions, is enough to rectify this point. The exclusiveness of caste, race, and tradition in a hierarchical system results in the individual possessing hereditary predispositions for his development in a particular direction; this ensures an organic and harmonious character in his development, as opposed to the cases in which an attempt is made to reach the same point with a kind of violence, by starting from a naturally unfavorable base. Four ways are considered in some Buddhist texts, in three of which either the road or the achievement of knowledge is difficult, or both are difficult; the fourth way offers an easy road and easy attainment of knowledge; this way is called the "path of the elect," and it is reserved for those who enjoy the advantages bestowed by a good birth. At least it would have been so had circumstances been normal. But, let us repeat, Buddhism appeared in abnormal conditions in a particular traditional civilization: it is for this reason that Buddhism placed emphasis on the aspect of action and of individual achievement; and it is also for this reason that the support offered by tradition, in its most restricted sense, was held of little account.Prince Siddhattha stated that he himself had attained knowledge through his own efforts, without a master to show him the way; so, in the original Doctrine of Awakening, each individual has to rely on himself, and on his own exertions, just as a soldier who is lost must rely on himself alone to rejoin the marching army.Thus Buddhism, if a comparison of various traditions were being made, could legitimately take its place with the race that elsewhere we have called heroic, in the sense of the Hesiodic teaching on the "Four Ages." We mean a type of man in which the spirituality belonging to the primordial state is no longer taken for granted as something natural, for this tradition is no longer itself an adequate foundation. Spirituality has become an aim to him, the object of a reconquest, the final limit of a reintegration to be carried out by one's own virile efforts.This ends our account of the historical place of Buddhism, an essential prerequisite for understanding the meaning of its principal teachings and the reasons for their existence.Before going on to discuss the doctrine and the practice we must return to a point we have already mentioned, that is, that Buddhism belongs to a cycle that modern man can also comprehend.Although in the epoch in which Prince Siddhattha lived there was already a certain clouding over of spiritual consciousness and of metaphysical vision of the world such as was possessed by ancient Indo-Aryan man, the later course of history— and particularly of Western history—has produced an increasing amount of regression, materialism, and individualism together with a corresponding loss of direct contact with metaphysical and, generally speaking, supersensible reality. With the "modern" world we have come to a point beyond which it would be difficult to go. The object of direct knowledge for modern man is exclusively the material world, with its counterpart, the purely psychological sphere of his subjectivity. His philosophical speculations and his religion stand apart, the first are purely cerebral creations, the second is based essentially on faith.It is not entirely a case of Western religion, as opposed to the highest traditions of the most ancient time, having centered itself on faith, thereby hoping to save what yet could be saved. It is, rather, a counsel of despair: a man who has long since lost all direct contact with the metaphysical world can only adopt one possible form of religio, of reconnection, namely, that provided by belief or faith. It is in this way that we can also come to understand the real significance of Protestantism as compared with Catholicism. Protestantism took root in a period when humanism and naturalism were ushering in a phase of "secularization" of European man, a process that went much further than the normal regression of the epoch in which Christianity in general arose; and at the same time decadence and corruption appeared among the representatives of the Catholic tradition, to whom had been entrusted the task of support and mediation. These being the real circumstances and the rift having thus grown wider, the principle of the pure faith was emphasized and opposed to any hierarchical organization and mediation; a distrust of "works" (even the Christian monastic asceticism was included in this) was nourished; these are tendencies that are characteristic of Protestantism.The present crisis of Western religions based on "belief is known to all, and we need not point out the completely secular, materialistic and samsaric character of the mentality predominant in our contemporaries. We are entitled to ask ourselves, under these circumstances, what a system, based rigorously on knowledge, free from elements of both faith and intellectualism, not tied to local organized tradition, but in reality directed toward the unconditioned, may have to offer. It is evident that this path is only suited to a very small minority, gifted with exceptional interior strength. Original Buddhism, in this respect, can be recommended as can few other doctrines, particularly because when it was formulated the condition of mankind, although still far from the straits of Western materialism and the subsequent eclipse of any living traditional knowledge, nevertheless manifested some of these signs and symptoms. Nor must we forget that Buddhism, as we have said, is a practical and realistic adaptation of traditional ideas, an adaptation that is mainly in the spirit of the ksatriya, of the Aryan warrior caste; it should be remembered especially since Western man's line of development has been warlike rather than a sacerdotal, while his inclination for clarity, for realism, and for exact knowledge, applied on the material plane, has produced the most typical achievements of his civilization.Other metaphysical and ascetic systems might appear more attractive than Buddhism and might offer a deeper gratification for a mind anxiously trying to penetrate the mysteries of the world and of existence. Yet they tend proportionately to provide modern man with opportunities for illusions and misconceptions; the reason being that genuinely traditional systems, such as the Vedanta, if they are to be fully understood and realized, presuppose a degree of spirituality that has disappeared long ago in the vast majority of men.Buddhism, on the other hand, poses a total problem, without any loopholes. As someone has rightly said, it is "no milk for babies," nor does it provide metaphysical feasts for lovers of intellectual speculation. It states: "Man, this is what you have become and this is what your experience has become. Know it. There is a Way which leads beyond. This is its direction, these are its milestones, these are the means for following it. It rests with you to discover your true vocation and to measure your strength." "Do not persuade, do not dissuade; knowing persuasion, knowing dissuasion, neither persuade, nor dissuade, expound only reality"—we have already seen that this is the fundamental precept of the Awakened Ones.

Thus, in describing the historical place of Buddhism, we have also explained the last of the reasons we adopted to justify the choice of Buddhism as a basis for a study of a complete and virile ascesis, formulated with regard to the cycle that also includes contemporary man.JULIUS EVOLA

JuliusEvola.NET

Castes: from Divine Kings to Servants

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Castes: from Divine Kings to Servants(from “The Path of Cinnabar”)[...]
In order to illustrate this vast process of degeneration, particularly in its political and social aspects, I referred to the aforementioned law of caste regression. Significantly, other authors had referred to this same law in the years when I was writing Revolt, both simultaneously and independently from one another. On the other hand, the law of caste regression was clearly related to the doctrine of four ages. Such a law is best explained on the basis of an intrinsically valid teaching espoused in a more or less explicit, complete and regular form among most traditional civilizations. According to such teachings, human society is structured in four 'functional classes' or castes, which correspond to definite and differentiated ways of being; each caste possesses its own character, ethics, rights and duties within the broader framework of Tradition. The highest caste is comprised of those individuals who embody spiritual authority; the second of the warrior aristocracy; the third of the property-owning bourgeoisie; the fourth of servants.History is clearly marked by the progressive descent of civilization, power and values from the level of the highest caste to that of the lowest. With the end of those systems based on pure spiritual authority ('sacral civilizations' ruled by 'divine kings'), authority fell into the hands of the warrior aristocracy: here began the cycle of great monarchies - the 'divine right' of the sovereign representing the residual echo of a former sacred dignity. The bourgeois revolution, democracy, capitalism and industrialism then contributed to transfer power into the hands of the representatives of the third caste, that of the wealthy - such transferral radically altering the character of the civilization and the nature of its interests. In the present day, socialism, Marxism and Communism are foreshadowing - and have already partly brought about - the final phase: the advent of the fourth caste, that of servants. Servants ('workers' and proletarians) are here seen to organize themselves in an attempt to gain power and to conquer the world, leaving their imprint on all aspects of life, leading the historical process of regression to its close.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Christianity: Historical Function & Spirit

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Christianity: Historical Function & Spirit(from "Revolt Against the Modern World")[...] If, on the one hand, we should not ignore the complexity and the heterogeneity of the elements that were found in primitive Christianity, on the other hand, we should not minimize the existing antithesis between the dominating forces and the pathos found in these elements and the original Roman spirit. At this point I do not purport to focus on the traditional elements found in this or that historical civilization; I rather intend to assess in what function and according to what spirit the historical currents have acted as a whole. Thus the presence of some traditional elements within Christianity, and more specifically within Catholicism, should not prevent us from recognizing the subversive character of these two currents.We already know what kind of equivocal spirituality is associated with Judaism, from which Christianity grew, and with the Asiatic cults of decadence that facilitated the expansion of the new faith beyond its birthplace.The immediate antecedent of Christianity was not traditional Judaism, but rather prophetism and analogous currents in which the notions of sin and of expiation prevailed; in which a desperate form of spirituality emerged; and in which the type of the warrior Messiah as an emanation of the "Lord of Hosts" was replaced with the type of the Messiah as "Son of Man" predestined to be the sacrificial victim, the persecuted one, the hope of the afflicted and the rejected, as well as the object of a confused and ecstatic cult. It is a well-known fact that the mystical figure of Jesus Christ originally derived his power and inspiration from an environment impregnated with this messianic pathos, the size of which grew with time as a result of prophetic preaching and various apocalyptic expectations. By regarding Jesus as Savior and by breaking away from the "Law," that is, from Jewish orthodoxy, primitive Christianity took up several themes typical of the Semitic soul at large. These themes were those proper to an innerly divided human type and constituted fertile ground for the growth of an antitraditional virus, especially vis-à-vis a tradition like the Roman one.Through Paul's theology these elements were universalized and activated without a direct relationship to their Jewish origins.As far as Orphism is concerned, it facilitated the acceptance of Christianity in several areas of the ancient world, not so much as an initiatory doctrine of the Mysteries, but as its profanation paralleling the onslaught of the cults of Mediterranean decadence. These cults were characterized by the idea of "salvation" in a merely religious sense and by the ideal of a religion open to everyone and therefore alien to any notion of race, tradition, and caste; in other words, this ideal welcomed all those who had no race, tradition, or caste. A confused need started to grow among these masses, in concert with the parallel action of the universalist cults of Eastern origins, until the figure of the founder of Christianity became the precipitating catalyst and the crystallization of what had been saturating the spiritual "atmosphere." When this happened, it was no longer a matter of a state of mind or a widespread influence, but of a well-defined force opposing the world of tradition.From a doctrinal point of view, Christianity appears as a desperate version of Dionysism. Modeling itself after a broken human type, it appealed to the irrational part of being and instead of the paths of heroic, sapiential, and initiatory spiritual growth posited faith as its fundamental instrument, the élan of a restless and perturbed soul that is attracted to the supernatural in a confused way. Through its suggestions concerning the imminent advent of the Kingdom of God and its vivid portrayals of either eternal salvation or eternal damnation, primitive Christianity exasperated the crisis of such a human type and strengthened the force of faith, thus opening a problematic path of liberation through the symbol of salvation and redemption found in the crucified Christ. If in the symbolism of Christ there are traces of a mysteric pattern (through new references to Orphism and to analogous currents), nevertheless the proprium or typical feature of the new religion was the employment of such a pattern on a plane that was no longer based on initiation, but rather on feelings and on a confused mysticism; therefore it can rightly be said that with Christianity, God became a human being. In Christianity we no longer find the pure religion of the Law, as in traditional Judaism, nor a true initiatory Mystery, but rather an intermediate form, a surrogate of the latter in a formulation proper to the abovementioned broken human type; this type felt relieved from his abjection, redeemed through the feeling of "grace," animated by a new hope, justified and rescued from the world, the flesh, and from death. (1) All of this represented something fundamentally alien to the Roman and classical spirit, better yet, to the Indo-European spirit as a whole. Historically, this signified the predominance of pathos over ethos and of that equivocal, deficient soteriology that had always been opposed by the noble demeanor of the sacred Roman patriciate, by the strict style of the jurists, the leaders, and the pagan sages. God was no longer conceived of as the symbol of an essence not liable to passion and change, which establishes an unbridgeable distance between itself and all that is merely human; nor was he the God of the patricians who is invoked in an erect position, who is carried in front of the legions and who becomes embodied in the winner. The God who came to be worshiped was a figure who in his "passion" took up and affirmed in an exclusivist fashion ("I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me." John 14:6-7) the Pelasgic-Dionysian motif of the sacrificed gods and the gods who die and rise again in the shadow of the Great Mothers. Even the myth of the virginal birth reflects an analogous influence, since it reminds us of the goddesses who generate without a mate (like Hesiod's Gaea); in this regard the relevant role that the cult of the "Mother of God," or the "Divine Virgin" was destined to play in the development of Christianity is significant. In Catholicism Mary, the "Mother of God," is the queen of angels and of all the saints; she is also thought of as the adoptive mother of mankind, as the "Queen of the world," and as the "bestower of all favors." These expressions, which are exaggerated in comparison to the effective role played by Mary in the myth of the Synoptic Gospels, echo the attributes of the sovereign divine Mothers of the pre- Indo-European Southern Hemisphere. Although Christianity is essentially a religion of the Christ, more so than of the Father, its representations of both the infant Jesus and the body of the crucified Christ in the arms of the deified Mother show definite similarities with the representations of the eastern Mediterranean cults, thereby giving new emphasis to the antithesis that exists between itself and the ideal of the purely Olympian deities who are exempt from passions and free of the telluric, maternal element. The symbol that the Church herself eventually adopted was that of the Mother (Mother Church). The epitome of true religiosity became that of the imploring and prayerful soul, that is aware of its unworthiness, sinfulness, and powerlessness before the Crucified One. (2) The hatred early Christianity felt toward any form of virile spirituality, and its stigmatization as folly and sin of pride anything that may promote an active overcoming of the human condition express in a clear fashion its lack of understanding of the "heroic" symbol. The potential that the new faith was able to generate among those who felt the live mystery of the Christ, or of the Savior, and who drew from it the inner strength to pursue martyrdom frantically, does not prevent the advent of Christianity from representing a fall; its advent characterized a special form of that spiritual emasculation typical of the cycles of a lunar and priestly type.(1) Thus, in comparison with historical Judaism, primitive Christianity may be credited with a mystical character along the same lines of prophetism, but not with an initiatory character, contrary to what F. Schuon claimed (The Transcendent Unity of Religions [Paris, 1937]) on the basis of sporadic elements found mostly in Eastern Orthodoxy. We should never forget though that if Christianity developed from the ancient Jewish tradition, orthodox Judaism developed in an independent fashion through the Talmud and the Kabbalah, which represents an initiatory tradition that was always missing in Christianity. This is how, later on, true esotericism developed in the West, that is, outside Christianity and with the help of non-Christian currents such as the Jewish Kabbalah, Hermeticism, or movements of a remote Nordic origin.(2) In pre-Christian Rome the libri sibillini, which introduced the cult of the Great Goddess, also introduced the supplicatio, the ritual abasement before the divine statue, whose knees were hugged and whose hands and feet were kissed.Even in Christian morality, the role played by Southern and non-Aryan influences is rather visible. It does not really make much of a difference that it was in the name of a god instead of a goddess that equality among human beings was spiritually proclaimed and that love was adopted as the supreme principle. This belief in human equality essentially belongs to a general worldview, a version of which is that "natural law" that crept into the Roman law during decadent times; it exercised an antithetical function to the heroic ideal of personality and to the value bestowed on anything that a being, by becoming differentiated, by giving itself a form, is able to claim for itself within a hierarchical social order. And so it happened that Christian egalitarianism, based on the principles of brotherhood, love, and community, became the mystical and religious foundation of a social ideal radically opposed to the pure Roman idea. Instead of universality, which is authentic only in its function as a hierarchical peak that does not abolish but presupposes and sanctions the differences among human beings, what arose was the ideal of collectivity reaffirmed in the symbol of the mystical body of Christ; this latter ideal contained in embryonic form a further regressive and involutive influence that Catholicism itself, despite its Romanization, was neither able nor entirely willing to overcome.Some people attempt to see a value in Christianity as a doctrine because of its idea of the supernatural and the dualism that it upheld. Here, however, we find a typical case of a different action that the same principle can exercise according to the function under which it is assumed. Christian dualism essentially derives from the dualism proper to the Semitic spirit; it acted in a totally opposite way from the spirit according to which the doctrine of the two natures constituted the basis of any achievement of traditional humanity. In early Christianity the rigid opposition of the natural and supernatural orders may have had a pragmatic justification motivated by a particular historical and existential situation of a given human type. Such dualism differs from the traditional dualism, however, in that it is not subordinated to a higher principle or to a higher truth, and that it claims for itself an absolute and ontological character rather than a relative and functional one. The two orders, the natural and the supernatural, as well as the distance between them, were hypostatized and thus any real and active contact was prevented from taking place. Thus, in regard to man (here too because of a parallel influence of a Jewish theme) what emerged were: (a) the notion of the "creature" separated by an essential distance from God as its "Creator" and as a personal, distinct being; and (b) the exasperation of this distance through the revival and the accentuation of the idea, of Jewish origins as well, of “original sin."More particularly, this dualism generated the understanding of all manifestations of spiritual influence in the passive terms of “grace," "election," and "salvation," as well as the disavowal (at times accompanied by real animosity) of all "heroic" human possibilities; the counterpart of this disavowal consisted in humility, fear of God, mortification of the flesh, and prayer. Jesus' saying in Matthew (11: 12) concerning the violence suffered by the kingdom of Heaven and the revival of the Davidic saying: "You are gods" (John 10:34), belong to elements that exercised virtually no influence on the main pathos of early Christianity. But in Christianity in general it is evident that what has been universalized, rendered exclusive, and exalted are the way, the truth, and the attitude that pertain only to an inferior human type or to those lower strata of a society for whom the exoteric forms of Tradition have been devised; this was precisely one of the characteristic signs of the climate of the Dark Age, or Kali Yuga.What has been said concerns the relationship of man with the divine. The second consequence of Christian dualism was the deconsecration of nature. Christian "supernaturalism" caused the natural myths of antiquity to be misunderstood once and for all. Nature ceased to be something living; that magical and symbolical perception of nature that formed the basis of priestly sciences was rejected and branded as "pagan." Following the triumph of Christianity, these sciences underwent a rapid process of degeneration, with the exception of a weakened residue represented by the later Catholic tradition of the rites. Thus, nature came to be perceived as something alien and even diabolical. Again, this constituted the basis for the development of an asceticism of a monastic and mortifying type, hostile to the world and to life (Christian asceticism), and radically antithetical to the classical and Roman sensibility.The third consequence concerns the political domain. The principles: "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36) and "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's" (Matt. 22:21), represented a direct attack on the concept of traditional sovereignty and of that unity of the two powers that had formally been reestablished in imperial Rome. According to Gelasius I, after Christ, no man can simultaneously be king and priest; the unity of sacerdotium and regnum, when it is vindicated by a king, is a diabolical deception and a counterfeit of the true priestly regality that belongs to Christ alone. It was precisely at this point that the contrast between Christian and Roman ideas escalated into an open conflict. When Christianity developed the Roman pantheon was so inclusive that even the cult of the Christian Savior could have found its proper place within it, among other cults, as a particular cult derived from a schism in Judaism. As I have previously suggested, it was typical of the imperial universalism to exercise a higher unifying and organizing function over and above any particular cult, which it did not need to deny or to oppose. What was required though, was an act demonstrating a superordained fides in reference to the principle "from above" embodied in the representative of the empire, namely, in the "Augustus." The Christians refused to perform this very act, consisting of a ritual and sacrificial offering made before the imperial symbol, since they claimed that it was incompatible with their faith; this was the only reason why there was such an epidemic of martyrs, which may have appeared as pure folly in the eyes of the Roman Magistrates.

In this way, the new belief imposed itself. Over and against a particular universalism, a new, opposite universalism based on a metaphysical dualism affirmed itself. The traditional hierarchical view, according to which loyalty enjoyed a supernatural sanction and a religious value, since every power descended from above, was undermined at its very foundation. In this sinful world there can only be room for a civitas diaboli, the civitas dei, or the divine state, was thought to belong to a separate plane and to consist in the unity of those who are drawn to the otherworld by a confused longing and who, as Christians, acknowledge only Christ as their leader as they await the Last Day. Wherever this idea did not result in a virus that proved to be a defeatist and subversive one, and wherever Caesar was still given "the things which are Caesar's," the fides remained deconsecrated and secularized; it merely had the value of a contingent obedience to a power that was merely temporal. The Pauline saying, "all authority comes from God" was destined to remain ineffectual and meaningless.And thus, although Christianity upheld the spiritual and supernatural principle, historically speaking this principle was destined to act in a dissociative and even destructive fashion; it did not represent something capable of galvanizing whatever in the Roman world had become materialized and fragmented, but rather represented something heterogeneous, a different current drawn to what in Rome was no longer Roman and to forces that the Northern Light had successfully kept under control for the duration of an entire cycle. It helped to rescind the last contacts and to accelerate the end of a great tradition. It is not surprising that Rutilius Namatianus put Christians and Jews on the same level, insofar as both groups were hostile to Rome's authority; he also blamed the former for spreading a fatal disease (excisae pestis contagia) outside the boundaries of Judea, which was under the legions' yoke, and the latter for spreading a poison that altered both the race and the spirit (tunc mutabantur corpora, nunc animi).When considering the enigmatic witnesses offered by ancient symbols, one cannot help noticing the role the motif of the ass played in the myth of Jesus. Not only was the ass present in the Nativity scene, but it was on an ass that the Virgin and the Divine Child escaped to Egypt; most of all, it was on an ass that Jesus rode during his triumphal entrance into Jerusalem. The ass was it traditional symbol of an infernal dissolutive "force." In Egypt it was the animal sacred to Set, who embodied this force, had an antisolar character, and was associated with the "children of the powerless rebellion." In India the ass was the mount of Mudevi, who represented the infernal aspect of the feminine deity. Also, in Greece the ass was the symbolic animal that in Lethe's plain continuously ate Ocnus's handiwork, and that had a relationship with the chthonic and infernal goddess Hecate. (3)(3) In the Rg Veda the ass is often referred to as rasabha, a word that denotes turmoil, noise, and even inebriation. In the myth, Apollo turned King Midas's ears into ass's ears, since the latter had preferred Pan's music to his own - in other words, for preferring the Dionysian, pantheistic cult to the Hyperborean cult. The slaughter of asses was, among the Hyperboreans, the sacrifice that Apollo preferred. See Pindar, Pythian Odes, 10.33-56. Typhon-Set (who corresponds to Python, Apollo's nemesis), after being defeated by Horus, runs into the desert riding an ass (Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 29-32); Apep, the serpent that represents the principle of darkness, is often portrayed in the company of an ass or riding an ass. Dionysus too was believed to have been carried to Thebes by an ass, an animal that was always associated with him. Some of these elements must have been preserved underground, since they later reemerged in some medieval festivals in which the Virgin and Child, led by Joseph, were carried in a procession, in the course of which the highest honors were paid to the ass.This is how this symbol could represent the secret sign of a force that was associated with primitive Christianity and to which it partially owed its success; it was the force that emerged and assumed an active part wherever what corresponded to the "cosmos" principle within a traditional structure vacillated and disintegrated. In reality, the advent of Christianity would not have been possible if the vital possibilities of the Roman heroic cycle had not been exhausted; if the "Roman race" had not been broken in its spirit and in its representatives (a proof of this was the failure of the attempted restoration promoted by Emperor Julian); if the ancient traditions had not been dimmed; and if, in the context of an ethnic chaos and a cosmopolitan disintegration, the imperial symbol had not been contaminated and reduced to merely surviving in a world of ruins.JULIUS EVOLA

JuliusEvola.NET

Devotio: Ancient Roman Self-Sacrifice in Battle
as Man's Influence on Invisible Forces

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Devotio: Ancient Roman Self-Sacrifice in Battle as Man's Influence on Invisible Forces(from "Metaphysics of War")[...] Although this is not widely known our ancient Roman traditions contained motifs concerning the disinterested, heroic offering of one's own person in the name of the State for the purpose of victory analogous to those which we have seen in the Japanese mysticism of combat. We are alluding to the so-called devotio. Its presuppositions are equally sacred. What acts in it is the general belief of the traditional man that invisible forces are at work behind the visible ones and that man, in his turn, can influence them.According to the ancient Roman ritual of devotio, as we understand it, a warrior, and above all a chieftain, can facilitate victory by means of a mysterious unleashing of forces determined by the deliberate sacrifice of his own person, combined with the will not to come out of the fray alive. Let us recall the execution of this ritual by Consul Decius in the war against the Latins (340 B.C.), and also the repetition of it - exalted by Cicero (Fin. II, 19, 61; Tusc. I, 37, 39) - by two other members of the same family. This ritual had its own precise ceremony, testifying to the perfect knowledge and lucidity of this heroic-sacrificial offer. In proper hierarchical order, first the Olympian divinities of the Roman State, Janus, Jupiter, Quirinus, and then, immediately following this, the God of war, Pater Mars, and then, finally, certain indigenous gods, were invoked: "gods - it is said - which confer power to heroes over their enemies"; by the virtue of the sacrifice which these ancient Romans proposed to perform the gods were called upon "to grant strength and victory to the Roman people of the Quirites, and to sweep up with terror, fright and death the enemies of our people" (cf. Livy, VIII, 9). Proposed by the pontifex, the words of this formula were uttered by the warrior, arrayed in the praetesta, his foot upon a javelin. After that he plunged into the fray, to die. Incidentally, here the transformation of the sense of the word 'devotio' must be noticed. While it applied originally to this order of ideas, that is, to a heroic, sacrificial and evocative action, in the later Empire it came to mean simply the fidelity of the citizen and his scrupulosity in payment to the State treasury (devotio rei annonariaei. As Bouché-Leclercq'' puts it, in the end, "after Caesar was replaced by the Christian God, devotio means simply religiosity, the faith ready for all sacrifices, and then, in a further degeneration of the expression, devotion in the common sense of the word, that is, constant concern for salvation, affirmed in a meticulous and tremulous practice of the cult". Leaving this aside in the ancient Roman devotio we find, as we have shown, very precise signs of a mysticism aware of heroism and of sacrifice, binding the feeling of a super-natural and super-human reality tightly to the will to struggle with dedication in the name of one's own Chieftain, one's own State and one's own race. There are plenty of testimonies to an 'Olympian' feeling of combat and victory peculiar to our ancient traditions. We have discussed this extensively elsewhere. Let us only recall here that in the ceremony of the triumph the victorious dux displayed in Rome the insignia of the Olympian god to indicate the real force within him which had brought about his victory; let us recall also that beyond the mortal Caesar Romanity worshipped Caesar as 'perennial victor', that is, as a sort of supra- personal force of Roman destiny.Thus, if succeeding times have made other views prevail the most ancient traditions still show us that the ideal of an Olympian 'heroism' has been our ideal also, and that our people also have experienced the absolute offering, the consummation of a whole existence in a force hurled against the enemy in a gesture which justifies the most complete evocation of abysmal forces; and which brings about, finally, a victory which transforms the victors and enables their participation in supra-personal and 'fatal' powers. And so in our heritage points of reference are indicated which stand in radical opposition to the sub-personal and collectivist heroism we discussed above, and not only to that, but to every tragic and irrational vision, which ignores what is stronger than fire and iron, and stronger than life and death.JULIUS EVOLA
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Difference between Higher & Lower Views on Racism
however Meaningless to Discuss Today

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Difference between Higher & Lower Views on Racism
however Meaningless to Discuss Today(from "The Path of Cinnabar")[...] Racist ideology, as is known, had always played a prominent role within National Socialism: generally promoted in an extremist and primitive fashion, racism represented one of the most problematic features of the Third Reich, and one in need of rectification. On the one hand, racism was associated with anti- Semitism; on the other, racism had given rise to 'pagan' tendencies, the chief exponent of which was Alfred Rosenberg. As I already mentioned when talking of Pagan Imperialism, Rosenberg - whom I had personally met - regarded me as the spokesman of an Italian current similar to his own. In fact, the differences between my own thought and that of Rosenberg were very conspicuous. In his well-known book entitled The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg, not unlike myself, had quoted authors such as Wirth and Bachofen in order to discuss the idea of Nordic origins, and to provide a dynamic historical analysis of various civilizations from a racist perspective. Rosenberg's study, however, was superficial and imprecise; politically, it was aimed at serving, almost exclusively, German interests. Rosenberg also lacked any understanding of holiness and transcendence - hence his most primitive critique of Catholicism, a religion which he even attacked, in a kind of renewed Kulturkampf, by borrowing the most obsolete arguments from Enlightenment and secularist polemics. The 'myth of the twentieth century', according to Rosenberg, was to be the myth of blood and race: 'A new myth of life that is called forth to create, along with a new kind of life, a new kind of state and of civilization.'As for the racism of the German state, it merged a sort of pan-Germanic nationalism with the ideas of biological science. With respect to the latter, I believe that Trotsky was not far off the mark when he described racism as a kind of zoological materialism. The German state embraced biology, eugenics, and the theory of heredity, accepting all the materialist assumptions behind such doctrines. This led National Socialism to posit the unilateral dependence of the superior to the inferior: of the psychic and super-biological part of man to the biological. This materialist view was little affected by the superimposition of a vague mystique of blood. A materialist perspective was also responsible for the National Socialist illusion that mere prophylactic intervention on the biological level - an intervention, that is, upon the physical race - might automatically better all aspects of the life of peoples and nations. Where a similar analysis might have proven valid was in the idea that it is not the state, society or civilization which are of central importance, but rather race - had 'race' here been understood in its higher sense, as describing the deepest and most fundamental components of man. Also potentially valid was the National Socialist acknowledgement of the need and opportunity to 'fight for a worldview' appropriate for the Aryan man - this representing a means of promoting a broad reassessment of the values which have come to inform the Western world. A negative element, instead, was the fanatical anti-Semitism of National Socialism, something which many people have regrettably come to identify with racism tout court.On more than one occasion in the past, I had already had my say on the issue of materialist racism. As for Nazi neopaganism, at a press conference held in 1936 at the Kulturbund of Vienna, I argued that its theories were enough 'to turn into Catholics even those best disposed towards paganism'. I should also mention the fact that Mussolini expressed his approval of one article of mine entitled 'Race and Culture' ('Razza e cultura'), which I had published in 1935 in the magazine Italian Review (Rassegna Italiana). In this article, I affirmed the pre-eminence of formative ideas over merely biological and ethnic traits (the same argument I also made in the pages of my own section in Regime Fascista). An editorial of mine in Balbo's newspaper, Corriere Padano, was also well-received by the upper echelons of the Fascist regime. The editorial was entitled 'The Duty of Being Aryan' ('Responsabilita di dirsi ariani'), and was aimed at criticizing the fetish of physical race. I here denounced the irrelevance of 'Aryanness' as an expression used merely to denote individuals who are neither Jewish nor colored, rather than as a term employed in the spiritual and ethical sense to imply a certain duty towards oneself. Racism, I suggested, certainly expressed legitimate needs, but needed to be redefined on a different basis.By exploiting my aforementioned influence in certain German circles, I sought to promote a rectification of racist ideology. The opportunity for me to take a more decisive stand on the matter, however, only presented itself in 1938, when Fascism suddenly turned 'racist' and issued its 'Race Manifesto'.As in the case of many other policies adopted by the Fascist regime, most people today have misunderstood the Fascist embrace of racism. It is generally believed that Fascism passively followed Hitler in this regard, and that racism, in Italy, was merely something imported. It is certainly true that racist ideology had no precedents in Italy - not least because of the historical precedents of the country - and that it only took hold with difficulty. Yet, intrinsic and legitimate reasons existed for the Fascist promotion of racism. Firstly, the establishment of an empire in Africa, and the new contact with colored peoples such an empire entailed, required a sense of remoteness, and for the racial consciousness of the Italian people to be strengthened, as - to avoid forms of dangerous promiscuity and to safeguard a necessary colonial prestige. Besides, the same approach was favored by Britain until very recently - had it been maintained by Whites, it would have forestalled the kind of 'anti-colonial' uprisings which struck at the heart of a weakened Europe like a righteous Nemesis in the aftermath of the Second World War.A second justification for the Fascist embrace of racism was the well documented anti-Fascist sentiment of international Jewry, which intensified following Italy's alliance with Germany. It was only natural, therefore, for Mussolini to react. The suffering of Jews in Fascist Italy - a small thing in comparison to that of Jews in Germany - was due to the attitude of Jews on the other side of the Alps. The third and most important reason for the Fascist adoption of racism, however, was Mussolini's ambition to invest his 'revolution' with more than a merely political significance by shaping a new kind of Italian. Mussolini correctly believed that political movements and states require adequate and well-defined human resources in order to survive and assert themselves. It is as a means to secure such resources that Mussolini first approached the myth of race and blood.The Italian 'Race Manifesto', however, which had been hurriedly assembled on Mussolini's orders, proved a slipshod piece of work. No doubt, Italy lacked individuals capable of discussing similar issues. The same carelessness that marked the Manifesto also surfaced in the course of the Fascist racial campaign, which was partly articulated by means of cheap and virulent polemics. All of a sudden, a whole bunch of Fascist men of letters and journalists realized they were 'racists', and started using the word 'race' at every turn, to describe the most varied and less pertinent things. People also started talking of the 'Italian race', an utterly meaningless idea, given that no modem nation corresponds to one race - Italy least of all. The various European races described in racial studies rather feature as the single components of a whole in almost all Western nations.In 1937, the publisher from Hoepli entrusted me with the writing of a history of racism. The book was entitled The Myth of Blood (II milo del sangue), and a second edition of the work was published during the war. In this volume, I discussed the antecedents of racism in the ancient world (where 'race' was seen not as a myth, but as a living reality), and in the centuries leading up to the present day. I then outlined the modern variants of racial ideology by describing the basic ideas of de Gobineau, Woltmann, de Lapouge, Chamberlain and various other authors. I also examined racist views of anthropology, genetics, heredity and typology, and discussed the racist view of history and the foundations of anti- Semitism. Finally, I provided an outline of the various forms of political racism in Hitler's day. The book, with its descriptive character, allowed me to clarify a number of points.The research I had conducted in order to write The Myth of Blood Ied me to develop a racial doctrine of my own. I outlined such a doctrine in a book entitled Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race (Sintesi di dottrina della razza), which was published by Hoepli in 1941 (a slightly revised edition was published in German by Runge Verlag of Berlin). The appendix of the volume included 52 photos.One's idea of race depends on one's idea of man: the nature of each racial doctrine is determined by its conceptualization of the human being. All distortions in the field of racism derive from a materialist view of man, a view informed by science and naturalism. By contrast, at the very basis of my racial doctrine I placed the traditional idea of man as a being comprised of three elements: body, character and spirit. I argued that an exhaustive racial theory has to take all three elements into account by examining race in its threefold manifestation: as race of the body, race of the character, and race of the spirit. Racial 'purity' is found when these three races stand in harmonious balance with one another, each race shining through the other two. This, however, has long been only a rare occurrence. The most unwelcome consequence of the various cases of miscegenation which have occurred during the historical development of human society is not the alteration of the physical race and psychosomatic type - what ordinary racism is chiefly concerned with - but, rather, the divide and contrast between the three kinds of races within the same individual. As a consequence of such miscegenation, one finds men whose body no longer reflects their character, and whose emotional, moral and volitional dispositions no longer agree with their spiritual inclinations. 'Spirit' should here be distinguished from 'character' as that component of man in touch with higher values that transcend life. In this sense, the 'race of the spirit' manifests itself in the different approaches to the sacred, to destiny and to the question of life and death, as well as in world-views, religions, etc. I here argued, therefore, that three levels of racism ought to be distinguished in order to reflect the three kinds of races: the first level of racism pertaining to the race of the body, the second to the race of the character, and the third to the race of the spirit.In my study of race, I argued that in accordance with the legitimate inner hierarchy of man, the inner race ought to be regarded as superior to the external and merely biological form. A similar approach called for a radical reassessment of the views of materialist racism, not least with respect to genetics and heredity. I rejected the fetish of merely physical racial purity, on the grounds that the purity of the external race of an individual is often preserved even when his inner race has dimmed or deteriorated (a common example of this is that of the Dutch and Scandinavians). Such an approach also put the problem of miscegenation into perspective: miscegenation certainly has negative consequences in those cases where the inner race is weak; yet if the inner race is strong, the presence of an external element, introduced - albeit not in excess - by means of interbreeding, potentially provides a galvanizing challenge (hence, the opposite problem of certain aristocratic stocks which degenerate on account of incestuous unions). These, and other, similar considerations I made in my book.From a political and social perspective, I acknowledged the use of racism as the expression of an anti-egalitarian and anti-rationalistic approach. Racism clearly emphasizes the idea of differentiation, with regard to both the peoples and the members of a given people. Racism opposes the democratic ideology born of the Enlightenment which proclaims the identity and equal dignity of all human beings; on the contrary, racism asserts that humanity as such is either an abstract and fictitious concept, or the final stage in a process of degeneration, dissolution and collapse - a stage only to be posited as an outmost limit never actually to be reached. Human nature, instead, is ordinarily differentiated, and this differentiation is expressed in the form of different bloodlines and races. This differentiation constitutes the primary feature of humanity: not only is it a natural condition among all beings, but also a positive element, something which ought to exist, and ought to be defended and safeguarded. The acknowledgement of diversity never led me - unlike certain other racists - to conceive humanity as a series of isolated, self-contained units; nor did it lead me to reject all higher principles. A kind of unity is certainly conceivable for humanity, but only at a higher level; and such unity accepts and preserves differentiation at a lower level. Unity 'from below', on the other hand, is a regressive phenomenon: such is the leveling unity sought by democracy, 'integrationism', humanitarianism, pseudo-universalism and collectivism. De Gobineau had already criticized similar ideas, essentially by promoting racism in aristocratic terms.The other, generally positive aspect of racism is its anti-rationalism, which accompanies the racist embrace of differentiation as an attempt to valorize the kind of qualities, dispositions and dignities which cannot be bought, gained or replaced, which do not derive from an external influence or from the environment, which are related to the living whole of an individual person, and which have their roots in a deep, organic terrain. Such is the foundation of the individual person, as opposed to the merely abstract or amorphous individual. My aforementioned racial theory provided a safe key to approach these issues by emphasizing the fact that human races cannot be discussed in the same terms as horse or cat breeds: for human life, unlike the life of animals, is not confined to instincts and bios.The notion of an 'inner race', and of its pre-eminence over the external race, was particularly useful in two regards. On the one hand, from a moral point of view, this doctrine presented each race as an independent essence regarded as a universal in itself, almost as a Platonic 'idea' - although each race might empirically be understood in conjunction to a given physical race, among a given people. A similar analysis could practically be applied to the use of the terms 'Aryan' and 'Jewish', here understood as indicative of a series of attitudes that may or may not be found among all people of Aryan or Jewish blood. Such a use of the two terms would have provided a safeguard against conceit and one-sidedness: for what ultimately counted the most, in my view, was the inner form of each individual. As anticipated in my article in Corriere Padano, my doctrine of the inner race also implied a number of duties. It is for this reason, I may add, that after the war I was to emphasize the futility, from a superior perspective, of dwelling on the 'Jewish' or 'Aryan' question: for the negative behavior which Jews are charged with is now common among most 'Aryans' (who, unlike Jews, lack the extenuating circumstance of any hereditary predisposition).

Moreover, the notion of inner race implied the idea of race as a moulding energy. Thus, the development of a definite human type free of ethnic miscegenation might be explained on the grounds of an inner moulding power, which finds its most direct manifestation in a given civilization or tradition. A notable example of this phenomenon is provided by the Jewish people: originally lacking any ethnic unity (in a physical sense), the Jews came to possess recognizable hereditary traits thanks to their tradition, ultimately coming to embody one of the clearest historical examples of strenuous racial unity. A more recent example is that of North American society: for Americans have come to show rather constant racial traits (particularly in terms of inner race) thanks to the moulding power of their civilization, which has shaped an extraordinarily mixed ethnic whole. My approach, therefore, ruled out the possibility that populations might be conditioned by biological factors alone.The practical possibilities of applying my racial doctrine to the field of what Vacher de Lapouge termed 'political anthropology' were self-evident. In a country where the state embodies the role of a superior, active and moulding principle, an attempt to favor the differentiation of the ethnic make-up of the population is certainly a conceivable prospect. In this regard, National Socialism was not entirely mistaken. What ought to have been distinguished in Germany was negative racism - understood as a means to protect the nation from dangerous forms of miscegenation - from positive racism - which is aimed at fostering diversity within the national community in order to define and strengthen a superior human type. Modern racism goes beyond the broad racial distinctions found in school textbooks (those between the White race and the Black, Yellow, etc.): for even the White, ‘Aryan’ or Indo-European race ought to be divided into smaller groupings: the Mediterranean race, the Nordic, the Dinaric, the Slav, Ostid, etc. (such terms significantly varying among different authors). In his Rassenseelekunde, L.R Clauss had also sought to provide a description of the soul and inner character of these different races, which are present in every European nation to various degrees. The aim of political racism ought to have been that of determining which race should be granted pre-eminence in the case of each country, and allowed to shape the nation. In the case of Germany, this race was the Nordic Aryan.I personally addressed the same question with regard to Italy, and reached the conclusion that the central, guiding race of the country was to be the Roman Aryan race, a race that in ancient times had broken away from the same branch which had later engendered the Nordic race. In my book, I provided a description of the Roman Aryan type primarily in terms of its inner race (I provided a rough outline of the typology of the various 'races of the spirit'). In a separate chapter, I also discussed the prospect of an ethnic rectification of Italy aimed at reducing the widespread 'Mediterranean' elements in favor of the Roman Aryan - this, it goes without saying, from the point of view of sensibility and customs. I here described the elite as a governing class which would not only possess authority, power and prestige thanks to its position, but also embody a superior human type, where external and inner race would ideally coincide. The book also contained an iconographic appendix with photos and images in order to provide initial guidance in the study of the various races of the body, of the character and of the spirit, and of the consequences of interfering with them.My book, no doubt, provided an original approach to racism, which avoided the chief pitfalls that marked the German approach. In my study of the subject, I raised a number of points which, I believe, remain valid even outside the specific context in which they were first formulated.From a historical perspective, it might be interesting to note that Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race was openly approved by Mussolini. After reading the book, Mussolini got in touch with me, praising the work beyond its real merit on the grounds that the doctrine it espoused was just what he needed. My racial doctrine, Mussolini believed, might allow him to engage with the same issues addressed in Germany, thus 'conforming' to Germany, while at the same time maintaining an independent approach based on a spiritual drive (the primacy of the spirit which German racism generally lacked). In particular, Mussolini believed that my theory regarding the Roman Aryan race, and the myth which accompanied it, might serve both to integrate the Roman ideal of Fascism and to provide a foundation for his attempt to rectify and elevate the Italian people - to create, as it were, a new kind of Italian - by means of the Fascist 'revolution' and state.[...] As should be evident from what I have written so far, mine had been an attempt to engage with the issue of race from a superior, spiritual perspective. Racism I actually regarded as a secondary matter: my purpose was rather that of contrasting the errors of the materialist and primitive brand of racism which had surfaced in Germany, and which some people amateurishly sought to emulate in Italy. This field, too, I explored in accordance with my own inclinations, and nothing I then wrote I now truly disown - although I acknowledge the meaninglessness of any attempt to resume similar discussions today. [...]JULIUS EVOLA

JuliusEvola.NET

Essence of the Very Idea of Empire
& Aryan Race as Army of Solar Reality

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Essence of the Very Idea of Empire
& Aryan Race as Army of Solar Reality(from "Metaphysics of War")[...]
For the ancient Aryan war had the general meaning of a perpetual fight between metaphysical powers. On the one hand there was the Olympian principle of light, the uranic and solar reality; on the other hand, brute violence, the titanic-telluric, barbaric element in the classical sense, the feminine-demonic substance. The motif of this metaphysical fight resurfaces continually through countless forms of myth in all traditions of Aryan origin. Any fight, in the material sense, was experienced with greater or lesser awareness as an episode in that antithesis. But the Aryan race considered itself to be the army of the Olympian principle: accordingly, it is necessary to restore this conception among Aryans, as being the justification, or the highest consecration, of any hegemonic aspiration, but also of the very idea of empire, whose anti-secular character is basically very obvious.To the traditionally based world view, all apparent realities are symbolic. This is therefore true of war as well, as is seen from the subjective and interior point of view. War and the Path of God are thus merged into a single entity.[...] If we want to go beyond an exhausted, battered spirituality, built upon speculative abstractions and pietistic feelings, and at the same time to go beyond the materialistic degeneration of action, what better points of reference can be found today than the aforementioned ideals of ancient Aryan man?But there is more. In the West spiritual and material tensions have become entangled to such a degree in recent years that they can only be resolved through combat. With the present war an age goes towards its end and forces are gaining ground which can no longer be dominated by abstract ideas, universalistic principles or myths conceived as mere irrationalities, and which do not in themselves provide the basis for a new civilization. A far deeper and far more essential form of action is now necessary so that, beyond the ruins of a subverted and condemned world, a new age breaks through for Europe.In this perspective a lot will depend on the way in which the individual of today is able to give shape to the living experience of combat: that is, on whether he is in a position to assume heroism and sacrifice as catharsis, as means of liberation and of inner awakening. This work of our combatants - inner, invisible, far from gestures and grandiloquences - will have a decisive character not only for the conclusion, victorious and definitive, of the events of this stormy period, but also for the configuration and the attribution of the sense of the Order which will rise from victory. Combat is necessary to awaken and temper that force which, beyond onslaughts, blood and danger, will favor a new creation with a new splendor and a powerful peace.For this reason it is on the battlefield that pure action must be learned again today: action not only in the sense of virile asceticism, but also in the sense of purification and of path towards higher forms of life, forms valid in themselves and for themselves - this means precisely a return to ancient Aryo-Western tradition. From remote times, this evocative watchword still echoes down to us: "Life - like a bow; the mind - like the arrow; the target to pierce - the supreme spirit; to join mind to spirit as the shot arrow hits its target."The one who still experiences combat today, in the sense of this acknowledgement of this profession, will remain standing while others will collapse - and his will be an invincible force. This new man will overcome within himself any drama, any dusk, any chaos, forming, with the advent of the new times, the principle of a new development. According to the ancient Aryan tradition such heroism of the best men can assume a real evocative function, that is, it can re- establish the contact, lost for centuries, between world and supra-world. Then the meaning of combat will be, not horrible slaughter, nor desolate destiny conditioned by the will-to-power alone, but a test of the good reason and divine vocation of a stock. Then the meaning of peace will not be renewed drowning in colorless bourgeois everyday life, nor the lack of the spiritual tension found in combat, but the fullness of the tension itself."The blood of Heroes is closer to the Lord than the ink of scholars and the prayers of the pious."The traditional conception is also based on the presupposition that, far more than individuals, the mystical primordial powers of the race are at work in 'holy war'. These powers of the origins are those which create world-wide empires and bring to men 'victorious peace'.JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

From the Lesser to the Greater Holy War:
Bhagavad-Gita's Aryan Sense of Heroic-Spiritual Reality
Unmatched Elsewhere
& Contains Precious Hyperborean Material

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From the Lesser to the Greater Holy War:
Bhagavad-Gita’s Aryan Sense of Heroic-Spiritual Reality
Unmatched elsewhere
& Contains Precious Hyperborean Material(from "Metaphysics of War")[...] even without having been killed one can have experienced death, can have won and can have achieved the culmination peculiar to 'supra-life'. From a higher point of view 'Paradise', 'the celestial realm', are, like Valhalla, the Greek 'Isle of Heroes', etc., only symbolic figurations, concocted for the masses, figurations which actually designate transcendent states of consciousness, beyond life and death. Ancient Aryan tradition has the word jivanmukti to indicate a realization of that sort obtained already in the mortal body.Let us come now to a pure metaphysical exposition of the doctrine in question. We find it in a text originating from the ancient Indo-Aryan races, imprinted with a sense of the heroic-spiritual reality which it would be hard to match elsewhere. It is the Bhagavad-Gita, a part of the epic poem, the Mahabharata, which to an expert eye contains precious material relating not only to the spirituality of the Aryan races which migrated to Asia, but to that of the 'Hyperborean' nucleus of these which, according to the traditional views to which our conception of race refers, must be considered as the origin of them all.The Bhagavad-Gita contains in the shape of a dialogue the doctrine given by the incarnate divinity, Krishna, to a warrior prince, Arjuna, who had invoked him, as, overcome by humanitarian and sentimentalist scruples, he found himself no longer able to resolve to fight the enemy. The judgement of the god is categorical: it defines the mercy which had withheld Arjuna from fighting as "the limp tie of the soul", and "impurity, unworthy of a noble man, not leading to heaven" (II, 2). Therefore, it is not on the basis of earthly and contingent necessities but of a divine judgement that the duty of combat is confirmed here. The promise is: "Killed you will attain heaven; victorious you will enjoy the earth; arise, therefore, resolved to fight" (II, 37). The inner guideline, necessary to transfigure the 'lesser war' into 'greater, holy war' in death and triumphant resurrection, and to make contact, through heroic experience, with the transcendental root of one's own being, is clearly stated by Krishna: "Devoting all acts to Me with your mind absorbed in the supreme spirit, free from desire and selfishness, fight without faltering" (III, 30). The terms are just as clear about the 'purity' of heroic action, which must be wanted for itself, beyond every contingent motivation, every passion and all gross utility. The words of the text are: "Making equal pleasure and pain, profit and loss, victory and defeat, fight for the sake of fighting; in this way you will incur no sin" (II, 38).But beyond even this a true metaphysical justification of war is arrived at. We will try to express this in the most accessible way. The text works on the fundamental distinction between what in man exists in the supreme sense and, as such, is incorruptible and immutable - spirit - and the corporeal and human element, which has only an illusory existence. Having stressed the metaphysical non-reality of what one can lose or make another lose in the vicissitudes of combat, as ephemeral life and mortal body (there is nothing painful and tragic - it is said - in the fact that what is destined fatally to fall, falls), that aspect of the divine which appears as an absolute and sweeping force is recalled. Before the greatness of this force (which flashes through Arjuna's mind in the moment of a supernatural vision), every created, that is, conditioned, existence appears as a 'negation'. It can therefore be said that such a force strikes as a terrible revelation wherever such 'negation' is actively denied; that is to say, in more concrete and intelligible terms, wherever a sudden outburst sweeps up every finite life, every limitation of the petty individual, either to destroy him, or to revive him. Moreover, the secret of the 'becoming', of the fundamental restlessness and perpetual change which characterises life here below, is deduced precisely from the situation of beings, finite in themselves, which also participate in something infinite. The beings which would be described as 'created' by Christian terminology, are described rather, according to ancient Aryan tradition, as 'conditioned', subject to becoming, change and disappearance, precisely because, in them, a power burns which transcends them, which wants something infinitely vaster than all that they can ever want. Once the text in various ways has given the sense of such a vision of life it goes on to specify what fighting and heroic experience must mean for the warrior. Values change: a higher life manifests itself through death; and destruction, for the one who overcomes it, is a liberation - it is precisely in its most frightening aspects that the heroic outburst appears as a sort of manifestation of the divine in its capacity of metaphysical force of destruction of the finite - in the jargon of some modern philosophers this would be called 'the negation of the negation'. The warrior who smashes "the limp tie of the soul", who faces the vicissitudes of heroism "with your mind absorbed in the supreme spirit", seizing upon a plan according to which both the 'I' and the 'thou', and therefore both fear for oneself and mercy for others, lose all meaning, can be said to assume actively the absolute divine force, to transfigure himself within it, and to free himself by breaking through the limitations relating to the mere human state of existence. "Life - like a bow; the mind - like the arrow; the target to pierce - the supreme spirit; to join mind to spirit as the shot arrow hits its target." - These are the evocative expressions contained in another text of the same tradition, the Markandeya Purana. Such, in short, is the metaphysical justification of war, the sacred interpretation of heroism, the transformation of the 'lesser war' into the 'greater holy war', according to the ancient Indo-Aryan tradition which gives us therefore, in the most complete and direct form, the intimate content present also in the other formulations pointed out.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Get Rid of Church, Islam, Freemasonry & All:
Today only Ignorant Conformists Follow Exoteric Norms
or Going Beyond René Guénon

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Get Rid of Church, Islam, Freemasonry & All:
Today only Ignorant Conformists follow Exoteric Norms
or Going Beyond René Guénon(from “The Path of Cinnabar”)[...]
My position on such matters also served as an implicit critique of the view that had been voiced in Guénonian circles concerning the 'need to adopt a traditional form of exotericism' (although I never explicitly referred to such matters in the book). The issue of exotericism perfectly serves to illustrate the tendency of similar groups to indulge in the discussion of abstract, normative principles while ignoring concrete reality. Guénon had argued that superior forms of knowledge ought not be pursued on a level removed from the general norms established by a positive tradition ('exotericism') - less still in opposition to, and in revolt against such norms. The two spheres - the exoteric sphere and the esoteric - Guénon suggested, ought to be complementary: so that an individual who is incapable of following 'exoteric' norms aimed at investing life with order and sacredness ought not attempt to pursue a higher path. The basic premise of Ride the Tiger, however, was precisely my realistic acknowledgement of the fact that it is impossible to follow such exoteric norms in the present day: for no positive, meaningful and truly legitimate institutions exist to provide a support for the individual. A 'consecration', therefore, of external, active life today can only derive from a free and genuine inner drive towards transcendence, rather than from given moral or religious norms. Hence, if - as might have been expected - I referred to traditional doctrines when examining the prospect of 'riding the tiger', it is the 'inner doctrines' of Tradition that I examined: those doctrines that, in traditional civilizations, were usually known to a privileged minority alone. What I was concerned with was the fact that traditionalism might serve as a tool for conformism. Plotinus' injunction aphele panta ('get rid of all') must serve as the motto of those capable of seeing the present in its true light. Hence, too, the central relevance of the idea of the 'Left-Hand Path' in our day.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Grail Embodies Mystery of Warrior Initiation

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Grail Embodies Mystery of Warrior Initiation(from "The Path of Cinnabar")[...]
The ordinary reader today knows about the Grail thanks only to Richard Wagner's Parsifal, which, in its Romantic approach, really deforms and twists the whole myth. Equally misleading is the attempt to interpret the mystery of the Grail in Christian terms: for Christian elements only play an accessory, secondary and concealing role in the saga. In order to grasp the true significance of the myth, it is necessary instead to consider the more immediate points of reference represented by the themes and echoes pertaining to the cycle of King Arthur, which survives in the Celtic and Nordic traditions. The Grail essentially embodies the source of a transcendent and immortalizing power of primordial origin that has been preserved after the 'Fall', degeneration and decadence of humanity. Significantly, all sources agree that the guardians of the Grail are not priests, but are knights and warriors - besides, the very place where the Grail is kept is described not as a temple or church, but as a royal palace or castle.In the book, I argued that the Grail can be seen to possess an initiatory (rather than vaguely mystical) character: that it embodies the mystery of warrior initiation. Most commonly, the sagas emphasize one additional element: the duties deriving from such initiation. The predestined Knight - he who has received the calling and has enjoyed a vision of the Grail, or received its boons - or he who has 'fought his way' to the Grail (as described in certain texts) must accomplish his duty of restoring legitimate power, lest he forever be damned. The Knight must either allow a prostrate, deceased, wounded or only apparently living King to regain his strength, or personally assume the regal role, thus restoring a fallen kingdom. The sagas usually attribute this function to the power of the Grail. A significant means to assess the dignity or intentions of the Knight is to 'ask the question': the question concerning the purpose of the Grail. In many cases, the posing of this crucial question coincides with the miracle of awakening, of healing or of restoration.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Guénon's Excessive Faith in Catholicism
& the Secularization and Deconsecration
of the World of Action & Virility

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Guénon's Excessive Faith in Catholicism
& the Secularization & Deconsecration
of the World of Action & Virility(from "The Path of Cinnabar")[...] Given the overall perspective of Revolt, the book also appeared to be lacking the same faith in Catholicism as a positive point of reference that marked the work of other traditionalist authors. As I previously mentioned, Guénon had argued that the Catholic Church had provided Europe with a traditional order, and that a return to traditional Catholicism - as I already mentioned with regard to The Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism - constituted the only means for a rebirth of the West and an overcoming of the crisis of the modern world. Consequently, Guénon had directed a more or less explicit appeal to the representatives of the Catholic tradition (in the letters we privately exchanged, however, Guénon had confessed that while he had felt obliged to launch such an appeal, he had also predicted its failure).As I stated in the conclusion to Revolt, I could not agree with Guénon on this point. Catholicism, I argued, had failed to give proof of any restraining or creative power even in the past, when material and intellectual conditions were far more favorable. Rather, Catholicism was one of the factors which contributed to the dissolution of the West: for Catholicism had caused a disastrous fracture by stripping spirituality of virility and advocating the supremacy of priestly holiness in place of primordial synthesis and centrality, thus favoring the secularization and deconsecration of the world of action and virility. Naturally, Revolt did not emphasize those aspects of Catholicism which The Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism had praised from a purely doctrinal or esoteric perspective. In my conclusion to the second edition of Revolt, following an evaluation of certain new experiences, I argued that: 'Those individuals who today consider themselves to be men of Tradition on the simple grounds of their adherence to Catholicism are stopping midway, for they show no awareness of the series of causes, and of the world of origins and absolute values.’
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Heroism:
from the Lowest Naturalistic Level to the Holy Aryan Heights

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Heroism:
from the Lowest Naturalistic Level to the Holy Aryan Heights(from "Metaphysics of War")[...] People are accustomed to speaking too generally, and too romantically, about 'heroism', 'heroic experience' and the like. When they are done with such romantic assumptions, in modern times, there seem to remain only material ones, such that men who rise up and fight are considered simply as 'human material', and the heroism of the combatants is related to victory as mere means to an end, the end itself being nothing but the incrementation of the material and economic power and territory of a given State.In view of the considerations which have been pointed out here, it is necessary to change these attitudes. From the 'ordeal by fire' of the primordial forces of race, heroic experience, above all other experience, has been a means to an essentially spiritual and interior end. But there is more: heroic experience differentiates itself in its results not only according to the various races, but also according to the extent to which, within each race, a super-race has formed itself and come to power. The various degrees of this creative differentiation correspond to so many ways of being a hero and to so many forms of awakening through heroic experience. On the lowest plane hybrid, essentially vital, instinctive and collective forces emerge - this is somewhat similar to the awakening on a large scale of the 'primordial horde' with the solidarity, the unity of destiny and of holocaust which is peculiar to it. Gradually, this mostly naturalistic experience is purified, dignified, becomes luminous, until it reaches its highest form, which corresponds to the Aryan conception of war as 'holy war', and of victory and triumph as an apex, since its value is identical to those of holiness and initiation, and, finally, of death on the battlefield as mors triumphaiis, as not rhetorical but effective overcoming of death.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Military Style - Prussian Style - 'Militarism' - Heroism - War

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Military Style - Prussian Style - "Militarism" - Heroism - War(from "Men Among the Ruins")[...] I will not repeat what I have expounded elsewhere in a more detailed fashion, namely how often in the traditional world we encounter the interpretation of life as a perennial struggle between metaphysical powers, between Uranian forces of light and order, on the one hand, and telluric, dark forces of chaos and matter on the other. Traditional man yearned to fight this battle and to triumph in both the inner and outer worlds. A true and just war on the external plane reproduced in other terms the same struggle that had to be waged within: it was a struggle against forces and people that in the external world presented the same traits as the powers the single individual needed to subjugate and dominate internally, until a pax triumphalis was achieved.From this follows an interdependence between the warrior idea and that of a certain "asceticism," inner discipline, and superiority toward or control of one's self that appears in various degrees in the best warrior traditions and remains on the military plane (in the specific sense of the term) with the authentic value of a culture, in the anti-intellectualist sense of development and mastery of one's self. Contrary to what the bourgeois and liberal polemics claim, the warrior idea may not be reduced to materialism, nor is it synonymous with the exaltation of the brutal use of strength and destructive violence. Rather, the calm, conscious, and planned development of the inner being and a code of ethics; love of distance; hierarchy; order; the faculty of subordinating the emotional and individualistic element of one's self to higher goals and principles, especially in the name of honor and duty—these are all elements of the warrior idea, and they act as the foundations of a specific "style" that has largely been lost. This loss occurred with the shift from the States that are regarded as "militaristic," in which all this corresponded to a long and stern tradition, to the democratic and nationalistic States, in which the duty of serving in the armed forces has replaced the right to bear arms. Thus, the real antithesis is not between the "spiritual values" and "culture," on the one hand, and "militaristic materialism," on the other; the antithesis is between two ways of conceiving what spirit and culture really are. We must resolutely oppose the democratic, bourgeois, and humanistic view of the nineteenth century, which, in correspondence with the advent of an inferior human type, has presented its interpretation as the only legitimate and unquestionable one.The truth is that there has been an entire cycle of civilization, especially in the Indo-European areas, in which elements, feelings, and structures of an analogous warrior type were determinant in all the domains of life, up to and including the domain of familiar and patrician right, whereas the factors of a naturalistic, sentimental, and economic character were limited. The hierarchical idea is certainly not exhausted in the hierarchy of a military or warrior type. The more original form of hierarchy is defined with essentially spiritual values (the Greek word for hierarchy means "sovereignty of the sacred," hieros). However, it must be pointed out that in many civilizations even the hierarchies with a spiritual foundation either relied on hierarchies that were more or less warrior and military or reproduced their form, at least externally. Thus, when the original spiritual level could not be maintained, hierarchical structures of a warrior type constituted the armature of the major States, especially in the West.The Prussian spirit, the bête noire of democracies, should not be regarded as the anomaly of a certain people; on the contrary, in it we must see the same style that, thanks to a set of favorable circumstances, was preserved until recent times in German-speaking countries (as an "intolerable obscurantist residue," according to the progressive representatives of the modern era). The Prussian style did not apply only to the military: by defining itself as "Frederickianism," it shaped one of the most austere and aristocratic European military traditions, but also manifested its influence in everything that is service to the State, loyalty, and anti- individualism. This style educated a class of government officials according to principles very different from mere bureaucracy, petty clerical spirit, and the irresponsible and lazy administration of the affairs of the state. Moreover, this style never failed to act in the economic sector, ensuring, at the onset of the industrial era, an intimate cohesion to great industrial complexes led by quasi- dynastic lines of entrepreneurs who were respected and obeyed by the workers almost in terms of military loyalty and solidarity.Thus, the antithesis between two eras is reflected in the polemics concerning the meaning of the military and warrior element: moreover, in it we see the polemics between the two components of a collective organism—the social and the political. Antimilitaristic democracy is the expression of "society," which, with its material ideals of peace or, at most, of wars waged to maintain peace, is opposed to the political principle—that is, to the principle of the Männerbund, the shaping force of the State that has always depended on a warrior or military element, that cherished less material ideals, such as honor and superiority. Thus, what has transpired at an international level in the democratic ideology upheld during the two world wars is yet another aspect of the regressive phenomena and of the aggressive emergence of an inferior element.Aside from this, from a practical point of view we must acknowledge that in modern times, since the sensibility for purely spiritual values and dignities has become mostly atrophied among Western populations ("spiritual" in a traditional sense, not an "intellectualist" or "cultural" one), the model of a military hierarchy, though it is not the highest nor the original one, is almost the only one that can still supply the basis and act so as to emphasize hierarchical values in general, and thus save what can still be saved. That model still retains a certain prestige, and exercises a certain attraction on every human type that is not yet entirely disintegrated and "socialized." Despite any antimilitaristic propaganda culminating in the shallow, spineless, and gutless "conscientious objectors," there is a heroic dimension in the Western soul that cannot be totally extirpated. Maybe it is still possible to appeal to this dimension through an adequate view of life.In relation to this, a further consideration concerns a general attitude and a certain level of tension, which in many sectors of contemporary life become necessary, with the effect of minimizing the distinction between times of peace and times of war. I am not alluding to the political struggles among political parties, which are phenomena that relate only to a period of decadence and an absence of the idea of the State: I am alluding to all those aspects of modern life that, in order to be mastered and not to have destructive consequences on the individual, require a complete assumption of one's own position, so as not to refrain from turning risk and discipline into an integral part of one's way of being. In this case, too, we have an attitude opposite of the bourgeois man's. Obviously it cannot be required that such a climate of tension last permanently and remain in everybody, in the same degree: however, at the present time, in certain instances there is no other choice. It is on the basis of various capabilities of the individuals to conform to such a climate, to love such a climate, so that in every domain new selections and real, existential hierarchies can be determined; these hierarchies are such as to find a natural acknowledgment from every healthy human being.It is obvious that the nations in which such premises are sufficiently realized will be not only the ones better prepared for war, but also the ones in which war will acquire a higher meaning. Concerning the first point, it is the equivalent of what applies on the material plane, where the wartime efficiency of a nation is measured by the virtual potential for industries and peacetime economy to be suddenly converted into wartime industries and economy. There will be a certain continuity of spirit and attitude, a common moral denominator in peace and in war that facilitates the shift from one state to the other. It has rightly been affirmed that war shows a nation what peace has meant for it. The "military" education of the spirit has an independent value from "militarism" and from war; however, it creates the necessary potential so that, when a war breaks out, a nation is ready for it, and fights it with a sufficient number of men who reproduce in a new form the warrior type, rather than that of the "soldier."The entire order of ideas that has been discussed so far is thus ignored or falsified by the polemics against "militarism," just as in other cases (e.g., "totalitarianism") a false target is created. In reality, what is meant to be effaced and discredited is a world that the merchant and the bourgeois type abhor, hate, and regard as intolerable, even when it does not directly threaten democracy. Thus, it is convenient to focus on that which is only a degeneration of militarism, namely those situations in which a certain class of professional soldiers, of rather narrow views and limited competence, exercises an artificial influence on the politics of a nation, pushing it to the brink of war with the support of warmongering elements. Such situations can be definitely condemned without thereby compromising the value of the overall warrior view that I have discussed so far. However, this does not amount to espousing the democracies' theoretical pacifism and sharing their totally negative view concerning war and the meaning of battle.Contemporary democracies are caught in a contradiction that undermines their very physical existence. After trying to persuade the world that their last anti- European crusade was a "war against war," or the last war, now they need to rearm themselves, since they cannot defend their interests against the new "aggressors" with mere prayers and solemn proclamations issued by their leadership. Thus, this is the situation we are facing today: democracies theoretically continue to deprecate war; to conceive of war only in terms of "defense" and "aggression"; to abhor "militarism"; and almost to perceive the warrior as a criminal—and yet with such demoralizing and self-defeating ideological views, they arm themselves in order to confront their new opponents, namely the world of the Fourth Estate, organized by communism into one powerful bloc. The ideal for these democracies would be to find someone else to wage a war for them, as their "soldiers," limiting themselves to supplying weapons, ammunition, financing, and well-tested propaganda employing slogans such as "defense of the free world" and "defense of civilization." But such propaganda loses credibility day by day; moreover, we should not harbor too many illusions concerning the value of a technical and industrial superiority (unless it is totally overwhelming) when the counterpart of a moral factor and the warrior spirit is lacking in the fighting troops.Finally, it is not easy to find somebody naive enough to believe that he is fighting in the "last war" and to be so selfless as to risk or sacrifice his life for those who will come after him in the hypothetical, idyllic democratic age without wars. And so the situation arises in which one is forced to fight, while his entire bourgeois and democratic education makes him hate war and conceive it as the worst scourge or as something ushering in ruin and all sorts of miseries. The best possibility will be to fight out of desperation in order to save one's life or wallet, since plutocratic democracies today remind us of the situation of one who, confronted with the choice between his wallet and his life, prefers to risk his life rather than surrendering the wallet. We can see up what blind alleys the democratic "antimilitarism" leads today, when those who are fighting are the elements more or less directly threatened and pushed against the wall. The civilization of the merchant and the bourgeois who extols only the "civic virtues" and who identifies the standard of values with material well-being, economic prosperity, a comfortable and conformist existence based on one's work, productivity, sports, movies, and sexuality causes the involution and extinction of the warrior type and the hero; what remains is the military man as "human material," whose performance on the battlefield is very problematic due to the above-mentioned absence of the inner factor—namely, a corresponding tradition and warrior view of life.However, we may wonder if, after the recent experiences, one has had enough, or if one should forget what a modern "total war" entails; moreover, we may recall the extreme technical nature of such a conflict, seeing it not as a war of man against man, but rather as a war of the machine, matériel, and everything devised by science harnessed for purposes of radical destruction against man. We may wonder, in such a war, what margin is left to the traditional type of the warrior and the hero. The reply is that what is at work here is what Asians call karma. Modern man has no other choice. We may well agree with Ernst Jünger's views, according to which modern man, by creating the technology to dominate nature, has signed a promissory note that is now due; for instance, this is the type of war in which technology turns against him and threatens to destroy him not only physically, but spiritually as well. Thus, mankind must come to terms with its creation and compete with it. This is impossible unless a new inner dimension is created, which, in the case of war, will manifest itself in the form of a cold, lucid, and complex heroism in which the romantic, patriotic, instinctive element is absent, and in which, beside a more specific technical preparation, we find a sacrificial disposition: man's capability to face, and even to love, the most destructive situations through the possibilities they afford. These possibilities, in their elementary character, offer him the chance to grasp what may be called the "absolute person." All this, to a certain degree, will have to be applied to an entire nation, as in the modern "total war" the distinction between combatants and noncombatants is a relative one.

It may be said that modern war will lead only to the transformation of the heroic disposition and that its increasingly technical nature will constitute a real test, so that this disposition may assume a quintessential form, be purified and almost deindividualized, joining particular and complex forms of control, lucidity, and dominion. This purely spiritual and naked assumption of heroism is probably the only one that is still possible.Obviously, in these terms heroism assumes an autonomous value as pure experience and individual realization. The circumstances of modern times seem such that those who still yearn to be warriors and heroes must place this value at the forefront. In a novel written during World War II, a character says: "It is a luxury to be able to fight for a just cause." This is a significant testimony concerning the deep, widespread mistrust toward the ideological background of the recent wars, a background shaped by many lies and much propaganda. Thus, wars will increasingly display the traits attributed to them by certain sociologists; such traits are similar to those of elementary and unavoidable natural phenomena, and the result is the relativization of the meaning and value of the "cause" in the name of which people fight on both sides. We might be inclined to suspect that to think in these terms may promote a demoralizing and defeatist attitude. This may be the case, but only in those who have a passive attitude toward the phenomenon of war and who are bourgeois in spirit. In other instances, it will be a matter of inverting the relationship from means to end: the value of the "cause" will consist in its susceptibility to become a mere means for the realization of the experience as "autonomous value." Beyond any destruction, ideology, and "ideals," this realization will remain as an intangible and inalienable thing. However, it is not the view of life endorsed by modern democracies that will propitiate this eventual inversion of perspectives. The times ahead of us, despite the euphoria for the "second industrial revolution," make it very likely that to remain spiritually upright and to endure even after extreme trials and destructions will be possible only on such conditions.JULIUS EVOLA

JuliusEvola.NET

Nature as a School of Distance,
mere Facts without Meaning, Finality or Intention

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Nature as a School of Distance,
mere Facts without Meaning, Finality, or Intention(from "Ride the Tiger")[...] Also for us, it is a matter of a human type whom nature no longer interests by offering him what is "artistic," rare, characteristic; he who no longer seeks in nature the "beauty" that merely feeds confused nostalgias and speaks to fantasy. For this human type, there can be no landscape more beautiful than another, but some landscapes can be more distant, boundless, calm, cool, harsh, and primordial than others. He hears the language of things of the world not among trees, brooks, beautiful gardens, before oleographic sunsets and romantic moonlight, but rather in deserts, rocks, steppes, glaciers, murky Nordic fjords, the implacable, tropical sun, great ocean currents - in fact, in everything primordial and inaccessible. It naturally follows that the man with this sentiment of nature relates to it more actively - almost by absorbing its own pure, perceived force - than in a vague, lax, and rambling contemplation.If for the bourgeois generation nature was a kind of idyllic Sunday interlude of small-town life, and if for the latest generation it is the stage for acting out its vacuous, invasive, and contaminating vulgarity, it is for our differentiated man a school of objectivity and distance; it is something fundamental in his sense of existence, exhibiting an absolute character. At this point one can clearly speak of a nature that in its elementarity is the great world where the stone and steel panoramas of the metropolis, the endless avenues, the functional complexes of industrial areas are on the same level, for example, as great, solitary forests as symbols of a fundamental austerity, objectivity, and impersonality.With regard to the problems of inner orientation in our epoch, I have always valued ideas present in traditional esoteric doctrines. This also applies to what I have just said. The liberation of nature from the human, the access to it through the language of silence and the inanimate seems congenial to one who would turn the objective, destructive processes of the modern world to his own advantage. But the direction is no different from that which schools of traditional wisdom, like Zen, knew through a real cleansing and transparency of the glance or an opening of the eye, an enlightening revelation of the consciousness that has overcome the fetters of the physical I, of the person, and his values.The result here is an experience that already belongs to a different level from that of ordinary consciousness. It does not exactly concern the matter of this book, but it is still interesting to point out its relationship with the vision of the world centered on free immanence, which was mentioned in an earlier chapter (in which a fleeting allusion to Zen itself was made) and which I now reconsider as the limit of a new realism. Ancient tradition has a saying: "The infinitely distant is the return." Among the maxims of Zen that point in the same direction is the statement that the "great revelation," acquired through a series of mental and spiritual crises, consists in the recognition that "no one and nothing 'extraordinary' exists in the beyond"; only the real exists. Reality is, however, lived in a state in which "there is no subject of the experience nor any object that is experienced," and under the sign of a type of absolute presence, "the immanent making itself transcendent and the transcendent immanent." The teaching is that at the point at which one seeks the Way, one finds oneself further from it, the same being valid for the perfection and "realization" of the self. The cedar in the courtyard, a cloud casting its shadow on the hills, falling rain, a flower in bloom, the monotonous sound of waves: all these "natural" and banal facts can suggest absolute illumination, the satori. As mere facts they are without meaning, finality, or intention, but as such they have an absolute meaning. Reality appears this way, in the pure state of "things being as they are." The moral counterpart is indicated in sayings such as: "The pure and immaculate ascetic does not enter nirvana, and the monk who breaks the rules does not go to hell," or: "You have no liberation to seek from bonds, because you have never been bound." [...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

On Catholicism

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On Catholicism(from "Revolt Against the Modern World")[...] In order to follow the development of forces that shaped the Western world, it is necessary to briefly consider Catholicism. Catholicism developed through (a) the rectification of various extremist features of primitive Christianity; (b) the organization of a ritual, dogmatic, and symbolic corpus beyond the mere mystical, soteriological element; and (c) the absorption and adaptation of doctrinal and organizational elements that were borrowed from the Roman world and from classical civilization in general. This is how Catholicism at times displayed "traditional" features, which nevertheless should not deceive us: that which in Catholicism has a truly traditional character is not typically Christian and that which in Catholicism is specifically Christian can hardly be considered traditional. Historically, despite all the efforts that were made to reconcile heterogeneous and contradictory elements, and despite the work of absorption and adaptation on a large scale, Catholicism always betrays the spirit of lunar, priestly civilizations and thus it continues, in yet another form, the antagonistic action of the Southern influences, to which it offered a real organization through the Church and her hierarchy.This becomes evident when we examine the development of the principle of authority that was claimed by the Church. During the early centuries of the Christianized empire and during the Byzantine period, the Church still appeared to be subordinated to imperial authority; at Church councils the bishops left the last word to the ruler not only in disciplinary but also in doctrinal matters. Gradually, a shift occurred to the belief in the equality of the two powers of Church and empire; both institutions came to be regarded as enjoying a supernatural authority and a divine origin. With the passage of time we find in the Carolingian ideal the principle according to which the king is supposed to rule over both clergy and the people on the one hand, while on the other hand the idea was developed according to which the royal function was compared to that of the body and the priestly function to that of the soul; thereby the idea of the equality of the two powers was implicitly abandoned, thus preparing the way for the real inversion of relations.By analogy, if in every rational being the soul is the principle that decides what the body will do, how could one think that those who admitted to having authority only in matters of social and political concern should not be subordinated to the Church, to whom they willingly recognized the exclusive right over and direction of souls? Thus, the Church eventually disputed and regarded as tantamount to heresy and a prevarication dictated by pride that doctrine of the divine nature and origin of regality; it also came to regard the ruler as a mere layman equal to all other men before God and his Church, and a mere official invested by mortal beings with the power to rule over others in accordance with natural law. According to the Church, the ruler should receive from the ecclesiastical hierarchy the spiritual element that prevents his government from becoming the civitas diaboli. Boniface VIII, who did not hesitate to ascend to the throne of Constantine with a sword, crown, and scepter and to declare: "I am Caesar, I am the Emperor," embodies the logical conclusion of a theocratic, Southern upheaval in which the priest was entrusted with both evangelical swords (the spiritual and the temporal); the imperium itself came to be regarded as a beneficium conferred by the pope to somebody, who in return owed to the Church the same vassalage and obedience a feudal vassal owes the person who has invested him. However, since the spirituality that the head of the Roman Church incarnated remained in its essence that of the "servants of God," we can say that far from representing the restoration of the primordial and solar unity of the two powers, Guelphism merely testifies to how Rome had lost its ancient tradition and how it came to represent the opposite principle and the triumph of the Southern weltanschauung in Europe. In the confusion that was beginning to affect even the symbols, the Church, who on the one hand claimed for herself the symbol of the sun vis-à-vis the empire (to which she attributed the symbol of the moon), on the other hand employed the symbol of the Mother to refer to herself and considered the emperor as one of her "children." Thus, the Guelph ideal of political supremacy marked the return to the ancient gynaecocratic vision in which the authority, superiority, and privilege of spiritual primacy was accorded to the maternal principle over the male principle, which was then associated with the temporal and ephemeral reality. [...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

On Pre-Birth Superconsciousness
& the Power of Occult Forces
over 'Backward', 'Primitive' People
or Going Beyond René Guénon

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On Pre-Birth Superconsciousness
& the Power of Occult Forces
over 'Backward', 'Primitive' People
or Going Beyond René Guénon(from "The Path of Cinnabar")[...] In Rome, therefore, at the time of the German occupation, I made a secret attempt to establish a 'Movement for the Rebirth of Italy'. Involved in this project, among others, were Senator Carlo Costamagna - whom I had worked with in the past - and the Senator and former Minister, Balbino Giuliano. The purpose of our Movement, which after the war would have become a political party, would have been analogous to that of the Movimento Sociale Italiano - although our own Movement would have been conceived in more traditionalist terms as an expression of the Right devoid of one-sided references to Fascism (the negative as well as positive aspects of which we would have taken into account). Our political project came to an end at the time of the Allied occupation of Rome for a number of reasons (apparently, including an act of betrayal). I ought to have stayed in Rome, but the force of events led me away from the capital. I then crossed the frontier and moved to Vienna, where I had been summoned, by way of northern Italy. In the Austrian city, a similar political project was underway as the one which had failed in Rome. However, not long before the Russian occupation of the city, a bombing raid caused an injury to my spinal cord. The injury, which appeared lethal at first, caused the partial paralysis of my lower limbs.I thus found myself confined to hospital. Such an accident, no doubt, was not unrelated to a rule I had long chosen to follow: not to avoid, but, on the contrary, to seek dangers as a tacit way of putting fate to the test. For this very reason, in the past, I had pursued mountain climbing at dangerous altitudes. I remained faithful to this very principle during the war, when a world was crumbling and the future was shrouded in uncertainty. The accident I fell victim to, however, lent itself to no obvious explanation. Not much changed in my life following the accident, as my handicap was merely physical: aside from the practical disadvantages, and the limitations it entailed from the point of view of my profane existence, the handicap hardly bothered me, for my spiritual and intellectual work remained unaffected by the accident. In my heart, I have always thoroughly subscribed to the traditional doctrine I often quoted in my writing, which teaches that we have wished all relevant events in our life before our birth. I could not, therefore, avoid applying such a doctrine to the aforementioned event. To remember why I had wished such an accident upon myself, and to understand its most profound significance, is what truly mattered in my eyes - more than 'recovery' itself (something I cared little about). (Besides, as I saw it, had I been capable of grasping the 'memory' of such a wish by the light of knowledge, I would no doubt also have been capable of removing the physical handicap itself - if I had wished to do so.) To this day, however, the fog which clouds my memory has yet to lift. For the time being, I have come to adapt myself to the circumstances. Occasionally, I am humorously led to believe that it is gods who might be responsible for the situation, having used a little too much force when playing with me.Someone has spread the rumor that my accident was caused by pursuit of a 'Promethean' endeavor of some sort. This, of course, is sheer fantasy, not least because, at the time of the accident, I had long interrupted any work in the realm of the supernatural. Besides, I was living in Vienna incognito and under a false name. It is rather odd, however, that René Guénon himself favored a similar interpretation at first. For when I got in touch with Guénon after the war, and informed him of my accident (in the secret hope that Guénon might help me to 'understand' the event), I was asked whether I suspected that someone might have acted against me by occult means. Guénon added that he himself had been confined to his bed for several months, apparently on account of arthritis, but actually as a consequence of an outside attack; and that he had recovered from his illness once the person responsible had been discovered and neutralized. I told Guénon that a similar attack would be an unlikely cause in my case, not least because an extraordinarily powerful spell would have been necessary to cause such damage: for the spell would have had to determine a whole series of objective events, including the occurrence of the bombing raid, and the time and place in which the bombs were dropped.It is interesting to note that when I questioned Guénon concerning his accident (his case of pseudo-arthritis), and asked him whether an individual who has attained a certain spiritual level might not be safe from all attacks of 'magic' and wizardry, Guénon replied by reminding me that, according to tradition, the Prophet Mohammed himself was not invulnerable in this regard. Apparently, the reason for this is that 'subtle', 'psychic' processes operate in a deterministic fashion, not unlike physical processes (a knife stab, for instance, causes damage regardless of the kind of person it hits). (Actually, I have some further reservations on the matter: for I believe that the process of materialization of the individual - what contributes to distance him from the subtle forces of nature - can actually act as a protection against occult attacks of the kind I have just been discussing. Such attacks, therefore, would have little power over modern man, an intellectual type and city-dweller, whereas they would prove effective against more 'backward' and 'primitive' human groups.)
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

On the Dark Age

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On the Dark Age(from "Revolt Against the Modern World")[...]
In reference to what I previously said concerning what ancient traditions called the Dark Age (Kali Yuga), I will now describe some of the features of this age found in an ancient Hindu text, the Visnu Purana. I will put in brackets what I consider to be the contemporary applications.Outcastes and barbarians will be masters of the banks of the Indus, Darvika, the Chandrabhaga and Kashmir. These will all be contemporary rulers [of this age] reigning over the earth: kings [rulers] of violent temper ... They will seize upon the property of their subjects; they will be of limited power and will for the most part rapidly rise and fall; their lives will be short, their desires insatiable, and they will display but little piety. The people of various countries intermingling with them will follow their example ... The prevailing caste will be the Shudra ... Vaisyas will abandon agriculture and commerce and gain a livelihood by servitude or the exercise of mechanical arts [proletarization and industrialization] ... Kshyatrias instead of protecting will plunder their subjects: and under the pretext of levying customs will rob merchants of their property [crisis of capitalism and of private property; socialization, nationalization, and communism] ... Wealth [inner] and piety [following one's dharma] will decrease day by day until the whole world will be wholly depraved. Then property alone will confer rank [the quantity of dollars - economic classes]; wealth [material] will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation....Earth will be venerated but for its mineral treasures [unscrupulous exploitation of the soil, demise of the cult of the earth] ...Brahmanical clothes will constitute a Brahman ... weakness will be the cause of dependence [cowardice, death of fides and honor in the modern political forms] ... simple ablution [devoid of the power of the true rite] will be purification [can there really be anything more in the alleged salvation procured in the Christian sacraments?] ...In the Kali age men corrupted by unbelievers ... will say: "Of what authority are the Vedas? What are gods or Brahmans? ..."Observance of caste, order and institutes [traditional] will not prevail in the Kali age. Marriages in this age will not be conformable to the ritual, nor will the rules that connect the spiritual preceptor and his disciple be in force. ... A regenerated man will be initiated in any way whatever [democracy applied to the spiritual plane] and such acts of penance as may be performed will be unattended by any results [this refers to a "humanistic" and conformist religion] ... all orders of life will be common alike to all persons. ...He who gives away much money will be the master of men and family descent will no longer be a title of supremacy [the end of traditional nobility, advent of bourgeoisie, plutocracy]. ...Men will fix their desires upon riches, even though dishonestly acquired. ... Men of all degrees will conceit themselves to be equal with Brahmans [the prevarication and presumption of the intellectuals and modern culture]. ... The people will be almost always in dread of dearth and apprehensive of scarcity; and will hence ever be watching the appearances of the sky [the meaning of the religious and superstitious residues typical of modern masses]. ...The women will pay no attention to the commands of their husbands or parents.... They will be selfish, abject and slatternly; they will be scolds and liars; they will be indecent and immoral in their conduct and will ever attach themselves to dissolute men....Men having deviated into heresy, iniquity will flourish, and the duration of life will therefore decrease.*Nevertheless, in the Visnu Purana there are also references to elements of the primordial or "Manu's" race that have been preserved in this Dark Age in order to be the seed of new generations; what appears again is the well-known idea of a new and final epiphany "from above":When the practices taught by the Vedas and the institutes of law shall nearly have ceased, and the close of the Kali age shall be nigh, a portion of that divine being who exists of his own spiritual nature in the character of Brahma, and who is the beginning and the end, and who comprehends all things, shall descend upon the earth. ... He will then reestablish righteousness upon earth; and the minds of those who live at the end of the Kali age shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time shall be as the seeds of [new] human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age, or age of purity [primordial age].In the same text and chapter it is said that the stock from which this divine principal will be born lives in the village of Shambhala; Shambhala - as I previously suggested - refers to the metaphysics of the "center" and the "pole," to the Hyperborean mystery and the forces of primordial tradition.JULIUS EVOLA●* This prophecy appears to have been contradicted by facts, unless we distinguish the case in which a longer life is due to contact with that which transcends time from the case of artificial "devices" to prolong life (which is meaningless and just a parody of the first type of life), realized through the means of profane science and modern hygiene.
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JuliusEvola.NET

On the Hebrew Cycle & Islam:
a more Recent Tradition among Semitic Races

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On the Hebrew Cycle & Islam:
a more Recent Tradition among Semitic Races(from "Revolt against the Modern World")[...]
The failure of the attempt of the Chaldean hero Gilgamesh corresponds to the fall of Adam in the myth of another civilization within the Semitic cycle, the Hebrew civilization. Here we find a fundamental and characteristic motif: the transformation into sin of what in the Aryan version of the myth was regarded as a heroic, bold deed, often crowned by success, but that in Gilgamesh's myth had a negative outcome only because the hero was caught asleep. In the context of Hebrew Semitism, the one who attemps to take possession of the symbolic Tree is univocally transformed into a victim of woman's seduction and a sinner. The curse he has to suffer and the punishment that has been meted out to him by a jealous, terrible, and omnipotent god, follow him; there is no better hope, in the end, than that for a "redeemer" who will provide a vicarious atonement.In the ancient Hebrew tradition there are also elements of a different type. Moses himself, though he owed his life to a woman of the royal family (i.e., pharaoh's daughter, Exod. 2:5), was conceived of as having been "rescued from the waters"; likewise, the events described in the book of Exodus are capable of esoteric interpretation. Besides Elijah and Enoch, Jacob too was a heroic type, because he fought an angel and won; in relation to this, even the name "Israel," which the angel gave him, conveys the idea of a "victory over the deity" (Gen. 32:29). These elements are still sporadic and reveal a curious oscillation, which is typical of the Jewish soul, between a sense of guilt, self-humiliation, deconsecration, and carnality and an almost Luciferian pride and rebelliousness. Maybe this could be explained by the fact that even the initiatory tradition, which is also found in Judaism (e.g., the Kabbalah) and which played an important role in the European Middle Ages, has some particularly involuted traits, which characterize it at times as an "accursed science."The Jews originally conceived the otherworld as the dark and mute Sheol, or as some kind of Hades without the counterpart of an "Island of Heroes"; not even sacred kings such as David could escape it. This is the theme of the "way of the ancestors" (pitr-yana in Hinduism), which in this context has special relevance as the idea of an ever greater distance between man and God. Even on this plane, however, we find a double characteristic. On the one hand, according to the ancient Hebrews, Jehovah is the true king; thus, the Jews saw in the full and traditional understanding of regal dignity a disparagement of God's privilege (whether historical or not, Samuel's opposition to the establishment of a monarchy is very significant). On the other hand, the Jewish people considered themselves to be a "chosen people" and "God's people," who had been promised dominion over all the other peoples and possession of all the riches of the earth. They even derived from the Iranian tradition the theme of the hero Saoshyant, who in Judaism became the "Messiah," retaining for some time the traits typical of a manifestation of the "Lord of Hosts."Not without relation to all this, in ancient Judaism we find a very visible effort on the part of a priestly elite to dominate and coalesce a turbid, multiple, and turbulent ethnical substance by establishing the divine Law as the foundation of its "form," and by making it the surrogate of what in other people was the unity of the common fatherland and the common origins. From this formative action, which was connected to sacred and ritualistic values and preserved from the first redactions of the ancient Torah to the elaboration of the Talmuds, the Jewish type arose as that of a spiritual rather than a physical race.(1) But the original substratum was never totally eliminated, as ancient Jewish history shows in the form of the recurrent betrayals of God and his becoming reconciled with Israel. This dualism and the ensuing tension help to explain the negative forms that Judaism assumed in later times.(1) Originally Israel was not a race, but a people, or an ethnical mixture of various elements. This was a typical case in which a tradition "created" a race, and especially a race of the soul.For Judaism, as in the case of other civilizations, the time frame between the seventh and the sixth century B.C. was characterized by upheaval. Once the military fortunes of Israel declined, defeat came to be understood as a punishment for "sins" committed, and thus an expectation developed that after a dutiful expiation Jehovah would once again assist his people and restore their power. This theme was dealt with in Jeremiah and in Isaiah. But since this did not happen, the prophetic expectations degenerated into an apocalyptic, messianic myth and in the fantastic eschatological vision of a Savior who will redeem Israel; this marked the beginning of a process of disintegration. What derived from the traditional component eventually turned into a ritualistic formalism and thus became increasingly abstract and separated from real life. To be aware of the role the Chaldean priestly sciences played in this cycle would allow one to connect to this source everything that was successively articulated in Judaism in the form of abstract thought and even of mathematical insights (up to and including Spinoza's philosophy and the modem "formal" physics in which the Jewish component is very strong). Moreover, a connection was established with a human type, who in order to uphold values that he cannot realize and that thus appear to him increasingly abstract and Utopian, eventually feels dissatisfied and frustrated before any existing positive order and any form of authority (especially when we find in him, though in an unconscious way, the old idea according to which the state of justice willed by God is only that in which Israel rules) so as to be a constant source of disorder and of revolution. Finally we must consider another dimension of the Jewish soul: it is like somebody who, having failed to realize the values typical of the sacral and transcendent dimension in the course of the attempt to overcome the antithesis between spirit and "flesh" (which he exasperates in a characteristic way), eventually rejoices wherever he discovers the illusion and the irreality of those values and wherever he ascertains the failure of the yearning for redemption; this becomes for him some kind of alibi and self- justification. These are specific developments of the original "guilt" motif, which acted in a disaggregating way as Judaism became increasingly secularized and widespread during the most recent Western civilization.It is necessary to point out a characteristic moment in the development of the ancient Jewish spirit. The abovementioned period of crisis witnessed the loss of anything that was pure and virile in the ancient cult of Jehovah and in the warrior figure of the Messiah. Already in Jeremiah and in Isaiah there emerged a rebellious spirituality that condemned and disdained the hieratic, ritual element; such was the meaning of Hebrew "prophetism," which originally displayed traits that were very similar to the cults of inferior castes, and to the pandemic and ecstatic forms of the Southern races. The figure of the "seer" (roeh) was replaced by the figure of the one obsessed by the spirit of God.(2) Other features of prophetism were the pathos of the "servants of the Eternal," which replaced the proud and fanatical self-confidence of being ''God's people," and also an equivocal mysticism with apocalyptic overtones. The latter feature, once freed from the ancient Hebrew context, played a relevant role in the general crisis that affected the ancient Western world. The Diaspora, or the scattering of the Jewish people, corresponded to the by-products of the spiritual dissolution of a cycle that did not have a "heroic" restoration and in which some sort of inner fracture promoted processes of an antitraditional character. There are ancient traditions according to which Typhon, a demon opposed to the solar God, was the father of the Hebrews; various Gnostic authors considered the Hebrew god as one of Typhon's creatures. These are references to a demonic spirit characterized by a constant restlessness, by an obscure contamination, and by a latent revolt of the inferior elements; when this substance returned to a free state and when it separated itself from the "Law," that is, from the tradition that had formed it, all these factors acted upon the Jewish substratum in a more dramatic and decisive way than in other people.(2) Originally the prophets (nebiim) were possessed people who, through a natural disposition or through artificial means achieved a state of excitement in which they felt dominated and guided by a higher power, superior to their own wills.When they spoke it was no longer themselves but the spirit of God who made utterances. See J. Reville, Le Prophetisme hebreux (Paris, 1906). Thus the prophets were regarded by the priestly caste as raving lunatics; opposed to the prophet (nabi) originally there was the higher and "Olympian" figure of the seer (roeh): "In former times in Israel, anyone who sent to consult God used to say: 'Come, let us go to the seer,' for he who is now called prophet was formerly called seer." 1 Sam. 9:9.This is the origin of one of the main hotbeds of those forces that exercised an often unconscious, though negative influence during the last phases of the Western cycle of the Iron Age.Even though it began relatively recently, I will briefly refer to another tradition, Islam, which originated among Semitic races and succeeded in overcoming those negative motifs. As in the case of priestly Judaism, the center in Islam also consisted of the Law and Tradition, regarded as a formative force, to which the Arab stocks of the origins provided a purer and nobler human material that was shaped by a warrior spirit. The Islamic law (shariah) is a divine law; its foundation, the Koran, is thought of as God's very own word (kalam Allah) as well as a nonhuman work and an "uncreated book" that exists in heaven ab eterno. Although Islam considers itself the "religion of Abraham," even to the point of attributing to him the foundation of the Kaaba (in which we find again the theme of the "stone," or the symbol of the "center"), it is nevertheless true that (a) it claimed independence from both Judaism and Christianity; (b) the Kaaba, with its symbolism of the center, is a pre-Islamic location and has even older origins that cannot be dated accurately; (c) in the esoteric Islamic tradition, the main reference point is al-Khadir, a popular figure conceived as superior to and predating the biblical prophets (Koran 18:59-81). Islam rejects a theme found in Judaism and that in Christianity became the dogma and the basis of the mystery of the incarnation of the Logos; it retains, sensibly attenuated, the myth of Adam's fall without building upon it the theme of "original sin." In this doctrine Islam saw a "diabolical illusion" (talbis Iblis) or the inverted theme of the fall of Satan (Iblis or Shaitan), which the Koran (18:48) attributed to his refusal, together with all his angels, to bow down before Adam. Islam also not only rejected the idea of a Redeemer or Savior, which is so central in Christianity, but also the mediation of a priestly caste. By conceiving of the Divine in terms of an absolute and pure monotheism, without a "Son," a "Father," or a "Mother of God," every person as a Muslim appears to respond directly to God and to be sanctified through the Law, which permeates and organizes life in a radically unitary way in all of its juridical, religious, and social ramifications. In early Islam the only form of asceticism was action, that is, jihad, or "holy war"; this type of war, at least theoretically, should never be interrupted until the full consolidation of the divine Law has been achieved. It is precisely through the holy war, and not through preaching or missionary endeavor, that Islam came to enjoy a sudden, prodigious expansion, originating the empire of the Caliphs as well as forging a unity typical of a race of the spirit, namely, the umma or "Islamic nation." Finally, Islam presents a traditional completeness, since the shariah and the sunna, that is, the exoteric law and tradition, have their complement not in a vague mysticism, but in full-fledged initiatory organizations (turuq) that are characterized by an esoteric teaching (tawil) and by the metaphysical doctrine of the Supreme Identity (tawhid). In these organizations, and in general in the shia, the recurrent notions of the masum, of the double prerogative of the isma (doctrinal infallibility), and of the impossibility of being stained by any sin (which is the prerogative of the leaders, the visible and invisible Imams and, the mujtahid), lead back to the line of an unbroken race shaped by a tradition at a higher level than both Judaism and the religious beliefs that conquered the West.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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Protestantism, the Reformation, Luther

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Protestantism, the Reformation, Luther(from "Revolt Against The Modern World")[...] The ancient world had witnessed the degeneration of symbolism into a mythology that became increasingly opaque and mute and that eventually became the object of artistic fantasy. When the experience of the sacred was reduced to faith, sentiment, and moralism, and when the intuitio intellectualis was reduced to a mere concept of Scholastic philosophy, the unrealism of the spirit entirely took over the domain of the supernatural. This course underwent a further development with Protestantism, the contemporaneity of which with humanism and with the Renaissance is significant.Prescinding from its final meaning in the history of civilization, its antagonistic role during the Middle Ages, and its lack of an initiatic and esoteric dimension, we nevertheless must acknowledge a certain traditional character to the Church that lifted it above what had been mere Christianity, because it established a system of dogmas, symbols, myths, rituals, and sacred institutions in which, though often indirectly, elements of a superior knowledge were sometimes preserved. By rigidly upholding the principle of authority and dogma, by defending the transcendent and superrational character of "revelation" in the domain of knowledge and the principle of the transcendence of grace in the domain of action, the Church defended from any heresy - almost desperately - the nonhuman character of its deposit. This extreme effort of Catholicism (which explains much of whatever is crude and violent in its history), however, encountered a limit. The "dam" could not hold and some forms that could be justified in a merely religious context could not retain the character of absoluteness that is proper to what is nonhuman; this was especially true not only because a superior knowledge was lacking, but also considering that the secularization of the Church, the corruption, and the unworthiness of a great number of its representatives and the increasing importance that political and contingent interests acquired within it became increasingly visible. Thus, the stage was set for a reaction destined to inflict a serious blow to the traditional element that was added to Christianity, to exasperate the unrealist subjectivism, and to uphold individualism in a religious context. For this is what the Reformation accomplished.It is not a coincidence that Luther's invectives against the "papacy, the devil's creature in Rome" and against Rome as the "kingdom of Babylon" and as a radically pagan reality totally inimical to the Christian spirit were very similar to those invectives employed by the early Christians and by the Jewish apocalyptic texts against the city of the eagle and of the battle-axe. By rejecting everything in Catholicism that was Tradition and opposed to the simple Gospels, Luther demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of that superior content that cannot be reduced either to the Jewish-Southern substratum, or to the world of mere devotion, which in the Church had developed through secret influences from above. (1) The Ghibelline emperors rose up against papal Rome in the name of Rome, thus upholding again the superior idea of the Sacrum Imperium against both the merely religious spirituality of the Church and her hegemonic claims. Instead, Luther rose up against papal Rome out of an intense dislike for what was a positive aspect, that is, the traditional, hierarchical, and ritual component that existed within the Catholic compromise.(1) Naturally, this lack of understanding was typical of the representatives of Catholicism as well. Paracelsus was right when he said: "What is this commotion about Luther's and Zwingli's writings? It truly reminds me of a shallow bacchanalia. If I had to make a recommendation about this controversy I would have these gentlemen and the pope himself go back to school."In many regards Luther facilitated a mutilating emancipation, even in the domain of politics. By supporting the Reformation the Germanic princes, instead of assuming the legacy of Frederick II, went over to the anti-imperial coalition. In the author of the Warnung an seine lieben Deutschen, who presented himself as the "prophet of the German people," these princes saw one who legitimated their revolt against the imperial principle of authority with his doctrines and who allowed them to disguise their insubordination in the form of an anti-Roman crusade waged in the name of the Gospel, according to which they had no other goal than to be free German rulers and to be emancipated from any supernational hierarchical bond. Luther also contributed to an involutive process in another way; his doctrine subordinated religion to the state in all of its concrete manifestations. Because the government of the states was the responsibility of mere secular rulers; because Luther foreshadowed a democratic theme that was later on perfected by Calvin (the rulers do not govern by virtue of their nature, but because they are the representatives of the community); because a characteristic of the Reformation was the radical negation of the "Olympian" or "heroic" ideal, or any possibility on man's part to go beyond his limitations either through asceticism or consecration and so to be qualified to exercise even the right from above, which is typical of true leaders - because of all these reasons, Luther's views concerning "secular authority" (die weltiche Obrigkeit) practically amounted to an inversion of the traditional doctrine concerning the regal primacy and thus left the doors open for the usurpation of spiritual authority on the part of the temporal power. When defining the theme of the Leviathan, or of the "absolute state," Hobbes similarly proclaimed: "civitatem et ecclesiam eadem rem esse."From the point of view of the metaphysics of history, the positive and objective contribution of Protestantism consists in having emphasized that in mankind living in recent times a truly spiritual principle was no longer immediately present and that, therefore, mankind had to portray this principle as something transcendent. On this basis, Catholicism itself had already assumed the myth of original sin. Protestantism exasperated this myth by proclaiming the fundamental powerlessness of man to achieve salvation through his own efforts; generally speaking, it regarded the whole of humankind as a damned mass, condemned to automatically commit evil. To the truth obscurely foreshadowed by that myth, Protestantism added tints typical of an authentic Syrian masochism that were expressed in rather revolting images. Over and against the ancient ideal of spiritual virility Luther did not hesitate to call a "royal wedding" one in which the soul, portrayed as a "prostitute" and as "the most wretched and sinful creature," plays the role of the woman (see Luther's De libertate christiana); and to compare man to a beast of burden on which either God or the devil ride at will, without his being able to do anything about it (see Luther's De servo arbitrio).While what should have followed from the acknowledgment of the abovementioned existential situation was the affirmation of the need for the support proper to a ritual and hierarchical system, or the affirmation of the strictest type of asceticism, Luther denied both things. The entire system of Luther's thought was visibly conditioned by his personal equation and the gloomy character of his inner life as a failed monk and a man who was unable to overcome his own nature, influenced as it was by his passions, sensuality, and anger. This personal equation was reflected in the peculiar doctrine according to which the Ten Commandments had not been given by God to men to be implemented in this life but so that man, after acknowledging his inability to fulfill them, his nothingness, as well as concupiscence's invincibility and his inner tendency to sin, would entrust himself to a personal God and trust desperately in His free grace. This "justification by faith alone" and the ensuing condemnation of the power of "works" led Luther to attack the monastic life and the ascetical life, which he called "vain and hopeless," thus deterring Western man from pursuing those residual possibilities of reintegration available in the contemplative life that Catholicism had preserved and that had produced figures like Bernard of Clairvaux, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart. (2) Secondly, the Reformation denied the principle of authority and hierarchy in the dimension of the sacred. The idea that a human being, as a pontifex, could be infallible in matters of sacred doctrine and also legitimately claim the right to an authority beyond criticism was regarded as aberrant and absurd. According to the reformers, Christ did not give to any church, not even to a Protestant church, the privilege of infallibility; (3) thus, anybody is able to reach conclusions in matters of doctrine and interpretation of the sacred text through a free and individual examination outside any control and any tradition. Not only was the distinction between laity and priesthood in the field of knowledge basically abolished, but also denied was the priestly dignity understood not as an empty attribute, but in reference to those who, unlike other people, are endowed with a supernatural chrism and who carry an indoles indelebilis that allows them to activate the rites (these being residues of the ancient notion of the "Lord of the rites"). (4) Therefore, the objective, nonhuman meaning that not only the dogma and the symbols but the system of rites and the sacraments could have as well, was denied and rejected.(2) This is the main difference between Buddhism and Protestantism, which confers a positive character to the former and a negative to the latter. Both movements are characterized by pessimist premises - Luther's concupiscientia invincibilis corresponds somewhat to Buddhism's "thirst for life" - and by a revolt against a corrupted priestly caste. However, Buddhism indicated a path to follow since it created a strict system of asceticism and of self-discipline, unlike Protestantism, which rejected even the mitigated forms of asceticism found in the Catholic tradition.
(3) De Maistre (Du pape [Lyon, 1819]) correctly remarked that this situation is paradoxical: Protestantism in fact upholds the idea that God did not bestow infallibility to man or to the Church as if it were a dogma. In Islam, infallibility (isma) is not regarded as the natural possession of an individual, but of all the legitimate interpreters of the tawil, the esoteric teaching.
(4) Within Catholicism, due to a confusion between what is proper to asceticism and what is proper to the priesthood, the clergy never was a real caste. Once the principle of celibacy was established, by virtue of this very principle Catholicism irremediably lost the possibility of connecting the deposit of certain spiritual influences with the deep-seated forces of a blood legacy that had been preserved from any corrupt influence. The clergy, unlike the noble class, was always affected by the promiscuity of the origins since it recruited its members from all social strata and therefore always lacked an "organic" (i.e., biological and hereditary) basis for those spiritual influences.One might object that all this no longer existed in Catholicism or that it existed only formally or indirectly. But in that case the way leading to an authentic reformation should have been one and one alone: to act in earnest and replace the unworthy representatives of the spiritual principle and tradition with worthy ones. Instead, Protestantism has led to a destruction and a denial that were not balanced with any true constructive principle, but rather only with an illusion, namely, sheer faith. According to Protestantism, salvation consisted in the mere subjective assurance of being counted in the ranks of those who have been saved by faith in Christ, and "chosen" by divine grace. In this fashion, mankind progressed along the path of spiritual unrealism; the materialistic repercussion did not delay its appearance.After rejecting the objective notion of spirituality as a reality ranking higher than profane existence, the Protestant doctrine allowed man to feel, in all aspects of life, as a being who was simultaneously spiritual and earthly, justified and sinner. In the end this led to a radical secularization of all higher vocations; again, not to sacralization, but to moralism and puritanism. It was in the historical development of Protestantism, especially in Anglo-Saxon Calvinism and Puritanism, that the religious idea became increasingly dissociated from any transcendent interest and thus susceptible to being used to sanctify any temporal achievement to the point of generating a kind of mysticism of social service, work, "progress," and even profit. These forms of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism were characterized by communities of believers with no leader to represent a transcendent principle of authority; thus, the ideal of the state was reduced to that of the mere "society" of "free" Christian citizens. In this type of society, profit became the sip of divine election that, once the prevalent criterion became the economic one, corresponds to wealth and to prosperity. In this we can clearly distinguish one of the aspects of the abovementioned degrading regression: this Calvinist theory was really the materialistic and lay counterfeit of the ancient mystical doctrine of victory. For quite a long time this theory has supplied an ethical and religious justification for the rise to power of the merchant class and of the Third Estate during the cycle of the modem democracies and capitalism. [...]JULIUS EVOLA
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René Guénon's Spiritual Understanding
Influenced by an Unacceptable
Un-Aryan Vision of Life

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René Guénon's Spiritual Understanding
Influenced by an Unacceptable
Un-Aryan Vision of Life(from "Metaphysics of War")The decline of the modern West, according to the view of a famous critic of civilization, clearly possesses two salient characteristics: in the first place the pathological development of activity for its own sake; in the second place contempt for the values of knowledge and contemplation.By knowledge this critic does not mean rationalism, intellectualism or the vain games of men of letters - nor by contemplation does he mean cutting oneself off from the world, renunciation or a misunderstood form of monastic detachment. Knowledge and contemplation represent for him, rather, the most normal and appropriate forms of participation of man in super-natural, superhuman and supra-rational reality. Notwithstanding this clarification his view involves what is, to us, an unacceptable presupposition. In fact, he has already tacitly implied that every act in the material domain is limiting and that the highest spiritual sphere is accessible only in ways different from those of action.In this premise the influence of a vision of life is clearly recognizable which, in its essence, remains strange to the spirit of the Aryan race, even if it is so embedded in the thought of the Christianized West that it can even be found revived in the imperial conception of Dante. The opposition between action and contemplation, however, was unknown to the ancient Aryans. Action and contemplation were not regarded as the two terms of an opposition. They designated merely two distinct paths to the same spiritual realization. In other words, it was thought that man could overcome the conditioning of individuality and participate in the supernatural reality by means of contemplation or, equally, by means of action.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Sacred War's Essence
beyond Inherent Duty
towards Race & Fatherland

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Sacred War's Essence
beyond Inherent Duty
towards Race & Fatherland(from "Metaphysics of War")[...] Those who regard the Crusades, with indignation, as among the most extravagant episodes of the 'dark' Middle Ages, have not even the slightest suspicion that what they call 'religious fanaticism' was the visible sign of the presence and effectiveness of a sensitivity and decisiveness, the absence of which is more characteristic of true barbarism. In fact, the man of the Crusades was able to rise, to fight and to die for a purpose which, in its essence, was supra- political and supra-human, and to serve on a front defined no longer by what is particularistic, but rather by what is universal. This remains a value, an unshakeable point of reference.Naturally, this must not be misunderstood to mean that the transcendent motive may be used as an excuse for the warrior to become indifferent, to forget the duties inherent in his belonging to a race and to a fatherland. This is not at all our point, which concerns rather the essentially deeply disparate meanings according to which actions and sacrifices can be experienced, despite the fact that, from the external point of view, they may be absolutely the same. There is a radical difference between the one who engages in warfare simply as such, and the one who simultaneously engages in 'sacred war' and finds in it a higher experience, both desired and desirable for the spirit.We must add that, although this difference is primarily an interior one, nevertheless, because the powers of interiority are able to find expression also in exteriority, effects derive from it also on the exterior plane, specifically in the following respects:First of all, in an 'indomitability' of the heroic impulse: the one who experiences heroism spiritually is pervaded with a metaphysical tension, an impetus, whose object is 'infinite', and which, therefore, will carry him perpetually forward, beyond the capacity of one who fights from necessity, fights as a trade, or is spurred by natural instincts or external suggestion.Secondly, the one who fights according to the sense of 'sacred war' is spontaneously beyond every particularism and exists in a spiritual climate which, at any given moment, may very well give rise and life to a supra-national unity of action. This is precisely what occurred in the Crusades when Princes and Dukes of every land gathered in the heroic and sacred enterprise, regardless of their particular utilitarian interests or political divisions, bringing about for the first time a great European unity, true to the common civilization and to the very principle of the Sacred Roman Empire.Now, in this respect as well, if we are able to leave aside the 'integument', if we are able to isolate the essential from the contingent, we will find an element whose precious value is not restricted to any particular historical period. To succeed in referring heroic action also to an 'ascetic' plane, and in justifying the former according to the latter, is to clear the road towards a possible new unity of civilization, to remove every antagonism conditioned by matter, to prepare the environment for great distances and for great fronts, and, therefore, to adapt the outer purposes of action gradually to its new spiritual meaning, when it is no longer a land and the temporal ambitions of a land for which one fights, but a superior principle of civilization, a foreshadowing of what, even though itself metaphysical, moves ever forward, beyond every limit, beyond every danger, beyond every destruction.JULIUS EVOLA
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The Concept of Holy War
(- in Islam: an Inheritance
of the Persian Tradition)

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The Concept of Holy War
(- in Islam: an Inheritance
of the Persian Tradition)(from "Metaphysics of War")[...] Historically, in order to comprehend what concerns us here, it must first be understood that the Islamic tradition, rather than having such a unique metaphysical point of origin, is essentially dependent upon its inheritance of the Persian tradition - Persia, as is well known, having possessed one of the highest pre-European civilizations. The original Mazdaist conception of religion, as military service under the sign of the 'God of Light', and of existence as a continuous, relentless struggle to rescue beings and things from the control of an anti-god, is at the centre of the Persian vision of life, and should be considered as the metaphysical counterpart and spiritual background to the warrior enterprises which culminated in the creation by the Persians of the empire of the 'kings of kings'. After the fall of Persia's power, echoes of such traditions persisted in the cycle of medieval Arabian civilization in forms which became slightly more materialistic and sometimes exaggerated, yet not to such an extent that their original elements of spirituality were entirely lost.We bring up traditions of that kind here, above all, because they introduce a concept which is very useful in clarifying further the order of ideas set out in our latest articles; namely, the concept of the 'greater' or 'holy war', as distinct from the 'lesser war', but at the same time as related to the latter in a special manner. The distinction itself derives from a saying of the Prophet, who, returning from a warrior expedition, declared: "I return now from the lesser to the greater war."The lesser war here corresponds to the exoteric war, the bloody battle which is fought with material arms against the enemy, against the 'barbarian', against an inferior race over whom a superior right is claimed, or, finally, when the event is motivated by a religious justification, against the 'infidel'. No matter how terrible and tragic the events, no matter how huge the destruction, this war, metaphysically, still remains a ‘lesser war'. The 'greater' or 'holy war' is, contrarily, of the interior and intangible order - it is the war which is fought against the enemy, the 'barbarian', the 'infidel', whom everyone bears in himself, or whom everyone can see arising in himself on every occasion that he tries to subject his whole being to a spiritual law. Appearing in the forms of craving, partiality, passion, instinctuality, weakness and inward cowardice, the enemy within the natural man must be vanquished, its resistance broken, chained and subjected to the spiritual man, this being the condition of reaching inner liberation, the 'triumphant peace' which allows one to participate in what is beyond both life and death.Some may say that this is simply asceticism. The greater, holy war is the ascesis which has always been a philosophical goal. It could be tempting to add as well: it is the path of those who wish to escape from the world and who, using the excuse of inner liberation, become a herd of pacifist cowards. This is not at all the way things are. After the distinction between the two wars there is their synthesis. It is a feature of heroic traditions that they prescribe the 'lesser war', that is to say the real, bloody war, as an instrument in the realization of the 'greater: or 'holy war'; so much so that, finally, both become one and the same thing.Thus, in Islam, 'holy war' - jihad - and 'the path of God' are interchangeable terms. The one who fights is on the 'path of God'. A well-known and quite characteristic saying of this tradition is: "The blood of heroes is closer to the Lord than the ink of scholars and the prayers of the pious."Once again, as in the traditions already reviewed by us, as in the Roman ascesis of power and in the classical mors triumphalis, action attains the value of an inner overcoming and of an approximation to a life no longer mixed with darkness, contingency, uncertainty and death. In more concrete terms, the predicaments, risks and ordeals peculiar to the events of war bring about an emergence of the inner 'enemy', which, in the forms of the instinct of self-preservation, cowardice, cruelty, pity and blind riotousness, arise as obstacles to be vanquished just as one fights the outer enemy. It is clear from this that the decisive point is constituted by one's inner orientation, one's unshakeable persistence in what is spiritual in this double struggle, so that an irresistible and blind changing of oneself into a sort of wild animal does not occur, but, instead, a way is found of not letting the deepest forces escape, a way of seeing to it that one is never overwhelmed inwardly, that one always remains supreme master of oneself, and, precisely because of this sovereignty, one remains able to affirm himself against every possible limitation. In a tradition to which we will dedicate our next article, this situation is represented by a most characteristic symbol: the warrior is accompanied by an impassive divine being who, without fighting, leads and guides him in his struggle, side by side with him in the same war chariot. This symbol is the personified expression of a duality of principles, which the true hero, from whom something sacred always emanates, maintains unceasingly within himself.
[...]
As if by a circular path the reader is thus brought back to the same ideas which were examined in our previous writings on the subject of tradition, whether classical or Nordic-medieval: that is to say, to the idea of a privileged immortality reserved for heroes, who alone, according to Hesiod, pass on to inhabit symbolic islands, which image forth the bright and intangible existence of the Olympians.Additionally, in the Islamic tradition, there are frequent references to the idea that some warriors fallen in the 'sacred war' are in reality not dead, in a sense which is not symbolic in any way, and which need not be referred to supernatural states cut off from the energies and destinies of the living. It is not possible to enter into this domain, which is rather mysterious and requires the support of references which would ill befit the present article. What we can say definitely is that, even today, and particularly in Italy, the rites by which a warrior community declares its most heroically fallen companions still 'present' have regained a special evocative force. He who begins from the belief that everything which, by a process of involution, retains today only an allegorical and, at best, moral character, whereas it originally possessed the value of reality, and every rite contained real action and not mere 'ceremony' - for him these warrior rites of today could perhaps provide material for meditation, and he could perhaps approach the mystery contained in the teaching already quoted: that is, the idea of heroes who really never died, and the idea of victors who, like the Roman Caesar, remain as 'perpetual victors' at the centre of a human stock.JULIUS EVOLA
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The Elements of Style of the Original Roman Spirit

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The "Elements of Style" of the Original Roman Spirit(from "Men Among the Ruins")[...] we should be able to extract from the Roman spirit a living content that has nothing to do with rhetorical assumptions or with museums and scholarly dissertations, such that even a simple man could understand it without the need of erudition and historical notions. To this effect, I have spoken about "elements of style." These elements have to be drawn from what we know about the Roman tradition and customs; in this case too, we need to discriminate among various types of Roman spirit. Alongside the Roman spirit of the origins, which reproduced in a special and original form a type of culture and custom common to the main, higher Indo-European civilizations, there were a Hellenized (in the negative sense of the term), a "Punicized," a "Ciceronian," an "Asiaticized," and a Catholic Roman spirit. The reference points should not be sought in these cases. Everything that is valid in them can be reduced to the first Roman spirit.This original Roman spirit was based on a human type characterized by a group of typical dispositions. Among them we should include self-control, an enlightened boldness, a concise speech and determined and coherent conduct, and a cold dominating attitude, exempt from personalism and vanity. To the Roman style belong virtus, in the sense not of moralism, but of virile spirit and courage; fortitudo and constantia, namely spiritual strength; sapientia, in the sense of thoughtfulness and awareness; disciplina, understood as love for a self-given law and form; fides, in the specifically Roman sense of loyalty and faithfulness; and dignitas, which in the ancient patrician aristocracy became gravitas and solemnitas, a studied and moderate seriousness. The same style is characterized by deliberate actions, without grand gestures; a realism that is not materialism, but rather love for the essential; the ideal of clarity, which eventually turned into rationalism in only some Latin peoples; an inner equilibrium and a healthy suspicion for every confused form of mysticism; a love for boundaries; the readiness to unite, as free human beings and without losing one's identity, in view of a higher goal or for an idea. We may also add religio and pietas, which do not mean "religiosity" in the Christian sense of the word, but instead signify for a Roman an attitude of respectful and dignified veneration for the gods and, at the same time, of trust and re-connection with the supernatural, which was experienced as omnipresent and effective in terms of individual, collective, and historical forces. Obviously, I am far from suggesting that every Roman man and woman embodied these traits; however, they represented the "dominant factor" and were embodied in the ideal that everybody perceived to be specifically Roman.Likewise, these elements of style are self-evident. They are not connected to past times; they may act in every period as character-forming influences and effective values as soon as a corresponding calling is awakened. They have a normative value. In the worst case, they might have only the value of a measure. Moreover, we should not think they must be adopted by every individual; this would be absurd and even unnecessary. It would suffice if only a certain social stratum, called to inspire the others, could embody them.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

The Meaning & Context of Zen

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The Meaning and Context of Zen(from "Zen - The Religion of the Samourai")We know the kind of interest Zen has evoked even outside specialized disciplines, since being popularized in the west by D.T. Suzuki through his books Introduction to Zen Buddhism and Essays in Zen Buddhism. This popular interest is due to the paradoxical encounter between East and West. The ailing West perceives that Zen has something "existential" and surrealistic to offer. Zen's notion of a spiritual realization, free from any faith and any bond, not to mention the mirage of an instantaneous and somehow gratuitous "spiritual breakthrough", has exercised a fascinating attraction on many Westerners. However, this is true, for the most part, only superficially. There is a considerable difference between the spiritual dimension of the "philosophy of crisis", which has become popular in the West as a consequence of its materialistic and nihilist development, and the spiritual dimension of Zen, which has been rooted in the spirituality of the Buddhist tradition. Any true encounter between Zen and the West, presupposes, in a Westerner, either an exceptional predisposition, or the capability to operate a metanoia. By metanoia I mean an inner turnabout, affecting not so much one's intellectual "attitudes", but rather a dimension which in every time and in every place has been conceived as a deeper reality.Zen was a secret doctrine and not to be found in scriptures. It was passed on by the Buddha to his disciple Mahakassapa. This secret doctrine was introduced in China around the sixth century C.E. by Bodhidharma. The canon was transmitted in China and Japan through a succession of teachers and "patriarchs". In Japan it is a living tradition and has many advocates and numerous Zendos ("Halls of Meditation").As far as the spirit informing the tradition is concerned, Zen may be considered as a continuation of early Buddhism. Buddhism arose as a vigorous reaction against the theological speculation and the shallow ritualism into which the ancient Hindu priestly caste had degraded after possessing a sacred, lively wisdom since ancient times. Buddha made tabula rasa of all this: he focused instead on the practical problem of how to overcome what in the popular mind is referred to as "life's suffering". According to esoteric teachings, this suffering was considered as the state of caducity, restlessness, 'thirst' and the forgetfulness typical of ordinary people. Having followed the path leading to spiritual awakening and to immortality without external aid, Buddha pointed the way to those who felt an attraction to it. It is well known that Buddha is not a name, but an attribute or a title meaning "the awakened One", "He who has achieved enlightenment", or "the awakening". Buddha was silent about the content of his experience, since he wanted to discourage people from assigning to speculation and philosophizing a primacy over action. Therefore, unlike his predecessors, he did not talk about Brahman (the absolute), or about Atman (the transcendental Self), but only employees the term nirvana, at the risk of being misunderstood. Some, in fact, thought, in their lack of understanding, that nirvana was to be identified with the notion of "nothingness", an ineffable and evanescent transcendence, almost bordering on the limits of the unconscious and of a state of unaware non-being.So, in a further development of Buddhism, what occurred again, mutatis mutandis, was exactly the situation against which Buddha had reacted; Buddhism became a religion, complete with dogmas, rituals, scholasticism and mythology. It eventually became differentiated into two schools: Mahayana and Hinayana. The former was more grandiose in metaphysics and eventually grew complacent with its abstruse symbolism. The teachings of the latter school were more strict and to the point, and yet too concerned about the mere moral discipline, which became increasingly monastic. Thus the essential and original nucleus, namely the esoteric doctrine of the enlightenment, was almost lost.At this crucial time Zen appeared, declaring the uselessness of these so-called methods and proclaiming the doctrine of satori. Satori is a fundamental inner event, a sudden existential breakthrough, corresponding in essence to what I have called the "awakening". But this formulation was new and original and it constituted a radical change in approach. Nirvana, which had been variously considered as the alleged Nothingness, as extinction, and as the final end result of an effort aimed at obtaining liberation (which according to some may require more than one lifetime), now came to be considered as the normal human condition. By these lights, every person has the nature of Buddha and every person is already liberated, and therefore, situated above and beyond birth and death. It is only necessary to become aware of it, to realize it, to see within one's nature, according to Zen's main expression. Satori is like a timeless opening up. On the one hand, satori is something sudden and radically different from all the ordinary human states of consciousness; it is like a catastrophic trauma within ordinary consciousness. On the other hand, satori is what leads one back to what, in a higher sense, should be considered as normal and natural; thus, it is the exact opposite of an ecstasis, or trance. It is the rediscovery and the appropriation of one's true nature: it is the enlightenment which draws out of ignorance or out of the subconscious the deep reality of what was and will always be, regardless of one's condition in life.The consequence of satori is a completely new way to look at the world and at life. To those who have experienced it, everything is the same (things, other beings, one's self, "heaven, the rivers and the vast earth"), and yet everything is fundamentally different. It is as if a new dimension was added to reality, transforming the meaning and value. According to the Zen Masters, the essential characteristic of the new experience is the overcoming of every dualism: of the inner and outer; the I and not I; of finitude and infinity; being and not-being; appearance and reality; "empty" and "full"; substance and accidents. Another characteristic is that any value posed by the finite and confused consciousness of the individual, is no longer discernible. And thus, the liberated and the non- liberated, the enlightened and the non-enlightened, are yet one and same thing. Zen effectively perpetuates the paradoxical equation of Mahayana Buddhism, nirvana = samsara, and the Taoist saying "the return is infinitely far". It is as if Zen said: liberation should not be looked for in the next world; this very world is the next world; it is liberation and it does not need to be liberated. This is the point of view of satori, of perfect enlightenment, of "transcendent wisdom" (prajnaparamita).Basically, this consciousness is a shift of the self's center. In any situation and in any event of ordinary life, including the most trivial ones, the ordinary, dualistic and intellectual sense of one's self is substituted with a being who no longer perceives an "I" opposed to a "non-I", and who transcends and overcomes any antithesis. This being eventually comes to enjoy a perfect freedom and incoercibility. He is like the wind, which blows where it wills, and like a naked being which is everything and possesses everything because he has let go and abandoned everything, embracing poverty.Zen, or at least mainstream Zen, emphasizes the discontinuous, sudden and unpredictable character of satori disclosure. In regard to this, Suzuki was at fault when he took issue with the techniques used in Hindu schools such as Samkya and Yoga. These techniques were also contemplated in early Buddhist texts. Suzuki employed the simile of water, which in a moment turns into ice. He also used the simile of an alarm, which, as a consequence of some vibration, suddenly goes off. There are no disciplines, techniques or efforts, according to Suzuki, which by themselves may lead one to satori. On the contrary, it is claimed that satori often occurs spontaneously, when one has exhausted all the resources of his being, especially the intellect and logical faculty of understanding. In some cases satori is said to be facilitated by violent sensations and even by physical pain. Its cause may be the mere perception of an object as well as any event in ordinary life, provided a certain latent predisposition exists in the subject.Regarding this, some misunderstandings may occur. Suzuki acknowledged that "generally speaking, there are no indications on the inner work preceding satori". However, he talked about the necessity of first going through "a true baptism of fire". After all, the very institution of the so-called "Halls of Meditation" (Zendo), where those who strive to obtain satori submit themselves to a regimen of life which is partially analogous to that of some Catholic religious orders, bespeaks the necessity of a preliminary preparation. This preparation may last for several years. The essence of Zen seems to consist in a maturation process, identical to the one in which one almost reaches a state of an acute existential instability. At that point, the slightest push is sufficient to produce a change of state, a spiritual breakthrough, the opening which leads to the "intuitive vision of one's nature". The Masters know the moment in which the mind of the disciple is mature and ready to open up; it is then that they eventually give the final, decisive push. This push may sometimes consist of a simple gesture, an exclamation, in something apparently irrelevant, or even illogical and absurd. This suffices to induce the collapse of the false notion of individuality. Thus, satori replaces this notion with the "normal state", and one assumes the "original face, which one had before creation". One no longer "chases after echoes" and "shadows". This under some aspects brings to mind the existential theme of "failure", or of "being shipwrecked" (das Scheitern, in Kierkegaard and in Jaspers). In fact, as I have mentioned, the opening often takes place when all the resources of one's being have been exhausted and one has his back against the wall. This can be seen in relation to some practical teachings methods used by Zen. The most frequently employed methods, on an intellectual plane, are the koan and the mondo. The disciple is confronted with a saying or with questions which are paradoxical, absurd and sometimes even grotesque and "surrealistic". He must labor with his mind, if necessary for years, until he has reached the extreme limit of all his normal faculties of comprehension. Then, if he dares proceed further on that road, he may find catastrophe, but if he can turn the situation upside down, he may achieve metanoia. This is the point where satori is usually achieved.Zen's norm is that of absolute autonomy; no gods, no cults, no idols. To literally empty oneself of everything, including God. "If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him", a saying goes. It is necessary to abandon everything, without leaning on anything, and then to proceed forward, with one's essence, until the crisis point is reached. It is very difficult to say more about satori, or to compare it with various forms of initiatory mystical experience whether Eastern or Western. One is supposed to spend only the training period in Zen monasteries. Once the disciple has achieved satori, he returns to the world, choosing a way of life that fits his need. One may think of satori as a form of transcendence which is brought into immanence, as a natural state, in every form of life.The behavior which proceeds from the newly acquired dimension, which is added to reality as a consequence of satori, may well be summarized by Lao Tzu's expression: "To be the whole in the part". In regard to this, it is important to realize the influence which Zen has exercised on the Far-Eastern way of life. Zen has been called "the samurai's philosophy," and it had also been said that "the way of Zen is identical to the way of archery," or to the "way of the sword". This means that any activity in one's life, may be permeated by Zen and thus be elevated to a higher meaning, to a "wholesomeness" and to an "impersonal activity". This kind of activity is based on a sense of the individual's irrelevance, which nevertheless does not paralyze one's actions, but which rather confers cam and detachment. This detachment, in turn, favors an absolute and "pure" undertaking of life, which in some cases reaches extreme and distinct forms of self-sacrifice and heroism, inconceivable to the majority of Westerners (e.g. the kamikaze in WWII).Thus, what C.G. Jung claims is simply ridiculous, namely that Psychoanalysis, more than any other Western school of thought, is capable of understanding Zen. According to Jung, satori coincides with the state of wholeness, devoid of complexes or inner splitting, which psychoanalytic treatment claims to achieve whenever the intellect's obstructions and its sense of superiority are removed, and whenever the conscious dimension of the soul is reunited with the unconscious and with "Life". Jung did not realize that the methods and presuppositions of Zen, are exactly the opposite of his own. There is no "subconscious", as a distinct entity, to which the conscious has to be reconnected; Zen speaks of a super- conscious vision (enlightenment, bodhi or "awakening"), which actualizes the "original and luminous nature" and which, in so doing, destroys the unconscious. It is possible though, to notice similarities between Jung's views and Zen's, since they both talk about the feeling of one's "totality" and freedom which is manifested in every aspect of life. However, it is important to explain the level at which these views appear to coincide.Once Zen found its way to the West, there was a tendency to "domesticate" and to moralize it, playing down its potential radical and "antinomian" (namely, antithetical to current norms) implications, and by emphasizing the standard ingredients which are held so dear by "spiritual" people, namely love and service to one's neighbor, even though these ingredients have been purified in an impersonal and non-sentimental form. Generally speaking, there are many doubts on the "practicability" of Zen, considering that the "doctrine of awakening" has an initiatory character.Thus, it will only be able to inspire a minority of people, in contrast to later Buddhist views, which took the form of a religion open to everyone, or of a code of mere morality. As the re-establishment of the spirit of early Buddhism, Zen should have remained an esoteric doctrine. It has been so as we can see by examining the legend concerning its origins. However, Suzuki himself was inclined to give a different account; he emphasized those aspects of Mahayana which "democratize" Buddhism (after all, the term Mahayana has been interpreted to mean "Great Vehicle", even in the sense that it extends to wider audiences, and not just to a few elect). If one was to fully agree with Suzuki, some perplexities on the nature and on the scope of satori may arise; more specifically one should ask whether such an experience merely affects the psychological, moral or mental domain, or whether it affects the ontological domain, as is the case in every authentic initiation. In that event, it can only be the privilege a very restricted number of people.JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

The Plurality & Duality of Civilizations

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The Plurality and Duality of Civilizations(from "The Hermetic Tradition")Recently, in contrast to the notion of progress and the idea that history has been represented as the more or less continuous upward evolution of collective humanity, the idea of a plurality of the forms of civilization and of a relative incommunicability between them has been confirmed. According to this second and new vision of history, civilization breaks down into epochs and disconnected cycles. At a given moment and within a given race a specific conception of the world and of life is affirmed from which follows a specific system of truths, principles, understandings, and realizations. A civilization springs up, gradually reaches a culminating point, and then falls into darkness and, more often than not, disappears. A cycle has ended. Perhaps another will rise again some day, somewhere else. Perhaps it may even take up the concerns of preceding civilizations, but any connection between them will be strictly analogical. The transition from one cycle of civilization to another – one completely alien to the other – implies a jump, which in mathematics is called a discontinuity.Although this view is a healthy reaction to the superstition of history as progress – which came into fashion more or less at the same time as materialism and western scientism – nevertheless, we should be cautious, for in addition to a plurality of civilizations we have to recognize a duality – especially when we limit ourselves to those times and the central structures that we can embrace with some measure of certainty.Modern civilization stands on one side and on the other the entirety of all the civilizations that have preceded it (for the West, we can put the dividing line at the end of the Middle-Ages). At this point the rupture is complete. Apart from the multitudinous variety of its forms, pre-modern civilization, which we may as well call “traditional”, mean something quite different. For there are two worlds, one of which has separated itself by cutting of nearly every contact with the past. For the great majority of the moderns, that means any possibility of understanding the traditional world has been completely lost.This premise is indispensable for the examination of our subject. The hermetico- alchemical tradition forms part of the cycle of pre-modern “traditional” civilization and in order to understand its spirit we need to translate it inwardly from one world into the other. Who undertakes this study without having acquired the ability to rise above the modern mind-set or who has not awakened to a new sensitivity that can place itself in contact with the general spiritual stream that gave life to the tradition in the first place, will succeed only in filling his head with words, symbols, and fantastic allegories. Moreover, it is not just a question of intellectual understanding. We have to bear in mind that ancient men not only had a different way of thinking and feeling, but also a different way of perceiving and knowing. The heart of the matter that will concern us is to reevoke, by means of an actual transformation of the consciousness, this older basis of understanding and action.Only then will the unexpected light of certain expressions dawn on us and certain symbols be empowered to awaken our interior perception. Only then will we be conducted through them to new heights of human realization and to the understanding that will make it possible for designated “rites” to confer “magical” and operant power, and for the creation of a new “science” that bears no resemblance to anything that goes by that name today.JULIUS EVOLA
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Tradition vs. & beyond
Traditionalism or Traditionalist Attitudes

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Tradition vs. & beyond
"Traditionalism" or "Traditionalist" Attitudes(from "Men Among the Ruins")[...] I have already discussed what the term tradition signifies in the higher sense of the word: it is the form bestowed by forces from above upon the overall possibilities of a given cultural area and specific period, through super-individual and even antihistorical values and through elites that know how to derive an authority and natural prestige from such values. In the present day it often happens that a confused desire to return to "tradition" is purposely channeled to the form of "traditionalism." The content of this "traditionalism" consists of habits, routines, surviving residues and vestiges of what once was, without a real understanding of the spiritual world and of what in them is not merely factual but has a character of perennial value. Thus, such nontraditional or, should we say, "traditionalist" attitudes offer an easy target to the enemy, whose attack mounted against traditionalism is only the opening barrage preceding an attack against Tradition itself: to this purpose the slogans of "anachronism," "anti-history," "immobilism," and "regression" are employed. [...]JULIUS EVOLA
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Wei-Wu-Wei
& Lao Tsu's Ultimately Aristocratic Notion of Non-Action

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Wei-Wu-Wei
& Lao Tsu's Ultimately Aristocratic Notion of Non-Action(from "The Path of Cinnabar")[...] Lao Tzu's notion of 'non-action' was certainly contrary to any philosophically immanent identification of subject and act, or of act and fact - an identification which I came decidedly to oppose, both in itself and in its historicist application. The (ultimately aristocratic) principle of non-involvement and impassibility is what stood at the centre of Lao Tzu's doctrine. By imitating a divine model, the 'Perfect One' - the 'true man' or 'transcendental man' of Taoism - never identifies himself with external reality. By never acting directly, by not externalizing his own ego through self-affirmation, and by, instead, actively renouncing to 'be' and to 'act' in a direct and conditioned way, the Perfect One achieves what is truly essential. Thus, he enters the Way and makes himself intangible, inexhaustible, invulnerable and insusceptible to any external attempt to subdue him or render him impotent. By virtue of such a process, the Perfect One also becomes capable of acting in a subtle, invisible and magical way: this is the meaning of the expression wei-wu-wei ('to act without acting'), which is also defined as the virtue (té) of the Way (Tao).I was to discuss the principles of Taoism, as described by Lao Tzu, in a more faithful and precise manner about thirty-six years later, in 1959, when I was encouraged by a friend to write a second introduction to the Tao-té-ching. [...]It is only in my later commentary on the text that I clearly emphasized how Taoism is defined by a kind of 'immanent transcendence': by the direct presence of non- being (in its positive sense of supra-ontological essentiality) within being, of the infinitely remote (the 'Sky') in what is close, and of what is beyond nature within nature. Only then did I clearly point out that Taoism is equally remote from both pantheistic immanence and transcendence, as it is founded on the direct sort of experience which underlies the specific existential structure of primeval humanity. [...]JULIUS EVOLA
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