It is necessary to have “watchers” at hand who will bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. Even though these values cannot be achieved, it does not mean that they amount to mere “ideas.” These are MEASURES…. Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and anti-historical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their “truths” and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.

Julius Evola

"The educated man of today is, moreover, completely out of touch with those European modes of thought and those intellectual aspects of the Christian doctrine which are nearest those of the Vedic traditions. A knowledge of modern Christianity will be of little use because the fundamental sentimentality of our times has diminished what was once an intellectual doctrine to a mere morality that can hardly be distinguished from a pragmatic humanism. A European can hardly be said to be adequately prepared for the study of the Vedanta unless he has acquired some knowledge and understanding of at least Plato, Philo, Hermes, Plotinus, the Gospels (especially John), Dionysius, and finally Eckhart who, with the possible exception of Dante, can be regarded from an Indian point of view as the greatest of all Europeans." - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Vedanta and Western Tradition

Amongst the Celts, the wild boar and the bear symbolise respectively spiritual authority and temporal power, that is to say, the two castes of the Druids and Knights, the equivalents, at least originally and in their essential attributes, of the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. This symbolism in origin clearly Hyperborean, is one of the marks of the direct connection between the Celtic tradition and the primordial tradition of the present Mahayuga (cycle of four "yugas" or ages) whatever other elements from previous but already secondary and derivative traditions may have come to be added to this main current and be, as it were, reabsorbed into it. The point to be made here is that the Celtic tradition could well be regarded as constituting one of the "links" between the Atlantean and Hyperborean traditions, after the end of the secondary period when this Atlantean tradition represented the predominant form and became the "substitute" for the original centre which was already inaccessible to the bulk of humanity. As regards this point also, the very symbolism we have just mentioned can provide some not uninteresting evidence.
Note, in the first place, the importance given to the symbol of the boar by Hindu tradition, which was itself the direct issue of the primordial tradition, and which affirms expressly in the Vêda its own Hyperborean origin. The boar (varāha), as is well known, not only represents the third of the ten avatāras of Vishnu in the present Mahayuga, but our entire Kalpa, that is, the whole cycle of manifestation of our world, is designated as Shwêtavarāha-Kalpa, the "cycle of the white boar." This being so, and if the analogy which necessarily exists between the great cycle and subordinate cycles is taken into consideration, it is natural that the emblem of the Kalpa, if it may be expressed thus, is to be found once more at the starting point of the Mahayuga. This is why the polar "sacred land," seat of the primordial spiritual centre of this Mahayuga, is also called Vārāhi, or the "land of the boar." Moreover, since it is here that the first spiritual authority dwelt, of which all other legitimate authority of the same order is but an emanation, it is no less natural that representatives of such an authority should have received from it the symbol of the boar also, as their distinctive emblem, and should have kept it throughout. This is why the Druids designated themselves "boars," although since symbolism has always many aspects, we may well have here also an allusion to the isolation in which they kept themselves with regard to the outside world, the wild boar always being regarded as the "solitary" one. Moreover, it must be added that this isolation itself, which took the form, with the Celts as with the Hindus, of a forest retreat, is not unconnected with the characteristics of "primordiality," of which at least some reflection should be maintained in all spiritual authority worthy of the function it fulfils.

from The Wild Boar and the Bear

Perhaps one may object when it relates to Hermetism, that Hermes takes the place here of the Egyptian Thoth which he has been identified with, and that Thoth properly represents Wisdom, relating to the priesthood as a conservator and transmitter of tradition; this is true, but since this assimilation cannot be made without reason it must be admitted that in this we must consider more specifically a certain aspect of Thoth, corresponding to a certain part of the tradition, which includes knowledge relating to the ‘intermediary world;’ in fact, all that can be known of the ancient Egyptian civilization, according to the vestiges of what it left, shows precisely that knowledge of this order was much more developed and had taken on an importance which is more significant than anywhere else. For the rest, there is another link, we may even say an equivalence, which shows that this objection would be without real significance: in India, the planet Mercury (or Hermes) is called Budha, whose real root properly means Wisdom; here again it is enough to determine the order in which this Wisdom, which in its essence is indeed the inspiring principle of all knowledge, must find its more particular application when relating to this specialized function.
Regarding this name Budha, it is a curious fact to note that it is identical to the Scandinavian Odin, Woden, or Wotan; so it is not arbitrary that the Romans assimilated him to their Mercury, and anyway, in the Germanic languages Wednesday, or the day of Mercury, is currently stilled designated as the day of Odin. Perhaps what is even more remarkable is that this same name if found exactly as the votan of the ancient Central American traditions, which also has the attributes of Hermes in Quetzalcohuatl, the ‘Bird-Snake,’ and the union of these two symbolic animals (corresponding respectively to the elements of air and fire) is also represented as the wings and serpents of the caduceus. You would have to be blind to not see, in facts of this type, a mark of the innate unity of all traditional doctrines; unfortunately, such a blindness is all too common in our times when those who really know how to read the symbols are no more than a disabled minority, and where, on the other hand, there are too many ‘laymen’ who believe themselves qualified to interpret ‘sacred science,’ which they accommodate according to their more or less disordered imagination.

from Hermes

German executioner’s sword from 1613 with the innoscription “And the Word became Flesh”

The meaning of the legend of the Christian Rozenkreutz and the journeys attributed to him seem to be that, following the destruction of the Order of the Temple, the initiates of Christian esoterism reorganized themselves, in agreement with initiates of Islamic esoterism to maintain, as far as possible, the link which had apparently been broken by this destruction; but this reorganization had to be done in a hidden manner, invisible in some respects, and without taking its support in an institution which is known externally and which, as such, could have been destroyed once again. Those truly of the Rose-Cross were likely the inspirers of this reorganization, or, if one wishes, the possessors of the initiatic degree of which we spoke, envisaged especially as they played this role, which continued until when, as a result of other historical events, the traditional bond was definitively broken for the Western world in the seventeenth century. It is said that those of the Rose-Cross retreated to the Orient, which means that there was no longer any initiation in the West to achieve this degree effectively, and also that the action which had been exercised up to then for the maintenance of traditional education ceased to manifest itself, at least on a regular basis.

from The Rose-Cross and Rosicrucians

"The kshatriya – the ‘knightly’ type – has a keen intelligence, but it is turned towards action and analysis rather than towards contemplation and synthesis; his strength lies especially in his character; he makes up for the aggressiveness of his energy by his generosity and for his passionate nature by his nobility, self-control and greatness of soul. For this human type it is action that is ‘real’, for it is by action that things are determined, modified and ordered; without action there is neither virtue nor honour nor glory. In other words the kshatriya believes in the efficacy of action rather than in the fatedness of a given situation: he despises the tyranny of facts and thinks only of determining their order, of clarifying a chaos, of cutting Gordian knots." - Frithjof Schuon, The Meaning of Caste

Evola on Myth

"The 'experience of nature,' as it is understood by modern man, namely, as a lyrical, subjectivist pathos awoken in the sentiments of the individual at the sight of nature, was almost entirely absent in traditional man. Before the high and snowy peaks, the silence of the woods, the flowing of the rivers, mysterious caves, and so on, traditional man did not have poetic and subjective impressions typical of a romantic soul, but rather real sensations—even though at times confused—of the supernatural, of the powers (numina) that permeated those places; these sensations were translated into various images (spirits and gods of the elements, waterfalls, woods, and so on) often determined by the imagination, yet not arbitrarily and subjectively, but according to a necessary process. In other words, we may assume that in traditional man the power of the imagination was not merely confined to either the material images corresponding to sensible data or arbitrary and subjective images, as in the case of the reveries or dreams of modern man. On the contrary, we may conclude that in traditional man the power of the imagination was free, to a high degree, from the yoke of the physical senses, as it is nowadays in the state of sleep or through the use of drugs; this power was so disposed as to be able to perceive and translate into plastic forms subtler impressions of the environment, which nonetheless were not arbitrary and subjective. When in the state of dream a physical impression, such as the pressure of the blankets, is dramatized with the image of a falling rock, this is obviously the case of a fantastic and yet not arbitrary production: the image arose out of necessity, independently from the I, as a symbol that effectively corresponds to a perception. The same holds true for those fantastic images primordial man introduced in nature. Primordial man, in addition to physical perception, also had a 'psychic' or subtle perception of things and places (corresponding to the 'presences' found in them) that was generated by a power of the imagination free from the physical senses and responsible for determining in it corresponding symbolical dramatizations: for example, gods, demons, elementals, and spirits ruling over places and phenomena. It is true that there have often been different personifications according to the multiform power of the imagination of various races and sometimes even of different people; but a trained eye is able to see a unity behind this variety, just as a person who is awake is immediately able to see unity in the variety of impressions created by the diversity of symbols in the dreams of different people. These images are nevertheless equivalent once they are reduced to their common objective cause and perceived in a distinct way. ... "

" ... Far from being fantastic poetical tales drawn from nature, or better, from those material representations of nature that modern man can perceive, the myths of the ancients and their fantastic fundamental figurations originally represented an integration of the objective experience of nature. The myths also represented something that spontaneously penetrated into the fabric of sensible data, thus completing them with lively and at times even visible symbols of the subtle, 'demonic,' or sacred element of space and time.

These considerations concerning the traditional myths and the special relation they have with the sense of nature must naturally be applied to every traditional myth. It must be acknowledged that every traditional mythology arises as a necessary process in the individual consciousness, the origin of which resides in real, though unconscious and obscure, relationships with a higher reality; these relationships are then dramatized in various ways by the power of the imagination. Therefore, not only naturalistic or 'theological' myths but historical ones as well should not be regarded as arbitrary inventions totally devoid of an objective value with regard to facts or people, but rather as integrations that did not occur casually. These integrations eventually revealed the superhistorical content that may be found to varying degrees in those historical individuals and events. Therefore, the eventual lack of correspondence of the historical element with a myth demonstrates the untruth of history rather than that of the myth; this thought occurred to Hegel too, when he spoke about the 'impotence [Ohnmacht] of nature.' "

- Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

"Myth is not prehistory; it is timeless reality, which repeats itself in history."
- Ernst Jünger

"The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?"
- C G Jung