"The poem of Dante is not allegorical in the sense that its figures merely mean something different without existing independently of such meaning in and for themselves. On the other hand, none of them is independent of that meaning such that it simultaneously would be the idea itself and more than merely an allegory of it. His poem thus contains a totally unique medium between allegory and symbolic-objective configuration. There is no doubt, and the poet explains it himself elsewhere, that Beatrice, for example, is an allegory, namely, of theology. The same holds true of her companions and many other characters. Yet they also count for something by themselves and enter as historical characters without for that reason being symbols."

- 𝑭𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒅𝒓𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝑺𝒄𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈, "𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑷𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒐𝒑𝒉𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝑨𝒓𝒕"

"Lewis’s view of the relationship of mythology to Christianity is in broad outlines identical to Schelling’s. Lewis argues that primitive religions gave mythic expression to the primordial yearning in human consciousness for an intimate personal contact with the transcendent God, an encounter which would restore the fallen world’s lost immediacy with the divine. Rather than one myth among others, Christianity fulfils the mythological impulse in history; it is “myth become fact” (Lewis, 1970: 63–68)."

- - 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒂𝒓𝒌 𝑮𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝑺𝒑𝒊𝒓𝒊𝒕, 𝑺𝒄𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑼𝒏𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒄𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔, 𝒃𝒚 𝑺𝒆𝒂𝒏 𝑱. 𝑴𝒄𝑮𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒉

https://odysee.com/@gtk:4/Deconstructing-Dugin:2?r=7GMWxWe1ScWv4XQqzrNsN8vHVFAPv6YS

A good talk about one of the most polarizing intellectuals within 'Traditionalism.' It adds some context and nuance to his thought that is sorely lacking in most discussion of his ideas.

“Shame on life here in this world! It is better for me to die in battle than to live defeated.”

Buddha Shakyamuni, Padhana Sutta

"Those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. Celestial and divine beings have clearer judgements, an uncorrupted will, and the ability to achieve what they seek. Human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood. Their ultimate enslavement is when they give themselves up to vice and no longer exercise their powers of reason. They have lowered their eyes from the highest truth to dark, base things and are wrapped in a cloud of ignorance. They give in to destructive whims and consent to things that strengthen their bonds of slavery. They have brought this upon themselves and are captives of the exercise of their innate freedom. But still, providence looks after them from eternity, sees what they do, and disposes rewards and punishments according to what each person deserves.”

~Boethius

Fundamentals of the Platonic Tradition.
https://www.gornahoor.net/?p=8160

Apollo, Glorious golden haired Lord of the Sun who brings light and healing upon the Earth, tending to your herd with gentle hands and open arms.

The same hands that string an opaline bow with unrivaled skill and let loose a hundred gleaming arrows with ease, piercing the hearts of arrogant and wicked and setting them aflame with the heat of passionate righteousness.

The same hands that weave bandages like tapestries upon the flesh of the wounded, warding off pestilence and decay.

The same arms that embrace those who hold you within their heart, protecting and cradling them like a newborn babe, their devotion to you never going unheard or unanswered.

"More recently, the surprising parallel that has been established between some plastic investigations and a number of scientific discoveries, for exam­ple, of microscopic phenomena. This is an indication, if not a proof, of the unity of knowledge as well as its universality. Each truly original and thus unusual production in the domain of graphic or pictorial creation can put forward the case for its unforeseen but undeniable resemblance with some document brought to light by fundamental research and receive some type of validation from it. Kandinsky was thus overwhelmed by becoming aware of Bohr's theories about the atom. He saw in them a dissolution of objective reality or at least a deconstruction of what was taken to be the nature of things until then. He thereby found a powerful motif that gave full devel­opment to some of his intuitions. This resulted in what would come to be called 'abstract painting.'"

- Michel Henry, Barbarism

Image: Wassily Kandinsky, In Grey (1919)

"Why does art necessarily emerge in the human experience as one of the fundamental forms of all culture? That is one of our questions, and we are already able to provide some answer to it. Nature is essentially a sensible nature, because the relation to the object and ultimately the ek-stasis of being where all nature and this relation itself are based, is auto-affective in its own transcendence, such that seeing, for example, is a sensible seeing.
That is why Kant, who sought the conditions of all possible experience, or in his terms, of every possible world, began his investigation with a Tran­scendental Aesthetic - with the analysis of sensibility. Without a doubt, this analysis unfolds on a plane that is still the plane of factuality. It encounters sensibility at the birth of the world, without truly understanding the reason for the sensible character of this birth. But this reason is available to us: the world is a sensible world because it is a lifeworld and not a pure conscious­ness. It is affective in its basis, according to the innermost possibility of its ek-static display.
Sensibility not only is the a priori essence of every possible world but also defines the possibility of art. 'It is only through sensibility that one can reach the truth in art,' declares Kandinsky. And he adds: 'Art acting on sen­sibility, it can also only act through sensibility.' This is how the famous laws of beauty, as laws of sensibility, only appear to be mathematical, ideal, and objective laws. Even when one would be able to give forms, the relations between them, and the various plastic elements of a composition, a rigorous mathematical formulation, this would only ever be the ideal approximation of proportion and balance that are at play in sensibility. They find their pos­sibility, the demands to which they respond, and their ultimate reason in sensibility. That is why, as Kandinsky says, 'Balance and proportion cannot be found outside of the artist but within him.'"

- Michel Henry, Barbarism

Perhaps the antithesis between the initiatic notion of “awakening” and the religious and more especially Christian notion of “salvation” or “redemption” has not yet been adequately stressed. The religious conception is based on the assumption that man is a being existentially detached from the sacred and the supernatural; because of his ontological status of creature, or as the result of an original sin, he belongs to the natural order; only by the intervention of a transcendent power, only on the assumption of his “conversion,” of his faith and of his renunciation of his own will, only by Divine action, can he be “saved” and attain to life in “paradise.”

The implications of the notion of “awakening” are entirely different; man is not a fallen or guilty being, nor is he a creature separated by an ontological hiatus from a Creator. He is a being who has fallen into a state of sleep, of intoxication and of “ignorance.” His natural status is that of a Buddha. It is for him to acquire consciousness of this by “awakening.” In opposition to the ideas of conversion, redemption, and action of grace, the leading motive is the destruction of “ignorance,” of avijja. Decisive here is a fact of an essentially “noetic,” viz. intellectual, and not emotional nature. This confers an indisputable aristocratic character on the doctrine of Buddhism. It ignores the “sin”-complex, self-abasement, and self-mortification. Its askesis is clear and “dry”; it is alien to the features of auto-sadism or masochism which are always present in the forms of the asceticism more known to the West, and which have often given rise as to a reaction among Westerners to anti-ascetic prejudice and a distorted exaltation of life.

This character of loftiness, which is due to Buddhist ontology, is matched by the Buddhist doctrine of autonomy: man is the free master of his own destiny. He alone is responsible for what he is. Thus in conformity with his vocation, he can confirm the state in which he is, or he can change it. There are no penalties and no rewards; therefore there is nothing to hope for and nothing to fear; the only things that must be taken into consideration are objective, unsentimental, extra-moral connection of cause and effect. If a Buddha sets himself free, it is by his own efforts alone. On the path leading to awakening no external aid is to be looked for. This conception, on which already pivoted the traditional Hindu notion of karma, is particularly stressed by Buddhism. The historical Buddha, as is well known, did not present himself as a divine savior, but as a man who, after attaining by himself enlightenment and the Great Liberation, points out to those having a like vocation the path to follow. All this refers to early Buddhism. With Mahayanic Buddhism in its prevailing and popular aspects, we descend once more to the level of the soteriological religions; myriads of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas busy themselves to assure the salvation and happiness of all living beings.

Julius Evola

"Next, we should distinguish the world of religion from that of Initiation. Here a certain schematisation cannot be avoided. Basically, there are religions in which an Initiation is present, and from the point of view of the history of religion it is a fact that some religions have developed from a domain which originally had an initiatory character, through a process of popularisation, of flattening, and of externalisation of the original teachings and practices. Buddhism is characteristic of this: there is a real gulf between what can be called the pure ‘doctrine of awakening’ and the related practices at the origin of Buddhism, and the religion which spread subsequently.

It can be stated, however, that, in a complete Traditional system, Religion and Initiation are two hierarchically ordered degrees, whose relation in the doctrinal field is expressed by the following binaries: exoterism and esotericism; mere faith and gnosis; devotion and spiritual accomplishment; plane of the dogmas and myths and plane of metaphysics. The present history of religions hardly brings out, or does not bring out at all, this essential articulation, and the way of conceiving religion which has come to predominate in the West, to the suggestive power of which many independent scholars are subject without realising it, shows that ‘religion’ can in fact become a category in itself, quite precisely determined and defined in opposition to everything which is initiatory and metaphysical.

This conception derives to a large extent from the beliefs of the Semitic peoples, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, characterised, in their positive forms, by theism, creationism and the concept of man as generated per iatum (i.e., generated by the deity as a detached being). Islam indeed possesses an esoteric and initiatory tradition in the contexts of Shi’ism and Sufism; Judaism has a related tradition, in the Kabbala; but these currents are in a certain manner separated from orthodoxy. In Catholicism, their equivalent is completely lacking, since, instead of esotericism and initiatory experience, there is on the one hand mere mysticism, and on the other, as we shall note below, the curious phenomenon of structures which, in form, are of the initiatory type, but which are applied in a non-initiatic manner."
https://counter-currents.com/2013/03/the-concept-of-initiation/

"From the practical point of view, the metaphysical principle of identity leads to the replacement of relations of a moral and devotional character with relations of knowledge. This finds its main expression in the idea that what defines the human state with all its conditionalities is not an ontological distance, but only ‘ignorance’ or ‘oblivion’. This truth has sometimes been sensed also by high mysticism (Meister Eckhart: man is God, but ‘does not know’ he is such – which corresponds precisely to the Hindu theory of avidya, or ‘ignorance’). The concept of salvation or redemption is thus replaced by that of awakening and metaphysical awareness of the dimension of transcendence as such. It is in these terms that the specific attainment of the Initiate should be defined. Its essential character is that of a ‘centrality’. Thus, some have opposed to the concept of ecstasy that of en-stasy, indicative of the opposite direction, not of a ‘going out’, but of a reconvergence towards the centre – besides, mysticism itself has known the saying: “You have not found Me because you have sought Me outside of yourself, while I (the deity) was within you”. Another formula is that of the centre which unites with the Centre, of the one which unites with the One."

“O my son Yudhishthira, you should always exert yourself with diligence, for without diligence of exertion mere destiny never accomplishes the objects cherished by kings. These two - exertion and destiny - are equal in their operation. Of them, however, I regard exertion to be superior, for destiny is ascertained from the results of what is begun with exertion. Do not indulge in grief if what is commenced ends disastrously, for you should then exert yourself in the same act with redoubled attention. This is the high duty of kings."

(Mahabharata, Book 12; Shanti Parva; Rajadharma-anushasana Parva; 56)