“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)

Christianity understands 'that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.' (James 2:24) This is because actions are the actualization and fulfillment of inner faith. Justification by faith is a poison, a spiritual hyper-rationalization, a hijacking of the entire soul by a lazy and egoic nous. What you believe is worthless, what you do with it has the potential to be priceless.

have this egg

"As a starting point, we need to emphasize that the individuality of the overwhelming majority of people is a fiction, their very unity being a fictitious and precarious unity of a mere aggregate of forces and influences that in no way can be said to belong to them.

The forces on which man depends are first of all of a psychic order, and second of an organic order. To the first is connected everything that is related to passions, feelings, beliefs, natural affections, traditions, blood ties, and so on.

Ordinary man should never say, "I love," but, "Love loves through me." As the fire manifests itself in individual flames when the necessary conditions are present, likewise love (or better said, the being of love) manifests itself in individual beings who love with a love that transcends and transports them, in relation to which they are more or less passive. The same applies to hatred, fear, piety, etc.

Nor is that all: every nation, every religion or traditional institution has its own "being"; the instinctive and deep reaction against an insult to one's country, faith, or customs is the reaction of such beings and not, as it is commonly assumed, an individual reaction, proper to a distinct and autonomous Self.

Much less so is one truly a real individual as we descend into the depths of the organic being: circulatory, endocrine, and nervous systems, sleep, hunger, and so on. All this, in individuals, represents a transcendent and collective element, of which it is obvious that others, rather than the single Self, are the active and leading principle. The Self leans on all this, and neither is it nor dominates it.

Thus its individual life is a mirage that endures until the dissolution of the contingent nexus of equilibrium that gives a relative stability and unity to its psychophysical being, and until the various aggregated forces are reabsorbed into their respective "beings."

These beings are not to be found just anywhere: they exist in thoughts, actions, passions, creations, bodily functions, and organs of human beings. They invisibly permeate and direct most of what is called ordinary life.

This is why he who really wants to live must first die, separating himself from this mêlée of influences and dependencies, and making his own the principle of a life that is of itself, and, thus, immortal." - Ea, Introduction to Magic I.

My son found his death on November 29, 1944; he was 18 years old.
A bullet hit him in the head in a collision with a patrol detachment in the Marble Mountains of Carrara, in Central Italy, and death, as his comrades write, was instantaneous. They could not take him with them right away, but soon returned for him in an armored personnel carrier. In the cemetery of Turigliano near Carrara, he found his final resting place.

My cute boy.
Since childhood, he tried to imitate his father.
And now, from the first time, he has surpassed him immeasurably.

Today I went into a small basement room, which I gave to him and in which his aura still lived. I entered quietly, as if into a shrine.

There, among his papers, I found a small diary that began with the phrase: "The one who does not know where to go goes furthest of all."

~ Ernst Jünger, Diary, Kirchhorst, January 13, 1945

Heroism--that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant. Heroism is the good will to self-destruction.

Nietzsche

"There is a doctrine which says that after our nature fell into sin, God did not disregard our fall and withhold his providence. No, on the one hand, he appointed an angel with an incorporeal nature to help in the life of each person and, on the other hand, he also appointed the corruptor who, by an evil and maleficent demon, afflicts the life of man and contrives against our nature." - St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses

"I have seen that every man receives at his birth two spirits, one good, the other evil. The good one is heavenly by nature and belongs to the lowest hierarchy; the evil one is not a devil, not yet in torments, though deprived of the vision of God." - Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich

It must be said: few if any teachings are so ancient, so widespread, and remain so plainly true, as those attributed to Hermes-Thoth (Hermes Trismegistus). There is little reason to doubt their mythical Atlantean origins.

From the land of the Ganges many advanced occultists wandered to the land of Egypt, and sat at the feet of the Master. From him they obtained the Master-Key which explained and reconciled their divergent views, and thus the Secret Doctrine was firmly established...

I: The All is Mind, the universe is mental.

II: As above, so below; as below, so above.

III: Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.

IV: Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.

V: Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.

VI: Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law; chance is but a name for law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.

VII: Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; gender manifests on all planes.

From the comments: https://youtu.be/7rCF6vSeZ3k

I will listen to this when I have the chance, but I trust that whatever it contains will be insightful. I'm certainly not a true Hermeticist myself and I will concede to the genuine expert where he is superior.

It turns out that the Kybalion is degenerate Theosophical garbage. Those sneaky bastards are everywhere. I should have educated myself before using any of the book's content.

"It might be objected that in so far as concerns Hermetism, Hermes takes the place of the Egyptian Thoth with whom he has been identified, and that Thoth represents Wisdom, which is related to the priesthood as guardian and transmitter of the tradition; that is true, but since this identification cannot have been made without some reason, it must be admitted that it concerns more especially a certain aspect of Thoth which corresponds to a certain part of the tradition, the part that comprises those branches of knowledge which are related to the 'intermediary world'; and the remains that the ancient Egyptian civilization has left behind do in fact show that the sciences of this order were much more developed there and had taken on an importance far more considerable than anywhere else. There is moreover another comparison, we might even say another equivalence, which shows clearly that this objection would have no real bearing: in India the planet Mercury (or Hermes) is called Budha, a name of which the root letters mean Wisdom; here again, it is enough to specify the domain in which this Wisdom (in its essence the inspiring principle of all knowledge) is to find its more particular application when it is related to this specialized function.

Strange though it may seem, the name Budha is in fact identical with that of the Scandinavian Odin, Woden or Wotan; there was thus nothing arbitrary in the Roman assimilation of Odin to Mercury, and in some Germanic languages the day of Mercury (in French mercredi) is still called the day of Odin, which is precisely what the word Wednesday means.

Still more remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that this same name is to be found exactly in the Votan of the ancient traditions of central America who has moreover the attributes of Hermes, for he is Quetzal cohuatl [Quetzalcoatl], the 'bird-serpent,' and the union of these two symbolic animals (corresponding respectively to the two elements air and fire) is also figured by the wings and the serpents of the Caduceus. One must indeed be blind not to see, in such facts, a sign of the fundamental unity of all traditional doctrines."

- Rene Guénon, Hermes

The Cain and Abel chapter in René Guénon's The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times

A riveting read

Guénon makes an unexpected tie-in with Michel Henry's phenomenological perspective of culture and the origin of art.

"Furthermore, it is in the nature of things that sedentary peoples should tend to the making of visual symbols, images made up of various substances, and these images can always be related back, in their essential significance, more or less directly to the geometrical viewpoint, the origin and foundation of all spatial conception. Nomads, on the other hand, to whom images are forbidden, like everything else that might tend to attach them to some definite place, make sonorous symbols, the only symbols compatible with their state of continual migration.
...
Thus the sedentary peoples create the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the arts consisting of forms developed in space; the nomads create the phonetic arts (music, poetry), the arts consisting of forms unfolded in time; for, let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries."

"Alexander's greatness, the light he sheds on all the Western princely crowns, lies more in the fact that he was equal to the Great Territories than to the Great King. More surprising than the fact that he destroyed Babylon is the fact that he returned from India.

It is difficult to say which progress is more important: from West to East or from East to West. Both depart from the realm with their power, and lead to a different law. This is already indicated in the preparation. One side is interested in widening the scope, the other in measuring and limiting it. Levelling and raising the points of reference meet as forms of struggle, as between the Huns and Henry the Builder. Both are attempted by visible and invisible means, physical and mental. The two forms of freedom meet and feel each other as limitations; width and height are their main measures."

~ Ernst Jünger

https://news.1rj.ru/str/ernstjuengerenglish/37

Alexander the Great was Alexander III of Macedon (Ancient Greek: Μακεδονία). His father was Philip II of Macedon, and his mother was Olympias, the daughter of Neoptolemus I of Epirus (Doric: Ἄπειρος). Both Macedonia & Epirus were, like Sparta, comprised of a Doric Greek aristocracy who were, according to Herodotus, the 'purest of the Greeks'.

According to Plutarch, on the eve Philip & Olympias consummated their marriage, Olympias saw a vision of her womb being 'struck by a thunderbolt that caused a flame to spread far and wide'. Some interpreted this to show Alexander was the son of Zeus, or otherwise an incarnation of Zeus or Apollo.

It is said, however, that Olympias thought this supposition 'impious'.

"I speak of art in a more sacred sense - of the art which, in the words of the ancients, is an instrument of the gods, herald of divine mysteries, unveiler of the Ideas. It is that preternatural beauty whose inviolate light illumines only pure souls, which is as hidden and inaccessible to the sensible eye as pure truth itself. The philosopher is not interested in what the vulgar call art. To him, art is a direct and necessary expression of the Absolute, and only insofar as this can be demonstrated has it any reality to him."

- 𝑶𝒏 𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝑺𝒕𝒖𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒔, 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝑭𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒕𝒆𝒆𝒏, 𝒃𝒚 𝑭.𝑱.𝑾. 𝒗𝒐𝒏 𝑺𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈