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

Whatever may be the case, the religious element constitutes the central core of Romanian Legionarism, which has derived from it a need to create a new man by means of specific ascetic practices. Many a reader will thus be surprised to discover that over 600,000 men – for this is roughly the number of Codreanu’s followers – systematically practice not only prayer, but even fasting: three times a week the Legionaries are asked keep the so-called ‘black fast’, which consists in not eating, drinking or smoking.

Codreanu himself, during one of our conversations, explained the meaning of the above practice in the following terms: the complete supremacy of the spirit over the body must be ensured and fasting is one of the most effective means to this end; by loosening the bonds formed by the most natural,
material part of man, fasting also fosters a favourable condition for evoking invisible forces – forces from on high which are evoked through prayer and ritual. And in all tests and struggles – despite what ‘positive minds’ may believe – these forces play a part no less decisive than that played by visible,
material and purely human forces.

- Julius Evola, Nationalism and Ascesis: The Iron Guard

Perform your duty equipoised, O Arjuna, abandoning all attachment to success or failure. Such equanimity is called yoga.

"The initiate, if he truly is such, can place himself beyond the contingent historical forms of a particular tradition, can accuse - whereby to so he receives the mandate - the limitations thereof and place himself above their authority; he can reject the dogma, because he has something more, the transcendent knowledge, and elsewhere he knows of the inviolability of this knowledge; lastly, he can claim to himself the dignity of a free being, because he dissolved from the bonds of the inferior, human nature: in such a way the "free" are also the "peers" and their community can be conceived as a "brotherhood". Well, it is enough to materialise, laicise and democratise these aspects of the initiatic right, and translate them in individualistic terms, to immediately obtain the base principles of the modern subversive and revolutionary ideologies."

- Julius Evola, "The Mystery of the Grail"

"Soma produced a divine rapture, somewhat like that which the devotees of Dionysios sought in wine. Later came a set of practices designed to inhibit all sensation, to dull mental activity, in a word to induce states similar to hypnosis; these became systematized into the yoga... In fact, the yoga seems to have been, according to the time and place, a more popular form of mystic contemplation or else a complete system which included this contemplation."

- 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑻𝒘𝒐 𝑺𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒄𝒆𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝑴𝒐𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑹𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒈𝒊𝒐𝒏, 𝒃𝒚 𝑯𝒆𝒏𝒓𝒊 𝑩𝒆𝒓𝒈𝒔𝒐𝒏

Asceticism is a tool, as Codreanu puts it, a means to an end - that end being "the complete supremacy of the spirit over the body." Fasting, prayer, rituals, etc. are methods by which we subordinate our bodies and minds to the spirit. They are for reigning in our lower selves.

Having subdued this lower self, we do not remain withdrawn from the world. The name of the game is to go forth and conquer. Surf the Kali Yuga. We are in this material realm; we have this life. What makes more sense than to master the circumstances in which we find ourselves, what else can be done, but to work with what is?

The idea of rejecting the world should be interpreted as attaining mastery over one's senses, attachments, and the letting go of all those things that cause the true nature of reality to be obscured. The world is not inherently and overarchingly evil - we are simply ignorant. If we ever feel the world IS evil, it is because we are operating under a state of illusion and are taken by the "visible, material and purely human forces" that Codreanu speaks of.

The removal of such ignorance and illusion should be the motivation of ascesis - it is exactly what it's for! It should be a stepping stone, a tool, along our path. Again, means to an end, not our permanent resting place. We are indeed here in this world, and no golden age was ever brought about by men who refused to venture forth into it.

"Janus, the ancient divinity of Roman times, god of beginnings and therefore also, in an eminent sense, of initiation as "vita nova", was also a god of sailing; he had the ship among his characteristic insignia. And this ship of Janus, as well as its two keys then passed into the Catholic tradition, appearing in the ship of St. Peter and, in general, in the symbolism of the pontifical function. Now it could be noted that the same term pontifex, in the ancient Roman etymologies, meant the "builder of bridges"; that pons however, archaically it also meant way and the sea was also conceived as "way", and Pontus was called this way for no different reason. Hence we see how elements of the ancient concept of sailing as a symbol have been transmitted through occult plots, up to words and signs, almost no longer understood today." — Julius C. Evola, Sailing as a Heroic Symbol.

furu trikila fiari at kuli
ok a:ustarla arni kafu
tuu sunar:la at sirk:lan:ti:

They fared like bold men far for gold
and in the east gave food to the eagle,
died in the south in Sirkland

—Innoscription on the Gripsholm runestone

Mother tells me, the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet, that two fates bear me on to the day of death. If I hold out here and lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love, my pride, my glory dies…true, but the life that’s left me will be long, the stroke of death will not come on me quickly.

~ Achilles, the Iliad IX, 500-506

“The arcanum of inspiration is of vital practical importance not only for Hermeticism but also for the spiritual history of mankind in general. For just as in the individual human biography there are decisive moments of inspiration, so there are in mankind’s biography—which is history—decisive points where far- reaching inspirations enter into the spiritual life of humanity. The great religions are such inspirations. In ancient India the Rishis had inspiration, which became the source of the Vedas. In ancient Persia the great Zarathustra (“golden star”) had inspiration, which became the source of the Zend-Avesta. Moses and the prophets had inspiration, which became the source of the Old Testament in the Bible. The Event of the life, death and resurrection of Christ was followed by the inspiration which was the source of the written Gospels—of which each author is twofold: man and inspiring Cherubim. Lastly, Islam refers to no other source than the inspiration that Mohammed received from the Archangel Gabriel, which became the source of the Koran.”

- 𝑽𝒂𝒍𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒏 𝑻𝒐𝒎𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒈, 𝑴𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑻𝒂𝒓𝒐𝒕, 𝑳𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝑿𝑰𝑽

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/836653196801081355/986423297866616892/unknown.png?width=670&height=670

"Modern man has not only to fight against materialism, but must also defend himself from the snares and allures of false supernaturalism. His defense will be firm and effective only if he is capable of returning to the origins, of assimilating the ancient traditions, and then of relying upon the ascesis to carry out the task of reestablishing his inner condition. For it is through this that these traditions will reveal to him their deepest and perennially real content and show him, step by step, the path”

Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening