Transcendence, like freedom, ought to furnish existence with a foundation of calm and incomparable security, with a purity, a wholeness, and an absolute decisiveness in action. Instead, it feeds all the emotional complexes of the man in crisis: angst, nausea, disquiet, finding his own being problematical, the feeling of an obscure guilt or fall, deracination, a feeling of the absurd and the irrational, an unadmitted solitude (though some, like Marcel, fully admit it), an invocation of the “incarnate spirit,” the weight of an incomprehensible responsibility—incomprehensible, because he cannot resort to overtly religious (and hence coherent) positions like those of Kierkegaard or Barth, where angst refers to the sentiment of the soul that is alone, fallen, and abandoned to itself in the presence of God. In all of this, feelings appear like those that Nietzsche warned about in the case of a man who has made himself free without having the necessary stature: feelings that kill and shatter a man—modern man—if he is incapable of killing them.

On Nature: Apart from that position, which leads to the “animal ideal” and modern naturalism, I deplore the general confusion of a “return to origins” with a return to Mother Earth and even to Nature. Although it has often been misapplied, that theological doctrine that holds that a purely natural state for man has never existed is still legitimate; at the beginning he was placed in a supranatural state from which he has now fallen. In fact, for the true type of man, it can never be a question of those origins and that “mother” wherein the individual cannot differentiate himself from his fellow men, or even from the animals. Every return to nature is a regressive phenomenon, including any protest in the name of instinctual rights, the unconscious, the flesh, life uninhibited by the intellect, and so forth. The man who becomes “natural” in this way has in reality become denatured.

As for the “sentiment of nature,” in general, the human type that concerns us must consider nature as part of a larger and more objective whole: nature for him includes countrysides, mountains, forests, and seacoasts, but also dams, turbines, and foundries, the tentacular system of ladders and cranes of a great modern port or a complex of functional skyscrapers. This is the space for a higher freedom. He remains free and self-aware before both types of nature—being no less secure in the middle of a steppe or on an alpine peak than amid Western city nightlife.

The ancient Aryan world was ordered by natural hierarchy. The very top of this hierarchy was the Aryan seer. The seer was a higher order of being, whose consciousness extended throughout the many realms of cosmic existence. Having reached heaven, they were able to purely enjoy the pleasures of the earth. Their creative powers manifested, yet they remained humble, impartially providing their knowledge for the benefit of all. These seers were our spiritual fathers, the builders of civilization, they were the Brahamanas, Druids, and Magi, and the castes whose dharma it was (and still is) to traverse the spiritual roads towards enlightenment and self-realization. Upholding their inner spiritual values, which were embodied in the Solar Religion, harmony and Truth could reign on earth.

To the ancient seers, all life was good and all creation was beneficent. The ignorance and darkness we experience in materiality was viewed as a daring adventure for the spirit. The atman's assumption of a form in materiality was not just a covering, but a free expression of the formless being.

We can, and must, re-capture the spirit of the Solar religion and become those seers who lived in a time when the gods were present and manifested both externally and internally, to live in a time when the first day of creation is an eternal moment, where creation itself puts to rest the doubt of illusion.

We tirelessly and uncompromisingly oppose the decline in the spiritual level, which has become a habit of modern man. We resist the loss of all higher meaning in life, materialization, socialization and standardization, to which everything is subordinated. We want to be a threat, a challenge and an accusation to everything that is weak, compromises and enslaved by public opinion and petty adaptations to the current moment. We express our unshakable protest against the tyranny of everything economic and social, which impudently permeates everything around and against the relegation of any lofty worldview to the level of an insignificant humanism.

Julius Evola. Tower magazine (1929).

”We only have one life, and youth is brief. To be healthy without trying to run faster and longer, or harden one’s muscles, is to squander a chance to be more than one is; to miss the unique joy of striving, however painful.”

— Xenophon.

To be healthy without trying to contemplate deeper depths and greater abstractions, or to sharpen one's focus, is to squander a chance to be more than one is; to miss the unique joy of thinking, however painful.

This is a reminder to not get tied to ideology, and associate with it only when and where it is a practical means to our higher end. This is a positive end; it is not reactionary except that it happens to be diametrically opposed in form to the current paradigm; it is not a negative and base 'traditionalism' that only tries to revive dead and irrelevant ideologies or mimic idealized appearances of specific historical times and places. Always stay focused on what is true and eternal and do not get distracted by fleeting illusions.

"In a dramatic ritual action, Squin de Florian, the alleged accuser of the Templars, is made to say as his justification: "The Church is above freedom!" This is countered by the Master of the Great Lodge, who says: "Freedom is above the Church!" Obviously, the first statement is correct if we are dealing with the claim to freedom on the part of any individual; the second statement is true if we are dealing with a person who has the required qualification to put himself beyond the inevitable limitations proper of a particular historical form of spiritual authority." — Julius C. Evola, The Mystery of the Grail.

This engraving by Albrecht Dürer, acquired by Josef Glimer Gallery from a private collection in Austria, marks one of the artist’s many explorations of the world’s end. It was created in 1499, the year all Jews ... were expelled from Dürer’s hometown of Nuremberg.

The engraving is inspired by this caption from Petrus Berchoius’ Repertorium Morale, a Biblical-moral reflective text intended for preachers, given to Dürer by his godfather:

The Sun and Righteousness shall appear ablaze when he will judge mankind on the day of doom, and he shall be burning and grim. For, as the sun burns herbs and flowers in the summertime when he is the Lion, so shall Christ appear as a fierce and lion-like man in the heat of Judgement and shall wither the sinners.

Dürer’s engraving creatively combines pagan, astrological and Biblical symbols. The central figure sitting on a lion is at once Christ, the Roman goddess of justice Justitia, and the ancient sun god, called Helios by the Greeks and Sol by the Romans. He holds Justitia’s scales and a double edged sword, but unlike the traditionally blindfolded goddess, his eyes—wide and confrontational—see all. ... His mask is composed of three prongs of flame. While this number suggests the Christian Trinity, its beaming rays are a strong gesture toward Sol.

The duality of the Christ figure in this piece may also be influenced by ancient Roman coins, which sometimes featured overlapping profiles of emperors and gods to convey the idea that the emperor could become geminatapersona—'human by nature and divine by grace.'

Taken from: https://josefglimergallery.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/behind-the-picture-sol-justitiae-by-albrecht-durer/

"The era of the ‘Sacred King’ — of the natures that are simultaneously imperial and sacerdotal — already stands on the threshold of ‘mythic’ times. the peak disappears, power passes to the step immediately below — to the Warrior caste: monarchs of the lay type, military leaders, or lords of temporal justice.

Second collapse: the sunset of the great European monarchies, the decay of the aristocracies. Through revolutions (in England and France) and constitutions, they become empty remnants in respect of the ‘nation’s will.’ Along with the parliamentary, republican, and bourgeois democracies, the rise of the capitalist oligarchies express the inevitable passage of political power from the second caste to the modern equivalent of the third caste — the merchants’ caste.

Finally, the crisis of bourgeois society, the proletarian revolt, and the despotism of the masses that is established as purely collective, economic, and international entities forecast the final collapse, through which power passes to the last caste — the caste of those without names or faces, with the resulting reduction of every standard of living to the level of matter and number.

Another view: just like people who can no longer support the tension of the spirit, and then not even the tension of the will, of the force that moves the body — and they let themselves go — and then rise magnetically, almost like a soulless body, under the impulse of another force, which is barely seen, out of the shadows of pure vitality.

It is time to acknowledge the illusory character of all the myths of ‘progress’ and to open our eyes to reality. It is time to recognise the harsh destiny of spiritual destruction that has weighed on the West and that today is ripening its last fruits." - Julius C. Evola, Selected Essays "A Traditionallist Confronts Fascism".