“Like the preclassical Greeks, the ancient Romans were extremely religious, with a kind of animism in which the whole world was experienced as ensouled. Each mountain and lake had its spirit; each tree, each family, home, and hearth was inhabited by an unseen power. All activities were sacralized, ranging from war and harvest to childbirth, prophecy, and the common acts of daily life.”
― The Golden Thread, Joscelyn Godwin

Image: The Visit of a Sick Child to the Temple of Aesculapius by John William Waterhouse

"War is sacred like death, and like death, gives access to a holier life, and a higher ideal."

- Giuseppe Mazzini

https://youtu.be/tOyTbOlkKQk
I showed up on Nomos of War's podcast a while back. Give it a listen and follow my friend!

“My ancestors who are in the heavens or pure lands watch over me, the ones that are animals or people are still with me on earth, and the ones who are ghosts, asuras or in the hell realms are the beneficiaries of my practice”

-Paraphrased from a comment of a daoist-buddhist friend

"Heaven is long-enduring, and earth continues long. The reason why Heaven and Earth are able to endure and continue thus long is because they do not live of, or for, themselves. This is how they are and to continue and endure.

Therefore, the sage puts his own person last, and yet it is found in the foremost place; he treats his person as if it were foreign to him, and yet that person is preserved. Is it not because he has no personal and private ends, that therefore such ends are realized?

The highest excellence is like that of water. The excellence of water always in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving to the contrary, the low place which all men dislike. Hence its way is near to that of the Tao.

The excellence of residence is in the suitability of the place; that of the mind is in abysmal stillness; that of associations is in their being with the virtuous; that of government is in its securing good order; that of the conduct of affairs is in its ability; and that of the initiation of any movement is in its timeliness."

- Lao Tzŭ, The Tao Te Ching

"The Tao produces all things and nourishes them; it produces them and does not claim them as its own; it does all, and yet does not boast of it; it presides over all, and yet does not control them. This is what is called 'the mysterious Quality' of the Tao.

The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space for the axle that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out from the walls to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space within, that its use depends. Therefore, what has a positive existence serves for profitable adaptation, and what has not that for actual usefulness."

- Lao Tzŭ, The Tao Te Ching

VII. 60-61. Predestiny or divine will is powerless before Him. Everyone knows how He set aside predestiny and divine laws in the case of His famous devotee, Markandeya. I will explain to you now the fitness of this. Listen, my dearest!

[Note: A Rishi, Mrikandu by name, who was childless, pleased Siva by his penance. When Siva appeared to him, he prayed that a son might be born to him. Siva asked him if he wished to have a dull boy long-lived, or a bright boy short-lived. Mrikandu preferred the latter. So Siva said ‘You will have a very brilliant son; but he will only live for sixteen years’. Accordingly a son was born who was very good and dutiful, and most intelligent and pious, charming all who saw him. The parents were delighted with him but grew sad as he grew up. He asked them the reason for their sadness and they told him of Siva’s boon. He said, ‘Never mind. I will see’, and took to penance. Siva was pleased with his intense devotion and ordained that he should remain sixteen years of age for all eternity.]

62. The current notion that one cannot escape one’s destiny is applicable only to weak-minded and senseless wastrels.

64-66. Destiny seizes and holds only senseless people. Conforming to and following nature, destiny forms part of nature. Nature again is only the contrivance for enforcing God’s will. His purpose is always sure and cannot be prevented. Its edge can, however, be blunted by devotion to Him and if it is not so blunted, the predisposing cause must therefore be considered a most powerful factor in a man’s life.

67. Therefore, eschew high vanity and take refuge in Him. He will spontaneously take you to the Highest State.

— Tripura Rahasya (transl. Swami Ramanananda Saraswathi)

"The older Greeks felt differently about envy from the way we do; Hesiod counted it among the effects of the good, beneficent Eris, and there was nothing offensive in attributing to the gods something of envy: which is comprehensible under a condition of things the soul of which was contest; contest, however, was evaluated and determined as good. The Greeks likewise differed from us in their evaluation of hope: they felt it to be blind and deceitful; Hesiod gave the strongest expression to this attitude in a fable whose sense is so strange no more recent commentator has understood it – for it runs counter to the modern spirit, which has learned from Christianity to believe in hope as a virtue."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"In all epochs of the world’s history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;—the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men" - Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Lecture I

Lance also appeared on our show. In this clip he discusses the essence of war and technology with Sagittarius.

https://youtu.be/YjPypxUX1oU
https://news.1rj.ru/str/EvolasCave
https://news.1rj.ru/str/lanceslegion

“…the sacred is pre-eminently the real, at once power, efficacity, the source of life and fecundity. Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality, not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world, and not in an illusion.”
- Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane