"Hermes without the aid of Revelation, but through the use of reason, has come to the knowledge of God, and even of the Trinity.”

~ 𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊𝒂 𝑺𝒖𝒎𝒎𝒊 𝑩𝒐𝒏𝒊, 𝒃𝒚 𝑷𝒆𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝑨𝒃𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒓𝒅

https://youtu.be/OSimbphQw6U

"Considering the history of man as isolated in some way from everything else is an exclusively modern idea, in stark opposition to the teaching of all traditions which, on the contrary, are unanimous in affirming the existence of a correlation necessary and constant between the cosmic order and the human one."
- René Guénon, Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles

"But friend, we come too late. It's true that the gods live,
But up over our heads, up in a different world.
They function endlessly up there, and seem to care little
If we live or die, so much do they avoid us.
A weak vessel cannot hold them forever; humans can
Endure the fullness of the gods only at times. Therefore
Life itself becomes a dream about them. But perplexity
And sleep assist us: distress and night-time strengthen,
Until enough heroes have grown in the bronze cradle,
With hearts as strong as the gods', as it used to be."
- Friedrich Hölderlin, Bread and Wine

"When the spirit manages to take steps towards heights or depths, freeing itself from the sphere of phenomena, this world of forms dissolves: the light becomes too strong, it has to retreat. All that is personal is equivalent to separation, to loan. There is a happiness greater than that implied in the personality, and it is self-denial. Here father and mother are one."
- Ernst Jünger, At the Time Wall

"Before him [Herodotus] there was something different, there was the night of the myth. This night was not, however, darkness, but rather dream, and the connection it knew between men and events was different from historical consciousness and its separating force. From here comes the auroral light that illuminates the work of Herodotus. He stands as if on the crest of a mountain that separates night and day: not just two times, but two ways of time, two types of light. ...

From the space of history, into which he had just entered, Herodotus turned his gaze back towards the space of myth. He did it with respect. The same respect is necessary today where, beyond the wall of time, future events are looming."

- Ernst Jünger, At the Time Wall

As we've established, it was a spiritual power that unified Europe in order to counter the Huns. It is no coincidence then that in legend the Grail appears to Percival and allows him to push back the Huns. It is said to bestow the powers of the Holy Spirit and reveal 'the beginning of all great deeds and the reason behind courageous feats,' or what can identified as inner awakening, purification of the self. Like alchemical fire it is a test, and terrible things fall upon the weak man who sets out to take it but fails. The Grail symbolizes victory in the inner war. Victory in battle, from the Catalaunian Plains to Las Navas de Tolosa to the Seige of Vienna, comes to those who first pass the test of the Grail. Those who fail the test, lose.

The Grail means more than a symbol of the inner war of course; it is also a romantic symbol. The full significance of the Grail is in the combined relation of both war and romance to spiritual fulfillment. As in war, outer love comes to those who first pass the test of inner love. As in war, it is a spiritual force that unites and empowers lovers and brings them true love, 'what a tongue could never express and the heart fail to realize.'

https://youtu.be/4iCMIqgpC3A

In this video Schwerpunkt tears down the Nationalistic/Socialistic liberal view of history and makes an example of that fateful Seige of Vienna to illustrate the traditional forces at play in that moment and elsewhere. There are many 'inconvenient truths' laid out for those who might be held back by fundamentally liberal perspectives.

To reestablish a conservatism with theological and aesthetic power one would first have to confront nihilism, and perhaps what would more appropriately be known as a curse, doom. To begin with: acknowledging our defeat, and only then may one move on to banish ugliness. We are, each of us, the Last Man – completely alone.
The conservative figure wants a paradise without law, not only the absence of God's restrictions but also the excesses.

To be illiberal is not enough, such positions can only open up the greater questions of democracy. Dead questions. We are no longer confronted by democracy but the catastrophe of an entire era, and every last one of its forms.
Democracy was providential, and its defeat even more so. Only in confronting this does a new time begin to appear.

“The idea of existence is inseparable from that of the Being, and it manifests itself to us as an effect, of which Being is the cause”

~ 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑹𝒆𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝑫𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒏𝒆 𝑷𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒐𝒑𝒉𝒚, 𝒃𝒚 𝑽𝒊𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒛𝒐 𝑮𝒊𝒐𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒕𝒊

'Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.' - Tolkien

"For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief."

"Combat of Eros and Antheros", Germán Hernández Amores (10 June 1823 – 16 May 1894), Spanish

From our dear grandfather Nietzsche descends two species of Man: Sartre-de Beavoir and Jünger.

With the first we encounter question of the will to freedom, concived of as self-power, and the denial of any preternatural essence predating existence, indeed even the natural is denied its essence. Humanity begins its war on itself by attack its "restrictions".

Of interest to our readership here is perhaps the fact that with Sartres "Humanity as Freedom", de Beavoir formulates the idea of the socially constructed conditions of sex, in which sexuality is envisioned as an avenue for freedom, that is to say self-power, self-realization. In effect, we witness the doctrine of female emancipation and of sexual revolution recieve their constitution, and the prophesy of the coming of the radical transsexual individual subject. Existenialism is a humanism, but in its bowels we find the hidden skull of Descartes and the echoing Nietzschean madness.

Your homework today:

Read this:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm

Afterwards, watch this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gICVYpUWBzo

As a combat reading goes this is not our mostly friendly sparring with Nietzsche. If we take him for the sake of discussion as Nietzsche's offspring, Sartre explains his dark side of existentialism: far from, opposite even, that of his own distant relative Jünger who is anything but degenerative. After all, the inversion of a half-truth is often worse than an outright lie; the vindication of a half-truth is often better than a simple fact.

Nietzscheans, could you see how a reading (including a bad one) of your teacher could possibly lead to both these opposite conclusions, even if, at first, both might seem to have diverged too far from their common source to still be connected?

Idealists and theists, do you identify anything in Nietzsche's thinking that might lead to such ideas as Sartre's? If so, what do you make of Jünger et al. and is existentialism entirely incompatible with your views?

"Reading these novels [Céline and Sartre], one gets the impression of viewing society in a tarnished mirror. Food and drink, the flesh of men and women, even ideas – all becomes listless, suffused with the breath of death. The atmosphere is a concentration camp without barbed wire.
Books you only read once."
~ Ernst Jünger

Some aspects of existentialism are salvageable, for example, in 'Existentialism is a Humanism,' Sartre defines a thing according to how it behaves. This creates a condition of "radical freedom" wherein we are all radically responsible for our own decisions, because how we act in any given circumstance is how we inherently believe all things are to act in the same circumstance. "This action, under this circumstance, is what it means to be a human."

However, Sartre falls short as the fact remains that many different people will choose many different actions, so it tells us nothing about "what it means to be human"- assuming Sartre's premise that there is no ontological prior- except that given radical freedom there are brave humans and there are cowardly humans. Jünger certainly proves that courageous men are a minority.

Whether or not Nietzsche accepts this concept of radical freedom can be debated. I haven't read enough of his works on this subject to know for sure. But I can see how the "will to power" concept must rely on a kind of radical freedom, even if only in the vain of Camus' Sysiphus struggling "in spite of life's absurdity."

13th century image of Bhudevi, who is the personification of Earth and a consort of Varaha, an avatar of Lord Vishnu