"In his arms methought I saw one sleeping, naked, save that she seemed to me wrapped lightly in a crimson drapery; whom gazing at very intently, I knew to be the lady of the salutation, who the day before had deigned to salute me. And in one of his hands methought he held a thing that was all aflame; and methought he said to me these words: Vide Cor tuum [Behold thy heart!]."

At the opening of The New Life Dante mentions the experience of "contact." He talks about the apparition of the "glorious lady of my mind," who "was called Beatrice by many who did not know what to call her" (II, 4; in other words, they did not know what this experience consisted of). This marks the beginning of a radical transformation of the human being: At that point I verily declare that the vital spirit which dwelleth in the most secret chamber of the heart began to tremble so mightily that it was horribly apparent in the least of my pulses, and trembling, it said these words: "Behold a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me."

What is announced is the awakening of the inner ruler, who is "the lord on the throne." The "animal spirit," which is here equated with the vital principle, is astonished at the incipient transformation: "Now has appeared your bliss." Finally, the "natural spirit," which could be equated with the samsaric nature, begins to weep and finally says: "Alas, wretched, because often from now on I shall be hindered." In other words, it realizes that it will no longer control the Worshiper of Love's being. Dante goes on to say: "From thenceforth I say that Love held lordship over my soul, which was early bounden unto him."

In the previously mentioned passage the "woman" is related to the "knowledge of the heart," and to something that is "all aflame," as if it were the center of a magic, life-giving fire. All of this helps us to appreciate the deepest meaning of the noscript Dante gave to his book, namely, The New Life. Even the sleeping woman, wrapped up in a crimson drapery, may be a highly symbolic figure. She could be equated with the "woman" found in the bloodstream, who induces the Tantric divya to claim that he has no need for external women.

— Julius Evola, The Yoga of Power

"The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own."

– Xenophanes

EDIT: This is not a direct quote but a paraphrasing of Plato's sentiments, yet it remains valuable and in the vein of the previous two posts.

"Undoubtedly, the new Fascist generation already possesses a broadly military, warlike orientation, but it has not yet grasped the necessity of integrating the details of simple discipline and psychophysical training into a superior order, a general vision of life. ... [For a warrior] society is neither a creature of necessity, nor something to be justified or sublimated on the basis of the ideal of honeyed universal love and obligatory altruism. Every society will instead be essentially conceived in the terms of the solidarity existing between quite distinct beings, each one determined to protect the dignity of its personality, but nevertheless united in a common action which binds them side by side, without sentimentalism, in male comradeship. Fidelity and sincerity, with the ethics of honour to which they give rise, will thus be seen as the true basis of every community. ... If the two most recent phases of the involutionary process which has led to the modern decline are first, the rise of the bourgeoise, and second, the collectivisation not only of the idea of the State, but also of all values and of the conception of ethics itself, then to go beyond all this and to reassert a ‘warlike’ vision of life in the aforementioned full sense must constitute the precondition for any reconstruction: when the world of the masses and of the materialistic and sentimental middle classes gives way to a world of ‘warriors’, the main thing will have been achieved, which makes possible the coming of an even higher order, that of true traditional spirituality."

- Julius Evola in 'Army' as Vision of the World

"This will never be completely understood if the biological conception of race is not integrated with that ‘racism of the second and of the third degree’ of which we have repeatedly spoken here. It is only if race is considered as existing not only in the body, but also in the soul and in the spirit, as a deep, meta-biological force which conditions both the physical and the psychical structures in the organic totality of the human entity – it is only if this eminently traditional point of view is assumed – that the mystery of the decline of races can be fathomed in all its aspects. One can then realise that, in a way analogous to the individual abdication and inner breakdown of the individual, where the loss of all moral tension and the attitude of passive abandonment can gradually find expression in a true physical collapse, or can paralyse natural organic resources far more efficiently than any threat to the body – so developments of the same nature can occur on the plane of those greater entities which are human races, on the greater scale in space and in time of their aggregate life spans. And what we have just pointed out about organic resources neutralised, when the inner – moral and spiritual – tension of an individual is lacking, can even allow us to consider less simplistically and less materialistically the matter of racial alterations due to mixing and contamination, as well. ... On the basis of these considerations two practical tasks of racism can be distinguished. The first task could be said to be one of passive defence. This means sheltering the race from all external actions (crossings, unsuitable forms of life and culture, etc.) which could present the danger to it of a crisis, a mutation or a denaturation. The second task, in contrast, is active resistance, and consists in reducing to a minimum the predisposition of the race to degeneration, that is to say, the ground on which it can be exposed passively to external action. This means, essentially, ‘to exalt’ its inner race; to see to it that its intimate tension is never lacking; that, as a counterpart of its physical integrity, within it there is something like an uncontrollable and irreducible fire, always yearning for new material to feed its blaze, in the form of new obstacles, which defy it and force it to reassert itself. ... But the highest instrument of the inner awakening of race is combat, and war is its highest expression. That pacifism and humanitarianism are phenomena closely linked to internationalism, democracy, cosmopolitanism and liberalism is perfectly logical – the same anti-racial instinct present in some is reflected and confirmed in the others. ... In view of the considerations which have been pointed out here, it is necessary to change these attitudes. From the ‘ordeal by fire’ of the primordial forces of race and heroic experience, above all other experience, has been a means to an essentially spiritual and interior end. But there is more: heroic experience differentiates itself in its results not only according to the various races, but also according to the extent to which, within each race, a super-race has formed itself and come to power. The various degrees of this creative differentiation correspond to so many ways of being a hero and to so many forms of awakening through heroic experience. On the lowest plane, hybrid, essentially vital, instinctive and collective forces emerge – this is somewhat similar to the awakening on a large scale of the ‘primordial horde’ by the solidarity, unity of destiny and holocaust which is peculiar to it. Gradually, this mostly naturalistic experience is purified, dignified, and becomes luminous until it reaches its highest form, which corresponds to the Aryan conception of war as ‘holy war’, and of victory and triumph as an apex, since its value is identical to the values of holiness and initiation, and, finally, of death on the battlefield as mors triumphalis, as not a rhetorical but an effective overcoming of death."

- Julius Evola in Race and War

"The Sun is an image of the Creator who is higher than the heavens. Just as that supreme creator gave life to the whole universe, Ra gives life to the Animals and Plants. His material body is the source of visible light, and, if there be such a thing as a substance not perceptible to the senses, the light of the sun must contain that substance. Yet what it is or how it flows- only Atum knows.
The Sun continously pours forth Light and Life. Ra nurtures all vegetation, gathering the first fruits produced by the power of his rays, as if in his mighty hands, bringing out sweet perfumes from the plants. In the same way, our souls, like heavenly flowers, are nurtured by the Light of Atum's wisdom, and in return, we should use in his service all that grows within us." - Hermes Trismegistus, The Hermetica.

"Although it obeys its own laws, which must be respected, that which in man is ‘nature’ allows itself to be the organ and instrument of expression and action of that in him which is more than ‘nature’. It is only in the vision of life peculiar to Semitic peoples, and above all to the Jewish people, that corporeality becomes ‘flesh’, as root of every sin, and irreducible antagonist of spirit. ... Having referred to the savages, incidentally, and reserving the right to return eventually to the argument involved, we must indicate the error of those who consider the savages as ‘primitives’, that is, as the original forms of humanity; from which, according to the usual mendacious theory of the inferior miraculously giving rise to the superior, superior races would have ‘evolved’. In many cases it is exactly the contrary which is true. Savages, and many races which we can consider as ‘natural’, are only the last degenerate remnants of vanished, far anterior, superior races and civilisations, even the name of which has often not reached us. This is why the presumed ‘primitives’ who still exist today do not tend to ‘evolve’, but rather disappear definitively and become extinct. ... In other races, however, the naturalistic element is, so to speak, the vehicle of a superior, super-biological element, which is to the former what the spirit is to the body. Such an element almost always becomes incarnated in the tradition of such races and in the elite which embodies this tradition and keeps it alive. Here, therefore, there is a race of the spirit behind the race of body and blood in which the latter expresses the former in a more or less perfect manner according to the circumstances, individuals, and often castes, in which this race is articulated. ... To put such a product of crisis [modern man] to the test of fire, to impose upon him a fundamental alternative, not theoretical, but in terms of reality and even of life and death: this is the first healthy effect of the fact of war for race. Ignis essentiae, in the terminology of ancient alchemists: the fire which tests, which strips to the ‘essence’. ... One is in the face of pure forces. And, to resist, one must reawaken likewise as an embodiment of pure forces intimately connected with the depth of race: forgetting one’s own ‘I’, one’s own life. But it is precisely here that the two opposite possibilities show themselves: once the superstructures of the ‘race of limbo’, of the bourgeois, half-extinguished man, have been blown up, two ways of overcoming the ‘human’ are likewise open: the shift to the sub-human, or the shift to the super-human. In one case, the beast reawakens; in the other, the hero in the true sense, the sacred and traditional sense; in the former, the ‘race of nature’ revives, and, in the latter, the ‘super-race’. ... Even death – death on the battlefield – becomes, in this respect, a testimony to life; hence the Roman conception of the mors triumphalis and the Nordic conception of Valhalla as a place of immortality exclusively reserved for ‘heroes’. But there is more: the assumptions of such heroic experience seem to possess an almost magical effectiveness: they are inner triumphs which can determine even material victory and are a sort of evocation of divine forces intimately tied to ‘tradition’ and the ‘race of the spirit’ of a given stock. That is why, in the ritual of the triumph in Rome, the victorious leader bore the insignia of the Capitoline divinity. ... This doctrine of heroism as a sacred and almost magical culmination, this mystical and ascetic conception of fighting and of winning, itself expresses a precise tradition, today forgotten but extensively documented in the testimonies of ancient civilisations, and especially of Aryan ones."

- Julius Evola in Two Heroisms

"This constitutes an evocation of what we have called ‘the race of the spirit’, that is, of the spiritual element from ‘above’, which, in superior stocks, acts formatively on the purely biological part, and is at the root of their ‘tradition’ and of their prophetic greatness – simultaneously, from the point of view of the individual, these are experiences which Antiquity, and specifically Aryan antiquity, considered no less rich in supernatural fruits than those of asceticism, holiness and even initiation. ... Broadly speaking, we find that, especially among ancient Aryan humanity, wars were thought of as images of a perennial fight between metaphysical forces: on one hand there was the Olympian and luminous principle, uranic and solar truth; on the other hand there was raw force, the ‘titanic’, telluric element, ‘barbaric’ in the classical sense, the demonic-feminine principle of chaos. This view continually recurs in Greek mythology in various symbolic forms; in still more precise and radical terms it appears in the general vision of the world of the Irano-Aryan races, which considered themselves literally to be the armies of the God of Light in his struggle against the power of darkness; they persist throughout the Middle Ages, often retaining their classical features in spite of the new religion. ... It is the Bhagavad-Gita, a part of the epic poem, the Mahabharata, which to an expert eye contains precious material relating not only to the spirituality of the Aryan races which migrated to Asia, but to that of the ‘Hyperborean’ nucleus of these which, according to the traditional views to which our conception of race refers, must be considered as the origin of them all. ..."

- Julius Evola in Race and War: the Aryan Conception of Combat
(Part 1/2)

"... Moreover, the secret of the ‘becoming’, of the fundamental restlessness and perpetual change which characterises life here below, is deduced precisely from the situation of beings, finite in themselves, which also participate in something infinite. The beings which would be described as ‘created’ by Christian terminology, are described rather, according to ancient Aryan tradition, as ‘conditioned’, subject to becoming, change and disappearance, precisely because, in them, a power burns which transcends them, which wants something infinitely vaster than all that they can ever want. Once the text in various ways has given the sense of such a vision of life it goes on to specify what fighting and heroic experience must mean for the warrior. Values change: a higher life manifests itself through death; and destruction, for the one who overcomes it, is a liberation – it is precisely in its most frightening aspects that the heroic outburst appears as a sort of manifestation of the divine in its capacity of metaphysical force of destruction of the finite – in the jargon of some modern philosophers this would be called ‘the negation of the negation’. The warrior who smashes ‘degarding impotence’, who faces the vicissitudes of heroism ‘with your mind absorbed in the supreme spirit’, seizing upon a plan according to which both the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’, and therefore both fear for oneself and mercy for others, lose all meaning, can be said to assume actively the absolute divine force, to transfigure himself within it, and to free himself by breaking through the limitations relating to the mere human state of existence. ‘Life – like a bow; the mind – like the arrow; the target to pierce – the supreme spirit; to join mind to spirit as the shot arrow hits its target.’ – These are the evocative expressions contained in another text of the same tradition, the Markandeya Purana. Such, in short, is the metaphysical justification of war, the sacred interpretation of heroism, the transformation of the ‘lesser war’ into the ‘greater holy war’, according to the ancient Indo-Aryan tradition which gives us therefore, in the most complete and direct form, the intimate content present also in the other formulations pointed out. ... The ancient traditions of the Aryan races were essentially characterised by the ideal of action: they were paralysed and partially suffocated by the advent of Christianity, which, in its original forms, and not without relation to elements derived from non-Aryan races, shifted the emphasis of spirituality from the domain of action to that of contemplation, devotion and monastic asceticism. Catholicism, it is true, often tried to rebuild the smashed bridge – and here, in discussing the spirit of the Crusades, we have already seen an example of this attempt. However, the antithesis between passive spirituality and un-spiritual activity has continued to weigh on the destinies of Western man and recently it has taken the form of a paroxysmal development of all sorts of action in the already stated sense of action on the material plane, which, even when it leads to realisations of unquestionable greatness, is deprived of every transcendent point of reference. ... If beyond the re-integration and defence of the race of the body we must proceed to the rediscovery of values able to purify the race of the spirit of Aryan humanity from every heterogeneous element, and to lead to its steady development, we think that a new, living understanding of teachings and of ideals such as those briefly recalled here is a fitting task for us to undertake."

- Julius Evola in Race and War: the Aryan Conception of Combat
(Part 2/2)