Meme Friday: Hardcore Edition

“Thou art called to endure and to labour, not to a life of ease and trifling talk. Here therefore are men tried as gold in the furnace.”

~Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

"Sallust described the original Romans as the most religious of mortals: religiossimi mortales (Cat., 13), and Cicero said that ancient Roman civilisation exceeded every other people or nation in its sense of the sacred: omnes gentes nationisque superavimus (Hat: respon., IX, 19). ... The Roman, like ancient and traditional men in general, believed in a meeting and mutual interpenetration of divine and human forces. This led him to develop a special sense of history and time, to which we have drawn attention in another of our articles here, speaking about a book by Franz Altheim. The ancient Roman felt that the manifestation of the divine was to be found in time, in history, in everything which is carried out through human action, rather than in the space of pure contemplation, detached from the world, or in the motionless, silent symbols of a hyperkosmia or ‘super-world’. He thus lived his history, from his very origins onwards, more or less in terms of ‘sacred’, or at the very least ‘prophetic’ history. In his Life of Romulus (1:8) Plutarch says in so many words, ‘Rome could not have acquired so much power if in one way or another it had not had a divine origin, such as to show to the eyes of men something great and inexplicable.’ ... This fact allows us to see the error of those who consider the ancient Romans essentially as a race of semi-barbarians, who prevailed only through brutal force of arms, borrowing from other peoples, such as the Etruscans, Greeks and Syrians, the elements which served them in lieu of true culture. Rather, it is true that ancient Romanity had a particular mystical conception of war and victory, whose importance has oddly escaped the specialists ... Each victory was believed to actualise a new centre of forces, separate from the particular individuality of the mortal man who had realised it; or, if we prefer, by victory the victor had become a force existing in an almost transcendent order: a force not of the victory achieved in a given moment of history, but, as the Roman expression stated exactly, of a ‘perpetual’ or ‘perennial’ victory. The cult of such entities, established by law, was designed to stabilise, so to speak, the presence of this force, so that it added invisibly to those of the race, leading it towards outcomes of ‘fortune’, making of each new victory a means for revelation and reinforcement of the energy of the original victory. ... The cult of victory, which was believed to have prehistoric origins, can be said more generally to be the secret spirit of the greatness of Rome and of Rome’s faith in its prophetic destiny. ... It is however certain that, even today, in this unleashed vicissitude one should not feel alone on the battlefields – one should sense, in spite of everything, relationships with a more than merely human order, and paths which cannot be assessed solely by the values of this visible reality can be the source of a force and an indomitability whose effects on any plane, in our view, should not be underestimated."

- Julius Evola in Roman Conception of Victory

"In the quiet and ordered periods of history, this wisdom is accessible only to a few chosen ones, since there are too many occasions to surrender and to sink, to consider the ephemeral to be the important, or to forget the instability and contingency which is the natural state of things. It is on this basis that what can be called, in the broader sense, the mentality of bourgeois life is organised: it is a life which does not know either heights or depths, and develops interests, affections, desires and passions which, however important they may be from the merely earthly point of view, become petty and relative from the supra-individual and spiritual point of view, which must always be regarded as proper to any human existence worthy of the name. The tragic and disrupted periods of history ensure, by force of circumstances, that a greater number of persons are led towards an awakening, towards liberation. And really and essentially it is by this that the deepest vitality of a stock, its virility and its unshakability, in the superior sense, can be measured. ... We need to remember that, for a complex set of reasons, the superstition which attaches all value to purely individual and earthly human life has spread and rooted itself tenaciously – a superstition which, in other civilisations, was and remains almost unknown. The fact that, nominally, the West professes Christianity has had only a minimal influence in this respect: the whole doctrine of the supernatural existence of the spirit and of its survival beyond this world has not undermined this superstition in any significant way; it has not caused knowledge of what did not begin with birth and cannot end with death to be applied in the daily, sentimental and biological life of a sufficient number of beings. ... A radical destruction of the ‘bourgeois’ who exists in every man is possible in these disrupted times more than in any other. In these times man can find himself again, can really stand in front of himself and get used to watching everything according to the view from the other shore, so as to restore to importance, to essential significance, what should be so in any normal existence: the relationship between life and the ‘more than life’, between the human and the eternal, between the short-lived and the incorruptible. And to find ways over and above mere assertion and gimmickry, for these values to be positively lived, and to find forceful expression in the greatest possible number of persons in these hours of trial is undoubtedly one of the main tasks facing the politico-spiritual elite of our nation."

- Julius Evola in Liberations

"War and rearmament in the world of the ‘Westerners’ is once again about guaranteeing security. Intensive propaganda with a crusading tone, using all its tried and tested methods, is in the air. Here, we cannot go thoroughly into the concrete questions which concern our specific interests, but rather hint at something more general, one of the inner contradictions of the notion of war, which undermines the foundations of the so-called ‘West’. ... They now want, for the third time in this century, to lead humanity to war in the name of ‘the war against war’. This requires men to fight at the same time that war as such is criticised. It demands heroes while proclaiming pacifism as the highest ideal. It demands warriors while it has made ‘warrior’ a synonym for attacker and criminal, since it has reduced the moral basis of ‘the just war’ to that of a large-scale police operation, and it has reduced the meaning of the spirit of combat to that of having to defend oneself as a last resort. ... This means to rush to the crusade against the Communist threat only out of physical terror; of terror for one’s own skin; for the frightening, wavering ideal of Babbitt; of bourgeois safety; of the ‘civilisation’ of the domesticated and standardised human animal, which eats and copulates, and the limits of whose horizon is Reader’s Digest, Hollywood and the sports stadiums. ... Thus, those who are fundamentally lacking in heroism will seek to awaken warriors for the ‘defence of the West’ by playing upon the complex of anxiety. Since they have deeply demoralised the true Western soul; since they have debased and demeaned, firstly, the true basis of the state, hierarchy and virile solidarity; and secondly, the notion of war and combat, they must now play the ‘trump card’ of the anti-Bolshevik crusade. ... Thus, those who are fundamentally lacking in heroism will seek to awaken warriors for the ‘defence of the West’ by playing upon the complex of anxiety. Since they have deeply demoralised the true Western soul; since they have debased and demeaned, firstly, the true basis of the state, hierarchy and virile solidarity; and secondly, the notion of war and combat, they must now play the ‘trump card’ of the anti-Bolshevik crusade. Thus, those who are fundamentally lacking in heroism will seek to awaken warriors for the ‘defence of the West’ by playing upon the complex of anxiety. Since they have deeply demoralised the true Western soul; since they have debased and demeaned, firstly, the true basis of the state, hierarchy and virile solidarity; and secondly, the notion of war and combat, they must now play the ‘trump card’ of the anti-Bolshevik crusade. In the opposing bloc there are forces which combine technology with the elemental force of fanaticism, of dark and savage determination and of the contempt for individual life found among masses which, whether through their own ancient traditions or through the exaltation of the collectivist ideology, hardly value their own existence. This is the tide which will swell forth not only from the Red East, but from the whole of a contaminated and unleashed Asia. However, what is really required to defend ‘the West’ against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. ... This is not the moment to dwell on such prospects. Besides, what we have said does not concern any nation in particular, nor even the present time. It concerns the time when things will become serious, globally, not merely for the interests of the bourgeois, capitalist world, but for those men who know and, at that point, will still be able to gather together into an unshakeable bloc."

- Julius Evola in The Decline of Heroism

I have finished reading Metaphysics of War and posting selected quotations which, because Evola's essays are brief yet dense, became summarizations of each essay using his own words.

The book's primary theme is the nature of war as the cultivation of heroism. A warrior's true war should be his inner spiritual overcoming, for which all his physical training and combat in the material world should act as a metaphor. When the inner war and the material war converge into one 'just', and 'holy' war, its warriors are given a clear path to transcendence and heroism thrives. A culture must be a 'High Culture' capable of such spiritual pursuits however; a culture with degenerated values ruled by corrupted or lower castes cannot inspire true heroes, only degenerated heroes who operate within the lesser values of their ruling structures. On the other hand any individual or small sub-group within a culture or race can independently aspire to heroism and achieve greatness, from which comes the mythic origins of the founders of all great empires and the progenitors of all great races. Evola details hows the various iterations of the Aryan tradition have exemplified total heroism and greatness, to the point that true heroism and spiritual warriorship is a core tenet of the Aryan tradition.

Evola also gets a bit into critiques of contemporary (pre- and mid-war) Fascism and touches on recent and contemporary (19th C. to post-war) history, however he only mentions recent and current phenomena to demonstrate the eternal principles at play. Especially as time moves past the war, Evola's constructive criticism of the Axis and his optimistic view of their potentialities in the earlier essays of Metaphysics switches to a detached view on broader forces and timescales as he seeks to empower the next generation of potential heroes to rise from the now inevitable collapse of Western culture. He asserts individual spiritual discipline and militaristic social organization, those Aryan hallmarks, will be the only path that can bring these new warrior heroes out of the Kali Yuga and into a new Aryan age.

If you are seeking to start reading Evola or the esoteric 'Right'/traditionalism in general, I cannot recommend a better combination than Evola's Handbook for Right-Wing Youth followed by Metaphysics of War. These relatively short books are both collections of various short essays in which Evola passes on the core of his knowledge in simple terms with repeated themes for easy comprehension. They act as great introductions to his more long-form work or even esotericism and traditionalism in general. Following Telegram channels posting quotes are not a substitute for reading; if you are in this Aryan spiritual pursuit and don't read yourself, at least read these two books:

My next reading will be Revolt Against the Modern World, continuing this Evola theme which the community at large seems to be in right now. It is for good reason of course, as Evola's writing appears to be the capstone to our literature - none can match the scope nor scale of his understanding of Tradition - and it appears we are indeed living through those times for which he recorded his thoughts. I will not summarize each chapter this time around but instead pull the most meaningful quotes and expound on those that inspire me.

After this book I will branch out to other authors and topics because we are seeking to build a holistic understanding here.

The evidence gathered from millennia of shamanic experience argues that the world is actually made of language in some fashion. Although at odds with the expectations of modern science, this radical proposition is in agreement with much of current linguistic thinking. "The twentieth-century linguistic revolution," says Boston University anthropologist Misia Landau, "is the recognition that language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply 'experienced' or 'reflected' in language, but instead is actually produced by language."

From the point of view of the psychedelic shaman, the world appears to be more in the nature of an utterance or a tale than in any way related to the leptons and baryons or charge and spin that our high priests, the physicists, speak of. For the shaman, the cosmos is a tale that becomes true as it is told, and as it tells itself.

This perspective implies that human imagination can seize the tiller of being in the world. Freedom, personal responsibility, and a humbling awareness of the true size and intelligence of the world combine in this point of view to make it a fitting basis for living an authentic neo-Archaic life. A reverence for and an immersion in the powers of language and communication are the basis of the shamanic path. This is why the shaman is the remote ancestor of the poet and artist. Our need to feel part of the world seems to demand that we express ourselves through creative activity. The ultimate wellsprings of this creativity are hidden in the mystery of language. Shamanic ecstasy is an act of surrender that authenticates both the individual self and that which is surrendered to, the mystery of being.

Because our maps of reality are determined by our present circumstances, we tend to lose awareness of the larger patterns of time and space. Only by gaining access to the Transcendent Other can those patterns of time and space and our role in them be glimpsed. Shamanism strives for this higher point of view, which is achieved through a feat of linguistic prowess. A shaman is one who has attained a vision of the beginnings and the endings of all things and who can communicate that vision. To the rational thinker, this is inconceivable, yet the techniques of shamanism are directed toward this end and this is the source of their power. Preeminent among the shaman's techniques is the use of the plant hallucinogens, repositories of living vegetable gnosis that lie, now nearly forgotten, in our ancient past.

[excerpt from Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge]