"There will be Kantians, unwilling to have anything to do with piety even in the world of appearance, who, with axe and sword, will mercilessly tear up the soil of our European life in order to destroy the past to its very roots. Armed Fichteans will come onto the scene, who, with fanatic will, will be untamable by self-interest or fear; for they live in the spirit, they defy matter just like the first Christians, who also could not be defeated either through bodily torment or bodily enjoyment. Indeed, such transcendental idealists would be even more inflexible in a social upheaval than the first Christians, since the latter bore earthly torment in order to achieve heavenly bliss later, whereas the transcendental idealist considers martyrdom itself to be mere appearance and is unreachable in the fortification of his own thought."
- Heine

"When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity." - Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

A subtle reading of Fear and Trembling will reveal that the Knight of Faith is the individual who acts, and it is the acting that is important to Kierkegaard. We can untether the Knight of Faith from Kierkegaard's strongly Christian / Protestant framework rather easily and, in so doing, find something of Evola's "differentiated" man. The Knight of Faith acts, venturing everything, on the spiritual. He is not merely a theorizer, but an actor. Kierkegaard uses Abraham as an example. In the Jewish context, Abraham submitting to God's order to kill his son Isaac is about God's staying hand and the mercy to not deprive Abraham of his beloved son. However, for Kierkegaard it is not the staying hand of God that is important, but the will to act on divine command.

Nietzsche states that God is dead. Evola, takes this as true, with a slight modification, stating that the God of petty morality is dead. Evola writes that the differentiated man acts not on morality, but on self-determined will, a will that is striving for unity of Self. We can take the Knight of Faith and look at it as the individual who acts from the "Being", undisturbed by "others' weal and woe" and by the honours that may be granted to him by a society that has dissolved the traditional means of self-realisation.

If we look on the Self as predetermined "that is in a way timeless, precosmic, and prenatal, and connected with it the concept of one’s “own nature” (the Hindu svadharma, the “original face” of Far Eastern philosophy)" (Evola, Ride The Tiger), then we can justify - within limits - a certain "fidelity to oneself, self-election, and responsibility." Action, like that taken by Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, I argue, is the way in which the essence that contains the potential realisable in human existence, it is to act out of authenticity, which leads to the "profound unity with oneself" (Evola, Ride The Tiger).

"It is only in an individualistically disintegrated society that the aesthetically productive subject could shift the intellectual center into itself, only in a bourgeois world that isolates the individual in the domain of the intellectual, makes the individual its own point of reference, and imposes upon it the entire burden that otherwise was hierarchically distributed among different functions in a social order. In this society, it is left to the private individual to be his own priest. But not only that. Because of the central significance and consistency of the religious, it is also left to him to be his own poet, his own philosopher, his own king, and his own master builder in the cathedral of his personality. The ultimate roots of romanticism and the romantic phenomenon lie in the private priesthood. If we consider the situation from aspects such as these, then we should not always focus only on the good-natured pastoralists. On the contrary, we must also see the despair that lies behind the romantic movement — regardless of whether this despair becomes lyrically enraptured with God and the world on a sweet, moonlit night, utters a lament as the world-weariness and the sickness of the century, pessimistically lacerates itself, or frenetically plunges into the abyss of instinct and life. We must see the three persons whose deformed visages penetrate the colorful romantic veil: Byron, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, the three high priests, and at the same time the three sacrificial victims, of this private priesthood."
- Carl Schmitt

"There is no such thing as a reality "beyond" another reality but rather, different means of experiencing one unique thing. The material, the phenomenological domain is a projection of the immaterial one. Whenever a man changes his state of being he will eventually perceive reality in different forms. It is therefore like the radio: one can change the tuner to different positions, and other channels will be percieved. So no such thing exists as a relative world and absolute world, but rather relative eyes and absolute eyes." - Julius C. Evola

"In China, only the patricians practiced the rites (yi-li), while the plebeians merely had customs (su). There is a Chinese saying: 'The rites are not the legacy of ordinary people,' which corresponds to the famous saying of Appius Claudius: 'Auspicia sunt patrum.' A Latin expression characterized the plebeians as gentum non habent: people who have no rites nor ancestors. This is why in ancient Rome the patricians viewed the plebeians' lifestyle and sexual coupling as similar to that of wild animals (more ferarum). Thus, the supernatural element was the foundation of the idea of a traditional patriciate and of legitimate royalty: what constituted an ancient aristocrat was not merely a biological legacy or a racial selection, but rather a sacred tradition."

- Julius Evola in Revolt Against the Modern World

"It was not in this sense that the plebeian was said to lack ancestors: the true principle of the differentiation between patricians and plebeians was that the ancestors of the plebeian and of the slave were not "divine ancestors" (divi parentes) like the ancestors of the patrician stocks. No transcendent quality or "form" entrusted to a rigorous and secret ritual tradition was transmitted to them through the blood. The plebeians lacked that power through which the members of the priestly class (as was the case in the ancient classical world, in ancient Northern and Germanic races, in the Far East, and so on). The plebeian did not have the privilege of the second birth that characterized the arya (the noble) and the Manudharmasastra does not hesitate to say that even an arya is not superior to the sudra until he has been born again. The plebeians were not purified by any of the three heavenly fires that in ancient Iran were believed to act as occult souls of the three higher castes in the empire. The plebeians also lacked the 'solar' element that in ancient Peru characterized the race of the Incas. The plebeians' promiscuity had no limits; they had no true cult of their own, and in a higher sense they had no founding father (patrum ciere non possunt). Therefore the plebeians' religion could not help but have a collective and chthonic character. In India their religion was characterized by frenzied and ecstatic forms more or less connected to the substratum of pre-Aryan races. In the Mediterranean civilizations, the plebeians' religion was characterized by the cult of mothers and by subterranean forces instead of the luminous forms of the heroic and Olympian tradition. The plebeians, who in ancient Rome were called 'children of the Earth,' had a religious devotion to the feminine deities of the earth. Even in China, the official aristocratic religion stood in contrast with the practices of those who were often called 'obsessed' (ling-pao), and with the popular cults of a Mongolian and shamanic type."

- Julius Evola in Revolt Against the Modern World

Evola makes abundantly clear the absolute importance of the initiation and the sacred rite, things all too absent in modernity. The initiation into a secret society is that 'second birth' that totally and truly changes a person. Sincerity and self-sacrifice are the keys to becoming virtuous in the first place, but the initiation is the highest form of both sincere and self-sacrificial action, and therefore the highest form of pursuing virtue. The key to any secret societies (be they cults or brotherhoods or aristocracies) is the magical rite. The sacred rituals must be undeniably true to Tradition and performed by only those masters to whom the duty is bestowed by Tradition itself. Whatever their form, the true rite channels and inspires energies of the highest (spiritual, ideal) forms, and is in fact necessary to channel those at all.

Understanding this, one can hardly wonder why spirituality is in its modern crisis. Modern religions have for the most part lost the sacred nature of their rituals, especially the total and truly life-changing initiation that not only makes one 'born again' but is necessary to truly become a part of any true faith. These considerations must be a part of any attempt to re-invigorate spirituality. Any attempt to build or reinvigorate a spiritual discipline must include the features of real initiation and sacred rites or it will be doomed to fail.

“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.”

[from Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life by Oswald Spengler]

"You will never get to see fifty foot statues of warlords and emperors or feel the triumph of conquest. You will never see man live as the ancients dreamed he would, all because a couple of rats tunneled their way into positions of power. They said the past is wrong. They said invaders should have your land. They said its ok to embrace apathy. You are a victim of the technocracy, of an abuse named 'civility'. You have been robbed of a fulfilling earnest life."
-Mike Ma

"An Aryan mind has too much respect for other people, and its sense of its own dignity is too pronounced to allow it to impose its own ideas upon others, even when it knows that its ideas are correct." - Julius C. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening.

How?

It goes back to the absolute importance of sacred rites and initiations. Normally such things are required for men to reach such heroic and ascetic states. However in this age we lack the institutions that would give us these functions, so it is up to the strongest and most pious of us to re-discover those paths and lead the way for others.

To put it simply and concretely, you need to sincerely commit to the warrior-mystic path, always working to improve yourself and your connection to the Divine, praying or meditating for insights and inspirations. Without a mortal guide to help you you must train yourself. The 'divine madness' rarely comes to an uninitiated being, but when one prays for insight and inspiration they will come, and with practice these simple insights and inspirations become entire states of mind until you are truly 'possessed.'

“Men are often called intelligent wrongly. Intelligent men are not those who are erudite in the sayings and books of the wise men of old, but those who have an intelligent soul and can discriminate between good and evil. They avoid what is sinful and harms the soul; and with deep gratitude to God they resolutely adhere by dint of practice to what is good and benefits the soul. These men alone should truly be called intelligent.”

+St. Anthony The Great

"To free human beings from the dominion of the totems [telluric, lunar, plebeian religion]; to strengthen them; to address them to the fulfillment of a spiritual form and limit; and to bring them in an invisible way to the line of influences capable of creating a destiny of heroic and liberating immortality - this was the task of the aristocratic cult.⁹ When human beings persevered in this cult, the fate of Hades was averted and the 'way of the Mother' was barred. Once the divine rites were neglected, however, this destiny was reconfirmed and the power of the inferior nature became omnipotent again. In this way, the meaning of the abovementioned Oriental teaching is made manifest, namely, that those who neglect the rites cannot escape 'hell,' this word meaning both a way of being in this life and a destiny in the next. In its deeper sense, the duty to preserve, nourish, and develop the mystical fire (which was considered to be the body of the god of the families, cities, empires, as well as, according to a Vedic expression, the 'custodian of immortality') without any interruption concealed the ritual promise to preserve, nourish, and develop the principle of a higher destiny and contact with the overworld that were created by the ancestor. In this way the fire is most intimately related to the fire, which especially in Hindu and in the Greek view and, more generally speaking, in the Olympian-Aryan ritual of cremation, burns in the funeral pyre; this fire was the symbol of the power that consumes the last remains of the earthly nature of the deceased until it generates beyond it the 'fulgurating form' of an immortal.¹¹"

⁹ In some traditions there is a belief in two demons: a divine and friendly demon and an earthly demon, subjected to body and to passions. The former may represent transformed influences, or the 'triumphal' heredity that the individual can confirm and renew or betray whenever he gives in to his inferior nature, expressed by the other demon.

¹¹ This form is the same superindividual form of the divine ancestor or of the god into whom the limited consciousness of the individual becomes transformed; this is why in Greece the name of the deceased sometimes was substituted with the name of the founding father of the stock. We may also refer to the Zen koan: 'Show me the face you had before you were born.'

- Julius Evola in Revolt Against the Modern World

Let us take a quick break to celebrate both physical fitness and our specific community. Ozymandias is an old community member with a video channel that has plenty of great book reviews and discussions, and actually inspired our channel here in the first place. While his intellectual discipline is solid, he also is not afraid to put out there as an example his strength earned through years of physical discipline too.

Please give his short video a watch and support our community, and perhaps get inspired yourself along the way.

https://youtu.be/HxIUjSKvA1M

He vows to endure to be burned, to be bound, to be beaten, and to be killed by the sword." The gladiator's oath as cited by Petronius

(Satyricon, 117).