"You might ask: is it a sin to sleep peacefully, eat and drink well, and have fun? This is a question that you justify yourself with because, although it isn’t a sin, it encourages you to sin. It prevents you from tasting spiritual gifts from God." - St Nicodemus the Hagiorite

Commentary: always be vigilant of your present state so that you may avoid sin. So while yes they aren't sins in themselves, indulging in many of these will lead to sin if you do not guard yourself carefully.

The Scythians who dominated the steppes for millenia held few personal possessions beyond a sword and a cup; the Spartans of legendary martial prowess who trained their children to sleep on bare floors and reject money; the mighty Templars who gave up all worldly pursuits in absolute dedication to holy war; all the great warriors were ascetic.

To 'eat, drink, and be merry' is not to sin, indeed it is given proper times and places in most traditions, however any man aspiring to greater ideals than those of the average layman must put away that lesser lifestyle that defines the lower caste. That is why every Persian boy was made sure to learn 'to ride, to shoot straight, and to always speak the truth' much like all the other veins of the Aryan warrior tradition. These habits create a lifestyle of discipline and higher virtue, which though not necessarily degraded by reasonable food or drink, are not fostered by it. Therefore the ascetic, seeking higher goals, must shed lesser habits and adopt the lifestyle more like a devoted monk than the common farmer.

Only then perhaps in holy victory one may enjoy the famous celebrations of the Scythians who drank unmixed wine and had cannabis smoking tents, albeit in a communal and no doubt spiritual setting that dissuaded gluttonous indulgence. It is said their chief would pour a large tub of wine saying 'only those who have killed a man [in battle] may drink.'

The Early Roman Republic (509 - 338 BCE) was the golden age of Rome, characterised by traditional religious practises and moral standards. The aristocracy - the Patrician class - lived in an austere manner, dressing in simple white tunics and eating a basic diet consisting of, primarily, bread and cheese. Ostentatious displays of wealth and status, as seen in the late-Republic/early Imperial period, were harshly frowned upon in the Early Republic as they were examples of decadence.

"In the glory days of Rome, real [patrician] men had scorned luxury in their dress: merely wearing one's sleeve's a little too long, as the infamously dapper Caesar had done, had been enough to raise eyebrows and suspicions. Proper Romans should wear simple tunics that were becomingly manly."

Quote by Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age (ch 7).

(Painting by Juan Antonio Ribera, 1806)

"Christ says: Whosoever will not forsake houses, land, money, goods, wife, children, brothers and sisters, and deny himself and follow Me, is not My disciple; also, you must turn and become like children, or be born anew of water and the spirit, else you shall not see the kingdom of God. This is not meant that one should run out of his vocation and calling, and from his wife and children into a solitary desert and wilderness, and forsake all; but only he must forsake the Antichrist, that is, the SELF in all [the meum and tuum, the mine and thine].

Whosoever will attain to divine contemplation and feeling within himself, he must mortify the Antichrist in his soul, and depart from all ownhood of the will; yea, from all creatures, and become the poorest creature in the ownhood [selfness or self-interest] of his mind, so that he has or owneth nothing any more for a propriety, be he in what estate and condition he will." - Jacob Boehme (The Teutonic Theosopher), Epistle X

Thank you for 500 subscribers. It warms the heart to know one's efforts are not in vain, and that others are finding value in the product of them.

Please give some attention to these other small channels putting out great content in a similar vein:

Der Schattige Wald - https://news.1rj.ru/str/mandalietmandaliet

Ex Non Grata - https://news.1rj.ru/str/existentialistnongrata

Wrath of Guénon - https://news.1rj.ru/str/WrathofGuenon

Via Evolae - https://news.1rj.ru/str/EvolasCave

Diary of a Modern Kshatriya - https://news.1rj.ru/str/PerenNat

Fire of Tradition - https://news.1rj.ru/str/occontent

"When viewing a landscape, the seer sees not just the hills or rivers but a living world in which the sound of the waters, the wind through the trees and the movements of animals are meaningful…. A land-feature has power to reconnect the physical and unseen sides of reality, becoming a threshold where past, present and future fuse into a single focus for knowing and understanding."

- Caitlin Matthews, The Bright Knowledge.
Art: Underworld by Peter Burns

The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

Jung

The world revolution, however, will not be that which Marx envisaged; it will rather be that which Nietzsche foresaw.” 

- Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

"A hierarchy was not a device of the human will but a law of nature and as impersonal a physical law as that according to which a lighter fluid floats on top of a denser fluid, unless an upsetting factor intervenes. There was a firmly upheld principle according to which 'those who want to institute a process at variance with human nature cannot make it function as an ethical system.'* "

- Julius Evola in Revolt Against the Modern World

* Chung-yung, 13.1. Plato defined the concept of 'justice' along similar lines (Republic, 432d, 434c)

"According to a Hellenistic teaching, not only 'the soul's quality exists before any bodily life; it has exactly what it chose to have,' but 'the body has been organized and determined by the image of the soul which is in it.'¹ Also, according to some Persian-Aryan views that eventually found their way to Greece and then to ancient Rome, the doctrine of sacred regality was connected to the view that souls are attracted by certain affinities to a given planet corresponding to the predominant qualities and to the rank of human birth; the king was considered domus natus precisely because he was believed to have followed the path of solar influences.² Those who love 'philosophical' explanations should remember that Kant's and Schopenhauer's theory concerning the 'intelligible character' (the 'noumenal' character that precedes the phenomenal world) relates to a similar order of ideas."

- Julius Evola in Revolt Against the Modern World

¹ Plotinus, Enneads, 3.4.5; 1.1.1. Plato wrote: 'No guardian spirit will cast lots for you, but you shall choose your own destiny. Let him to whom the first lot falls choose first a life to which he will be bound of necessity' Republic, 617e.

² See Plato's Phaedrus, 10.15-16, 146-48b; and Emporer Julian's Hymn to King Helios, 131b. However, the nature of the elements that determine a given birth is as complex as the nature of the elements that constitutes a human being, who is the sum of various legacies. See my Doctrine of Awakening.

Evola is certainly no exception to 'footnotes to Plato'

"Comparison of the Chaldaean Oracles (attributed to Zoroaster) and Schelling on the Absolute as Trinity:

The five first contain the whole Principles of Schelling
I. [Where the Paternal Monad is.]—(The Absolute.)
2 [The Monad is enlarged, which generates Two.] (The polar Law.)
3. [For the Dyad sits by him (the Monad), and glitters with Intellec tual Sections.] (Productive Dyad of Thesis & Antithesis)
4. [And to Govern all things, and to Order all things not Ordered.]
(Polarity the Law of all Manifestation, the one universal Pantoplast.)
5. [For in the whole World shineth the Triad, over which the Monad
Rules.] Synthesis, Trichotomy [For the Mind of the Father said, that
all things be cut into three.]

Zoroaster has one final stage that Schelling doesn't mention:
6. [Whose Will assented, and then all things were divided.]
and by this omission rendered his system either spinosistic-barren,
or groundless."

- The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (CN III 4424)

“The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful.”

Theodore Roosevelt