"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

The Greeks understood race as the autochthones. This is close to Hesiod's Five Ages.
Man may be born of the blood of the warring gods; Prometheus forming him of the clay of the earth; or the Nymphs who raise him from the trees.
The Roman race was born of the wolf, and the great genealogy surrounding the heroism of Romulus and Remus. This reminds us that there is something hidden and fateful in race. It is neither spiritual nor biological alone.
The strength of this conception can be seen in that neighbouring states had their own very distinct myths of race. Often so different that it would be more appropriate to call them separate species.
Today we have fallen from an idea of a single, global race into the sub-races. Which is what is meant by identity – a racial and species pessimism.

Not only have the deeper meanings of race been forgotten, the same degeneration has happened to its subsets: the town or city or polis, the clan, the family. These subsets (and caste, which was also racial) were more significant to one's identity than broader race. Where the modern man is barely aware of distinctions between 'ethnicities' (races) and is afraid to recognize significant differences in 'races' (effectively sub-species), the traditional man implicitly understood that there would be differences in character within all the families that made up all the clan lineages that populated every locality.

This rich experience of human society came from the awareness of spiritual and biological forces being present within race. Without that awareness, the meaning behind family and clan fades, every town or city begins to appear the same as the next, and the race left with no culture blends with and adopts foreign elements until it becomes something new.