“The great Zarathustra wanted knights to fight under the banner of light in the struggle against darkness—the Turanian idolaters, the demons of impurity and ignorance, and lastly the spirit of Ahriman or Satan. He wanted that there should be people able to say yes to the light—and who, consequently, learnt to say no to the darkness.” - Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XVII

“The great Buddha wanted to awaken the will to say no to the great routine of desires which make the wheel of births revolve. He wanted ascetics with regard to the automatic mechanism of the psyche, who would learn to say yes with regard to the free creativity of the spirit.” - Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XVII

A fascinating legend of a lost Island (Atlantis) which predates Plato and his account comes from Vedic literature. The Mahabharata speaks of "Atala (Atlantis), the White Island."

"The men that inhabit that island have complexions as white as the rays of the Moon and they are devoted to Narayana (the supreme God)... Indeed, the denizens of White Island believe and worship only one God."- The Mahabharata.

"The fact remains that modern man needs these degraded and desecrated forms of action as if they were some kind of drug; he needs them to elude the sense of his inner emptiness, to be aware of himself, and to find in exasperated sensations the surrogate for the true meaning of life. One of the characteristics of the Western 'Dark Age' (Kali Yuga) is a sort of Titanic restlessness that knows no limitations and that induces an existential fever and awakens new sources of elation and of stupefaction."

- Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

"In order to clarify this point it is necessary to explain what time means today. Time is perceived as the simple irreversible order of consecutive events; its parts are mutually homogenous and therefore can be measured in a quantitative fashion. Moreover, a distinction is made between "before" and "later" (namely, between past and future) in reference to a totally relative (the present) point in time. But whether an event is past or future, whether it takes place in one or another point in time, does not confer upon it any special quality; it merely makes it a dateable event, that's all. In other words, there is some kind of reciprocal indifference between time and its contents. The temporality of these contents simply means that they are carried along by a continuous current that never inverts its course and in which every moment, while being different from all others, is also equal to all others. In the most recent scientific theories (such as Minkowski's and Einstein's) time even loses this particular character. Scientists talk about the relatively of time, of time as space's 'fourth dimension' and so on; this means that time becomes a mathematical order per se that is absolutely indifferent with regard to events, which may this be located in a 'before' rather than in an 'after,' depending on the reference system being adopted.
The traditional experience of time was of a very different kind; time was not regarded quantitatively but rather qualitatively; not as a series, but as rhythm. It did not flow uniformly and indefinitely, but was broken down into cycles and periods in which every moment had its own meaning and specific value in relation to all others, as well as a lively individuality and functionality. Each of these cycles or periods (the Chaldean and Hellenic 'great year'; the Etruscan or Latin saeculum; the Iranian aeon; the Aztec 'suns'; the Hindu kalpas) represented a complete development forming closed and perfect units that were identical to each other; although they reoccurred they did not change nor did they multiply, but rather followed each other, according to Hubert-Mauss's fitting expression, as a 'series of eternities.' Since this wholeness was not quantitative but organic, the chronological duration of the saeculum was ephemeral. Qualitatively different periods of time were regarded as equal, provided that each of them contained and reproduced all the typical phases of a cycle. And so, certain numbers such as seven, nine, twelve, and one thousand were traditionally employed not to express quantities, but rather typical structures of rhythm; thus they had different durations though they remained symbolically equivalent."

- Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

"When I consider what God is, then I say, He is the One; in reference to the creature, as an eternal Nothing; he has neither foundation, beginning, nor abode; he possesses nothing, save only himself; he is the will of the abyss; he is in himself only one; he needs neither space, nor place; he begets himself in himself; from eternity to eternity; he is neither like nor resembles any thing; and has no peculiar place where he dwells; the eternal wisdom or understanding is his dwelling; he is the will of the wisdom; the wisdom is his manifestation."

- 𝕵𝖆𝖐𝖔𝖇 𝕭𝖔̈𝖍𝖒𝖊, 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕸𝖞𝖘𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖎𝖚𝖒 𝕸𝖆𝖌𝖓𝖚𝖒 𝕴.𝕴.𝕴

The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things; and yet it is all things in a transcendental sense - all things, so to speak, having run back to it: or, more correctly, not all as yet are within it, they will be.

But a universe from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no diversity, not even duality?

It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it: in order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no Being but Being's generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new: this product has turned again to its begetter and been filled and has become its contemplator and so an Intellectual-Principle.

That station towards the One (the fact that something exists in presence of the One) establishes Being; that vision directed upon the One establishes the Intellectual-Principle; standing towards the One to the end of vision, it is simultaneously Intellectual-Principle and Being; and, attaining resemblance in virtue of this vision, it repeats the act of the One in pouring forth a vast power.

This second outflow is an image or representation of the Divine Intellect and the Divine Intellect represented its own prior, The One.

This active power sprung from essence (from the Intellectual-Principle considered as Being) is Soul.

Plotinus, Enneads 5.2.1

Prayer is the mortification of the will’s motions pertaining to the flesh. For a man who prays correctly is the equal of the man who is dead to the world. And the meaning of ‘to deny oneself’ is this: courageously to persevere in prayer.
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St Isaac the Syrian

Humility collects the soul into a single point by the power of silence. A truly humble man has no desire to be known or admired by others, but wishes to plunge from himself into himself, to become nothing, as if he had never been born. When he is completely hidden to himself in himself, he is completely with God

St Isaac The Syrian

One error of the anarchists is their belief that human nature is intrinsically good. They thereby castrate society, just as the theologians ("God is goodness") castrate the Good Lord.

- Ernst Jünger

"God is goodness" or its more modern offshoot "God is love" are indeed errors. They may work as shorthand theology for those only capable of seeking the comfort of a most basic theistic "God;" for them they are truisms about the invisible man in the sky who controls things. For those seeking truth those phrases do not do any justice towards the One. Proper Truth, Justice, Beauty, Love, etc., etc., are lost when deified themselves; proper Divinity is lost when it is reduced to being an object, even when that object is of the greatest of abstractions such as those virtues listed above.

The language used in "God is goodness/love" carries an implication that what is "good" is also divine. It carries baggage of a pre-occupation with sensuality and rationality, of that Titanic restlessness that seeks deliverance from its self in a manic panic. Any "good" is necessary to cling to in order to deliver oneself from suffering which becomes de facto evil (here "evil" is little more than "what causes pain") and this goodness then becomes like a drug necessary for life - it becomes a god. The language denies Divinity its place above all mortal affairs and keeps God in a theistic box that exists, more or less, to make one feel happy in the sense of a fleeting emotion or "high." In there there is no room for an aspiration towards self-improvement or appreciation of any Virtues, no respect for true Divinity within that box. There is no room for transcendence, nor the Transcendent.

Not all can operate on that level of intellect; that is the reality of the castes. Those who are able should exercise caution in borrowing language that originates from below because its inferior conceptions will often ultimately limit understanding.

"The Supreme Truth exists outside and inside of all living beings, the moving and the nonmoving. Because He is subtle, He is beyond the power of the material senses to see or to know. Although far, far away, He is also near to all." (Bhagavad Gita, 13.16)

Now if the Good is above all things (as indeed it is) Its Formless Nature produces all-Form; and in It alone Not-Being is an excess of Being, and Lifelessness an excess of Life and Its Mindless state is an excess of Wisdom, and all the Attributes of the Good we express in a transcendent manner by negative images.

Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names

It is necessary to have “watchers” at hand who will bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. Even though these values cannot be achieved, it does not mean that they amount to mere “ideas.” These are MEASURES…. Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and anti-historical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their “truths” and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.

Julius Evola

"The educated man of today is, moreover, completely out of touch with those European modes of thought and those intellectual aspects of the Christian doctrine which are nearest those of the Vedic traditions. A knowledge of modern Christianity will be of little use because the fundamental sentimentality of our times has diminished what was once an intellectual doctrine to a mere morality that can hardly be distinguished from a pragmatic humanism. A European can hardly be said to be adequately prepared for the study of the Vedanta unless he has acquired some knowledge and understanding of at least Plato, Philo, Hermes, Plotinus, the Gospels (especially John), Dionysius, and finally Eckhart who, with the possible exception of Dante, can be regarded from an Indian point of view as the greatest of all Europeans." - Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Vedanta and Western Tradition

Amongst the Celts, the wild boar and the bear symbolise respectively spiritual authority and temporal power, that is to say, the two castes of the Druids and Knights, the equivalents, at least originally and in their essential attributes, of the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas. This symbolism in origin clearly Hyperborean, is one of the marks of the direct connection between the Celtic tradition and the primordial tradition of the present Mahayuga (cycle of four "yugas" or ages) whatever other elements from previous but already secondary and derivative traditions may have come to be added to this main current and be, as it were, reabsorbed into it. The point to be made here is that the Celtic tradition could well be regarded as constituting one of the "links" between the Atlantean and Hyperborean traditions, after the end of the secondary period when this Atlantean tradition represented the predominant form and became the "substitute" for the original centre which was already inaccessible to the bulk of humanity. As regards this point also, the very symbolism we have just mentioned can provide some not uninteresting evidence.
Note, in the first place, the importance given to the symbol of the boar by Hindu tradition, which was itself the direct issue of the primordial tradition, and which affirms expressly in the Vêda its own Hyperborean origin. The boar (varāha), as is well known, not only represents the third of the ten avatāras of Vishnu in the present Mahayuga, but our entire Kalpa, that is, the whole cycle of manifestation of our world, is designated as Shwêtavarāha-Kalpa, the "cycle of the white boar." This being so, and if the analogy which necessarily exists between the great cycle and subordinate cycles is taken into consideration, it is natural that the emblem of the Kalpa, if it may be expressed thus, is to be found once more at the starting point of the Mahayuga. This is why the polar "sacred land," seat of the primordial spiritual centre of this Mahayuga, is also called Vārāhi, or the "land of the boar." Moreover, since it is here that the first spiritual authority dwelt, of which all other legitimate authority of the same order is but an emanation, it is no less natural that representatives of such an authority should have received from it the symbol of the boar also, as their distinctive emblem, and should have kept it throughout. This is why the Druids designated themselves "boars," although since symbolism has always many aspects, we may well have here also an allusion to the isolation in which they kept themselves with regard to the outside world, the wild boar always being regarded as the "solitary" one. Moreover, it must be added that this isolation itself, which took the form, with the Celts as with the Hindus, of a forest retreat, is not unconnected with the characteristics of "primordiality," of which at least some reflection should be maintained in all spiritual authority worthy of the function it fulfils.

from The Wild Boar and the Bear

Perhaps one may object when it relates to Hermetism, that Hermes takes the place here of the Egyptian Thoth which he has been identified with, and that Thoth properly represents Wisdom, relating to the priesthood as a conservator and transmitter of tradition; this is true, but since this assimilation cannot be made without reason it must be admitted that in this we must consider more specifically a certain aspect of Thoth, corresponding to a certain part of the tradition, which includes knowledge relating to the ‘intermediary world;’ in fact, all that can be known of the ancient Egyptian civilization, according to the vestiges of what it left, shows precisely that knowledge of this order was much more developed and had taken on an importance which is more significant than anywhere else. For the rest, there is another link, we may even say an equivalence, which shows that this objection would be without real significance: in India, the planet Mercury (or Hermes) is called Budha, whose real root properly means Wisdom; here again it is enough to determine the order in which this Wisdom, which in its essence is indeed the inspiring principle of all knowledge, must find its more particular application when relating to this specialized function.
Regarding this name Budha, it is a curious fact to note that it is identical to the Scandinavian Odin, Woden, or Wotan; so it is not arbitrary that the Romans assimilated him to their Mercury, and anyway, in the Germanic languages Wednesday, or the day of Mercury, is currently stilled designated as the day of Odin. Perhaps what is even more remarkable is that this same name if found exactly as the votan of the ancient Central American traditions, which also has the attributes of Hermes in Quetzalcohuatl, the ‘Bird-Snake,’ and the union of these two symbolic animals (corresponding respectively to the elements of air and fire) is also represented as the wings and serpents of the caduceus. You would have to be blind to not see, in facts of this type, a mark of the innate unity of all traditional doctrines; unfortunately, such a blindness is all too common in our times when those who really know how to read the symbols are no more than a disabled minority, and where, on the other hand, there are too many ‘laymen’ who believe themselves qualified to interpret ‘sacred science,’ which they accommodate according to their more or less disordered imagination.

from Hermes