The would-be initiate must bring with him a certain measure of courage and fealessness. He must positively go out of his way to find opportunities for developing these virtues. His training should provide for their systematic cultivation. In this respect, life itself is a good school — possibly the best school. The student must learn to look danger calmly in the face and try to overcome difficulties unswervingly.For instance, when in some peril, he must swiftly come to the conviction that fear is of no possible use: I must not feel afraid; I must only think of what is to be done. And he must improve to the extent of feeling, upon occasions which formerly inspired him with fear, that to be frightened, to be disheartened, are things that are out of the question as far as his own inmost self is concerned. By self-discipline in this direction, quite definite qualities are developed which are necessary for initiation into the higher mysteries.
~ Rudolph Steiner, “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”
In “Sintesi di dottrina della razza” (Synthesis of Racial Doctrine), Evola included several pages of photographs illustrating various aspects of Aryan men. He included not one, but two, photos of Rudolph Steiner with this caption.
Among the race of the nordic-dinaric body type, we see the solar element differentiating itself, predominantly in the “ascetic” sense … The physical traits give the sense of a condition of illumination and a power of spiritual penetration.
I had a different topic in mind, but I decided to address this thoughtful comment first:
I think the issue some take with Christianity lies in the third of your
criteria. The Christian religion seems to have been the fountainhead of a large number of subversive movements – though even as I write this I can anticipate your response will be that Christianity was Judaized. Well, fair enough, but wasn’t it also paganized in an earlier period? It seems to me that what is of most value in historical Christianity is what is least essentially Christian about it.
We need to look at this from the point of view of Tradition and not in a partisan way. The third criterion is this: “Does the exterior form provide a safe haven within which the elite can accomplish their tasks?” Even though the post made no reference to Christianity, the comment nevertheless brought it up.
As a word “Christianity” encompasses a long period of history and and too many movements, and yes, most of them subversive. See we are not nominalists, we need to specify something with a determinate content. As a side note, it should be pointed out that the subversive movements are nomilinist, either explicitly or implicitly. For the background to this, I recommend Ideas Have Consequences
So as far as I am concerned, we should only be concerned about the “Religion of the Middle Ages” (ROTMA). Some, such as Maurras and Comte regarded it as a form of paganism and Evola considered that some “rectifications” were made to make it near pagan. Guenon referred to it as Catholicism, but regarded it — both esoterically and esoterically — as an extension of Classical Rome, not of Jerusalem. These are the assumptions of the latter two expounders of Tradition:
The Middle Ages represented a civilization of the Traditional type
The end began with the Renaissance and Reformation
There is no longer a Traditional religion in the West
So the third point is moot; there exists in the West no Traditional religion readily available, whether Christian or pagan. If this point were the only issue in dispute, it could be intelligently discussed. Unfortunately, discussion is replaced with partisanship, with the most absurd and irrelevant arguments made against Christianity. These come straight from the enemies of the West, so you have to wonder if they are really false flag operations. At some point we can address some of them.
It is not advisable to throw away the accomplishments of the west, described by Donoso Cortesso quickly. Because of the ROTMA, Europe had spiritual unity. A knight could travel from Portugal to Poland and encounter the same religion and the same code of chivalry. The attempts nowadays to create a unity based on “whiteness” or “genetic similarity” are ludicrous and doomed to failure.
If we reject ROTMA out of hand, then we will miss out on what was able to establish a continental unity and Traditional society. Guenon regarded Hermeticism as the esoteric core of ROTMA; this is the perspecitve of the Brahmin. We can also point to the chivalric orders to get the perspective of the kshatriya. Everything said deserves much deeper treatment, and that will be forthcoming.
So did Guenon “convert”? In the article “Conversions”, included in the collection “Initiation and Spiritual Realization”, he explains that the word can be taken in two totally different senses. The first is an “intellectual metamorphosis”, an “interior transformation”, metanoia, or “change of nous” that indicates the “conscious passage of the ordinary and individual mind, normally turned toward sensible things, to its superior transposition.” This is an interior transformation and has nothing to do with what is commonly called a religious conversion, nor is it the exterior passage from one religious form to another.
As for the latter type of conversion, Guenon offers this explanation, apparently in light of his own seeming exterior conversion: “those who, for reasons of an esoteric an initiatic order, adopt a traditional form different form that to which they would seem to be linked by their origin [do this] either because their native tradition provides them with not possibility of an esoteric order, or because their chose tradition give them a foundation that is more appropriate to their nature, and consequently more favorable to their spiritual work.”
“Contrary to what takes place in ‘conversion’, nothing here implies the attribution of the superiority of one traditional form over another. It is merely a question of what one might call reasons of spiritual expediency, which is altogether different from simple individual ‘preference’.”
So we see that for the elite, it is the intellectual conversion that is important. The outer form is secondary. Therefore, the various attempts to recover lost forms for their own sake or to critique living forms based solely on their exteriority are misguided. The criteria are these:
Is the form rich and varied enough to incorporate true metaphysical teachings?
Is the exterior form able to capture the allegiance of the general population, given their various capacities to understand?
Does the exterior form provide a safe haven within which the elite can accomplish their tasks?
Tradition, in the Guenonian sense, has nothing to do with the past in itself. Just because it happened yesterday does not make it therefore traditional. And it is not a reaction against modernity, nor a nostalgia for the past. Its expression today may appear that way, but that is because a Traditional path either no longer exists in the West, or is accessible only to a few.
The method of Tradition has nothing at all to do with the study of comparative religion. One can be a so-called “Traditionalist” within the confines of one’s own religion alone, without any detailed knowledge of any other religion whatsoever. As a matter of fact, that is the way it has been for most of history, recorded and unrecorded. So it is not a process of somehow “distilling” the core teachings of several religions to end up with something remarkable. I don’t see what that even entails or how it could be accomplished, since it implies one can somehow have the inside (“esoteric”) without an outside (“exoteric”). Even worse, is syncretisim, that is, combining all the religions into some incompatible stew.
So that brings us to the next item: the relationship between the esoteric and exoteric sides of a religious tradition. In “The Esoterism of Dante”, Guenon responds to the question of whether Dante was Christian or pagan. Guenon explains: “we do not think that such a point of view is necessary, for true esoterism is something completely different from outward religions, and if it has some relationship with it, this can only be insofar as it finds a symbolic mode of expression in religious forms. Moreover, it matters little whether these forms be of this or that religion, since what is involved is the essential doctrinal unity concealed beneath their apparent diversity.”
So this brings us to the crux of the matter, which few people seem to find palatable: “in the past, initiates participated in all forms of worship, following the customs established in whatever country they happened to be.” So let us make clear the necessary corollaries that follow from this.
Esoterism is neither pagan nor Christian. So whoever – and I have met many – believes that by rejecting Christianity and reverting to some pagan practice, whether Greek, Roman, or Germanic, he therefore is coming closer to Tradition, then he is quite mistaken. Guenon again: “The ancient mysteries were not paganism, but were superimposed upon it. In the same way there were in the Middle Ages some organizations of an initiatic, and not religious, character, but which took Catholicism as their base.”
Since Catholicism has been, at least until recently, the Traditional form of worship in Europe, then we would expect Traditionalists to find their home there. The idea that we can “pick and choose” our religion comes from a modernist mindset and is alien to the Traditionalist. Unfortunately, Catholicism has lost much of its Traditional character, leaving Traditionalists without solid ground in the West; reenacting the lost forms of ancient paganisms is an even worse option.
Nietzsche has done as much as anyone in undermining the Traditional spiritual roots of Western man in his division of religion into life-denying as exemplified in Christianity and life-affirming as exemplified in Paganism. The destruction of Christianity has not led to a life-affirming paganism, but rather to a paganism that limits itself to the satisfaction of biological needs. As was shown in a previous post, there was much less difference between the Christian and the Pagan elites (whatever the masses may have believed). The dichotomy proposed by Nietzsche is useless; the spirituality of the elite has always been life-transcending.
It is likely that Nietzsche borrowed this concept from his “educator” Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer took the opposite position from Nietzsche; within the context of his philosophical pessimism, Schopenhauer praised the life-denying religions at the expense of the life-affirming. Among the former, he included the religion of the Upanishads, Buddhism, and Christian mysticism, particularly in its Neoplatonic form. Clearly, this not only ties Christianity to the Eastern religions, but also to the most advanced manifestations of Classical Greek and Roman paganism. I believe that in this matter, Schopenhauer is a better psychologist than Nietzsche.
Furthermore, Schopenhauer criticizes Judaism as a life-affirming religion. This is hard to deny, since Judaism does not have all those other-worldly elements that Nietzsche attributes to Christianity. It is also more interested in material benefits than is Christianity. So all the anti-Semites who lean on Nietzsche for their anti-Christian attitudes are inadvertently promoting Judaism, and are totally missing the continuity between the Classical Pagan civilization and the Christian Middle Ages.
Here’s a short clip about a cadre of Evolians who have infiltrated the Catholic Church in order to take over the UK through the BNP. You got that straight? cuz you won’t see it on Glenn Beck!
He must not live in a country governed by Sudras, nor in one inhabited by impious men, nor in one conquered by heretics, nor in one abounding with men of lower castes.
79.
He must not be in the company of outcasts, nor of Chandalas, the lowest of men, nor of mixed races, nor of idiots, nor of men of low class, nor of gravediggers.
Chapter 8.
22.
A kingdom peopled mostly by Sudras, filled with godless men and deprived of twice-born (Aryan/noble) inhabitants, will soon wholly perish, stricken by hunger and disease.
Some men return to their past, so that new forces may arise for the reconquest ~ J. Evola
Par l'espace, l'univers me comprend et m'engloutit comme un point ; par la penseé, je le comprends.
~ Pascal
A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace. ~ Confucius
Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi: in interiore hominis habitat veritas. ~ St. Augustine
A man of talent is like a marksman who hits a target others cannot hit, but the man of genius is like a marksman who hits a target others cannot see. ~ Schopenhauer
To live is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often. ~ John Henry Cardinal Newman
I believe in being free, acquiring knowledge, and telling the truth. ~ H. L. Mencken
