Julius Evola Quotes Page 2

“What is really required to defend ‘the West’ against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life.

Apart from the military-technical apparatus, the world of the ‘Westerners’ has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance – and the cult of the skin, the myth of ‘safety’ and of ‘war on war’, and the ideal of the long, comfortable, guaranteed, ‘democratic’ existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfilment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.”

“To know, according to Wisdom, does not mean 'to think', but to be the thing known: to live it, to realise it inwardly. One does not really know a thing unless one can actively transform one’s consciousness into it.”

“According to traditional man the physical plane merely contains effects; nothing takes place in this world that did not originate first in the next world or in the invisible dimension.”

“As soon as the sacred character of a law is acknowledged and its origins in a non-human tradition, then its authority becomes absolute; This law becomes too sacred to mention, rigid, steadfast and beyond all criticism.

Thus every violation of this law is not regarded as a crime against society, but more as a sacrilege or an act of impiety, or as an act endangering the spiritual destiny of the person who disobeyed as well as the people with whom that person was related.”

“At the origin of every true civilization there lies a 'divine' event (every great civilization has its own myth concerning divine founders): thus, no human or naturalistic factor can fully account for it.

The adulteration and decline of civilizations is caused by an event of the same order, though it acts in the opposite, degenerative sense.”

“Being and stability are regarded by our contemporaries as akin to death; they cannot live unless they act, fret, or distract themselves with this or that.

Their spirit (provided we can still talk about a spirit in their case) feeds only on sensations and on dynamism, thus becoming the vehicle for the incarnation of darker forces.”

“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.”

“No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress.”

“Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is 'open-minded' and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.”

“One thing becomes very clear; if the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal.

What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated 'Christendom', but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority.”

“The best and most authentic reaction against feminism and against every other female aberration should not be aimed at women as such, but at men instead. It should not be expected of women that they return to what they really are and thus reestablish the necessary inner and outer conditions for a reintegration of a superior race, when men themselves retain only the semblance of true virility.”

“The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.”

“There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other elements in which no assimilation or real evolution occurs.

The result of this interbreeding closely resembles Mendel’s laws concerning heredity: once it disappears in the phenotype, the primitive element survives in the form of a separated, latent heredity that is capable of cropping up in sporadic apparitions, even though it is always endowed with a character of heterogeneity in regard to the superior type.”

“Ancient tradition has a saying: 'The infinitely distant is the return'. Among the maxims of Zen that point in the same direction is the statement that the 'great revelation', acquired through a series of mental and spiritual crises, consists in the recognition that 'no one and nothing 'extraordinary' exists in the beyond'; only the real exists.

Reality is, however, lived in a state in which 'there is no subject of the experience nor any object that is experienced', and under the sign of a type of absolute presence, 'the immanent making itself transcendent and the transcendent immanent'.

The teaching is that at the point at which one seeks the Way, one finds oneself further from it, the same being valid for the perfection and 'realization' of the self. The cedar in the courtyard, a cloud casting its shadow on the hills, falling rain, a flower in bloom, the monotonous sound of waves: all these 'natural' and banal facts can suggest absolute illumination, the satori.

As mere facts they are without meaning, finality, or intention, but as such they have an absolute meaning. Reality appears this way, in the pure state of 'things being as they are.'

The moral counterpart is indicated in sayings such as: 'The pure and immaculate ascetic does not enter nirvana, and the monk who breaks the rules does not go to hell,' or: 'You have no liberation to seek from bonds, because you have never been bound.”

“It is a sign of regression when pleasure begins to be considered as the highest principle.”

“Neither pleasure nor pain should enter as motives when one must do what must be done.”

“There is no other civilization that can serve as support; we have to face our problems alone. The only prospect offered us as a counterpart of the cyclical laws, and that only hypothetical, is that the process of decline of the Dark Age has first reached its terminal phases with us in the West.

Therefore it is not impossible that we would also be the first to pass the zero point, in a period in which the other civilizations, entering later into the same current, would find themselves more or less in our current state, having abandoned — 'superseded' — what they still offer today in the way of superior values and traditional forms of existence that attract us.

The consequence would be a reversal of roles. The West, having reached the point beyond the negative limit, would be qualified to assume a new function of guidance or command, very different from the material, techno-industrial leadership that it wielded in the past, which, once it collapsed, resulted only in a general leveling.

This rapid overview of general prospects and problems may have been useful to some readers, but I shall not dwell further on these matters. As I have said, what interests us here is the field of personal life; and from that point of view, in defining the attitude to be taken toward certain experiences and processes of today, having consequences different from what they appear to have for practically all our contemporaries, we need to establish autonomous positions,”

“What I am about to say does not concern the ordinary man of our day. On the contrary, I have in mind the man who finds himself involved in today's world, even at its problematic and paroxysmal points; yet he does not belong inwardly to such a world, nor will he give in to it.

He feels himself, in essence, as belonging to a different race from that of the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries. The natural place for such a man, the land in which he would not be a stranger, is the world of Tradition.”

“When a cycle of civilisation is reaching its end, it is difficult to achieve anything by resisting it and by directly opposing the forces in motion. The current is too strong; one would be overwhelmed.

The essential thing is to not let oneself be impressed by the omnipotence and apparent triumph of the forces of the epoch. These forces, devoid of connection with any higher principle, are in fact, on a short chain. One should not become fixated on the present, and on things at hand, but keep in view the conditions that may come about in the future.

Thus the principle to follow could be that of letting the forces and processes of this epoch take their own course, while keeping oneself firm and ready to intervene when 'the tiger, which cannot leap of the person riding it, is tired of running'.”

“Anyone with an adequate education will easily acknowledge that in the mythology of the Eddas itself the essential element does not correspond to the pathos of the emerging and unleashing of elementary forces and of the struggle against them. The essential, in the tradition in question, is to be found in what are ultimately ‘Olympian’ meanings.

These are implied, for instance, by the idea of Miðgarðr, which reflects the general idea of a supreme centre and fundamental order of the world, and which, in a way, may be considered the metaphysical basis of the idea of empire; by the symbolism of Valhalla as a mountain whose frozen and bright peak shines of an eternal light beyond all clouds; and, connected to this, the motif of the so called Light of the North in its many variants.

In relation to this, I should recall the symbolism of the golden realm of Glaðsheimr, ‘brighter than the sun’ and the image of the celestial place of Gimlé, ‘more magnificent than any other and brighter than the sun,’ which ‘will endure even when the heavens and the earth pass away.’

In this and many other motifs a trained eye is bound to detect a testimony to a higher dimension in ancient Nordic mythology. According to Völuspá and Gylfaginning, after Ragnarök a ‘new sun’ and ‘new race’ will arise, the ‘divine heroes’ will return to Iðavöllr and find gold, which symbolises the primordial tradition of luminous Asgard and the original state.”

“In an egalitarian and democraticised society (in the broader sense of the term); in a society in which there are no longer any casts, functional organic classes or Orders; in a society in which ‘culture’ is standardised, extrinsic, utilitarian, and tradition is no longer a living, forming force; in a society in which Pindar’s ‘be thyself’ has become but a meaningless phrase;19 in a society in which character amounts to a luxury that only fools can afford, whereas inner weakness is the norm; in a society, finally, in which whatever lies above racial, ethnic and national difference has been replaced by what effectively lies below all this and which, therefore, has a shapeless and hybrid character — in such a society, forces are at work that in the long run are bound to influence the very constitution of individuals, thus affecting everything typical and differentiated, even in the psycho-physical field.”

“Modern civilization should not be considered as an 'active' civilization, but as a civilization of restless and neuropathic people. As a compensation for the 'work' and the wear and tear of a life that becomes brutalized in vain agitation and production, modern man, in fact, does not know the classic otium, recollection, silence, state of calm and pause that allow you to come back to yourself and find yourself.

No: he only knows 'distraction' (in the literal sense, distraction means 'dispersion'); he seeks sensations, new tensions, new stimulants, like so many psychic narcotics. Everything, as long as he escapes from himself, everything, as long as he does not find himself alone with himself, isolated from the din of the outside world and from the promiscuity with his 'neighbour'.”

“We are in fact witnessing a strange reversal of perspective: ancient humanity was accused of being 'mythical', that is to say of having lived and acted under the pressure of imaginary and irrational complexes.

The truth, in fact, is that if there ever was a 'mythical' humanity in this negative sense of the term, it is contemporary humanity: all the great words written with a capital letter – beginning with People, Progress, Humanity, Society, Freedom and so many others which have provoked incredible mass movements, brought about in the individual a fundamental paralysis of all capacity for lucid judgment and criticism, and which have had the most disastrous consequences – all these words today resemble myths or, better, 'fables', since 'fable', from fari, etymologically signifies what corresponds to speaking alone, therefore to empty words. This is the level to which present, evolved and enlightened humanity has arrived.”

“As in a mirror, he 'looks at himself again and again before performing an action; he looks at himself again and again before saying a word; he looks at himself again and again before harboring a thought.'

It can easily be seen that by following such a path a man naturally transforms himself into a kind of living statue made up of awareness, into a figure pervaded by composedness, decorum, and dignity.”

“Awakening is the keystone and the symbol of the whole Buddhist ascesis: to think that ‘awakening’ and ‘nothingness’ can be equivalent is an extravagance that should be obvious to everyone. Nor should the notion of ‘vanishing’, applied in a well-known simile of nibbāna to the fire that disappears when the flame is extinguished, be a source of misconception.

It has been said with justice that, in similes of this sort, one must always have in mind the general Indo-Aryan concept that indicates that the extinguishing of the fire is not its annihilation, but its return to the invisible, pure, supersensible state in which it was before it manifested itself through a combustible in a given place and in given circumstances.”

“Modern man has not only to fight against materialism, but must also defend himself from the snares and allures of false supernaturalism.

His defense will be firm and effective only if he is capable of returning to the origins, of assimilating the ancient traditions, and then of relying upon the ascesis to carry out the task of reestablishing his inner condition.

For it is through this that these traditions will reveal to him their deepest and perennially real content and show him, step by step, the path.”

“Nothingness and freedom can either be the cause of inner defeat, or provide the incentive for the manifestation of a hidden and superior dimension of being.

In the latter case, new inner developments occur, such as the transcendence of both theism and atheism: for the individual comes to realize that the only god who 'is dead' is the humanized god of morality and devotion, and not the god of metaphysics and traditional inner doctrines.”

“The ordinary reader today knows about the Grail thanks only to Richard Wagner's Parsifal, which, in its Romantic approach, really deforms and twists the whole myth. Equally misleading is the attempt to interpret the mystery of the Grail in Christian terms: for Christian elements only play an accessory, secondary and concealing role in the saga.

In order to grasp the true significance of the myth, it is necessary instead to consider the more immediate points of reference represented by the themes and echoes pertaining to the cycle of King Arthur, which survives in the Celtic and Nordic traditions. The Grail essentially embodies the source of a transcendent and immortalizing power of primordial origin that has been preserved after the 'Fall', degeneration and decadence of humanity.

Significantly, all sources agree that the guardians of the Grail are not priests, but are knights and warriors – besides, the very place where the Grail is kept is described not as a temple or church, but as a royal palace or castle.

In the book, I argued that the Grail can be seen to possess an initiatory (rather than vaguely mystical) character: that it embodies the mystery of warrior initiation. Most commonly, the sagas emphasize one additional element: the duties deriving from such initiation.

The predestined Knight – he who has received the calling and has enjoyed a vision of the Grail, or received its boons – or he who has 'fought his way' to the Grail (as described in certain texts) must accomplish his duty of restoring legitimate power, lest he forever be damned.

The Knight must either allow a prostrate, deceased, wounded or only apparently living King to regain his strength, or personally assume the regal role, thus restoring a fallen kingdom.

The sagas usually attribute this function to the power of the Grail. A significant means to assess the dignity or intentions of the Knight is to 'ask the question': the question concerning the purpose of the Grail.

In many cases, the posing of this crucial question coincides with the miracle of awakening, of healing or of restoration.”

“The analysis of the last age, the 'dark age' or Kali Yuga, brings to light two essential features. The first is that mankind living in this age is strictly connected to the body and cannot prescind from it; therefore, the only way open is not that of pure detachment (as in early Buddhism and in the many varieties of yoga) but rather that of knowledge, awakening, and mastery over secret energies trapped in the body.

The second characteristic is that of the dissolution typical of this age. During the Kali Yuga, the bull of dharma stands on only one foot (it lost the other three during the previous three ages). This means that the traditional law (dharma) is wavering, is reduced to a shadow of its former self, and seems to be almost succumbing.

During Kali Yuga, however, the goddess Kali, who was asleep in the previous ages, is now fully awake. Let us say that this symbolism implies that during the last age elementary, infernal, and even abyssal forces are untrammeled.”