Footnotes

Introduction

1. A version of this article, translated by E. E. Rehmus, first appeared in Theosophical History 5 (January 1994): 11–22, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the editor.
    Dr. Hansen, a native of Austria, studied law and received his Ph.D. in 1970. After working in the export trade, he has, since 1989, been exclusively engaged in writing book introductions and translating works in esotericism and philosophy. He is also a partner in the Ansata Verlag in Interlaken, Switzerland, one of the foremost publishers of the esoteric in the German-speaking world. Apropos this article, Dr. Hansen knew Julius Evola personally and has also devoted many years to researching Evola's life and writings.

2. The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt., 1992); The Hennetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art, trans. E. E. Rehmus (Rochester, Vt., 1995); The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, trans. H. E. Musson (1951; reprint, Rochester, Vt., 1995).

3. "Baron Julius Evola and the Hermetic Tradition," Gnosis 14, (winter 1990): 12–17.

4. Richard H. Drake, "Julius Evola and the Ideological Origins of the Radical Right in Contemporary Italy," in Peter H. Merkl, ed., Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations (Berkeley, Calif., 1986); Thomas Sheehan, "Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist," Social Research 48: 45–73.

5. Gnosis 7 (spring 1988): 23–24.

6. A comprehensive study of Evola's involvement with Theosophy is planned for a future issue of Theosophical History.

7. Mussolini consulted Evola about counterbalancing the Nazi pure-body-and-blood racial idea with Evola's soul-spirit view, which was more in line with his own thinking.

8. Vita Italiana 30 (September 1942).

9. Vita Italiana 31 (February 1943): 151.

10. La difesa della razza 6 (November 1942): 20.

11.  Vita Nova (July 1931).

12. Tre aspetti del problema ebraico (Rome, 1936).

13.  Storia degli Ebrei Italiani sotto il Fascismo (History of Italian Jews under Fascism [Milan, 1977]): 465.

Preface

1. Evola did not mean to engage in an exhaustive interpretation of cultures as Spengler did in his Decline of the West or like Ulick Varange in his unsystematic and obscurely written Imperium (1948). In his autobiography Evola wrote: "Naturally, in order to give an exhaustive treatment to the subject matter contained in Rivolta, each of the topics would have deserved to be discussed in a separate book rather than being summarily outlined in those little chapters." Il cammino del cinabro (Milan. 1963), 127.

2. See for instance the essay by Anna Jellamo, "Julius Evola, ii pensatore della tradizione" in F. Ferraresi ed., La destra radicale (Milan, 1984), 214–47; the review by Furio Jesi, Cultura di Destra (Milan, 1979), 89–102; Italo Mancini, Il pensiero negativo e la nuova destra (Milan, 1983); the impartial review by Richard Drake in The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 116–34.

3. Julius Evola, The Yoga of Power, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt., 1983), ix. For a more detailed account of Evola's life and works see Richard Drake, "Julius Evola and the Ideological Origins of the Radical Right in Contemporary Italy," in Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations, ed. Peter Merkl (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 61–89.

4. A. Faivre & J. Needleman, eds., Modern Esoteric Spirituality, vol. 21 in the series World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest (New York, 1992), xiv. For a positive assessment of the role of esoteric culture in the West, see E. Tiryakian, "Toward the Sociology of Esoteric Culture," American Journal of Sociology 78 (1971): 491–512.

5. The Judeo-Christian worldview opposes the cyclical view of time because it firmly believes that the history of the world is framed within two unrepeatable events, namely, Creation and Judgment.

6. The afterlife was truly one of Evola's main interests. He outlined his views on the matter in several of his works, such as Introduzione alla magia and in the essays he published in an Italian Baptist periodical, Bilychnis, between 1925 and 1931; see Julius Evola, I saggi di Bilychnis (Padua, 1970).

7. For the way in whichEvola developed his philosophical views after overcoming the solipsism ("a rather inadequate term") of Idealist epistemology, see his Il cammino del cinabro (Milan, 1963), 39–62.

8. Italo Mancini, Il pensiero negativo e la nuova destra, 57–58.

9. See the brilliant analysis by Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (New York, 1987).

10. See p. 3.

11. For an exposition of the doctrines of early Buddhism, see Evola's The Doctrine of Awakening, trans. H.E. Musson. (London, 1951; reprint forthcoming from Inner Traditions).

12. See "Of the Flies of the Market-Place," in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. J. Hollingdale (New York, 1961), 78–81.

13. "Most excellent man, are you not ashamed to care for the acquisition of wealth and for reputation and honor, when you neither care nor take any thought for wisdom and truth and the perfection of your soul?" Apology 29E.

14. For a critique of contemporary cultural relativism, see Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, (New York, 1987).

15. Ezra Pound, Cantos. (New York, 1970), Canto LVXXX, p. 506.

Foreword

1. I say among "modern men" since the idea of a downfall and a progressive abandonment of a higher type of existence, as well as the knowledge of even tougher times in the future for the human races, were well known to traditional antiquity.

2. R. Guénon, La Crise du monde moderne (Paris, 1927), 21.

3. J. Evola, L'arco e la clava (Milan, 1968), chap. I.

4. "Those who are skilled in the Tao do not dispute about it; the disputatious are not skilled in it." Tao te Ching, 81. See also the traditional Aryan expressions concerning the texts that are "impossible to master and impossible to measure. . ." Further on, we read "The teachings differing from that of the Vedas that spring up and die out bear no fruit and are false, because they are of a modern date." W. Doniger and B. Smith, trans., The Laws of Manu (New York, 1991), 12.94.96 [also referred to in the text as the Manudharmaśāstra].

5. R. Guénon, Le Symbolisme de la croix (Paris. 1931), 10.

6. G. De Giorgio, "Crollano le torri," La Torre. no. 1 (1930): 5.

Chapter 1

1. See Plotinus, Enneads, 1.8.4–7; 6.6.18.

2. Heraclitus, frag. 62 Diels; Corpus Hermeticum 12.1.

Chapter 2

1. See the Mabinogion.

2. The Laws of Manu, 7.8.

3. Conversely, in Greece and in Rome, if the king was found unworthy of the priestly office, he could no longer be king.

4.  Nitisara, 4.4.

5. Ibid., 1.63.

6. Atharva Veda, 13.1.4–5.

7. Emperor Julian, Hymn to King Helios, 131b.

8. Concerning the hvareno, see Yasht(l9): "We sacrifice to the awesome kingly Glory made by Mazda; most conquering, highly working, that possesses health, wisdom and happiness, and is more powerful to destroy than all other creatures." The Avesta Major Portions, ed. and trans. Rev. E.G. Busch (1985).

9. One phase of these rites was the "walking in circles," reproducing the journey of the sun. Along the king's path an animal dear to Typhon was sacrificed as a magical, ritual evocation of Horus's victory over Typhon-Set.

10. Tao te Ching, 31.

11.  Lun-yu, 12.18. In the Chung-yung it is written that the secret actions of heaven are eminently immaterial: they are "without sound or scent" and as subtle as the "lightest feather." Ezra Pound, trans., Chung Yung: The Unwobbling Pivot (New York, 1969), 33.6.

12. Ibid., 26.5–6.

13. Ibid., 31.1.

14.  Lun-yu (6.27): "The due medium is virtue. This is the highest attainment. For a long time few people have reached it."

15. The Chinese distinguished between the imperial function and the emperor's person. The imperial function is believed to be divine and to transfigure the person invested with it. When the emperor is enthroned he renounces his personal name and adopts instead an imperial name. He is not so much a person as a neutral element, one of the forces of nature, or something like the sun or a polar star. A natural catastrophe or a popular rebellion signify that the individual has betrayed the principle, which nevertheless still stands. These events are a heavenly sign of the emperor's decadence; not of the imperial function, but of the individual himself.

16. Aristotle, Politics 6.5.2.

17.  Cyropaedia, 8.26.

18. In La Mentalité primitive (Paris, 1925), Lévy-Bruhl showed that "primitive peoples" believed that "a catastrophe disqualified the leader."

19.  Yasht, 19.34–38. The hvareno withdraws three times following the triple dignity of Yima as a priest, warrior, and shepherd.

20. The aśvattha tree of the Hindu tradition has its roots in heaven, or in the invisible dimension (Kaṭha Upaniṣad 6.1–2; Bhaghavadgītā, 15.1–2). In the first of these texts, the tree is related to the vital force (prāṇa) and to the "thunderbolt." Since the tree is related to the power of victory, the aśvattha is considered the ally of Indra, the warrior god, slayer of Vṛtra.

21. In the Egyptian tradition the "name" of the pharaoh was written by the gods on the sacred tree ashed, thus becoming "perennial." In the Persian tradition there is a relationship between Zarathustra who was, among the Parsis, the prototype of the divine king, and a heavenly tree planted on top of a mountain.

22. The Roman tradition of the gens Julia, which traced its origins to Venus victrix and to Venus genitrix, shared this perspective. In the Japanese tradition, until a few years ago, the origin of the imperial power was attributed to a solar deity (Amaterasu Omikami), and the focal point of the ceremony of enthronement (dajo-sai) represented the contact the emperor established with her through the "offering of new food."

23. In ancient India, for instance, the essence of royalty was condensed in a divine or semidivine woman (Śrī, Lakṣmī, Padmā) who chose and "embraced" the king, thus becoming his bride, notwithstanding the king's human wives.

24. Later on, I will expound the notion that in this context appears in a materialistic form. Traditionally the winner was believed to incarnate a nonhuman energy; in him there were two phases of the same act: he was the point of convergence of a "descent" and of an "ascent."

25. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (New York, 1961), i–ii.

26. Tradition also ascribed the thaumaturgical virtue to the Roman emperors Hadrian and Vespasian (Tacitus, Historiae, 4.81). Among the Carolingians it is still possible to find a residue of the idea that the supernatural power penetrated even the royal clothes. Beginning with Robert the Pius (French dynasty) and Edward the Confessor (English dynasty) until the age of revolutions, the thaumaturgical power was transmitted from one royal generation to the other. The power at first could heal all diseases, but with the passing of time it could only heal a few. C. Agrippa (De occulta philosophia, 3.35) wrote: "Righteous kings and pontifices represent God on earth and partake of his power. If they touch the sick, they heal them from their diseases."

27. Joseph de Maistre, Essay on the Generative Principle of Constitutions (reprint, New York, 1977), 19–20.

28. In this passage of de Maistre, we find again the mystical view of victory, since "taking their place" is considered "the most certain sign of their legitimacy."

Chapter 3

1. See R. Guénon's Le Roi du monde (Paris, 1927), in which several corresponding traditions have been gathered and interpreted. [English trans. The Lord of the World (Ellingstring, 1983).]

2. According to this tradition, the "wheel" has also a "triumphal" meaning: its appearance as a heavenly wheel is the visible sign of conquerors' and rulers' destinies. Like a wheel, the chosen one will go forth, sweeping away and dominating everything on his path (see the legend of the "Great Magnificent One" in Dīgha Nikāya, 17). As far as the organizing function is concerned, we may recall the Vedic image of the "cosmic order's (ṛta) bright and terrible chariot which confounds the enemies." Ṛg Veda, 2.23.3.

3. The Analects, trans. R. Dawson (Oxford, 1993), 2.1.

4.  Critias, 121.

5. R. Guénon, Autorité spirituelle et pouvoir temporel (Paris, 1929), 137.

6. V. Magnien, Les Mystères d'Eleusis (Paris, 1929), 196.

7. G. Tucci, Teoria e pratica dei mandala (Rome, 1949), 30–32; 50–51.

8. C. Dawson, The Age of the Gods (New York, 1933), 6.2.

9. Ṛg Veda, 10.173.

10. Moret, Royauté pharaonique, 42–43.

11.  Corpus Hermeticum, 18.10–16.

12. The Analects, 6.21.

13. In ancient times the fulgurating power, symbolized by the broken scepter and by the pharaoh's uraeus, was not a mere symbol; likewise many acts found in court ceremonies were not mere expressions of formalism and servile adulation of the pharaoh, but rather were induced by spontaneous sensations awakened in the subjects by the royal virtus. Somebody visited an Egyptian king of the Twelfth Dynasty, and later recalled: "When I came close to His Highness I prostrated myself and lost consciousness before Him. The god addressed me with friendly words, but I felt like I was suddenly blinded. I couldn't think straight, my body went limp; my heart gave way and I knew the difference between life and death." G. Maspero, Les Contes populaires de l'Egypte ancienne (Paris, 1889), 123. See also The Laws of Manu, (7.6): "Like the Sun, he burns eyes and hearts and no one on earth is able even to look at him."

14. Frederick II recognized that "justice" and "peace" are the foundation on which all kingdoms are built. "Justice" during the Middle Ages was often confused with "truth" and indicated the ontological dignity of the imperial principle. See A. De Stefano, L'idea imperiale di Federico II (Florence, 1927), 74. Among the Goths, truth and justice were often portrayed as regal virtues par excellence. These are all traces of the doctrine of the origins.

15. Heb. 7: 1–3.

16. The Republic, 5.18; 6.1.

17. The Republic, trans. B. Jowett (New York, 1937), 473.

Chapter 4

1. De Stefano, L'idea imperiale di Federico II, 75–79.

2. "Cities did not inquire whether the institutions which they had adopted were useful or not: these institutions had been established because it so pleased religion . . . Originally the higher rule on which the social order was founded was not self-interest." Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique (Paris, 1900), 365. (Up to Frederick II we still find the idea that the laws, to which the emperor himself is subjected, derive immediately not from men or from the people, but from God himself. De Stefano, L'idea imperiale, 57.)

3. R. Guénon, Roi du monde, chap. 9.

4. J. L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (London, 1913), 12–13.

5. See J. Evola, Il mistero del Graal e l'idea imperiale ghibellina (Rome, 1972).

6. Often the caste of the śūdra, or servants, was considered to be "demonic" (asurya) in opposition. to the caste of the brāhmaṇa which was considered to be "divine" (daivya) and at the peak of the hierarchy of the "twice-born."

7. In Yasht (19.9) it is said that the "glory" belongs "to the Aryan people who have already been born and who are yet to be born, and to the holy Zarathustra." This reminds us of the notion of "men of the primordial tradition" (paoiryo-thaesha), which was considered the true Aryan religion in every age, before and after Zarathustra.

8.  Bundahesh, 30.10; Yasht, 29.89–90.

9. This deed of Alexander the Great is described in the Koran (18:93), in which he is called Dhul-Qarnain. Gog and Magog are also found in the Hindu tradition with the similar names of the demons Koka and Vikoka, who will be destroyed at the end of the present age by Kalki-avatara, yet another messianic-imperial figure. See my Il mistero del Graal e l'idea imperiale ghibellina.

10.  Gylfaginning, 8.42; Voluspa, 82.

11. The dynamic interplay between the two opposite principles was represented in Aryan India during the feast of gavām-ayana, during which a black śūdra wrestled against a white Aryan for the possession of a solar symbol. One of the Nordic myths tells about a knight in white armor who fights against a knight in black armor; the knight in black wins the contest, but will eventually be vanquished once and for all by a king.

12. On an analogous basis in Islam we find the geographical distinction between Dar al-Islam, or "Land of Islam," ruled by divine laws, and Dar al-Harb, or "Land of War," the inhabitants of which must be brought into Dar al-Islam by means of jihad or "holy war."

13. Dante, Convivium, 4.5.4; De monarchia, 1.11, 11–14.

Chapter 5

1. F. de Coulanges, 211.

2. Pindar, The Nemean Odes, 11.1–5.

3.  Li-Chi, 7.4.6: "It was on this account that the sages knew that the rules of ceremony could not be dispensed with, while the ruin of states, the destruction of families and the perishing of individuals are always preceded by their abandonment of the rules of propriety." According to the Indo-Aryan tradition, not only truth, order and asceticism, but ritual formulations and sacrifices as well are the foundations of all human organizations.

4. Ṛg Veda, 10.124.3.

5. The original meaning of the word "ceremony" cannot be established for certain. The word comes from the root creo, which is identical to the Sanskrit root kṛ, "to do," "to act," "to create"; it did not express a conventional celebration, but an authentically creative action.

6.  Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad, 1.4.11.

7. In the Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad, (1.2.7–8) the primordial principle says: "Let my body become fit for sacrifice. Thanks to it I will acquire being." This sacrifice (aśvamedha) is related to the sun.

8.  Havamal, 139.

9.  Ynglingasaga, 10. Somebody pointed out that the name of the Eddie Tree, Yggdrasil, "the roots of which cannot be found by any mortal being" (Havamal, 139–40), seems to denote the instrument employed to sacrifice Yggr, "the Terrible," which is one of Odin's names.

10. A. Moret, Royauté pharaonique, 148.

11. Ibid., 149.

12. Ibid., 149; 153–61; 182–83. See also the expression of Ramses II: "I am a son who shapes the head of his own father and who gives life to the one who generated him," (127). The king's entrance into the throne room (paduat) corresponded to entering the otherworld (duat), namely, that of sacrificial death and transcendence.

13.  Chung–yung, 27.6.

14.  Introduzione alla magia (Rome, 1951), 3.281.

15. With regard to a new city, it is the formation of that τνχή πόλεως that in those civilizations of a higher type was identified with the "royal fortune" (τνχή βασίλεως). To consider such entities simply as "personified abstractions" is to adopt the perspective of profane knowledge. In ancient Egypt the divine king presided over the rites related to the construction of new temples; he even performed in a symbolical and ritual fashion the first steps in the construction process. To the vulgar construction materials, he also added gold and silver which symbolize the divine element that he bestowed, by virtue of his presence and of his rite, upon the visible construction as its soul. In this regard he acted in the spirit of an "eternal deed" and in some inscriptions it is written: "The king permeated the ground that will become the abode of the gods."

16.  Ṛg Veda, 1.40.3.

I 7. Bhagavadgītā, 3.11. In another text it is said that the sacrifice is the food of the gods and the "principle of their lives." Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 8.1.2, 10.

18. Plutarch, De sera num. vindicta, 28.

19.  Zohar, trans. H. Sperling and M. Simon (London, 1933), 2.244a.

Chapter 6

1. The brāhmaṇa, who was compared to the sun, was often thought to be substantiated by a radiant energy or splendor (tejas) that he drew from his vital force through his "spiritual knowledge," Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 13.2.6, 10.

2. Concerning the foundation of the brāhmaṇa's authority, see The Laws of Manu 9, 313–17.

3. Laws of Manu, 2.39; 103; 157–58; 172.

4. In the mythical account of the establishment of the castes as it was handed down by the brāhmaṇa, while to each of the three higher castes corresponds a group of deities, this is not the case of the śūdra, who do not have any god of their own to whom they may pray and offer sacrifices.

5. Hutton Webster, Primitive Secret Societies (Italian trans., Bologna, 1921).

6. Concerning virility in an eminent and not naturalistic sense, we may refer to the Latin term vir as opposed to homo. G. B. Vico (The New Science, 3.41) had already remarked that this term implied a special dignity, since it designated not only a man to be married with a patrician woman, but also the nobility, the magistrates (duumviri, decemviri), the priests (quindicemviri, vigintiviri), judges (centemviri), because "the term vir indicated wisdom, priesthood and kingship, as I have previously demonstrated that it formed one thing in the person of the first fathers in the state constituted by families."

7. Ṛg Veda, 1.1.7–8; 1.13.1; 10.5.7; 8.3.8.

8.  Atharva Veda 6.120.1. The expression refers to gārhapatya-agni which, among the three fires, is that of the pater or head of the household.

9. "The father is the household's fire." Laws of Manu, 2.231. To keep fueling the sacred fire is the duty of the dvīja, the twice-born, who constitute the three higher castes (2.108). It is not possible now to elaborate beyond this brief reference to the traditional cult of fire. Later on I will discuss the role that men and women played in the cult of the fire, in the family and in social life.

10. Concerning the abovementioned expressions, see M. Michelet, Histoire de la république romaine (Paris, 1843), 1.138, 144–46. Similar elements are even found in more recent traditions. The British lords in the beginning were considered to be demigods and on the same footing with the king. According to a law promulgated by Edward I, they enjoyed the privilege of simple homicide.

11. F. de Coulanges, Cité antique, 105.

12. In Rome there were two types of marriage, one related to the chthonic and the other to the Uranian component of Roman civilization. The first type was a secular and practical marriage, in which the woman was considered mere property to be transferred to the manum viri; the second type was a ritual and sacred marriage, a confarreatio, a sacrament or sacred union (hierogamos). The Hellenistic equivalent of the confarreatio was the eggineois; the sacral element that abided in the agape was considered to be so important that without it the validity of the marriage could be challenged.

13.  Tao te Ching, 18.

14.  Laws of Manu, 2.147–48.

15.  Laws of Manu, 2.150.

16. Deut. 5:7.

Chapter 7

1. G. F. Moore, Origin and Growth of Religion (London, 1921).

2. R. Otto (The Holy) has employed the term "numinous" (from numen) to designate the content of the experience of the sacred.

3. "Maiores enim expugnando religionem totum in experientia collocabunt." Ad georgicas, 3.456

4.  Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10.

5. Somebody remarked that in the Hindu tradition the religious deed par excellence appears to have been thought of in terms of a magical procedure or of a quasi-mechanical operation, the good or bad outcome of which depended entirely on the person engaging in it; in this context, morality had no role to play.

6.  Chung-yung, 24.1; 23.1; 31.1, 3, 4.

7. Porphyry did not fail to contrast this kind of attitude toward the divine with the attitude of fearful religious worship that emerged in some features of the Greco-Roman cult. Epistula Anebo, 29.

8. This explains why the first generation of Egyptologists was led by devotional religion to recognize in the features of pharaonic regality those of the Antichrist or of the princeps huius mundi.

9. This obviously corresponds to the principle of "acting without acting," which according to the Taoist tradition is "Heaven's Way"; accordingly, "those without kings" correspond to those whom Lao-tzu called "skillful masters" of the Tao (Tao te Ching, 15) and to the Iranian "men of the primordial law."

10. See J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition, trans. E.E. Rehmus (Rochester, Vt., 1994). Even though the king may be called "son of the Sun," or "son of Heaven" this does not contradict the abovementioned views, since such concepts do not evoke creationist and dualistic concepts. Rather, these views convey the idea of a descent that is the "continuation" of the same one influence, spirit or emanation. Agrippa remarked (De occulta philosophia, 3.36) that it is like "the univocal generation in which the son is similar to the father in all regards, and having been generated according to the human species, he is the same as the one who generated him."

11. J.E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of the Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1903), 162.

12. Cicero, De haruspicina responsio, 11.23; Amobius, Adversus nationes (The Case Against the Pagans), 4.31.

Chapter 8

1. The Egyptian tradition referred to those who are damned in the afterlife judgment as "twice dead." They become the victims of the infernal monster Amam ("The Devourer") or Am-mit ("The Corpse Eater"). The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains formulations designed to help a person "to elude the second death in the next world." "Judgment" is just an allegory. It is rather an impersonal and objective process, as the symbol of the scale weighing the "hearts" of the deceased seems to suggest, since nothing could prevent a scale from being weighed down by the greater weight. As far as the "sentencing" is concerned, it also presupposes the inability to realize some possibilities of immortality granted in the postmortem; these possibilities are alluded to by some traditional teachings, from Egypt to Tibet, and described in their respective "Books of the Dead." Also, see the Aztec traditions concerning the "trials" undergone by the deceased and the magical formulas employed by them.

2. Macrobius, Satumalia, 3.4.

3. Ṛg Veda, 10.14.8.

4. D. Merezhkovsky (Dante [Bologna, 1939]), wrote: "In Paleolithic times soul and body were believed to be inseparable; united in this world they remained joined together in the next world too. As strange as it may seem, cave men knew a 'resurrection of the flesh' which a Socrates and a Plato, with their 'immortality of the soul,' seem to have forgotten."

5. Such a justification of the authority of the leaders is still preserved among some primitive populations.

6. Among Assyrian-Babylonian people we find conceptions of a larval state, similar to the Hellenic Hades, awaiting the majority of people after death. Also, see the Jewish notion of the dark and cold sheol in which the deceased, including prestigious figures such as Abraham and David, led an unconscious and impersonal existence. The notion of torments, terrors and punishments in the afterlife (like the Christian notion of "hell") is very recent and extraneous to the pure and original forms of Tradition; in these forms we find only the difference between the aristocratic, heroic, solar, and Olympian survival for some, and the dissolution, loss of personal consciousness, larval life, or return into the cycle of generation for the others. In various traditions (e.g., in Egypt and in ancient Mexico) the fate of the postmortem of those who underwent the latter destiny was not even considered.

7. In Maitrāyaṇī Upaniṣad (6.30) the "path of the ancestors" is also called "the path of the Mother," more on which later. See also Bhagavadgrītā, 8.24–26.

8. All the main characteristics of the Greek religion are related to the opposition between chthonic and Olympian deities. The opposition was not merely between Hades, Persephone, Demeter, Dionysus and Zeus, Hera, Athena, Apollo. It was not just a matter of the difference between two orders of gods, but also of the opposition between radically different cults; the consequences of this opposition affected even the smallest details of the daily cult. In the second part of this work I will show an analogous opposition, including its development, in other civilizations.

9. In some traditions there is the belief in two demons: a divine and friendly demon (the "good demon" or αγαθός δαîμων) and an earthly demon, subjected to the body and to passions. The former may represent transformed influences, or the "triumphal" heredity that the individual can confirm and renew or betray whenever he gives in to his inferior nature, expressed by the other demon.

10. Concerning the relationship between the fire tended by noble families and a divine survival, see The Laws of Manu, 2.232.

11. This form is the same superindividual form of the divine ancestor or of the god into whom the limited consciousness of the individual becomes transformed; this is why in Greece the name of the deceased sometimes was substituted with the name of the founding father of his stock. We may also refer to the Zen koan: "Show me the face you had before you were born."

Chapter 9

1. G. De Giorgio, "Azione e contemplazione," La Torre, no. 2 (1930).

2. J. de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races.

3.  Tao te Ching, 38, in R. Van Over, ed., Chinese Mystics (New York, 1973), 22.

4. For a critique of these alleged causes of the decline of civilizations, see de Gobineau's The Inequality of Human Races.

5. For a more detailed account of race and of the relationship between the somatic, soul, and spiritual race, see my Sintesi di dottrina della razza (Milan, 1941).

6. We may here consider A. J. Toynbee's thesis (A Study of History [London, 1934]) according to which, a few exceptions notwithstanding, there have never been civilizations that have been killed, but only civilizations that have committed suicide. Wherever the inner strength exists and does not abdicate, then difficulties, dangers, an adverse environment, attacks from the outside, and even invasions may become a stimulus or a challenge that induces that inner strength to react in a creative way. Toynbee saw in these external elements the conditions for the advent and for the development of civilizations.

7. According to the Hindu tradition, the four great ages of the world, or yugas, depend on the kings's state: the Dark Age (Kali Yuga) corresponds to the state in which the regal function is "asleep"; the Golden Age corresponds to the state in which the king reproduces the symbolic actions of the Aryan gods.

Chapter 10

1. My primary source is the reconstruction of the Eleusinian Mysteries proposed by V. Magnien in his Les Mystères d'Eleusis.

2. Because of their traditional character, each of these phases could generate innumerable comparisons. Crossing the waters, together with the symbol of navigating, is one of the most recurrent themes. The ship is one of the symbols ascribed to Janus, which later on was incorporated into the Catholic pontifical symbolism. The Chaldean hero Gilgamesh who walks on the "sun's path" and on the "mountain path," must cross the ocean in order to reach a divine garden where he will find the gift of immortality. The crossing of a great river and a number of various trials consisting in encounters with animals (totems), storms, and the like, is also found in both the ancient Mexican and Nordic-Aryan (crossing of the river Thund in order to arrive in Valhalla) journey after death. The crossing of the waters is found in the Nordic saga of the hero Siegfried, who says: "I can lead you there [to the 'island' of the divine woman Brunhild, a land 'known to Siegfried alone'] riding the waves. I am accomplished in the true ways of the sea" (Niebelungenlied, 6); and it is also found in the Vedas where the king Yama, conceived as the "Sun's son" and as the first among the beings who have found their way to the otherworld, is called "he who has gone far out into the sea." (Ṛg Veda, 10.14.1–2; 10.10.1). The symbolism of the crossing is very frequent in Buddhism, while in Jainism we find the expression tīrthaṃkara ("ford-builder").

3.  See Introduzione alla magia (Milan, 1952) and also my other work, The Hermetic Tradition. It has been suggested that the requirement for the regal dignity consists in the control of the manas (the inner and transcendent root of the five senses), which is also a requirement for the successful practice of yoga and asceticism. See The Laws of Manu, 7.44.

4. As far as Rome is concerned we may notice the shift from the integral notion of regality to the narrower notion of rex sacrorum, the king's competence being limited to the sacral dimension. This shift was justified to the degree to which the king had to engage in military matters.

5. "Just as fire instantly burns up the fuel that it touches with its brilliant energy, so a man who knows the Veda burns up all evil with the fire of his knowledge." The Laws of Manu, 11.246. Also: "A priest who retains the Ṛg Veda in his memory incurs no guilt at all, even if he destroys these three worlds or eats food taken from anyone whatever" (11.262).

6.  Analects, 12.1; 14.45.

7.  Statesman, 290d–e.

8. De Iside et Osiride, 9.

9. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 3.2. Livy, The History of Rome, 1.20.

10. David was anointed by Samuel, "and the spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward." 1 Sam. 16:13. In some medieval texts the oil of regal consecration was assimilated to the oil used to consecrate prophets, priests, and martyrs. During the Carolingian era, the bishop at the time of consecration pronounced the words: "May God in his mercy grant you the crown of glory; may He pour upon you the oil of the grace of the Holy Spirit, which He poured upon His priests, kings, prophets, and martyrs."

11. For a definition of the specific nature of initiatory realization, see chapter 14 in my L'arco e la clava.

Chapter 11

1. In the Middle Ages, the mysterious figure of the royal Prester John replicated somewhat the figure of Melchizedek, while at the same time being related to the idea of a supreme center of the world. There is a legend according to which Prester John sent a salamander's skin, fresh water, and a ring that bestowed victory and invisibility to "Frederick"; this legend expresses the confused belief in a relationship between the medieval imperial authority and some kind of transmission of the authority found in that center.

2.  Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad, 1.4.11.

3. In the Hindu tradition there are plenty of instances of kings who already posses or eventually achieve a spiritual knowledge greater than that possessed by the brāhmaṇa. This is the case, for instance, of King Jaivala, whose knowledge was not imparted by any priest, but rather reserved to the warrior caste (kṣatram); also, in Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad (4.3.1) King Janaka teaches the brāhmaṇa Yājñavalkya the doctrine of the transcendent Self.

4. In a text called Pañcaviṁśati brāhmaṇa (18.10.8) we read that although in the regal consecration the formulations employed are the same as those inherent to the brāhmaṇa (the priestly caste), the latter has to be subjected to the kṣatram (the regal-warrior caste). The qualities that characterize the aristocrat and the warrior (rather than the priest strictly speaking) and that, once integrated in the sacred, reproduce the "solar" peak of spirituality, are the foundation of the well-known fact that in the highest traditions the priests, in the higher sense of the word, were chosen only from among the patrician families; initiation and the transmission of transcendent knowledge was reserved to these families alone.

5.  The Laws of Manu, 11.321–22; 11.83–84.

6. De Coulanges, Transformations de la royaute pendant l'époque Carolingienne (Paris, 1892), 315–16. The Liber pontificalis says: "Post laudes ad Apostolico more antiquorum principum adoratus est."

7. We may recall here that it was the emperor Sigismund who summoned the Council of Constance (A.D. 1413) on the eve of the Reformation in order to purify the clergy from schisms and anarchy.

8.  Oeuvres oratoires, 4.362.

9. This Pauline expression can be contrasted with the symbolism of Jacob who struggles against the angel of the Lord and forces him to bless him. (Gen. 32:27).

10. A. Solmi, Stato e Chiesa secondo gli scritti politici da Carlomagno al Concordato di Worms (Modena, 1901), 156. For the entire duration of the Roman Empire in the East, the Church was always a state institution dependent on the emperor, who exercised a universal rule. The beginning of the priestly usurpation can be traced back to the declarations of Pope Gelasius I (ca. 480).

Chapter 12

1. "The Emperor was entitled to the obedience of Christendom, not as a hereditary chief of a victorious tribe, or feudal lord of a portion of the earth's surface, but as solemnly invested with an office. Not only did he excel in dignity the kings of the earth: his power was different in its nature; and so, far from supplanting or rivalling theirs, rose above them to become the source and needful condition of their authority in their several territories, the bond which joined them in one harmonious body." James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (London, 1889), 114.

2.  Tao te Ching, 3, 66.

3. R. Guénon, Autorite spirituelle et pouvoir temporel, 112.

4. I have discussed the real meaning of the primacy of the "natural law" over the positive and political laws (a primacy that is also employed as an ideological weapon by all kinds of subversive movements) in my edition of selected passages of J. J. Bachofen's Myth, Religion and Mother Right and in my L'arco e la clava, chap. 8.

5. R. Fülöp-Miller, Segreto della potenza dei Gesuiti (Milan, 1931), 326–33.

Chapter 13

1. Concerning the cult of truth, the knights' oath was "In the name of God, who does not lie!" which corresponded to the Aryan cult of truth. According to this cult, Mithras was the god of all oaths and the Iranian mystical "glory" was believed to have departed from King Yima the first time he lied. In The Laws of Manu (4.237), we read: "By telling a lie, a sacrifice slips away."

2. See J. Evola, The Yoga of Power, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt., 1993), 205–9; and J. Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex (Rochester, Vt., 1983), 195–202.

3. This is mentioned in the Eddas: Gylfaginning. 26, 42; Havamal, 105; Sigrdifumal, 4–8. Gunnlöd, like the Hellenic Hesperides, is the. keeper of the golden fruit and of a divine potion. Sigrdifa, contrasted with Sigurd who "awakens" her, appears as a woman endowed with wisdom; she imparts to the hero the knowledge of the runes of victory. Finally we may recall in the Teutonic tradition the "wondrous woman" waiting on a mountain for "the hero who shines like the sun," and who will live forever with her. The ring of fire around the sleeping "woman" recalls the barrier that according to the Christian myth blocked the entrance to Eden after Adam's fall (Gen. 3:24).

4. They are the fravashi described in Vendidad, 19.30.

5.  Yashna, 10.7.

6.  Yasht, 12.23–24.

7.  Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad, 2.5–6.

8. Ricolfi (Studi sui fedeli d'amore (Milan, 1933]) remarked that ''in the thirteenth century the divine intellect is usually portrayed in feminine, not masculine terms": it is called Wisdom, knowledge, or "Our Lady Intelligence." In some figurations the symbol of what is active was attributed to man; this expresses an ideal corresponding to the path of a "warrior" rather than that of a "cleric."

9. See note 2 above.

10. Plato, Phaedrus, 264b.

11. This is certainly the case of the bas-reliefs of Tanagris and Tirea; in the latter the soul, wearing nothing but a regal mantle, holds the horse by the bridle; nearby there is the very significant symbol of the tree with a serpent.

12.  Viṣṇu Purāṇa 4.3.24.

13. On the Easter date, which was not chosen arbitrarily by Christians, and much earlier than the times of Jesus, many populations used to celebrate the rite of the "kindling of fire"; this was an element related to several traditions of a "solar" type. Concerning the two periods of seven years in the knightly novitiate, we should recall that a similar rhythm was followed in ancient Greece (Plato, Alcibiades, 1.121e) and not without reason: according to a traditional teaching, the number seven presided over the rhythms of the development of those forces acting within man and nature.

14. These three colors, sometimes found in the symbolism of three robes, are central in the Hermetic Ars Regia since they represent the three moments of the initiatory palingenesis; the "red" corresponds to "Gold" and to the "Sun."

15. If the term adoubler employed in the knightly ordination derives from the Anglo-Saxon dubban, "to strike" (in reference to the violent blow the consecrating person inflicted on the knight-to-be), this probably symbolizes the ritual "mortification" that the human nature of the knight had to undergo prior to sharing in the superior nature. In the secret language of the "Love's Lieges" we find mention of "being wounded" or "hit by death" or by Love or by the vision of the "Woman."

16. [Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Warrior's Code. (Burbank, Calif., 1975), 82–87.]

17. Among the twelve palatines there was an armed priest, the bishop Turpinus. He invented the war cry: "Glory be to our nobility, Montjoie!" See also the legendary journey of King Arthur through Montjoie before he was solemnly crowned in Rome; it is highly significant that the real etymology of the word Montjoie was Mons Jovis, or Mount Olympus (this etymology was suggested to me by R. Guénon).

18.  Viṣṇu Purāṇa 4.2.19.

19. Concerning the ethos of the Knights Templar, in his De laude novae militiae (chap.4), Saint Bernard wrote: "They live in pleasant fellowship in a frugal way, without getting married, begetting children or owning a thing of their own, including their will. . . . Usually they do not wear fancy clothes; they are covered with dust, their faces burnt by the sun, with a proud and severe look in their eyes. When preparing for battle they arm themselves with faith in the inside and with iron on the outside, without wearing adorned insignia or putting beautiful saddles on their horses. Their only decorations are their weapons which they use with bravery in the greatest dangers, without fearing the number or the strength of the enemy. They put all their trust in the Lord of Hosts, and as they fight for Him, they seek either a certain victory or a holy and honored death on the battlefield."

20. See my work, Il mistero del Graal e l'idea imperiale ghibellina.

21. Augustine, The City of God, 19.7; Tertullian, De corona, 11.

Chapter 14

1. "Justice is produced in the soul, like health in the body, by establishing the elements concerned in their natural relations of control and subordination; whereas injustice is like disease and means that this natural order is inverted." Plato, Republic, trans. B. Jowett, 444a, b.

2. Ṛg Veda 10.90.10–12. This fourfold division became a threefold division when nobility was thought to encompass both the warrior and the spiritual dimensions and practiced in those areas in which residues of this original situation existed. This division corresponds to the Nordic division into jarls, karls, and traells and to the Hellenistic division into eupatrids, gheomors, and demiurgs.

3.  Bhagavadgītā (18.41): "The works of Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Sudras are different in harmony with the three powers of their born nature." The Bhagavad Gita, trans J. Mascaró (New York, 1962).

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

5. The idea that the same personal principle or spiritual nucleus has already lived in previous human lives and that it will continue to do so ought to be rejected. R. Guénon launched a devastating critique of this idea in his L'Erreur spirite (Paris, 1923). I followed suit in my The Doctrine of Awakening. Historically, the belief in reincarnation is related to the weltanschauung typical of the substratum of pre-Aryan races and of the influence exercised by them; from a doctrinal point of view it is a simple. popular myth, and not the expression of an "esoteric" knowledge. In the Vedas the idea of reincarnation is not found at all.

6. 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.

7. See Plato's Phaedrus, 10.15–16, 146–48b; and Emperor 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.

8. "Just as good seed, sown in a good field, culminates in a birth, so the son born from an Aryan father in an Aryan mother deserves every transformative ritual. . . . Seed sown in the wrong field perishes right inside it; and a field by itself with no seed also remains barren." The Laws of Manu, 10.69.71.

9. The only modern thinker who has come close to this view, yet without being aware of it, was Nietzsche; he developed a view of absolute morality with a "naturalistic" basis.

10.  Bhagavadgītā, 18.46.

11. Ibid., 4.11. In 17.3 it is stated that the "devotion" of a man must be conformed to his nature.

12. Ibid., 3.19. See also The Laws of Manu, 2.9: "For the human being who fulfills the duty declared in the revealed canon and in tradition wins renown here on earth and unsurpassable happiness after death."

13.  Bhagavadgītā, 18.47: "Greater is thine own work, even if this be humble, than the work of another, even if this be great. When a man does the work God gives him, no sin can touch this man."

14. Ibid., 1.42–44. In relation to the duty of remaining faithful to the specific function and to the customs of one's caste, we may recall the characteristic episode in which Rama killed a serf (ṣūdra) who practiced asceticism, thus usurping a privilege of the priestly caste. Also we may recall the traditional teaching according to which the "Iron Age" or "Dark Age" will be inaugurated when the serfs will practice asceticism; this seems indeed a sign of our times, as some plebeian ideologies have come to see in "labor" a particular kind of asceticism.

15. Within certain limits, the idea of contamination did not apply to women; men of higher castes could marry women of lower castes without being contaminated. Traditionally the woman did not relate to a caste in a direct way but rather through her husband. The Laws of Manu (9.22): "When a woman is joined with a husband in accordance with the rules, she takes on the very same qualities that he has, just like a river flowing down into the ocean." This is, however, no longer the case when the existential traditional structures lose their vital force.

16. The meaning of this oracle converges with the Hindu teaching according to which the Dark Age (Kali Yuga), which is the end of a cycle (Mahā Yuga), corresponds to a period of unrestrained intermingling of the castes and to the decline of the rites.

17.  Enneads, 3.1.4.

18. "If we say that people of this sort ought to be subject to the highest type of man, we intend that the subject should be governed not to his own detriment but on the same principle as his superior, who is himself governed by the divine element within him. It is better for everyone to be subject to a power of godlike wisdom residing within himself, or failing that, imposed from without." Plato, Republic, 590d.

19. In The Laws of Manu, while on the one hand it is written: "Even if he is set free by his master, a servant is not set free from slavery; for since that is innate in him, who can take it from him?" (8.414); on the other hand we read: "The servant's duty and supreme good is nothing but obedience to famous priestly householders, who know the Veda. If he is unpolluted, obedient to his superiors, gentle in his speech, without a sense of 'I,' and always dependent on the priests and the other twice-born castes, he attains a superior birth in the next life" (9.334–5). And also (10.42): "By the powers of their seed and their asceticism, in age after age these castes are pulled up or pulled down in birth among men here on earth."

20. We may recall Plotinus's teaching: "When we cease to live, our death hands over to another principle this energy of our own personal career. That principle (of the new birth) strives to gain control, and if it succeeds it also lives and itself, in turn, possesses a guiding spirit" Enneads, 3.1.3. In this instance, this "guiding spirit" corresponds to the principle that has been made the object of one's active and loyal bhakti.

21. F. Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, 20.

Chapter 15

1. R. Guénon, La Críse du monde moderne, 108–15.

2. Very appropriately O. Spann defines modern knowledge as "the knowledge of what is not worthy of being known." Religionsphilosophie (Vienna, 1948), 44.

3. Concerning the illusions nourished by some in regard to modern science, see my Cavalcare la tigre (Milan, 1962).

4. Lucian of Samosata, On Dance, 59. The "dance of the seven veils," which are removed one at a time until the dancer is totally nude, repeats on its own plane a precise initiatory schema.

5. Li Chi, 4.1. l3; 17.3.20.

6. J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition, chap. 22.

7. In the language of the campagnonagge, in which these traditions were preserved, the word vocation was always synonymous with occupation: instead of asking a person what his occupation was, he was asked what was his "vocation."

8. The medieval "manuals" that have been preserved often mention mysterious practices that were associated with the process of construction itself; they also relate legends according to which masters of the art were killed because they betrayed the oath of secrecy.

9. Herodotus, The Histories, 6.60.

10. According to a tradition, Numa, by instituting the collegia, intended for "every profession to celebrate its own cult" (Plutarch, Numa, 17). In India too each profession pursued by the inferior castes often corresponded to a special cult of divine or legendary patrons; this practice is also found in Greece, among Nordic people and the Aztecs, in Islam, and so on.

11. In Rome the professional guilds became hereditary during the third century A.D. From that time on. every member of a corporation passed on to his heirs not only a biological legacy, but his profession and his property as well, provided that they too followed in his footsteps. This succession was enforced by the state, however, and thus we can no longer speak of an authentic conformity of the castes to the traditional spirit.

12. [The translator of this work has come across a passage that he regards worth quoting in this context: "Around 1820 an astrologer says to the young hero of Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma: 'In a century perhaps nobody will want idlers any more.' He was right. It ill becomes anyone today to admit that he lives without working. Since Marx and Proudhon, labor has been universally accepted as a positive social value and a philosophical concept. As a result, the ancients' contempt for labor, their undisguised scorn for those who work with their hands, their exaltation of leisure as the sine qua non of a 'liberal' life, the only life worthy of a man, shocks us deeply. Not only was the worker regarded as a social inferior; he was base, ignoble. It has often been held, therefore, that a society like the Roman, so mistaken about what we regard as proper values, must have been a deformed society, which inevitably paid the price of its deformity.... And yet, if we are honest, we must admit that the key to this enigma lies within ourselves. True, we believe that work is respectable and would not dare to admit to idleness. Nevertheless, we are sensitive to class distinction and, admit or not, regard workers and shopkeepers as people of relatively little importance. We would not want ourselves or our children to sink to their station, even if we are a little ashamed of harboring such sentiments. Therein lies the first of six keys to ancient attitudes toward labor: contempt for labor equals social contempt for laborers. " Paul Veyne, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 118–19.]

13. Aristotle (Politics, 1.4) based slavery on the presupposition that there are men who are only fit for physical labor, who therefore must be dominated and directed by others. According to this order of ideas, a distinction was made between "barbarians" and "Hellenes." Likewise, the Hindu caste of the śūdras originally corresponded to the stratum of the black aboriginal race, the "enemy race" dominated by the Aryans, which had no other choice but to serve those who were "twice-born."

14. See the introduction of my Hermetic Tradition.

15. G. Villa, La filosofia del mito secondo G. B. Vico (Milan, 1949), 98–99.

16. Ibid., 102.

Chapter 16

1. J. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening.

2. Porphyry, The Life of Plotinus, 10.

3. Plotinus, Enneads, 1.2.7; 1.2.6.

4. Ibid., 1.6.9.

5. "For here too when the centers have come together they are one, but there is duality when they are separate." Ibid., 6.9.10.

6. "The perfect life, the true, real life, is in that transcendent intelligible reality, and other lives are incomplete traces of life, not perfect or pure and no more life than its opposite." Ibid., 1.4.3.

7. Ibid., 3.6.6.

8. Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, trans. E. Colledge and B. McGinn. (New York, 1982), 286.

Chapter 17

1. "Sacratos more Samnitium milites eoque candida veste et paribus candore armis insignes." History of Rome, 9.44.9. And also: "They had also called in the aid of the gods by submitting the soldiers to a kind of initiation into an ancient form of oath (ritu quodam sacramenti verusta velut initiatis militibus)." Ibid., 10.38.2.

2.  Ynglingasaga, 10.

3. The term ragna-rokkr is found in the Lokasenna (39), and it literally means "twilight of the gods." More often we encounter the term ragna-rok (Voluspa, 44), which signifies the "doom" or the "end of the gods." The term ragna-rokkr became prevalent because from the twelfth or thirteenth century on, Norse writers adapted it instead of ragna-rok. The Nordic view of the Wildes Heer corresponds to the Iranian view of Mithras, the "sleepless warrior," who at the head of the fravashi leads the fight against the enemies of the Aryan religion (Yashna, 10.10).

4.  Gylfaginning, 38.

5. R. Guénon, Le Symbolisme de la croix, 77. In reference to the Bhagavadgītā, a text written in the form of a dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and the Lord Kṛṣṇa, Guénon wrote: "Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna, who represent respectively the Self and the empirical ego, or personality and individuality, or the unconditioned ātman and the living soul (jivātmā), climbed into the same chariot, which is the vehicle of Being, considered in its manifested state. As Arjuna fights on, Kṛṣṇa drives the chariot without becoming involved in the action. The same meaning is also found in various Upaniṣads; 'the two birds sitting in the same tree,' and 'the two birds who entered into a cave.' Al Hallaj said: 'We are two souls joined together within the same body."'
     The famous seal found in the Knights Templar tradition (a horse mounted by two knights wearing a helmet and a spike, and underneath the inscription sigillum militum Christi) may be interpreted along the same lines.

6. Bhagavadgrta 3.43.

7.  Koran 4:76.

8. Ibid., 47:4.

9. Ibid., 47:37.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 47:38.

12. Ibid., 9:38.

13. lbid., 9:52.

14. Ibid., 2:216.

15. Ibid., 9:88–89.

16. Ibid., 47: 5–7.

17.  Bhagavadgītā, 4.1–2.

18. Arjuna has the title of Gudakesha, which means "Lord of sleep." Thus, he represents a warrior version of the "Awakened One"; Arjuna also ascended a "mountain" (in the Himalayas) to practice asceticism and to achieve superior warrior skills. In the Iranian tradition the attribute of "sleepless" was referred in an eminent sense to the god of light, Ahura-Mazda (Vendidad, 19.20) and to Mithras (Yashna, 10.10).

19.  Bhagavadgītā, 2.2.

20. Ibid., 2.37.

21. Ibid., 3.30.

22. Ibid. 2.38. In the Chinese tradition mention is made of the brave and virile warrior who "regards equally defeat and victory" and of his noble countenance, which is unaffected by "tumultuous passions": "When I journey inward I find a pure heart; even if I had to face a thousand or ten thousand enemies, I march against them without any fear." Mencius, 3.2.

23.  The Laws of Manu (5.98): "When a man is killed by upraised weapons in battle, in fulfillment of the duty of a ruler, instantly he completes both a sacrifice and the period of pollution caused by his death." Also (7.89): "Kings who try to kill one another in battle and fight to their utmost ability, never averting their faces, go to heaven."

24.  Bhagavadgītā, 2.16–20.

25. Ibid., 7.9–11.

26. Ibid., 11.20, 24.

27. Ibid., 11.28–29.

28. Ibid., 11.32–34.

29.  Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, 42.7.8. Along these lines we may understand the "solar" transfiguration of the divine hero Karna described in the Mahābhārata: from his body, fallen on the battlefield, a thunderbolt of light tears the heavenly vault and pierces the "sun."

30. B. Kugler, History of the Crusades (Milan, 1887). This region appears as one of the representations of the symbolic "center of the world"; in this context, though, it is mingled with motifs proper to the Nordic tradition, considering that Ayard is Asgard, the Aesir's seat described in the Eddie saga, which is often confused with Valhalla.

31. J. Michaud, The History of the Crusades (Milan, 1909).

32. Saint Bernard, De Jaude novae militiae.

33. In the Judeo-Christian belief system, Jerusalem was often considered as an image of the mysterious Salem ruled by Melchizedek.

34. F. Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, xv-xvi.

35. An analogous form of universality "through action" was achieved to a large degree by the ancient Roman civilization. Even the Greek city-states experienced something higher than their political particularisms "through action," that is, through the Olympic games and through the league of the Hellenic cities against the "barbarians."

36. The reading of the so-called war novels written by E. M. Remarque (especially All Quiet On the Western Front) reveals the contrast between the patriotic idealism and rhetoric on the one hand and the realistic results of the experience of the war among European youth. An Italian officer, in the aftermath of World War I wrote: "When war is seen at a distance it may have idealistic and knightly overtones for the enthusiastic souls and some sort of choreographic beauty for aesthetes. It is necessary that future generations learn from our generation that there is no fascination more false and no legend more grotesque than that which attributes to war any virtue or influence on progress, and an education that is not based on cruelty, revolution and brutishness. Once stripped of her magical attractive features, Bellona is more disgusting than Alcina, and the youth who died in her arms have shivered in horror at her touch. But we had to go to war." V. Coda, Dalla Bainsizza al Piave. It was only in the earlier works of Ernst Jünger, inspired by his personal experiences as a soldier in the German army, that we find again the idea that these processes may change polarity and that the most destructive aspects of modern technological war may condition a superior type of man, beyond the patriotic and "idealist" rhetoric as well as beyond humanitarianism and antimilitarism.

Chapter 18

1. Cassius Dio, Roman History, 51. 1.

2. Augustine, De civitate dei, 4.26.

3. Pindar, The Olympian Odes, 3; 10.42; Diodorus, 4.14.

4. Pindar, The Olympian Odes, 3.13; Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, 16.240.

5. Tertullian, De spectaculis, 8.

6. Lidius, De mensibus, 1.4.12.

7. The undeniable symbolism of various details found in Roman circuses is one of the traces of the presence of "sacred" knowledge in the ancient construction art.

8. In antiquity the god Sol had a temple in the middle of the circus; the circuit races were sacred to this god who was represented as steering the chariot of the sun. In Olympia there were twelve rounds (dodekagnamptos, see Pindar, Olympian Odes, 2.50) that represented the position of the sun in the zodiac. Cassius Dio relates that the Roman circus represented the sequence of the four seasons.

9. These Roman games are connected with analogous traditions found in other Inda-European stocks. During the feast of Mahāvrata, which was celebrated in ancient India during the winter solstice, a representative of the white and divine Aryan caste fought against a representative of the dark caste of the śūdras for the possession of an object symbolizing the sun. In an ancient Nordic saga we find the periodic combat between two knights, one riding a white and the other a black horse, in the proximity of a symbolic tree.

10. ''The concourse of demons," in Tertullian, De spectaculis, 8.

11. Macroblus, The Saturnalia, 1.17.25. See also the Platonic saying: "Their victory [the Olympian winners] is the nobler, since by their success the whole commonwealth is preserved." Republic, 465d.

12. Tertullian, De spectaculis, 25.

13.  Yasht, 13.23–24; 66–67.

14.  Zend Avesta, trans. S. Darmesteter, in Sacred Books of the East, ed. M. Moeller (Oxford, 1883), 179.

15. The name of yet another priestly college (the Salii) is usually derived from salire or saltare ("to climb" or "to jump"). According to the Muslim mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, "He who knows the power of dance dwells in God, since he knows that love slays."

16. E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquities grecques et romains d'apres les textes et les monuments, 6.947. The Cureti, armed dancers who engaged in orgies (arkesteres aspidephoroi), were regarded as demigods endowed with the power to initiate and also as the "child's rearers" or pandotrophoi (See J.E. Harrison, Themis [Cambridge, 1912], 23–27), that is, as the mentors of the new principle that emerges through similar experiences.

17. E. Saglio, Dictionnaire, 6.944.

18. The Nordic view, according to which battles are won thanks to the Valkyrie, expresses the idea that the outcome of a fight is determined by these powers rather than by human strength in a materialistic and individualistic sense. In the ancient Roman world we often find the idea of the manifestation of a transcendent power. This manifestation was sometimes expressed through the voice of the god Faunus that was heard by the troops before a battle and that filled the enemy with a holy terror. We also find the idea that it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice a leader in order to actualize this presence, according to the general meaning of ritual slayings; this was the rite of devotio, the sacrifice of the leader that unleashed infernal powers and the genius of terror onto the enemy. The minute the leader died, the panic and horror that corresponded to the power liberated from the body was manifested; this horror could be compared to the herfjoturr, the panic and terror that were magically transmitted by the unleashed Valkyrie to the enemy. One of the last echoes of similar meanings was found in the Japanese kamikaze during World War II; the word kamikaze referred to the suicide pilots unleashed against the enemy, and it means "divine wind." On the fuselages of their planes there was the inscription: "You are gods who are free from all human yearnings."

19. See the enigmatic saying in the Koran (2:153): "Do not say that those who were slain in the cause of Allah are dead; they are alive, although you are not aware of them." Plato also wrote: "And of those who are slain in the field, we shall say that all who fell with honor are of that golden race, who when they die, according to Hesiod, 'Dwell here on earth, pure spirits, beneficent, Guardians to shield us mortal men from harm.'" (Republic. 468e).

20. Cassius Dio, Roman History, 45.7.

21. Dionysius of Halicamassus, 1.32.5.

22. Cicero, De natura deorum, 2.3.8; Plutarch, Life of Romulus, 1.8.

23. Livy, History of Rome, 17.9; 31.5; 36.2; 42.2. Plutarch tells us: "To such a degree did the Romans make everything depend upon the will of the gods, and so intolerant were they of any neglect of omens and ancestral rites, even when attended by the greatest success, considering it of more importance for the safety of the city that their magistrates should reverence sacred things than that they should overcome their enemies." Marcellus, 4.4.

24. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 3.9.2. Servius, Ad Aeneidem, 2.244.

25. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, 8.109.19.

26. In savage populations we still find characteristic echoes of these views, which should not be considered "superstitious" provided they are properly contextualized and interpreted. According to these populations, war, in the last analysis, is a confrontation between warlocks. Victory goes to those who have the more powerful "war medicine" with every other apparent factor, including the equal courage of the warriors, being just a consequence.

27. G. De Giorgio, "La contemplazione e l"azione," La Torre, no. 7 (1930).

28. Around the year A.D. 506, during the reign of Emperor Athanasius, a Catholic bishop proposed to an Arian bishop to undergo the test of fire in order to determine which one of the two faiths was the true one. After the Arian refused, the Catholic entered the fire and exited unscathed. This power was also attributed to the priests of Apollo: super ambustam ligni struem ambulantes, non aduri tradebantur says Pliny (7.2). The same idea is also found on a higher plane: according to the ancient Iranian idea, at the "end of the world" all people will have to go through a fiery current; the "righteous" will not be harmed but the evil ones will be consumed by the flames. Bundahesh, 30.18.

29. I said "until recently" because modern metapsychical researches have established the existence of paranormal powers latent in man that can become objectively, manifested and modify the network of physical and chemical phenomena. In addition to the fact that it would have been unlikely for the practice of "divine judgment" to be continued for such a long time if no extranormal phenomenon were ever produced, the said metapsychical findings ought to modify the common opinion regarding the "superstitious" variations of the so-called divine trials.

Chapter 19

1. Hubert-Mauss, Mélange d'histoire religieuse, 207. According to the Chaldeans, the universe's eternity was divided into a series of "great years" in which the same events keep on recurring, just like winter and summer keep on recurring every "small year." If some time periods were sometimes personified as divinities or as divinities organs, this was yet another expression of the idea of the cycle as an organic unity.

2. "The durations of traditional time may be compared to numbers that in turn are regarded as the enumeration of lower unities or as sums capable of serving as units for the composition of higher numbers. Continuity is given to them by the mental operation that synthesizes their elements." Ibid., 202.

3. This idea is reflected in the Hindu view according to which a year on the earth corresponds to a day for some lesser gods; while a year of these gods' lives corresponds to a day for gods occupying a higher hierarchical level, until we reach the days and nights of Brahman, which express the cyclical unfolding of the cosmic manifestation. See The Laws of Manu 1.64–74. In the same text it is written that these cycles are repeated by the Supreme Lord "as if he were playing"; this expresses the irrelevance and the antihistoricity of the repetition in comparison to the immutable and eternal element that is manifested in it. We may also recall the biblical saying: "For a thousand years in your sight are as yesterday, now that it is past. ..." Ps. 90:4.

4. Emperor Julian, Hymn to King Helios, 148c.

5. From a traditional point of view, great reservations should be expressed about the theory of H. Wirth concerning a sacred series derived in primordial times from the astral movement of the sun as "god-year"; this series, according to Wirth, was the basis for the measurement of time, for the signs and for the roots of a common prehistoric language and also for meanings related to the cult.

6. The number twelve, characterizing the signs of the zodiac, which correspond to the Hindu āditya, appears in the number of chapters of The Laws of Manu; in the twelve great Namshan of the circular council of the Dalai Lama; in the twelve disciples of Lao-tzu (originally two, who in turn initiated another ten); in the number of the priests of several Roman collegia (such as the Arvali and the Salii); in the number of the ancilia established by Numa in return for the sign of the heavenly protection he received (twelve is also the number of vultures that gave to Romulus rather than Remus the right to give his name to the city; twelve were also the lictorians instituted by Romulus), and in the altars dedicated to Janus; in the twelve disciples of Christ and in the twelve gates of the heavenly Jerusalem; in the twelve great Hellenic and Roman deities; in the twelve judges of the Egyptian Book of the Dead; in the twelve jasper towers built on the Taoist sacred mountain named Kuen-Lun; in the twelve main Aesir and their corresponding dwellings or thrones in the Nordic tradition; in the twelve labors of Heracles; in the number of days of Sjegfried's journey and in twelve kings subjected to him; in the twelve main knights sitting at King Arthur's Round Table; and in the twelve palatines of Charlemagne. The list could go on and on.
     Traditionally the number seven refers to rhythms of development, of formation and of fulfillment in man, the cosmos, and the spirit. As far as the spiritual dimension is concerned, see the seven trials found in many initiations; the seven deeds of Rostan; the seven days Buddha spent under the "bodhi tree"; the seven cycles of seven days each necessary to learn the doctrine, according to some Buddhist traditions. While the days of biblical "creation" were believed to be seven, these "days" corresponded to the millennia of the Iranian-Chaldean traditions; these millenia were cycles, the last of which was considered a cycle of "consummation," that is, of fulfillment and resolution or destruction in a solar sense. See R. Guénon, Le Symbolisme de la croix. Thus the week corresponds to the great hebdomadary of the ages of the world, just as the solar year corresponds to the cosmic "great year." There are also many references to the development and duration of some civilizations, such as the six saecula of life attributed to the Roman world, the seventh being the saeculum of its demise; the number of the first kings of Rome; the ages of the first Manus of the present cycle according to the Hindu tradition, and so on.

7. Concerning this future, see the characteristic expressions of Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1.15.

8. Such a plane should not be confused with the magical plane, although the latter, in the last analysis, presupposes an order of knowledge deriving more or less directly from the former. A separate group consists of those rites and those celebrations, which despite their cyclical character, do not find real correspondences in nature but are rather originated by fatal events connected to a given race.

9. R. Guénon, Le Symbolisme de la croix. Also J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition.

10. This should refer mainly to civilizations of a higher kind. When talking about the earth, I will mention the existence of an opposite orientation in the primitive connections between man and earth.

11. M. Eliade, Manuel d'histoire des religions (Paris 1949), 345; see The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton, 1954). Eliade correctly remarked that at the time of the expansion of the Christian ecumene, to raise or plant a cross (today this is done with a flag) in every new country added to this ecumene.

12. M. Guizot, Essais sur l'histoire de France (Paris, 1868).

Chapter 20

1. Further metaphysical and mythical references are found in J. Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: among the philosophers of the Sung dynasty we find the teaching that Heaven "produces" men while the Earth "produces" women; therefore woman must be subjected to man as the Earth is subjected to Heaven.

2. In the erotic symbolism of these traditions the same meaning is expressed through the figuration of the divine couple as they engage in the so-called viparīta-maithuna, an intercourse in which the male is still while the śakti moves her body.

3. "Apart from their husbands women cannot sacrifice or undertake a vow or fast; it is because a wife obeys her husband that she is exalted in heaven." The Laws of Manu 5.155. It is not possible in this context to discuss the meaning of female priesthood and to explain why it does not contradict the abovementioned example. Female priesthood traditionally had a lunar character; rather than representing another path available to women, it expressed an affirmation of feminine dharma as an absolute elimination of any personal principle so as to make room for the voice of the oracle and of the god. Further on I will discuss the alteration proper of decadent civilizations in which the lunar, feminine element usurps the hierarchical peak. We must also consider the sacral and initiatory use of women in the "path of sex."

4. In an ancient Chinese text, the Niu-kie-tsi-pien (5) we read: "When a woman leaves the house of her father to join the house of her husband, she loses everything, including her name. She does not own anything in her own right; whatever she has and whatever she is belongs to her husband." And in the Niu-hien-shu it is said that a woman must be in the house "as a shadow and as a mere echo." Quoted in S. Trovatelli. Le civilta e le legislazioni dell'antico Oriente (Bologna, 1890), 157–58.

5. Analogous customs are also found among other Indo—European stocks: among the Thracians, the Greeks, the Scythians, and Slavs. In the Inca civilization the suicide of widows, though it was not decreed by a law, was nevertheless common practice; those women who had not the courage to commit suicide or believed they had good reasons not to commit it, were despised by their community.

6. "The woman who is not unfaithful to her husband but restrains her mind and heart, speech, and body reaches her husband's worlds after death, and good people call her a virtuous woman." The Laws of Manu 9.29.

7. "In this fire the gods offer a person. From this oblation the man arises having the color of light." Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.2.14. See also Proclus, In Timeum, 5.331b; 2.65b.

8. In The Laws of Manu it is written: "A girl, a young woman or even an old woman should not do anything independently, even in her own house. In childhood a woman should be under her father's control, in youth under her husband's, and when her husband is dead, under her sons"' (5.147–48). And also: "A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities" (5.154).

9. The sacral offering of the body and of virginity itself has been sanctioned in a rigorous form in what amounts to yet another cause of scandal for our contemporaries, namely, in sacred prostitution, which was practiced in ancient Syrian, Lician, Lidian, and Theban temples. The woman was not supposed to offer her virginity out of a passional motive toward a given man; she was supposed to give herself to the first man who tossed her a sacred coin within the sacred enclosure, as if it were a sacred offering to the goddess of the temple. A woman was supposed to get married only after this ritual offering of her body. Herodotus (The Histories, 1.199) noted that: "The woman goes with the first man who throws her a coin, and rejects no one. When she has gone with him, and so satisfied the goddess, she returns home, and from that time forth no gift however great will prevail with her."

10. According to some statistics gathered in the 1950s (C. Freed and W. Kroger), an estimated 75 percent of North-American women are "sexually anesthetized," while their "libido" has allegedly shifted in the direction of exhibitionist narcissism. In Anglo-Saxon women, the neurotic and typically feminine sexual inhibition was typical of their culture and was due to their being victims of a false ideal of "dignity" in addition to the prejudices of puritan moralism. The reaction of the so-called sexual revolution has only led the masses to a regimen of quick, easy, and cheap sex treated as an item of consumption.

Chapter 21

1. J. Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love, especially chapters 5 ("Sacred Ceremonies and Evocations") and 6 ("Sex in the Realm of Initiations and Magic").

2. In the Upaniṣads there are some expressions that describe sexual intercourse: "With power and glory I give you glory." Also: 'This man (ama) am I; that woman (sa), thou! That woman thou, this man am I. I am the heaven; thou the earth! Come, let us two together clasp! Together let us semen mix, a male, a son for to procure." (Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6.4.8; 6.4.20–22.)

3. J. Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love.

4. "Of the seed and the womb, the seed is said to be more important, for the offspring of all living beings are marked by the mark of the seed. Whatsoever sort of seed is sown in a field prepared at the right season, precisely that sort of seed grows in it, manifesting its own particular qualities." The Laws of Manu, 9.35–36. On this basis the caste system even practiced hypergamy: the man from a higher caste was allowed to marry women of lower castes, no matter how high his caste was (The Laws of Manu, 3.13). It is possible to find among savage populations the idea of the duality of the blood and the spirit that is passed on exclusively through the male lineage.

5. In the Hindu tradition the male semen is often called vīzya, a term that in texts describing ascetical practices (especially Buddhist) is also used to designate that "upward-streaming" force that has the power of spiritually renewing all the human faculties. As a sign of distinction Śaivite ascetics and yogis carry the phallus emblem around their necks. The reason why in places like Lydia, Phrygia, and Etruria tombs were ornate with phalli or with statues of an ithyphallic form was to express the association between the virile force and the power of resurrection. Likewise, in ancient Hellenism. the ithyphallic Hermes represented the resurrected primordial man "who did, does, and will stand" through the various phases of the manifestation (Hippolytus, Philosophumena, 5.8.14). An echo of this reverberates in an ancient Roman superstition that regarded the phallus as an amulet capable of warding off fascinations and nefarious influences.

Chapter 22

1. Hesiod, Works and Days, 5.109 ff.

2. The Laws of Manu, 1.81–83.

3. Dio Chrysostom, Orationes, 36.39.

4. Daniel 2:31–45.

5. Cicero, De legibus 2.11: "Antiquitas proxime accedit ad deos" (Ancient times came very close to the gods).

6. Gen. 6: 4–13.

7. Plato, Critias, 110c; 120d–e; 121a–b: "As long as the divine element in their nature survived, they obeyed the laws and loved the divine to which they were akin. But when the divine element in them became weakened by frequent admixture with mortal stock, and their human traits became predominant, they ceased to be able to carry their spiritual legacy with moderation."

8. Douglas Dewar, The Transformist Illusion (1957).

9. J. de Maistre, Soires de St. Petersburg (Paris, 1924), 1.63.

10. Ibid., 1.82. One of the things de Maistre points out is that the ancient languages are more essential, organic, and logical than modern ones; they reveal a hidden formative, nonhuman principle, especially when the ancient or "primitive" languages obviously contain fragments of even older languages that have either been lost or fallen into disuse, an eventuality hinted at by Plato himself.

Chapter 23

1. Purity of heart, justice, wisdom, and adherence to sacred institutions are qualities that characterized every caste during the first age. See Viṣṇu Purāṇa 1.6.

2.  Introduzione alla magia (Genoa, 1955) 2.80 ff.

3. Hesiod, Works and Days, 5.108–202.

4.  Vendidad, 2.5.

5.  Yasna, 9.4. Immortality in this context should be regarded as the condition enjoyed by an indestructible soul; therefore there is no contradiction with the longevity that in other traditions characterizes the material or physical life of men during the first age.

6.  Gilgamesh, 10. In Gen. 6:3, a finite life span (one hundred and twenty years) appeared only at a given moment, thus putting an end to a state of tension between the divine spirit and mankind; that moment corresponds to the beginning of the "Titanic" cycle (third age). In several traditions of primitive populations we find the idea that one never dies because of natural circumstances, since death is always an accident and a violent and unnatural event that should rather be explained through the intervention of adverse magical powers; in this belief we find an echo of the memory of the origins, although in a superstitious form.

7. P. W. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances (London, 1879), 106–11.

8. Pindar, The Olympian Odes, 1.1.

9.  Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 13.4.7.

10. "The god who fashioned you mixed gold in the composition of those among you who are fit to rule, so that they are of the most precious quality." Republic, 415d. The golden symbol was applied again (468e) to the heroes, with an explicit reference to the primordial race.

11. Odin's royal palace in Asgard "shines like a room covered with gold, on the top of Gimle." Voluspa, 64.

12.  Gylfaginning, 52.

13.  Vendidad, 1.3.

14. Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo, 34–35.

15. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, 2.11.

Chapter 24

1. R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, chaps. 3, 4. The idea of a magnetic "polar" mountain, often located on an island, can be found in different forms and adaptations in Chinese, medieval Nordic, and Islamic legends. See E. Taylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1920).

2. The hypothesis of an austral rather than a boreal origin can be ascribed to the traditions concerning Lemuria, which, however, is connected to a cycle so ancient that it cannot be adequately considered in this context. [For an interesting discussion of this theme see J. Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1993).]

3.  Lieh-tzu, 5. Plato himself associated mythical catastrophes such as the one caused by Phaëthon with a "change in the course of the stars," that is, with the different appearance of the heavenly vault that resulted from the shift of the terrestrial axis.

4. G. B. Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas: Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of Many Vedic Texts and Legends (Poona, 1903).

5. In a Hindu rite (anjali), the homage paid to traditional texts is performed while facing north (The Laws of Manu 2.70), as if in memory of the place of origin of the transcendent wisdom contained in them. In Tibet, the north is believed to be the origin of a very ancient spiritual tradition, of which the magical formulas of the indigenous Bön religion allegedly are the degenerated residues.

6.  Vendidad, 2.20.

7. Ibid., l.3–4.

8. Jordanes, Historia Gotorum: "Sandza insula quasi officina gentium aut certe velut nationum."

9.  Gylfaginning, 51. The Eddie representation of the North as Niflheim, the "world of mist and darkness," inhabited by giants and by frost, was most likely developed in a later period by stocks that had already migrated to the South; likewise, the frozen Ariyana Vaego was regarded as the seat of the dark forces of the evil creation of Angra Mainyu, who personally came from the North to fight against Zarathustra. Vendidad, 19.1.

10.  Lieh-tzu, 5.

11. The four Quiche ancestors probably correspond to the Celtic idea of the "Island of the Four Lords," and to the Chinese idea of the faraway Ku-she island, inhabited by transcendent men and by four lords (R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, 71–72). Guénon recalled the division of ancient Ireland into four kingdoms that allegedly reproduced the division proper of "a land situated farther North, today unknown and maybe gone forever" and the repeated occurrence in Ireland of the symbol of the "center" or "pole," which the Greeks called omphalos. I will add that the black Stone of Destiny, which designated legitimate kings and which was one of the mystical objects brought to Ireland by the race of the Tuatha dé Danaan, who themselves came from an Atlantic or North Atlantic land, had the same value as a regal "polar" symbol in the double meaning of the word.

12. Guénon, in his Le Roi du monde (ch. 10), made some astute observations on the relationship that traditionally existed between Thule and the figurations of the Big Dipper, which is connected with the polar symbolism.

13. Pliny, Historia naturalis, 4.30.

14. According to Strabo (Geographia, 1.6.2), Thule was six days of navigation, north of (Great) Britain.

15. Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo, 4.281; Pliny, 4.89. Around the fourth century B.C., Hecateus of Abdera said that Great Britain was inhabited by "Hyperboreans," who are identified with the proto-Celts; these people were credited with erecting the prehistoric temple of Stonehenge.

16.  Odyssey, 1.50; 12.244. Here too, because of the connections with Zeus's and the Hesperides' garden, there are several obvious interpolations with the memory of the later Atlantic seat.

17. Plutarch, De facie in orbe Junae, 26. Plutarch says that beyond other islands, further north, there the seat still exists in which Kronos, the god of the Golden Age, sleeps on a rock that shines like gold and where birds bring him ambrosia.

18. It is possible that Ogygia, composed of the Gaelic roots og ("young" and "sacred") and iag ("island"), refers to the "Sacred Land of Youth," to the Tir na mBeo, the "Land of the Living" spoken of in Nordic legends, which in turn corresponds to Avalon, the original seat of the Tuatha dé Danaan.

19.  The Divine Institutes, 7.16.3. These emergences continue in the later mystical and hermetic literature. Besides Boehme, G. Postel in his Compendium cosmographicum says that "heaven" (a mystical and theological transposition of the primordial homeland) is found underneath the North Pole.

20. Virgil, Eclogues, 4.5–10.

Chapter 25

1. This is the legendary kingdom of Uphaz and, in part, the prehistoric African civilization as it was imagined by Frobenius; by confusing the partial center with the original seat of which Uphaz was probably a colony, he identified it with the seat of the Platonic Atlantis. See L. Frobenius, Die atlantische Götterlehre (Jena, 1926).

2. In China there have been recent discoveries of the vestiges of a great prehistoric civilization, similar to the Egyptian-Minoan, which was likely created by these migratory waves.

3. While on the one hand the legend of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders depicts the sentence of the Titan Atlas, who according to some (Servius. Ad Aeneidem, 4.247) participated in the conflict against the Olympian gods, on the other hand it may represent a symbol indicating the function of "pole," support, and spiritual axis the Atlanteans inherited from the Hyperboreans. In his exegesis, the Christian theologian and Church father Clement of Alexandria wrote: "Atlas is an impassible pole; it may even be an immobile sphere, and maybe, in the best of cases, it alludes to the state of unmoved immortality."

4. See the works of H. Wirth for the attempt to utilize the researches on blood types in order to define the two races that emerged from the original stock.

5. A. Mossa, Le origini della civilita ' mediterranea (Milan, 1910).

6. See D. Merezhkovsky, Das Geheimnis des Westens (Leipzig and Zurich, 1929), in which there are several valid references to what the rituals and the symbols of the Atlanteans might have been.

7. See for instance Yama, Yima, Noah, Deucalion, Shamashnapishtim, Romulus, the solar hero Karṇa in the epic Mahābhārhata, and so on. Just as Manu, son of Vivasvat, the heir of the solar tradition who survived the Flood and created the laws of a new cycle (The Laws of Manu) had for a brother Yama (compare with the Iranian Yima, the solar king who escaped the Flood too), who was "the god of the dead"; likewise Minos, whose name corresponds etymologically to Manu, often appears as the counterpart of Radamant, who is the king of the "Island of the Blessed" or of the "Heroes."

8. According to some (Piganiol, Les Origines de Rome [Paris, 1899]) the appearance of the Olympian gods next to the feminine deities of the earth was the result of the mixture of the cults of northern origin with the cults of southern origin.

9. Hesiod, Theogony, 215.

10. W. Ridgeway, The Early Age of Greece (Cambridge, 1901), correctly pointed out that the belief in western dwellings of immortality was typical of those people who used the essentially Northern-Aryan ritual of cremation and not merely of burial.

11.  Gilgamesh, 10.65–77; 11.296–98.

12. Just as among the Hellenes the localization of the dwelling of the immortals alternated between the North and the West, likewise in some ancient Egyptian traditions the Fields of Peace and the Land of Triumph that the deified soul of the deceased reached by first going through an existing passage in the "mountain," were also thought to be located in the North.

13. See Lieh-tiu (3) concerning the journey to the West made by the emperor Mu, who reached the "mountain" (Kuen-Luo) and met Si Wang Mu, the "Mother-Queen of the West."

14. Alan of Lille (Prophetia anglicana Merlini) compared the place where King Arthur disappeared with that in which Elijah and Enoch disappeared and from which they will return one day. In regard to the land of the Hyperboreans, classical antiquity believed in the existence of beings (often kings such as Kroisos) who were taken there by Apollo.

15. Enoch, 24.1–6; 25.4–6.

16. In the Chaldean redaction of the myth, the gods ordered Atrachasis to rescue the sacred writings of the previous era from the flood by "burying them": they were conceived as the "residual seeds" from which everything else will grow again.

17. According to the Iranian tradition, King Yima built a refuge (vara), which is often portrayed as "subterranean," in order to save the seeds of all living things. Vendidad, 2.22.

18. See R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, chaps. 7–8.

19. In the Irish sagas some of the Tuatha, after their defeat by the Milesians, withdrew to the "western paradise" of Avalon, others chose underground dwellings beneath mounds or hills (sidhe), hence the name Aes Sidhe, "the people of the hills." According to a Mexican tradition, in the caves of Chapultepec lies the entrance to the subterranean world into which King Huemac II disappeared and from which he will emerge one day in order to rebuild his kingdom.

20. Pindar, The Pythian Odes, 10.29.

21. Plutarch, De facie in orbe lunae, 26. In antiquity sleep was believed to neutralize the physical senses and to awaken the inner senses, thus naturally creating the conditions for contacts with the invisible dimension.

22. The Book of Lieh-tzu, trans. A.C. Graham (New York, 1960), 34.

Chapter 26

1. See R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, chap. 2. From an analysis of the geographical distribution of the swastika on the earth prepared by T. Wilson (The Swastika: The Earliest Known Symbol in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1896), while it seems that this sign was not proper only to the Indo-European races as it was supposed at first, nevertheless we find a distribution that largely corresponds to the Northern-Atlantic migrations to the west (America) and to the east (Europe).

2.  Vendidad, 1.4.

3. This was the opinion of H. Wirth. The term mu is often found in the Maya civilization, which may be considered a residue of the Southern cycle. The seat of this cycle was a very ancient continent that included Atlantis and perhaps stretched to the Pacific. It seems that in the Mayan tablets of the Troana Codex, mention is made of a certain Mu, a queen or divine woman who traveled west as far as Europe. Ma or Mu was also the name of the main Mother goddess of ancient Crete.

4. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances, 108.

5. Hesiod, Works and Days, 130–32.

6. In the medieval legend of monks who found a golden city and the prophets who never died in the middle of the Atlantic, mention is made of a statue of a woman in the middle of the sea, made of "copper" (Venus's metal) pointing the way.

7.  Odyssey, 1.50; 7.245, 257; 22.336. We may connect this with what Strabo wrote (Geographia, 4.4.5) concerning the island close to Britain in which the cult of Demeter and Core was as predominant as in the Pelasgic Aegean basin. While Ovid made of Anna an Atlantean nymph, Anna or Anna Perenna is but a personification of the food that bestows immortality (in Sanskrit: anna), which is often associated with the western Elysium.

8. The royal Mother of the West also appears in connection with the "mountain" Kuen-Lun; she possesses the elixir of immortality and according to the legend she bestows immortal life to kings such as Wang-Mu. In this Chinese view we find a contrast between two components; the pure western land, the seat of the mother, and the kingdom of Amitabha, from which women are rigorously excluded.

9. R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, chap. 10. The Hebrew term baithel or bethel, which corresponds to omphalos, means "the house of God."

10. Arnobius, The Case Against the Pagans. 11.5.

11. ''To teach with kindly benevolence, not to lose one's temper and avenge the unreasonableness of others, that is the virile energy of the South that is followed by the well-bred man. To sleep on a heap of arms and untanned skins, to die unflinching and as if dying were not enough, that is the virile energy of the North that is followed by the brave man." Chung-yung, 10.4.

12. Having suggested that the symbolism of the solstices has a "polar" character, while the symbolism of the equinoxes is referred to the western and eastern direction and to the "Atlantic" civilization, I think it is interesting to consider the meaning of some equinoctial feasts in relation to the themes typical of Southern civilizations; in this regard the exegesis of Emperor Julian (Hymn to the Mother of the Gods, l73c–d; l75a–b) is very significant. When an equinox occurs, the sun seems to escape from its orbit and law and to get lost in the unlimited; at that time the sun is at its "antipolar" and "anti-Olympian" peak. This tendency toward evasion and escapism corresponds to the pathos of the promiscuous feasts that some people celebrated during the spring equinox in the name of the Great Mother; these feasts were sometimes connected with the myth of the "castration" of her solar son-lover.

Chapter 27

1. A reading of Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht (1897) will show the extent to which I have employed the findings of this scholar and the extent to which I have integrated them in a wider and more up-to-date order of ideas.

2. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 41; 33. Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotheca historica, 1.27) related that in Egypt the queen enjoyed greater powers and was given higher honors than the king, to reflect the fact that Isis survived Osiris and that she was credited with the resurrection of the god and with the bestowal of many gifts to mankind (since she embodied the immortal principle and knowledge). I would add that this view reflects the decadence of the primordial Egyptian civilization.

3. Bachofen, Mutterecht, chap. I. Herodotus says that originally the Licians (the primordial inhabitants of Crete) adopted their mothers' rather than their fathers' names.

4. Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus, 1.9–15.

5. Dio Chrysostom, Orationes, 4.66. Although the modern interpretations that see in this ritual the slaying of the "spirit of vegetation" are typical of the whims of the ethnologists, nevertheless we find a predominant chthonic character in these Sacchean rituals that is found among several other peoples. Philo of Biblos recalled that Kronos sacrificed his son after putting the regal robe on him; in this context, Kronos is not the king of the Golden Age, but he represents time, which in later ages gains power over all forms of life and from which the new Olympian stock manages to escape only thanks to a stone. The sacrifice recalls the ephemeral character of every life, even when it has a regal dignity. While in the Sacchean feasts the role of the king was played by a prisoner sentenced to death—just as, according to the truth of the Mother, everybody is sentenced to die at their birth—this may contain a deep meaning.

6. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 3.7.2. An analogous change of sex occurred at Argos during the feast of the Hibristics, and also in the marriage ritual that was retained in some ancient traditions or employed by some primitive populations that are the degenerated remnants of lost civilizations.

7. The "gods," according to Varro, are beings of light and the day. Heaven is at the origins of all things and it expresses the highest power. The root of Zeus, as that of Jupiter (the Deus Pater), is the same as that for deva, Dyaus, and similar words, that refer to the splendor of the sky and the brightness of the day.

8. I am referring to cases in which this attitude was not typical only of the inferior strata of a civilization and the exoteric aspect of a tradition, and in which it did not even occur in a given ascetical path as a transitory phase, but formed all relationships with the divine.

9. "For Selene is the last of the heavenly spheres that Athena fills with wisdom; and by her aid Selene beholds the intelligible that is higher than the heavens, and adorns with its forms the realm of matter that lies below her, and thus she does away with its savagery and confusion and disorder." Emperor Julian, Hymn to King Helios, 150a.

10. Bachofen's views, which in many regards are true from a traditional point of view, should be rejected or at least integrated whenever they take as a reference point and assume as an original and even older element that which is connected with the Earth and with the Mother; these views posit something like a spontaneous evolution from the inferior to the superior in those cases in which there are forms of "mixture" between the inferior (the South) and the superior (the Hyperborean element).

11. A characteristic example is the legend of Jurupary, which reflects the sense of the recent Peruvian civilization. Jurupary was a hero who appeared in societies ruled by "women" to reveal a secret solar law, reserved to men alone, to be taught in every nation, against the ancient law of the mothers. Jurupary, like Quetzalcoatl, eventually withdrew to the sacred land situated east of America.

12. The Saturnalia, by evoking the Golden Age in which Saturn reigned, celebrated the promiscuity and universal brotherhood that were believed to characterize this age. In reality, this belief represents a deviation from traditional truth, and the Saturn who was evoked was not the king of the Golden Age, but rather a chthonic demon; this can be established by the fact that he was represented in the company of Ops, a form of the earth goddess.

13. A. Rosenberg in The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Munich, 1930), was right to claim, against Bachofen, that it is necessary to differentiate and not to put civilizations in a linear succession; that the "civilization of the Mother," which Bachofen thought to be the oldest stage from which Uranian and patriarchical societies "evolved" as superior and more recent forms, in reality was a heterogeneous, independent world, inhabited by other races that eventually clashed or came in contact with Nordic traditions. Rosenberg was also right to criticize Wirth's association, concerning the Northern-Atlantic cycle, of the solar cult with the cult of the Mother, which consistently presents chthonic and lunar, rather than solar, characteristics. Such confusions are driven by both the temporal distance between us and those events, and by their assumption of mythical forms; in many traditions the memories of the Arctic cycle are fused together with the memories of the Atlantic cycle.

Chapter 28

1. Plato. Symposium, 189c2–d6. Concerning the theme of the "pair," we may recall that according to Plato the primordial woman Kleito generated three couples in the mythical Atlantis; this corresponds to the Mexican tradition describing the cycle of the Waters, Atonatiu, in which the serpent woman Ciuatcoatl generated a large number of twins. The Mexican cycle ended with a deluge that corresponds in the smallest details (survival of the seeds of all living things, the sending forth of a vulture that does not return and of a hummingbird that returns with a green branch in its beak) to the biblical account.

2. "To the perceptive eye the depth of their degeneration was clear enough, but to those whose judgment of true happiness is defective, they seemed, in their pursuit of unbridled ambition and power, to be at the height of their fame and fortune." Plato, Critias.

3. The punishment met by Prometheus contains symbolic elements that reveal its esoteric meaning: an "eagle" ate his liver. The eagle or the sparrow hawk, birds of prey sacred to Zeus and to Apollo (in Egypt to Horus, among the Nordic people to Odin-Wotan, in India to Agni and Indra), were among the symbols of the regal "glory," in other words, of the divine fire that Prometheus stole. The liver was considered the seat of a feisty spirit and of the "irascible soul." The shift of the divine force onto the plane of merely human and impure qualities that are not adequate to it was what consumed Prometheus and was his punishment as well. I have already mentioned the double aspect in the symbolism of the Titan Atlas in which the idea of a "polar" function and of a punishment are seen as interchangeable.

4. Hesiod,. Works and Days, 129–42; 143–55.

5.  Gylfaginning, 5.

6. Hesiod, Works and Days, 154.

7.  Gylfaginning, 5 I.

8. Ibid., 34. From the mention that the two wolves were generated by a giantess (Gylfaginning, 12) we can see the inner connection between the various "stages of decadence."

9. Concerning the "wolf" and the "Age of the Wolf," here portrayed as synonymous with the Bronze Age and with the "Dark Age," we must keep in mind that this symbolism also has an opposite meaning: the wolf was associated with Apollo and with the light (ly-kos, lyke), not only among the Hellenes, but also among the Celts. The positive meaning of the wolf appears in the Roman cycle, in which the wolf and the eagle appeared as the symbols of the "eternal city." In the exegesis of Emperor Julian (Hymn to King Helios, 154b) the wolf was associated with the solar principle in its regal aspect. The double meaning of the symbol of the wolf is but an example of the degeneration of an older cult, the symbols of which take on a negative meaning in the following age. The wolf—in the Nordic tradition—that was related to the primordial, warrior element takes on a negative meaning when this element loses control and becomes unleashed.

10. This bridge, which recalls the "pontifical'' symbol mentioned in chapter 1, collapses when Muspell's sons "go and ride it"; the lord of Muspell is Surtr, who comes from the south to battle the Aesir. Thus, we have yet another mention of a southern location from which destructive forces will descend upon the world.

11. In the Germanic sagas the same theme appeared in the conflict between the original figure of Brunhild, queen of the island, and Siegfried, who defeated her.

12. Such as unbelief, pride, sodomy, burial of the dead, witchcraft, and cremation. Vendidad, 1.12.

13. Plato, Symposium, 14–15; 26–29; Phaedrus, 244–45; 251–57b.

14.  Symposium, 26.

15. For an in-depth analysis of this positive possibility of human sexuality, see my Eros and the Mysteries of Love.

16. Bachofen identified three stages in the cult of Dionysus that represent this god respectively as a chthonic being, a lunar nature, and a luminous god associated with Apollo, although with an Apollo conceived as the sun subject to change and passions. In this latter aspect Dionysus may fall into the group of heroes who vanquished the Amazons. More than in the Thracian-Hellenic myth, however, the highest possibility of the Dionysian principle was upheld in the Indo-Aryan myth of the soma, a heavenly and lunar principle that induces a divine intoxication (mada) and that is related with the regal animal, the eagle, and with a struggle against female demons.

17. Heraclitus, frag. B15 Diehl.

18. Hesiod, Works and Days, 156–73.

19. During his quest for the gift of everlasting life, the Chaldean hero Gilgamesh uses violence and threatens to knock down the door of the garden filled with "divine trees." A feminine figure, Sabitu, had closed this door to him.

20. Apollodorus, Bibl., 2.122.

21. In the saga of the Grail, the sacred "heroic" type corresponds to the one who can sit in the empty place in the assembly of the knights without being struck by lightning.

22. See J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition, chap. 19.

23. Pindar, The Pythian Odes, 10.2.

24. Pindar, The Olympian Odes, 3.

25. It is important to distinguish the valid elements that Dionysism may contain in the context of the so-called Way of the Left Hand (in relation to a special initiatory use of sex), from the meaning that Dionysism has in the context of a morphology of civilizations.

Chapter 29

1. For an overview of the notion of "Aryan," see my Sintesi di dottrina della razza.

2. In the Ṛg Veda the South is the direction of the sacrifice performed in honor of the forefathers (pitṛ-yāna); conversely, the North is the direction of the sun and of the gods (deva-yāna).

3. C. Dawson, The Age of the Gods.

4. According to an Inca law, every new king had the duty to increase the size of the empire and to replace the indigenous cults with the solar cult.

5. See L. Spence, The Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru (London, 1914). Analogous legends are found in North America too. From scientific researches on the blood types applied to the problem of the race, it seems that among the Indians of North America and the Pueblos the blood remnants are more similar than that between Scandinavian people.

6. F. Schuun, Études traditionnelles (1949), 3.64.

7. See H. Schmidt, Prähistorisches aus Ostasien (1924), concerning the possibility of civilizing actions of a Western origin during the Neolithic in China.

8. E. A. Wallis Budge. Egypt in the Neolithic and Archaic Periods (London, 1902), 164–65.

9. The tradition reported by Eusebius mentions an interval of time following the "divine" dynasty, which was characterized by lunar months. There is also an undeniable relation between Set and the feminine element, both because Set was mainly conceived as a female and also because while Isis—who will be the chief goddess during the Egyptian decadence—was portrayed in search of the dead Osiris, by disobeying Horus she freed Set. See Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 13.

10. Apuleius, Metamorphosis, 11.5.

11. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 33 (Osiris is associated with the waters); 41 (Osiris is associated with the lunar world); 33–34 (Osiris is associated with Dionysus and with the moist principle); 42 (Horus is associated with the terrestrial world). Osiris even came to be regarded as "Hysiris," namely as the son of Isis (34).

12. The relationship was very different in ancient Egyptian society. Trovatorelli (Civilta'e legislazione dell'antico Oriente, 136–38) mentions the figure of Ra-em-ke; the royal woman is smaller than man, to indicate inferiority and submission, and she is represented prostrated behind him. Only in a later period Osiris assumed the abovementioned lunar character and Isis appeared as the "Living One" in the eminent sense of the word, and as the "mother of the gods." Traces of the earlier period are documented by Bachofen (Mutterrecht, 68) and by Herodotus (The Histories, 2.35), according to whom there were no priestesses in the cult of male or female deities.

13. Texts quoted by K. G. Bittner, Magie, Mutter aller Kultur (Munich, 1930), 140–43 and by Merezhkovsky, Mystères de l'Orient, 163.

14. Herodotus, The Histories, 2.50; 2.171.

15. Egypt, unlike Babylon, ignored the notions of "sin" and "repentance"; Egyptians remained standing before their gods, while Babylonians prostrated themselves.

16. Originally Israel was not a race, but a people, or an ethnical mixture of various elements. This was a typical case in which a tradition "created" a race, and especially a race of the soul.

17. Originally the prophets (nebiim) were possessed people who, through a natural disposition or through artificial means achieved a state of excitement in which they felt dominated and guided by a higher power, superior to their own wills. When they spoke it was no longer themselves but the spirit of God who made utterances. See J. Reville, Le Prophétisme hébreux (Paris, 1906). Thus the prophets were regarded by the priestly caste as raving lunatics; opposed to the prophet (nabi) originally there was the higher and "Olympian" figure of the seer (roeh): "In former times in Israel, anyone who sent to consult God used to say: 'Come, let us go to the seer,' for he who is now calledprophet was formerly called seer." 1 Sam. 9:9.

18. Some recent archaeological excavations have brought to light the vestiges of a pre-Aryan Hindu civilization similar to the Sumerian, which supplied the main elements to the civilizations of the southeastern Mediterranean cycle. In relation to the Aryan element, in India the attribute used for salvific deities and heroes is hari and harit, a term which means both "the golden one" (in relation to the primordial cycle: Apollo, Horus, etc.) and the "blond god."

19.  Mahābhārata; Viṣṇu Purāṇa, 4.8.

20. Ibid., 4.3.

21. See for instance the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. There is an interesting tradition concerning a lunar dynasty, which through soma, was associated with the priestly caste and the telluric, vegetal kingdom. This dynasty usurped the solar ritual (rājasūya), became violent, and attempted to kidnap the divine woman Tara; this caused the outbreak of a war between gods and asura. Viṣṇu-Purāṇa 4.6.

22. J. Evola, The Yoga of Power.

23. J. Woodroffe, Shakti and Shakta (Madras, 1929).

24. M. Eliade, Patanjali and Yoga (New York, 1975).

25.  Majjhima Nikāya (The Middle-Length Sayings), 1.1.

26. For a systematic exposition based on the texts and on the historical milieu of the early Buddhist doctrine of awakening, see my Doctrine of Awakening.

27. The same type of involution occurred in many versions of Buddhism, notably in Amidism, which eventually became a "religion."

28.  Vendidad. 19.2.

29. The reason why the ancient Iranians did not practice cremation, unlike several other Nordic-Aryan stocks, was that they believed that the corpse corrupted the sacredness of fire. See W. Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece (Cambridge, 1901).

30.  Vendidad, 19.5; Yasht, 19.89: "The fiend-smiter will come up to life out of the lake Kasava, from the region of the dawn, to free the world from death and decay, corruption and rottenness . . . the dead shall rise and immortality commence,"

Chapter 30

1. Herodotus (Histories 1.56; 8.44) regarded the early Ionian inhabitants of Athens as Pelasgians and called their language "barbarous," that is, non-Hellenic.

2. W. Ridgeway, The Early Age of Greece (Cambridge, 1901), 1.337–406; 407, 541. This work contains several valuable insights regarding the separation of the Nordic component from the Pelasgic component within Hellenic civilization, even though the author emphasizes the ethnic more than the spiritual opposition between these components.

3. Callimachus. Hymn to Zeus, 5.9.

4. Herodotus, Histories, 2.50. There are two traditions concerning the Pelasgian Minos: in the first he appears as a just king and as a divine legislator (his name has an interesting etymological similarity to the Hindu Manu, the Egyptian Manes, the Germanic Mannus, and maybe the Latin Numa); in the second he appears as a violent and demonic power ruling over the waters. The opposition between the Hellenes and Minos refers to the latter tradition.

5. Thus wrote Bachofen: "Gynaecocracy is part of the legacy of those races that Strabo (7.321; 7.572) regarded as barbarous and as the early pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece and of Asia Minor, whose repeated migrations began ancient history just as the migratory waves of northern populations during later times began the history of our times." Mutterrecht, 43. Another historian, Domenico Mosso (Origini della civilta' mediterranea, 128) showed that the priestesses of the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada were in charge of the most important functions of the priesthood, while men only had a secondary role in it. Mosso also indicated that the Minoan-Pelasgian religion retained its matriarchical character for a long time and that the privileged status of women, not only in the rites but also in social life (Escursioni nel Mediterraneo, 216, 221),characterized both the Minoan and the Etruscan civilizations.

6. The Olympian Zeus, after defeating the Titans and their allies, confined them to Tartarus or Erebus, which is the location where "Atlas" was kept prisoner and also the seat of Hecate, one of the forms of the Pelasgian Goddess.

7. See J.E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1903), 4–10; 120; 162. In this work there are several valid observations regarding the opposition between an Achaean Olympian ritual and a chthonic ritual within the Greek religion.

8. See Ridgeway, Early Age of Greece (506 ff.; 521–25), which shows the opposition between the cremation practices of northern Aryan origin and the burial practices of Greek-Pelasgic origin; this difference reflects the Uranian and the telluric views of the afterlife. The cremation of corpses was practiced by those who wanted to remove once and for all the psychic residues of the "deceased," since these residues were regarded as baleful influences, or by those who imagined for the soul of the "hero" a dwelling totally removed from the earth; this dwelling could be reached only after the last connection with the living (i.e., the corpse) was destroyed as if through an extreme purification. The burial ritual expresses the return of "earth to earth" and the dependency on the origins conceived in a telluric fashion. In Homer's times this ritual was virtually unknown, just like the idea of a "hell" and its torments.

9. Herodotus (Histories, 2.81) did not distinguish Orpheus from Bacchus; if Dio (Roman History) relates the modifications Orpheus allegedly introduced into the orgiastic rituals, this may be a modification in a Pythagorean sense (Orpheus as musician, or the idea of harmony), which, however, did not alter its fundamental character. According to some Orpheus came from Crete, that is from an Atlantic-Pelasgic center; others, by identifying him with Pythagoras himself, see him as a descendant of the Atlanteans.

10. Harrison (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 120; 162) identified those festivals in which the feminine theme was predominant with the forms of magical rituals of purification that were typical of the ancient chthonic cult; it is likely that they constituted the germ of a certain aspect of the Mysteries. The notion of purification and expiation, which was virtually unknown in the Olympian cult, was a dominant theme in the inferior stratum. Later on, some kind of compromise and sublimation took place. Once the aristocratic idea of divinity as a natural state was lost (the heroes were mainly such by virtue of their divine origins), what ensued was the idea of a mortal man who yearned for immortality; then the ancient magical and exorcising motif of purification and of expiation was assumed in the mystical form of "purification from death," and finally in the form of a moral purification and expiation, as in the decadent aspects of the Mysteries that presaged Christianity.

11. Bachofen (Mutterrecht, 247–49) has brought to light an interesting thing, namely, that popular tyrants usually derived their power from a woman and succeeded each other according to a feminine line. This was one of signs of the relationship between democracy and gynaecocracy that is noticeable even in the cycle of the foreign kings in Rome.

12. According to some, Pythagoras owed his doctrine to the teaching of a woman, Themistoclea (Diogenes Laertius, Life of Pythagoras, 5). He entrusted some women to teach doctrine, since he acknowledged their greater propensity to the divine cult; his community had forms that remind us of matriarchy (ibid., 21, 8). Pliny (Natural History, 36.46) mentions that Pythagoras's disciples started to practice again the chthonic ritual of burial.

13. If we keep in mind the "Dionysization" undergone by the cult of Apollo in Delphi, which led to the introduction of an anti-Olympian ritual of prophecies uttered through ecstatic or delirious women—then the very same traditions that tend to establish a relationship between Pythagoreanism and Apollonism (Pythagoras as "the one who leads the Pythia," or Pythagoras being identified with Apollo through his "golden thigh," etc.) hardly contradict what has just been said.

14. Delphi's value of "pole" was obscurely perceived by the Hellenes since they regarded Delphi as the omphalos, or the "center" of the earth and of the world; in any event, they found in the Delphic amphitrionate the sacred bond that united them over and above the particularism of the individual city-states.

15. It is significant that Apollonian Delphi, the traditional center of ancient Hellas, did not hesitate to abandon the "national cause" when it came in contact with civilizations that expressed the same spirit that it itself embodied, such as in the fifth century, in favor of the Persians, and in the fourth century in favor of the Macedonians. The Persians, for their part, almost recognized their god in the Hyperborean Apollo; in Hellenism we often encounter the assimilation of Apollo to Mithras, and on the part of the Persians, of Ahura Mazda to Zeus, of Verethragna to Heracles, of Anahita to Artemis, and so on. This was much more than mere "syncretism."

16. In India, Buddhism opposed pragmatism and realism to priestly philosophical speculations around the same time the early Greek philosophers appeared on the scene.

17. Some, like Protagoras, claimed that "Man is the measure of all things" and employed this hermeneutical principle in an individualistic, destructive, and sophistical way.

18. I employ this term according to the sense that Michelstaedter (La persuasione e la retorica [Florence, C. 1922]) gave to it; he vividly illustrated the sense of Socratic conceptual decadence and philosophical evasiveness vis-à-vis the doctrine of "being.. as defended by the Eleatics.

19. Gellius, 18.7.3.

20. This opposition was the central thesis of Bachofen's Die Sage von Tanaquil (Heidelberg, 1870). In the next few pages I have borrowed and incorporated into a traditional conceptual framework several ideas of Bachofen's concerning the meaning and the mission of Rome in the West.

21. Bachofen's work showed the analogy with civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. Mosso noticed a general relationship between the Aegean (pre-Hellenic) civilization and the pre-Roman Italic civilization.

22. According to Livy (1.34), in the cult of Tanaquil the Etruscan women exercised the role of priestesses; this is a typical trait of the Pelasgic civilization.

23. The Roman gens that remained faithful to the ritual of inhumation was the gens Cornelia, whose characteristic cult was that of the telluric Venus.

24. The most ancient root of the cult of Bona Dea, a deity who at first was venerated in a chaste Demetrian form, reemerged in a decadent period of Roman history during which her cult came to be associated with uninhibited sexual promiscuity. Concerning Vesta, just as the maternal dignity of this goddess was respected and yet subordinated to the authority of the patres, likewise her cult was subjected to the pontifex magnus first and to the emperor later. After all, the official cult of fire in the time of Romulus was entrusted to priests; it became the legacy of the vestal virgins only as a decision of the Sabine and lunar king Numa. Emperor Julian (Hymn to King Helios, 155a) eventually restored its solar character.

25.  Varro, 5.74. In this context the lares are to be understood in their chthonic aspect. It would be interesting to examine the mixture of the telluric element, which is an Etruscan-Pelasgic remnant, with the "heroic" and patrician element in the Roman funerary cult. Also it would be interesting to analyze the phases of the process of purification through which the lares lost their original pre-Roman, telluric (the lares as the "children" of Acea Larentia, the equivalent of Bona Dea), and plebeian (a characteristic of the cult of the lares was that slaves played an important role in it and at times were even the officiating celebrants) character and thus assumed more and more the character of "divine spirits," "heroes," and souls that had overcome death. Augustine, City of God, 9. 11.

26. The most widespread classical tradition during the imperial era of Rome attributed an Asiatic origin to the Etruscans, in a way that can be summed up in Seneca's words: "Tuscos Asia sibi indicat." According to some, the Etruscans belonged to the stock of the Tursha, seafolk whose dwelling was located in some island or region of the eastern Mediterranean and who invaded Egypt toward the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. According to a more recent and reliable opinion, the Etruscans were the remnants of a population that preexisted those Italic nuclei that had come from the north; this population was scattered in Spain, along the Tyrrhenian Sea, in Asia Minor and even along the Caucasus (from the Basques, to the Liddi and the Hittites); in that case they belong to the Atlantic-Pelasgic cycle. Other scholars, such as Altheim and Mosso, talk about the kinship existing between the Etruscan and Minoan civilizations not only because of the privileged role that women played in the cult, but also because of affinities that are evident in their architecture, art, and customs.

27. Dio, Roman History, 1.27. See also M. Pallottino, Etruscologia (Milan, 1942), 175–81. This author, in addition to "an abandonment and almost an abdication of spiritual human activity before the deity," also noticed the gloomy and pessimistic Etruscan view of the afterlife, which did not know any hopes of immortality and heavenly survival for anybody, including the 'most exalted people.

28. Concerning the pathos of the afterlife, G. De Sanctis (Storia dei Romani, 1.147) explained that a characteristic of the Etruscan soul was the "terror of the afterlife, which was expressed through figurations of dreadful demons, like the monster Tuchulcha, and through macabre portrayals that anticipate the medieval ones."

29. Ovid, Metamorphosis, 15.553.

30. According to Piganiol, in the methods of Roman divination there must have been an opposition between the Uranian and patrician ritual of the augurs and the chthonic ritual of the Etruscan haruspexes.

31. Livy, 22.22.6. Fides—in its various forms, such as Fides Romana, Fides Publica, and so on—was one of the most ancient deities of Rome.

32. In this context "magic" is understood in the higher sense of the word and is referred to the official Roman religion, which according to some, consisted in a sheer "formalism" lacking religious pathos; on the contrary, it expressed the ancient law of pure action. The Roman persecutions against magic and astrology only concerned inferior forms of religion, that were often superstitious or quackish. In reality, a magical attitude understood as an attitude of command and action upon invisible forces through the pure determinism of the ritual, constituted the essence of the early Roman religion and the Roman view of the sacred. Later on, though the Romans opposed the popular and superstitious forms of magic, they continued to have a great respect for the patrician cult and for the figure of the theurgist, who was shrouded with dignity and with ascetical purity.

33. Plutarch, Phyrro, 19.5. In the episode of the Gallic invasion, the countenance of the elders was described by Livy as "more than human," and as "very similar to the gods (5.41).

34. See for instance: (a) the "sign of the center," the black stone Romulus put at the beginning of the Via Sacra; (b) the fatidic and solar "twelve," which was the number of vultures that gave Romulus the right to name the new city; the number of the lictorian fasces carrying an axe, the symbol of the Hyperborean conquerors; the number, instituted by Numa, of the ancilia (sacred shields) which were the pignora imperii (the pledge of command); and the number of the altars in the archaic cult of Janus; (c) the eagle, sacred to the god of bright skies, Jupiter, and also the signum of the Roman legions, which was also one of the Aryan symbols of the immortalizing "glory"; this is why the souls of the deceased Caesars were believed to take the form of an eagle and to fly into solar immortality; (d) the sacrifice of the horse, which corresponds to the aśvamedha of the Indo-Aryans; (e) many other elements of a universal sacred tradition.
    In regard to eagles, in ancient traditions we find the belief that the person on whom an eagle came to rest was predestined by Zeus to high offices or to regality and that the sight of an eagle was an omen of victory. The eagle was such a universal symbol that among the Aztecs it indicated the location for the capital of the new empire. The ba, the element of the human being destined to lead a heavenly eternal life in a state of glory, was often represented in Egyptian hieroglyphics as a sparrow hawk, which was the Egyptian equivalent of the eagle. In the Ṛg Veda (4.18.12; 4.27.2) the eagle carried the magic potion to Indra that consecrated him as the Lord of all gods, leaving behind infernal feminine forces. From a doctrinal point of view, this could be compared to the esoteric meaning of the Roman imperial apotheosis (consecratio) in which the flight of the eagle from the funeral pyre symbolized the deceased soul's ensuing deification.

35. Pliny said: "Saturnia ubi huc Roma est." Virgil (Aeneid, 357–58): "Hanc Janus pater, hanc Saturnus condidit arcem: Janiculum huic, illi fuerat Saturnia nomen."

36. Set, the dark brother who killed Osiris, was also called Typhon. According to Plutarch: "They called Typhon 'Set'; for this name, which denotes overpowering and violence, also denotes frequent return and overleaping." De Iside et Osiride, 49. The enemies of the solar principle (Ra), who were called "the children of the hopeless revolt," were associated with Set.

37. According to Piganiol the duel between Hercules and Cacus may have been a legendary transposition of the struggle between an Aryan or Aryan-like stock and an aboriginal stock of a Pelasgic origin.

38. Macrobius. Saturnalia, 1.12.27.

39. After Numa, the king (who originally ranked higher than the flamines, who in turn corresponded to the Hindu brāhmaṇa) was opposed to the rex sacrorum, who during that period was an expression of the plebeian ritual, rather than a priest of the patrician rite; he was the mediator between the people and the great plebeian goddess, the Moon, who did not own the spectio (the right to inspect the aruspicina, which was an attribute typical of the patricians) and who, according to the ritual, ranked below the vestal virgins.

40. I will refer the reader to Bachofen's work regarding the relationships between the feminine figures and the kings of the foreign dynasty. I will only add that the name Servius (Servius Tullius) originally indicated a son of slaves, just like the name Brutus (the name of the first tribune of the plebs was Junius Brutus and after the first year this name never appeared again in the consular lists) was given to rebellious slaves of Pelasgic stock. There is also a significant (for the plebeian element) telluric theme emphasized by tradition, according to which after the oracle announced that he who kissed his own mother would become king, Brutus knelt to the ground and kissed the earth, whom he conceived as the Mother of all; likewise, the plebeians and the Etruscan lucumoni were regarded as children of the earth. Besides, isn't it curious that centuries later the first person who attempted to usurp the legitimate authority in Rome himself carried the name of the rebellious Pelasgic slaves, namely, Brutus?

41. Piganiol rightly observed that the struggle of Rome against Vejo represented the struggle of Apollo against the Goddess; a similar meaning seems to be given by Livy (5.23.5–8) who related that Camillus, after conquering Vejo, was regarded as a solar deity.

42. In the example of Rome following the libri sibillini and welcoming the Phrygian Great Goddess (as it did before with the Asiatic goddess of prostitution, following the defeat at Lake Trasimene) in order to facilitate a victory over Hannibal, Bachofen saw an Aphrodistic city that was almost afraid of having neglected the Mother for such a long time and of having consecrated itself entirely to the virile principle of the imperium. This is possible. On the other hand, we should not forget that according to the Romans a war could not truly be won other than by evoking and drawing to their side the gods of the enemy: the great Phrygian goddess was a copy of the Punic Tanit. The cult of that goddess was incorporated into the Roman world only later on and it spread among the plebeian classes especially.

43. It is interesting that Cleopatra assumed the name "Isis" and Anthony. "Dionysus," thus reproducing two complementary types of a civilization of "Aphrodistic" type. See Dio Cassius, Roman History, 10.5.

44. Suetonius, Life of the Twelve Caesars (Julius Caesar, 6).

45. Rutilius Namatianus, De red. suo, 1.49, 50, 62–65.

46. Virgil, Eclogues, 4.5–10; 15–18. Among these prophetic expressions of Virgil we find mention of the serpent's death (5.24); of a group of heroes who will renew the symbolic feat of Argon; and of Achilles who will wage a new symbolic war of the Achaeans against Troy.

47. Expressions of Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, 7.25.6; Tertullian, Ad scapulam, 2.

Chapter 31

1. Thus, in comparison with historical Judaism, primitive Christianity may be credited with a mystical character along the same lines of prophetism, but not with an initiatory character, contrary to what F. Schuon claimed (The Transcendent Unity of Religions [Paris, 1937]) on the basis of sporadic elements found mostly in Eastern Orthodoxy. We should never forget though that if Christianity developed from the ancient Jewish tradition, orthodox Judaism developed in an independent fashion through the Talmud and the Kabbalah, which represents an initiatory tradition that was always missing in Christianity. This is how, later on, true esoterism developed in the West, that is, outside Christianity and with the help of non-Christian currents such as the Jewish Kabbalah, Hermeticism, or movements of a remote Nordic origin.

2. L. Rougier, Celse (Paris, 1925).

3. It is also significant that according to many Catholic theologians, any sign of predestination and election is dubious; the only certain sign is that consisting in devotion to the Virgin. Accordingly, the "true servant of Mary" will inherit eternal life." Concerning this attitude, see J. Berthier, Sommario di teologia dogmatica e morale (Turin 1933), 1791–92.

4. Saint Jerome (Epistula ad Paulinum, 49) noticed that Bethlehem, significantly, "was once under the shadows of the woods sacred to Tammuz-Adonis; in this cave, in which the infant Jesus cried, Venus's beloved was once mourned." Concerning the feminine element in Christianity, J. de Maistre wrote: "We can see how salvation (salut) began with a woman who had been announced from the origins. In all of the evangelical narratives, women have a very important role to play. Also, in all of the famous triumphs of Christianity [as was the case in the Dionysian religion] over individuals and nations, there was always a woman in the background."

5. In pre-Christian Rome the libri sibillini, which introduced the cult of the Great Goddess, also introduced the supplicatio, the ritual abasement before the divine statue, whose knees were hugged and whose hands and feet were kissed.

6. In the Ṛg Veda the ass is often referred to as rāsabha, a word that denotes turmoil, noise, and even inebriation. In the myth, Apollo turned King Midas's ears into ass's ears, since the latter had preferred Pan's music to his own—in other words, for preferring the Dionysian, pantheistic cult to the Hyperborean cult. The slaughter of asses was, among the Hyperboreans, the sacrifice that Apollo preferred. See Pindar, Pythian Odes, 10.33–56. Typhon-Set (who corresponds to Python, Apollo's nemesis), after being defeated by Horus, runs into the desert riding an ass (Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 29–32); Apep, the serpent that represents the principle of darkness, is often portrayed in the company of an ass or riding an ass. Dionysus too was believed to have been carried to Thebes by an ass, an animal that was always associated with him. Some of these elements must have been preserved underground, since they later reemerged in some medieval festivals in which the Virgin and Child, led by Joseph, were carried in a procession, in the course of which the highest honors were paid to the ass.

Chapter 32

1. The origin of the majority of the difficulties and of the aporiae encountered in Catholic philosophy and theology (especially in Scholasticism and in Thomism) is essentially due to the spiritual incompatibility between the elements that were derived from Platonism and Aristotclianism on the one hand, and those that were specifically Christian and Jewish on the other. See L. Rougier, La Scolastique et le tomisme (Paris, 1930).

2. By divine decree the emperor must ensure that the Church fulfills her function and mission; thus, not only was he crowned with the same symbols proper to the priestly consecration, but he also had the authority and the right to demote and to banish unworthy clergy; the monarch was truly regarded as the king-priest according to the order of Melchizedek, while the bishop of Rome was merely the vicar of Christ. F. de Coulanges (Les Transfonnations de la royauté pendant l'époque carolingienne, [Paris, 1892]) rightly remarked that although Pepin, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious swore to "defend" the Church, we should not be deceived by the meaning of this expression since in those days it had a different meaning than it does today. To defend the Church meant, in the parlance and in the mind-set of that period, to protect and exercise authority over her at the same time. What was called "defense" was really a contract that implied the state of dependence of the protected one, who was subjected to all the obligations the language of those times conveyed in the word fides, including swearing an oath of allegiance to the ruler. Charlemagne, when he took upon himself to defend the Church, also took on the authority and the responsibility of fortifying her in the "true faith."

3. Considering the fragmentary character and the several strata of the tradition of the Edda, it is not easy to orient oneself in it without possessing an adequate preparation in the matter. For instance, we often find in the Edda that the Muspelheim (world of fire) was no longer located in the North and therefore made to correspond to the Nordic seat, while the Niflheim and the frost-giants inhabiting it, were. Conversely, after Muspelheim was invaded by the forces of the South, it quickly turned into its opposite, thus acquiring a negative value; it became the seat of Surtr (a fire demon), who will overcome the gods and usher in the end of a cycle. Also, the sons of Muspell became the enemies of the Olympian gods and will cause the Bifrost bridge (uniting heaven and earth) to collapse once they ride over it. See Voluspa, 50, 51.

4. In the names "Ireland" and "Greenland" (Grünes-Land = "the green land") we find the idea of "green"; allegedly, up to the time of Procopius Greenland retained a lush vegetation.

5. It was probably in reference to this that the Nibelungs and the giants were represented as the creators of magical objects and weapons that will change hands and be acquired by the Aesir and the heroes (e.g., the hammer-thunderbolt of Thor; the golden ring and the magical helmet of Sigurd). A rather complex saga explains how these weapons and objects eventually turned into liabilities to the Aesir when they employed them in the reconstruction of the fortress of Asgard, which barred the way to the elementals (Gylfaginnig, 42).

6. According to the original Nordic-Gennanic view, the only people to enjoy divine immortality were, besides the heroes chosen by the Valkyries. the nobles, by virtue of their nonhuman origin; apparently, only heroes and the nobles were cremated. In the Nordic tradition only this ritual, prescribed by Odin, opened the doors of Valhalla while those who were buried (a Southern ritual) were believed to become slaves of the earth.

7.  Gylfaginning, 3.

8. This double influence finds a typical expression in the Heliand. In this work, on the one hand Christ is portrayed with warrior and very unevangelical traits; on the other hand, we find the overcoming of that dark view of destiny (Wurd) that in later times will become dominant in German history. In the Heliand Christ is the source of the Wurd and this force finds in him its Master, thus becoming the "wondrous power of God."

9. Tacitus. Germany, 14.

10. No matter how powerful and prideful, no medieval monarch ever felt capable of performing the function of the rite and the sacrifice (as with the ancient sacred kings) that had become the legacy of the clergy. Although the Hohenstaufen laid claim to the supernatural character of the Empire, they failed to reintegrate in their representative the primordial function of the rex sacrorum, even though the Church had usurped the title of pontifex maximus that was proper to the Roman emperors. Even in the Ghibelline doctrine of Hugh of Fleury, the sacred primacy of the Empire was limited to the ordo (that is, to the external constitution of Christianity) and was excluded from the dignitas, which belonged to the Church alone.

11. Ernst Kantorowicz spoke about the "empire breed" in reference to the Hohenstaufen: "A special virtue resided in this race, and to their offspring it was given 'to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God . . . but to others only in parables.' . . . The divine stock of the Roman Caesars appears once more in the Hohenstaufen, 'the heaven-born race of the God Augustus, whose star is unquenched forever,' a race which springs from Aeneas, the father of the Roman people, and descends through Caesar to Frederick and his offspring in direct descent. All members of this imperial race are called divine. The predecessors on the imperial throne are divi and the living no less, finally all members of the Hohenstaufen family. . . .
    The imperial office had been held divine by Barbarossa; now gradually not only Frederick's person but the Hohenstaufen race and the Hohenstaufen blood was caesarean and divine. But for one half-century of Staufen rule, the longed for Third Frederick whom the Sybils had foretold, and the West would have seen the God Augustus marching in the flesh through the gates of Rome, would have burnt incense on his altars and offered sacrifice. In the Hohenstaufens the son of God had appeared for the last time on earth." From Frederick the Second, trans. E. O. Lorimer (New York, 1931), 572–73.

12. See my Il mistero del Graal. Though the "Grail's regal character" was the central symbol of the secret Ghibelline tradition, the symbolical genealogy presented by Wolfram von Eschenbach shows the relalion existing between this tradition, the notion of "Universal Ruler," and the anti-Guelph aspect of the Crusades. This genealogy connects the Grail's kings with "Prester John" (who happens to be one of the medieval representations of the "Universal Ruler") and with the Knight of the Swan, a symbolic name given to leaders of the Crusades such as Godfrey of Bouillon.

13. In the Knight of the Swan, whose homeland is in heaven and who turns down Elsa's love, we find the antigynaecocratic theme proper of the heroic cycles already found in the myths of Heracles, Aeneas, Gilgamesh, Rostam, and so on.

Chapter 33

1. R. Guénon, Autorité spirituelle et pouvoir temporel, 111.

2. The French legislators were the first in Europe to claim that the king of a national state derives his power directly from God and is the "emperor of his kingdom."

3. R. Guénon, Autorité spirituelle, 111.

4. Ibid., 112.

5. Ibid. The fact that Germanic populations, despite the Reformation, retained feudal structures longer than other people is due to the fact that they were the last to embody—up to World War I—a higher idea than that represented by nationalisms and by world democracies.

6. Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno 16.73.

7. D. Flori, Dell'idea imperiale di Dante (Bologna, 1912), 38; 86–87.

8. Dante did not hesitate to criticize the growing nationalist aberration, particularly by opposing the French monarchy and by upholding the right of the emperor. In the case of Henry VII, he realized that if a nation like Italy, for instance, wanted to irradiate its civilization in the world it had to disappear into the Empile, since only the Empire is true universalism; thus, in his view, any rebellious force following the new principle upheld by "cities" and by homelands was destined to become an obstacle to the "kingdom of justice."

9. These are Dante's words. Interestingly enough, Barbarossa, in his struggle against the communes, was compared to Heracles, who was the hero allied to Olympian forces struggling against the forces of chaos.

10.  De vulgari eloquentia, 1.12. In reference to the Renaissance F. Schuon has rightly spoken of a "Caesarism of the bourgeoisie and of the bankers"; to these I would add the figures of the condottieri, who were mercenary leaders who made themselves kings.

11. See my Il mistero del Graal, chap. 29, especially in regard to the genesis and the meaning of modern Masonry and of the Enlightenment, as prime examples of this inversion.

12. B. Kluger, Storia delle Crociate (1887). From the context of the various versions of the second legend what emerges is the idea that a victory is possible but not certain. In some versions of the saga—which were probably influenced by the Eddie theme of ragna rok—the last emperor cannot overcome the forces of the last age and dies after hanging his scepter, crown, and sword in the Dry Tree.

Chapter 34

1. Naturally, this lack of understanding was typical of the representatives of Catholicism as well. Paracelsus was right when he said: "What is this commotion about Luther's and Zwingli's writings? It truly reminds me of a shallow bacchanalia. If I had to make a recommendation about this controversy I would have these gentlemen and the pope himself go back to school."

2. This is the main difference between Buddhism and Protestantism, which confers a positive character to the former and a negative to the latter. Both movements are characterized by pessimist premises—Luther's concupiscientia invincibilis corresponds somewhat to Buddhism's "thirst for life"—and by a revolt against a corrupted priestly caste. However, Buddhism indicated a path to follow since it created a strict system of asceticism and of self-discipline, unlike Protestantism, which rejected even the mitigated forms of asceticism found in the Catholic tradition.

3. De Maistre (Du pape [Lyon, 1819]) correctly remarked that this situation is paradoxical: Protestantism in fact upholds the idea that God did not bestow infallibility to man or to the Church as if it were a dogma. In Islam, infallibility (isma) is not regarded as the natural possession of an individual, but of all the legitimate interpreters of the tawil, the esoteric teaching.

4. Within Catholicism, due to a confusion between what is proper to asceticism and what is proper to the priesthood, the clergy never was a real caste. Once the principle of celibacy was established, by virtue of this very principle Catholicism irremediably lost the possibility of connecting the deposit of certain spiritual influences with the deep-seated forces of a blood legacy that had been preserved from any corrupt influence. The clergy, unlike the noble class, was always affected by the promiscuity of the origins since it recruited its members from all social strata and therefore always lacked an "organic" (i.e., biological and hereditary) basis for those spiritual influences.

5. Critical or "epistemological" idealism claimed to be the awareness of all other philosophical systems; in this it was right. It is the unrealism of philosophy in general that becomes aware of itself in the system, whereby the real becomes identical to the "rational," the world to the "concept" of the world, and the "I" to the "thought" of the "I." I have written at greater length about this in my Fenomenologia dell 'individuo assoluto (Turin, 1930).

6. During the Middle Ages there was a revival of some of the traditional sciences; the view of nature Scholasticism constructed on the basis of Aristotelianism, though constrained in a conceptualist apparatus, still upheld the view of the qualities or of the formative virtues.

7. Observations by J. de Maistre in Considerations sur la France (Lyon, 1860), 5–8.

8. J. Benda, La Trahison des clercs (Paris, 1928).

9. A. Tilgher, J. Benda e il problema del tradimento dei chierici (Rome, 1930). The "treason of the clerics," as Benda envisions it, is not a peculiar case of the phenomenon being discussed. The type of the "cleric" as a mere man of letters, philosopher, or moralist (Benda stops at this level) already represents that type of "betrayjng cleric."

10. In the Chinese tradition (Meng-tzu, 3.12) we find indications of this process in which individualism opens the gates to an obsessive phenomenon that puts man at the mercy of subpersonal and irrational faculties.

11. J. Evola, L'arco e la clava, chap. I.

12. In my Maschera e volto dello spiritualismo contemporaneo (Bari, 1949) and especially in the last chapter of Cavalcare la tigre I have discussed the meaning of the most recent kinds of "spiritualism."

Chapter 35

1. The idea of regression of the castes, which I had previously referred to in my pamphlet Imperialismo Pagano (Rome, I927), was detailed by V. Vezzani and by R. Guénon in his Autorité spirituelle et pouvoir temporel; finally, it has been expounded in an independent fashion by H. Berls in Die Heraufkunst des fünften Standes (Karlsruhe, 1931). This idea has an analogical correspondence with the traditional doctrine of the four ages, since each of the four traditional castes embodies the values that have predominated during the quadripartite process of regression.

2. Karl Marx, Deutsche-französische Jahrbücher (Paris, 1844), 209–12.

3. D. Merezhkovsky, Les Mystères de l'Orient (24): "The word 'proletarian' comes from Latin prolès, which means posterity, generation. Proletarians 'produce' and generate with their bodies, but are spiritual eunuchs. They are not men or women, but anonymous 'comrades,' impersonal ants which are part of the human anthill."

4. O. Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918; London, 1926), vol. I. The term "action" is here used as synonymous with a spiritual and disinterested activity; thus it may be applied to contemplation, which in the classical idea was often regarded as the most pure form of activity; it had its object and goal in itself and did not need "anything else" in order to be implemented.

5. Cicero, De officiis, 1.42.

6. Giordano Bruno, Spaccio della Bestia trionfante, dialogue 3.

7. A. Tilgher, Homo Faber, 120–21.

8. See M. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religion und Soziologie (Tübingen, 1924), vol. 3, in which the Protestant roots of such an "ascetical" version of capitalism are discussed. Originally there was a separation between earning as a "vocation" and the enjoyment of riches, the latter being looked down upon as a sinful element of the deification and pride of the human creature. Naturally, in the course of history the original religious considerations were eliminated; today we only find purely secular and unscrupulous forms. [Evola is referring to Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.]

9. W. Sombart, Il borghese, Italian trans. from the French (Paris, 1926), 204–22; 400–409.

10. The word "demonic" is obviously not to be understood in the Christian sense of the word. The expression "demonic people" found in the Bhagavadgītā applies very much to our contemporaries: "Thus they are beset with innumerable cares which last long, all their life, until death. Their highest aim is sensual enjoyment, and they firmly think that this is all" (16.11).

11. A. Tilgher, Homo Faber, 162.

Chapter 36

1. Proudhon had already declared that the true remedy does not consist in identifying mankind with God, but in proving that God, if he exists, is mankind's sworn enemy.

2. J. Benda, The Treason of the Clerics.

3. With regard to the dubious ideological alignments during World War II. one should notice in the two powers of the Axis, Italy and Germany, the negative element proper to "totalitarianism" and the new forms of dictatorial "Bonapartism." With regard to the other power of the Tripartite Pact (Japan), it would have been interesting to see the results of an unpreced entedexperiment, that is, of an external "Europeanization" coupled with an internal retention of the traditional spirit of an empire of divine right. Concerning the appraisal of both positive and negative elements of Fascism, see my Il fascismo: saggio di una analisi critica dal punto di vista della Destra (Rome, 1964).

Chapter 37

1. C. Malaparte, La Technique du coup d'état (Paris, 1931), 13.

2. M. Sertoli, La costituzione russa. (Florence, 1928), 67-85. This paradoxical situation occurred: once the pariahs organized themselves into an omnipotent organization, they reduced to the status of pariah anybody who adhered to the values and was faithful to the class principles that traditionally defined the nonpariah.

3. R. Fülöp-Miller, Mind and Face of Bolshevism (London, 1927). Stalin himself, in his Principles of Leninism, declared that the union of the revolutionary spirit and Americanism characterizes the style of Leninism in the work of the party and the state, as well as the complete type of the Leninist activist.

4. A. Siegfried, Les États-Unis d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1927), 436, 349, 350. There is another, opposite phenomenon to be considered, represented by the so-called beat generation and by the "hipsters" in whom an existential rebellion of some youth against American civilization has only an anarchist and destructive character, often ending up without any good causes to fight for and lacking a higher reference point. See my L'arco e la clava, chap. 14, entitled "Youth, the 'Beats' and Right-wing Anarchists."

5. Op. cit., 35–36, 40, 51.

6. The emergence in America of "atheist Christianity" and of the "theologians of the death of God" (such as T. Altizer, Paul van Buren, and J. A. T. Robinson) is a recent and very significant phenomenon. According to this movement, the idea of God in its aspect of transcendence and supernaturalism ought to be dismissed, since it is no longer operative or acceptable to modern man; better yet, modern man should not even be bothered with the term "god," due to the traditional implications of such a term. The only thing to be spared is a "demythologized" and secularized version of Christianity, amounting to nothing more than a social and humanitarian morality.

7. This is also reflected in the incredible severity of the penal sanctions that in some states (including the death penalty) are being meted out for "sexual crimes" against women.

Conclusion

1. Guido De Giorgio, "Ascesi e Anti-Europa," Introduzione alla magia, 2.194.

2. A. Stolz, L'ascesi cristiana (Brescia, 1944), 2.

3. In my book Cavalcare la tigre I have attempted to outline the existential orientations that may serve this purpose during an age of dissolution.

4. See the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, 6.2.

Appendix

1. [The passages that follow are taken from the English translation of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, by H. Wilson (London, 1868), 4.24; 6.1.]

2. This prophecy appears to have been contradicted by facts, unless we distinguish the case in which a longer life is due to contact with that which transcends time from the case of artificial "devices" to prolong life (which is meaningless and just a parody of the first type of life), realized through the means of profane science and modern hygiene.