Introduction to the Second Volume

The introduction to the first volume of this collection mentioned a possible existential crisis which, invading all the supports, values, and justifications of normal life, may be leading humankind to ruin, or else forcing it to open a path toward a new condition of being and consciousness. Such a path is spoken of in certain instructions and disciplines of an unchanging character, which are in fact the initiatic sciences.

The person who follows the impulse from his depths that has already made him burn all his bridges, and applies himself seriously and fervently to these disciplines, acquires first the presentiment and then the ever-more precise and experiential knowledge of another order of reality, which we call metaphysical reality. He is destined to be a participant in this reality, step-by-step, until he acquires a strength that is beyond strength, a consciousness beyond consciousness, a life beyond life.

Metaphysical reality exists and works in transcendent mode, in utter independence from the world of men. Nonetheless, he who is established in that mode and casts his glance downward can draw from it reference-points for a system of values and principles, which may confer earthly and temporal life with an order and a meaning that would otherwise be wholly lacking. And when this order and this meaning come to saturate a whole historical collectivity, in all its strata, then we have what may be called in the highest sense Tradition, or Traditional Civilization.

It goes without saying that today’s Western world represents the most complete antithesis of this type of civilization. Today as never before, human life both individual and collective has lost contact with the metaphysical order. It has thrown itself into the void, driven on by false myths; into an insane activism dominated by evil myths, bewitched by the promise of a miserable well-being. The result is a crisis that will close the circuits of the modern world, ending either in ruination or in a clean leap that marks the start of a total renovation.

This is how serious application to this initiatic knowledge, which may also be called traditional, can also serve the purpose of orientation today. Beside the inner and purely spiritual aspect, it can enable one to glimpse the “terra firma” underlying the present chaos, offering the image of a normal, legitimate and sacred order which is the same yesterday, now, and forever.

For this reason, the present volume not only continues to give instructions in initiatic science, but also gives some room to the study of various forms of Tradition over history, so as to present not only the principles themselves but also witnesses to them and their continual validity in the human world. This will have a further consequence. Gradually the sense will dawn of the proper “place” of initiatic wisdom—the true sort—in contrast to that of its various imitations. This wisdom is not something “marginal”; it is not what goes on in the dubious conventicles of spiritualists, Theosophists, devotees of the occult or of Americanized yoga. It is the wisdom of the ages, and he who effectively possesses it is not on the sidelines but in the center. Whatever his condition today, his is the dignity of those who, in every traditional (hence normal) civilization, by possessing knowledge also had the right to power, as visible or invisible representatives of the dominant élite.

JULIUS EVOLA
ROME, ITALY
1971