Wednesday, December 3, 2008

The Lost Cause 1

There is nothing of political philosophy more plainly taught in history than the limited value of the Federal principle...(33)

In the ante-revolutionary period, the differences between the populations of the Northern and Southern colonies had already been strongly developed. The early colonists did not bear with them from the mother country to the shores of the new world any greater degree of congeniality than existed among them at home. They had come not only from different stocks of population, but from different feuds in religion and politics. There could be no congeniality between the Puritan exiles who established themselves upon the cold and rugged and cheerless soil of New England, and the Cavaliers who sought the brighter climate of the South, and drank in their baronial halls in Virginia confusion to roundheads and regicides(49).

-Edward Pollard, The Lost Cause

Monday, December 1, 2008

Knighthood

Knighthood appeared as a superterritorial and supernational community in which its members, who were consecrated to military priesthood, no longer had a homeland and thus were bound by faithfulness not to people, but, on the one hand, to an ethics that had as its fundamental values honor, truth, courage, and loyalty, and, on the other hand, to a spiritual authority of a universal type which was essentially that of the Empire.

Knighthood did not necessarily have a hereditary character; it was possible to become a knight as long as the person wishing to become one performed feats that could demonstrate both his heroic contempt for attachment to life as well as the abovementioned faithfulness.

In the older versions of knightly ordination, a knight was ordained by another knight without the intervention of priests, almost as if in the warrior there was a force "similar to a fluid" that was capable of creating new knights by direct transmission.

The woman to whom a knight swears unconditional faithfulness and to whom even a crusader consecrates himself, the woman who leads to purification, whom the knight considers his reward and who will make him immortal if he ever dies for her - that woman is essentially a representation of "Holy Wisdom," or a perceived embodiement, in diferent degrees, of the "transcendent divine woman" who represents the power of a transfiguring spirituality and of a life unaffected y death.

The persistent, repeated use of feimine characters, which is typical of cycles of a heroic type, in reality means nothing else but this: even when confronting the power that may elnlighten him and lead him to something more than human, the only ideal of the hero and of the kngiht is that active and affirmative attitude that in every normal civilization characterizes a true man as opposed to a woman.

The "initiatory woman" or "secret woman" could be evoked in a real woman; in this book I also explained that Eros, love and sex were known and employed accordeing to their real transcendent possibilities. Such possibilities were hinted at by several traditional tteachings, so much so as to define a special path leading to the effective removal of the limitations of the empirical self and to the participation in higher forms of being.

Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World