Abstract movement gives rise to movement in the cosmos.
Forms give rise to abstract movement in a universe, and thereby link themselves on to the Cosmos, of which more later.
It is therefore essential in a universe, to have a form in order to evolve to Cosmic level, thereby enabling them to link themselves on to the Cosmic atoms that gave rise to them, thereby making these Cosmic atoms into Great Entities. Thus do the atomic planes of the Cosmos evolve.
This is the secret of the God in man. He is related primarily, not to the God of his universe, who is his conditioner, but to his Creator who is a corresponding atom in the Cosmos, who creates but has no power to condition, because it is itself conditioned by the Great Entity of which it forms a part. But when the reflected atom of a universe develops a corresponding aspect to the nature of its Creator and can thereby unite with it, that Cosmic atom receives into itself all the conditions of the universe which was projected by the Great Entity of whose body it forms a part. And, as that universe is conditioned by the Great Entity, the Cosmic atom thus becomes a replica of the Great Entity, and being thus completely conditioned by it, is no longer being conditioned but has been conditioned, and therefore its conditioning is of the past, and therefore in the present is unconditioned by the Great Entity, because it has achieved a state in which it conditions itself, and so is independent. It is made free of the Cosmic planes is no longer held in bondage to the service of a Great Entity, but by means of this attachment of an evolved atom of a projected universe, it is raised above the status of the atoms of its plane, and becomes, in its turn, a travelling atom, and together with its attached Divine Spark of the reflected universe, it makes the rounds of the Rays of the Cosmos, and thus, in its turn, becomes a Great Entity and develops a universe.
This is the goal of the evolution of every reflected atom in a universe - to develop a Divine Spark - to complete the evolution from the human to the Divine in a reflected universe, and to unite with its Cosmic Creator, thus enabling the Cosmic atom to evolve through the phase of a travelling atom into a Great Entity.
It is this scheme of evolution which we are now considering. These last details have never been revealed before. Human thought has never before passed beyond the conditioning Logos, but it is now revealed that, though the Logos is the Creator of a universe, each atom in that universe is separately created by a separate Cosmic atom, which aspires, by means of that reflected Life, to achieve a state whereby it can continue its own evolution.
Therefore, it can be said of man that, by eating of the Tree of Knowledge, they should be as Gods. It is this knowledge which has been withheld on the outgoing path of evolution lest souls should be tempted to turn back and forestall their goal, but to those who passed the nadir, it can now be revealed.
-Dion Fortune, The Cosmic Doctrine, 94-96
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
The Heroic Magical Point of View
The heroic magical point of view that we have always held will not be abandoned; in reality it alone will constitute the point of reference and justification for the task of critique and examination...It is our intention to erect an unbreachable bulwark against the general decline of every value in life; our claim to know and point out vaster horizons, beyond the usual ones of humanity's small constructions; our proposal to stand firm on the ramparts, ready for both offense and defense, isolated and closed to any escape.
xxi
...crisis or radical upheaval is necessary. This is why it is necessary to set everything aside, and to become detached from everything. The mutation of one's deepest structure is the only thing that matters for the purposes of higher knowledge. This knowledge, which is at the same time wisdom and power, is essentially non-human; it can be achieved by following a way that presupposes the active and effective overcoming of the human condition.
3-4
This "divine" technique, traditional in the higher sense of the word affords real possibilities to those who, after the previously mentioned crisis find in themselves the strength and calmness to overcome it in a positive manner and to experience it as a catharsis and purification from everything that is merely human. Moreover, this science offers real possibilities to another category of beings, namely those few individuals in whom, in mysterious ways, an ancient legacy reemerges and grows again, almost like the instinct of another race that has disappeared in the course of millenia.
4
The human brain has already given all it had to offer. Now what matters is to make the whole body into an instrument of consciousness, which, by overcoming the limitation of the individual, must penetrate those vital layers where the dark and deep energies of a higher self are at work, until the entrance of the path leading to the "closed palace of the King" is found again.
5
All the exercises of inner development will be paralyzed unless one breaks the shell of limitations that daily life forms around one, and that still remains in the human subconscious even after a change of perspectives.
14
On this side are ignorant people, lacking Knowledge, pale, passive, intoxicated, whose lives are still outside and on this side of the Waters. On the other shore you will find virile men, heroic souls, awakened to disgust, to revolt, to the Great Awakening; having left one shore behind, they dare to face the current and the undertow, being led by their ever more firm, unshakeable will. Once there, they are known as "Survivors of the Waters," "Walkers on the Waters," "The Holy Race of the Free," "The Conquerors," "The Lords of Life and Salvation," "The Radiant Ones." They are the "Dragon Slayers," the "Dominators of the Bull," "Consecrated to the Sun," those who have been transformed through Ammon's power and wisdom.
19
Cut yourself free from the bonds of sensuality, intoxication, and passion: reduce yourself to a simplicity that wills.
20
This is an absolute vertigo in the spirit, which is vanquished only by the awareness of the self as an intangible, indestructible, tenacious, and victorious reality.
25
The hierarchy proceeds from "sign" to "sign," from "name" to "name" until it reaches a state of perfect superrational, intellectual vision, of full actualization or realization of the object in the Self and the Self in the object. This is a state both of power and of absolute evidence in regard to what is known; once this state is reached, every rationalization and speculation appears superfluous and every discussion meaningless.
27
...the ideal of power here is that of an action occurring not subject to natural laws, but above them; not among phenomena, but among the causes of phenomena, with the irresistibility and the right proper to him who is superior. And this superiority comes from having effectively disengaged himself from the human condition, and having achieved the intiatic awakening.
32
Read the sacred scriptures of every people on earth: through all of them runs the scarlet thread of the secret doctrine of awakening.
If you want to overcome death itself, whose armor is sleep, dream, and dullness, you must climb from one step of awakening to the next. Imagine: the lowest step of this heavenly ladder is called "genius." What name shall we then give to the highest ones? They remain unknown to the multitudes and are considered to be legend.
35
Then you will be able to perform miracles at will, without having to wait humbly like a whimpering slave for a cruel God to bestow his grace upon you, or strike your head off.
36
The key consists simply in becoming aware of one's "form of the Self" or of one's skin, even though, one may be asleep, in discovering the narrow crack through which consciousness slips between waking and deep sleep.
The struggle for immortality is a battle for the control over the sounds and ghosts that dwell in us; the waiting for our "Self" to become King is the waiting for the Messiah.
37
Nobody knows if you will be allowed to share in the prodigious forces once possessed by ancient prophets, or if you are destined to enter enternal peace. Our path leads to the threshhold of maturity. Once you arrive at it, you are also worthy of receiving that gift. In either case you will have become a phoenix: it is up to you to get there by force.
One of those who still have the key of magic has remained behind on earth, to seek and to rally those who have been called.
The only true immortal being is the awakened man. Stars and gods disapear; he alone endures and can achieve anything he wants. There is no God above him.
That which a religious man believes about God is nothing but a state that he himself could achieve, if he could only believe in himself. But he obtusely sets up obstacles over which he does not dare to jump. He creates an image to worship, instead of transforming himself into it.
40
By now you should understand what the main task of our Art is: detach yourself from the humid substance that you are made of, and be regenerated in the solar strength.
46
A relationship saturated by desire and love is, moreover, negative and dependent; it has the character of need. To turn it into the purely affirmative, central, and self-sufficient solar nature requires a qualitatitive leap and a daring that is very difficult for the mystic to achieve...
We do not need "to go outside" ourselves (ecstasy-displacement) but rather to return and take possession of the "seat of the center." The mystical light represents for us the "Higher Waters" in which your individuality must not diminish, but rather reawaken.
49
Keep in mind that for modern man, the Royal Path usually starts from the humid principle, even though immediately after, this water must be made dry and arid. A spiritual hunger or the despotic need to entirely own yourself often leads to the Way.
50
In the magical, dry, or solar way, you will create a duality in your being not in an unconscious and passive manner (as the mystic does), but consciously and willingly; you will shift directly on the higher part and identify yourself with that superior and subsistent principle, whereas the mystic tends to identify with his lower part, in a relationship of need and abandonment. Slowly but gradually, you will strengthen this "other" (which is yourself) and create for it a supremacy, until it knows how to dominate all the powers of the natural part and master them totally. What is required of you is a discipline of firmness and sobriety until an equilibrium is created, namely the quality of a life that owns itself and is free with regard to itself, cleansed from instincts and from obscure appetite of the natural being, in both flesh and mind. Only then will you be able to employ, usefully and in an auxiliary fashion, some "corrosive water" (an alchemical term denoting violent methods such as toxic substances, the use of wine and sex, suspension of breath, and so forth). By attacking the natural connections, these give the fixed and preestablished nucleus the possibility of expanding and bursting forth more energetically. However, if this nucleus were not already established, the "corrosive waters," by dissolution, would lead you not above but below the condition from which you first started.
The affirmative discipline is enhanced by transformations provoked by some direct method, upon which the entire being, ready and compliant, reaffirms itself, digests and is itself digested, leaving nothing behind. These leaps are faster rhythms in which you must be able to transform the slow tempo of your incarnated being, in the same way that a surfer rides a wave; wherever the wave goes, so does the surfer, thus rejoining himself, remaining affirmative, firm, and centered.
Then the solar and golden nature in you will be able to break the equilibrium and be the stronger one: the other nature (your Self, your Senses, and your mind) will be under your control. At that point you can even suspend them, make them inert, neutralized, fixed. This is Silence, the "extinction of mania," the dissolving of the fog. Then, in your clarified eye, the cyclical integral vision will shine forth; you will see your transcendent essence, the destiny of beings and of all things, and the "Kingdom of Those Who Are." You will grasp the mode of action in a pure stsate, and you will grasp the mode of immaterial motion that operates every space or body in a timeless, creative rapidity. The center in you will amalgamate with the universal, non-becoming nature, and will derive from it a divine strength that expresses itself through miraculous powers. You will be able to focus on the Knowledge of the Names and on the wedding with the letters. You will be initiated.
50-1
...one of the first and fundamental operations in the initiatic art: the transferring of the Sense of the Self into the region of the Heart, the center of the human being.
We add that, contrary to common opinion, according to the traditional teaching, everything that is mental, reflective, cerebral must be referred to the lunar, feminine, passive element; conversely, to the heart must be attributed the quality of the solar, masculine, and central element.
55
...especially for the operative aspects of magic, one needs to nourish a faculty defineable in these terms: to be oneself beyond oneself, in the terms of an elan, an active self-overcoming, and an affirmation that situates itself beyond one's individuality. In everyday life, heroism, heroic and even orgiastic intoxication, the pleasure of risking one's life, and even certain times of readiness for sacrifice are already signs pointing in this direction. The power of a life free from itself, capable of going beyond itself in this active form, is as important to magical and theurgical practice as the principles of absolute comman and absolute obedience copresent in oneself.
58
There are two paths: one leads to servitude, the other to liberation. Its principles are: "I am this" and "I am not this." Man is bonded by the former and liberated by the latter.
71
Every teaching of ours is illusory until it is translated into a practice and an action...slowly build up a strength inside you, similar to a lord whose glance instills silence, respect or confusion in the servants around him. This is our Gold.
72
At the center of yourself, like a spider that keeps under control all the strings of its web and their vibrations, let there be a calm self-control and a scrutinizing lucidity, purified and fearless, open to every voice.
For the magician it is imperative to escape in any possible way from the atmosphere of enslavement and intoxications that is the "soul of the earth"; to enter in a conscious contact with the world beyond, and to act from there, directing corresponding reactions and effects in real life.
Dare and be silent.
The strongest force is the will of man who knows what he wants. Set the goal, then, and never change it. After you have started never, ever quit, no matter what, because, as I have told you before, the path of Magic does not have "dead corners." One does not have to embark upon it, but once you have done so, there are only 2 alternatives: succeed or perish.
78
In the highest potency, the Word realizes itself fully and perfectly because it contains in itself the principle of every manifestation, actualizing itself in it with a linear correspondence betweeen the realizing will and the realized being.
80
In Greek, the verb "sym-ballo" (to reunite) and the analogous term "sym-bolon" (symbol) designate the act of reunion, while the synthesis indicates the result of this action. The dynamic character of the symbol is opposed to the static, immanent character of the synthesis. In regard to the effect of the action, the verb "sym-ballo" (to reunite) is opposed to the verb "dia-bollo" (to separate, oppose). The attribution of dynamic and magical virtues to symbols in order to overcome diabolical opposition and adversities is philologically obvious. And just as the symbol leads to a synthesis, its opposite, the "devil," is what leads to the opposite of synthesis, namely to analysis: in fact "ana-lysis" is solution, breaking down, dissolution, death.
84
There is an analogy between the physical and the metaphysical, between exteriority and interiority, and between man and cosmos. Because of this, man is potentially God, and the microcosm is potentially a macrocosm.
89
V.I.T.R.O.L - Visita interiora terrae, rectificando invenies occultam lapidem
(Visit the interior of the earth. By rectification you will find the hidden stone."
92
The vessel, the grasale or chalice of the Holy Grail, is in fact of "earth"; but "earth"...is the human body.
92
Mithras is he who assumes and dominates the taurine cosmic force that carries and moves all things. After being experienced in a magical projection or image, this supreme principle, in a second phase, is directly realized. The Mithraic nature, evoked and mastered through a new "bellowing," is "fixed" by the initiate. He commands it to remain, for the perfection of the state of him who is free from necessity, birth, and death.
101
From an initiatic point of view it must be said that one feels "Self" precisely because of the reflection of a superior principle...nous=the mind seen as an Olympian and incorruptible principle.
146
The intiatic mystery is precisely that of metamorphosis, of the passage from one species to another.
149
In order to achieve immortality it is necessary to burn every tendency that would urge one to assume this or that superhuman "seat"...If the struggle for immortality occurred in truly a magical context, the task would consist of resisting the beings whom one encounters...by generating, in their exact direction, a higher intensity than theirs.
What is capable of surviving death and being immortal is not the "soul" but the mind as nous, as a supernatural element....a body of incorruptible light.
149-50
sic nos non nobis - thus we are not for ourselves
155
Self-overcoming, aside from being the object of rites, is connected to a renewed, heroicized perception of the world and of life, not as an abstract concept of the mind, but as something that pulsates in the rhythm of one's own blood. It is the sensation of the world as power, or the sensation of the world as a sacrificial act. A great freedom, with action as the sole law.
You must perceive yourself as a center of strength and know the action that is no longer dictated by this or that object, but for the sake of itself. You will no longer be moved: detached, you will move. The objects around you will cease to be objects of desire for you - they will become objects of action.
...vision without reference points, having as its only direct object reality itself. Action awakened as an elementary thing, simple, unrestrained. Power of commanding and power of obeying, both absolute, to be quintessentialized in the way that is required for evocations and identifications, as for those immediate, immaterial encounters with "presences," in which some may ascend and disappear, powerful and invisible, while others precipitate into bodily forms.
156-7
...remember that by hating you decline. Hatred alters and it prevents you from controlling the influence of your opponent, worse yet it opens you to his own influence which you can instead know and paralyze, if you remain calm, without reacting...that force and purity over which nothing has power...detachment, silence, solitude...distance between human beings.
...To overcome the brotherly contamination, the need to love and to feel loved, to feel together, to feel equal and joined with others.
You will feel united only with those who are on your same path, which is not the human path, having no regard for human ways.
158
Life is a heroic affair of every moment, made of symbols, illuminations, commands, ritual, and sacrificial actions.
159
The word "passion" designates a passive state, whereas the magus is always active and victorious. A magus in love, or a jealous or a lazy magus is a contradiction in terms...
The "Great Magical Agent," the natural mediator of human omnipotence, cannot be enslaved and directed by anything other than a supernatural principle, which is an independent will.
161
Do violence to yourself. Do not do what you like, but what costs you: on principle, always take the path of greatest resistance.
The magical act is one of concrete fluidification of the will, or an immaculate, androgynous conception in which the fluidic force operates as a feminine principle in the creative realization under the inspiring and masculine action of the solar principle.
...in order to "dissolve" a "metal" it is necessary to make it red-hot, and then immerse it in water, excite, exasperate an instinct, an impulse, a desire and then abruptly, when its fulfillment is at hand, suspend it. At that point, the supersensible "eye" will see flashes come out of the lower centers and run snakelike toward the higher centers of the head, which by absorbing the former's strength begins to shine with a formidable light. This virtue of theirs is powerful and dry, it is the golden virtue of absolute command and of the absolute conception in magical realizations.
162
In solar or high magic, what is at work is a clean and superhuman science.
The magical act is the conception of a lightning-flash, a swift operation in which the mental power fixes the command or conception of the goal and unleashes against it the ignified fluidic force.
164
The more the realization is perfect, the more exalted, energetic, and absolute in their respective virtue are the two principles joined together by Hermes wand; the more calm, dry lucid, icy is the power of the Sun; the more ardent, vehement, and wild is the power of the ignified fluidic force (perfected mercury)fixed by the Sun. It is the conjunction and embrace of the two enemies on the same bed of the magical androgynous alliance: it is the great mystery of the Ars Regia that cannot be communicated to any outsider.
165
...success in magic is never the result of effort...Magic always operates in a simple and direct way, as an instantaneous force or as an irresistible and subtle fragrant force. This is why Lao-tzu says that the virtue of the Tao is "to act without acting." Thus the Hermeticists talke about the Work as a "woman's game" or as "child's play."
This is why it is improper to talk about "will" in magic, because will as conceived by men is characterized by tension, violence, rigidity or exactly the opposite features favorable to magical realizations. One needs to feel superior, not limited by obstacles, powerful and ready in spirit, dwelling in a state of perfect justice. This is the necessary basis for the calm, determined placing of the image, which is accurately defined in all its parts, in the mental light that needs to be ignified and gradually exalted until you reach the state of sympathy. It is in this state, as a pure act of spirit, that the sudden flash of "projection" needs to occur.
166
He gains the wonderful path produced by the intensity, the constancy, and the concentration of will; the wonderful path produced by the intensity, the constancy, and the concentration of effort; the wonderful path produced by the intensity, the constancy, and the concentration of the mind; the wonderful path produced by the intensity, the constancy, and the concentration of investigation, and as a fifth the heroic spirit. And this disciple, who has thus become heroic fifteenfold, is capable of liberation, is capable of awakening, is capable of attaining incomparable security.
177-8
If instead an inner attitude is created, such that the force does not encounter something rigid in us, but something similar to air, it will no longer find a hold and, at worse, spin around itself. The technique consists in waiting for the moment when it is possible to reaffirm oneself against the force to which one had previously left open the door, and little by little to absorb and transform it in oneself. Sometimes this is equivalent to offering oneself in a sort of sacrificial action, drawing from it a positive effect, an elevation, and an intensification.
184
The magical body is invulnerable and immortal; only what is composed and dependent is liable to alteration and corruption. This body can properly be called vajra, namely "diamond-thunderbolt," something almost adamantine, incorruptible, made of power and fulminating light.
201
...a natural process leads Western man in the precise direction of the counter-initiation. According to Evola, beginning with the Renaissance, Western man wanted to be "free" and autonomous, cutting off in rapid succession all the remaining contacts with the higher world and pursuing the path of immanence and the conquest of the physical world. But when the end result is not materialism and a material reality dominated by technology, the individual separated from the spiritual world tends to a sort of asceticism that consists in the overamplification of the dominating will and its freedom, thus forging the myth of the Superman. Thus, the individual can only align himself with the line of influence of the counter-initiation, and appearances in this direction (of unknowing "ascetics of evil") already exist and are very significant. Probably these are the ways with which the destiny of an entire civilization will be sealed.
241-2
...magic is conceived synonymous with the art of those who know how to reopen the path leading to the earthly paradise, in order to partake of the "Tree of Life" found at its center. This obviously refers to the restoration of that primordial state, reintegration of power, and contact with the "center" which constitutes the main goal of initiation as such.
258
*** regal tradition vs priestly tradition ***
...the figure of the magus retains in a highly visible way the ideal of spiritual virility, which is most essential for the higher type of the initiate or adept. The magus has always called to mind the ideal of a dominating superiority.
...if we see in the priest one who simply mediates the relationship between the human and divine worlds and if in the king (according to his original dignity) we recognize one who is instead a directly divine being, so that he represents with his mere presence a mediating function - then we must recognize that the regal tradition is much closer than the priestly tradition to the primordial tradition, and consequently to the supreme ideal of adeptship.
Now, if the magical dignity, as we have said, leads one to think spontaneously of a spiritual virility and a dominating superiority, then the relationship that it has with the tradition of initiatic regality becomes evident.
...It is irrelevant that the tradition of initiatic regality has long since disapeared as a source of adepts such as visible heads of people and states. The secret tradition of initiatic regality has existed and continues to exist in its proper place, alongside the tradition of initiation in general. It is no coincidence that Hermeticism speaks of a "Royal Art" and of a rex physicorum; that the Rosicrucians referred to an Imperator; and that even in the degenerate residues and counterfeits of modern Freemasonry there are dignities that are connected to the idea the "Holy Empire."
...what matters most is a spiritual race of warriors and heroes.
259-60
YOU MUST NOT SEEK POWER, IT IS POWER THAT MUST SEEK YOU.
261
- from Introduction to Magic - Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus - Julius Evola and the UR Group - Inner Traditions, Rochester, VT, 2001.
xxi
...crisis or radical upheaval is necessary. This is why it is necessary to set everything aside, and to become detached from everything. The mutation of one's deepest structure is the only thing that matters for the purposes of higher knowledge. This knowledge, which is at the same time wisdom and power, is essentially non-human; it can be achieved by following a way that presupposes the active and effective overcoming of the human condition.
3-4
This "divine" technique, traditional in the higher sense of the word affords real possibilities to those who, after the previously mentioned crisis find in themselves the strength and calmness to overcome it in a positive manner and to experience it as a catharsis and purification from everything that is merely human. Moreover, this science offers real possibilities to another category of beings, namely those few individuals in whom, in mysterious ways, an ancient legacy reemerges and grows again, almost like the instinct of another race that has disappeared in the course of millenia.
4
The human brain has already given all it had to offer. Now what matters is to make the whole body into an instrument of consciousness, which, by overcoming the limitation of the individual, must penetrate those vital layers where the dark and deep energies of a higher self are at work, until the entrance of the path leading to the "closed palace of the King" is found again.
5
All the exercises of inner development will be paralyzed unless one breaks the shell of limitations that daily life forms around one, and that still remains in the human subconscious even after a change of perspectives.
14
On this side are ignorant people, lacking Knowledge, pale, passive, intoxicated, whose lives are still outside and on this side of the Waters. On the other shore you will find virile men, heroic souls, awakened to disgust, to revolt, to the Great Awakening; having left one shore behind, they dare to face the current and the undertow, being led by their ever more firm, unshakeable will. Once there, they are known as "Survivors of the Waters," "Walkers on the Waters," "The Holy Race of the Free," "The Conquerors," "The Lords of Life and Salvation," "The Radiant Ones." They are the "Dragon Slayers," the "Dominators of the Bull," "Consecrated to the Sun," those who have been transformed through Ammon's power and wisdom.
19
Cut yourself free from the bonds of sensuality, intoxication, and passion: reduce yourself to a simplicity that wills.
20
This is an absolute vertigo in the spirit, which is vanquished only by the awareness of the self as an intangible, indestructible, tenacious, and victorious reality.
25
The hierarchy proceeds from "sign" to "sign," from "name" to "name" until it reaches a state of perfect superrational, intellectual vision, of full actualization or realization of the object in the Self and the Self in the object. This is a state both of power and of absolute evidence in regard to what is known; once this state is reached, every rationalization and speculation appears superfluous and every discussion meaningless.
27
...the ideal of power here is that of an action occurring not subject to natural laws, but above them; not among phenomena, but among the causes of phenomena, with the irresistibility and the right proper to him who is superior. And this superiority comes from having effectively disengaged himself from the human condition, and having achieved the intiatic awakening.
32
Read the sacred scriptures of every people on earth: through all of them runs the scarlet thread of the secret doctrine of awakening.
If you want to overcome death itself, whose armor is sleep, dream, and dullness, you must climb from one step of awakening to the next. Imagine: the lowest step of this heavenly ladder is called "genius." What name shall we then give to the highest ones? They remain unknown to the multitudes and are considered to be legend.
35
Then you will be able to perform miracles at will, without having to wait humbly like a whimpering slave for a cruel God to bestow his grace upon you, or strike your head off.
36
The key consists simply in becoming aware of one's "form of the Self" or of one's skin, even though, one may be asleep, in discovering the narrow crack through which consciousness slips between waking and deep sleep.
The struggle for immortality is a battle for the control over the sounds and ghosts that dwell in us; the waiting for our "Self" to become King is the waiting for the Messiah.
37
Nobody knows if you will be allowed to share in the prodigious forces once possessed by ancient prophets, or if you are destined to enter enternal peace. Our path leads to the threshhold of maturity. Once you arrive at it, you are also worthy of receiving that gift. In either case you will have become a phoenix: it is up to you to get there by force.
One of those who still have the key of magic has remained behind on earth, to seek and to rally those who have been called.
The only true immortal being is the awakened man. Stars and gods disapear; he alone endures and can achieve anything he wants. There is no God above him.
That which a religious man believes about God is nothing but a state that he himself could achieve, if he could only believe in himself. But he obtusely sets up obstacles over which he does not dare to jump. He creates an image to worship, instead of transforming himself into it.
40
By now you should understand what the main task of our Art is: detach yourself from the humid substance that you are made of, and be regenerated in the solar strength.
46
A relationship saturated by desire and love is, moreover, negative and dependent; it has the character of need. To turn it into the purely affirmative, central, and self-sufficient solar nature requires a qualitatitive leap and a daring that is very difficult for the mystic to achieve...
We do not need "to go outside" ourselves (ecstasy-displacement) but rather to return and take possession of the "seat of the center." The mystical light represents for us the "Higher Waters" in which your individuality must not diminish, but rather reawaken.
49
Keep in mind that for modern man, the Royal Path usually starts from the humid principle, even though immediately after, this water must be made dry and arid. A spiritual hunger or the despotic need to entirely own yourself often leads to the Way.
50
In the magical, dry, or solar way, you will create a duality in your being not in an unconscious and passive manner (as the mystic does), but consciously and willingly; you will shift directly on the higher part and identify yourself with that superior and subsistent principle, whereas the mystic tends to identify with his lower part, in a relationship of need and abandonment. Slowly but gradually, you will strengthen this "other" (which is yourself) and create for it a supremacy, until it knows how to dominate all the powers of the natural part and master them totally. What is required of you is a discipline of firmness and sobriety until an equilibrium is created, namely the quality of a life that owns itself and is free with regard to itself, cleansed from instincts and from obscure appetite of the natural being, in both flesh and mind. Only then will you be able to employ, usefully and in an auxiliary fashion, some "corrosive water" (an alchemical term denoting violent methods such as toxic substances, the use of wine and sex, suspension of breath, and so forth). By attacking the natural connections, these give the fixed and preestablished nucleus the possibility of expanding and bursting forth more energetically. However, if this nucleus were not already established, the "corrosive waters," by dissolution, would lead you not above but below the condition from which you first started.
The affirmative discipline is enhanced by transformations provoked by some direct method, upon which the entire being, ready and compliant, reaffirms itself, digests and is itself digested, leaving nothing behind. These leaps are faster rhythms in which you must be able to transform the slow tempo of your incarnated being, in the same way that a surfer rides a wave; wherever the wave goes, so does the surfer, thus rejoining himself, remaining affirmative, firm, and centered.
Then the solar and golden nature in you will be able to break the equilibrium and be the stronger one: the other nature (your Self, your Senses, and your mind) will be under your control. At that point you can even suspend them, make them inert, neutralized, fixed. This is Silence, the "extinction of mania," the dissolving of the fog. Then, in your clarified eye, the cyclical integral vision will shine forth; you will see your transcendent essence, the destiny of beings and of all things, and the "Kingdom of Those Who Are." You will grasp the mode of action in a pure stsate, and you will grasp the mode of immaterial motion that operates every space or body in a timeless, creative rapidity. The center in you will amalgamate with the universal, non-becoming nature, and will derive from it a divine strength that expresses itself through miraculous powers. You will be able to focus on the Knowledge of the Names and on the wedding with the letters. You will be initiated.
50-1
...one of the first and fundamental operations in the initiatic art: the transferring of the Sense of the Self into the region of the Heart, the center of the human being.
We add that, contrary to common opinion, according to the traditional teaching, everything that is mental, reflective, cerebral must be referred to the lunar, feminine, passive element; conversely, to the heart must be attributed the quality of the solar, masculine, and central element.
55
...especially for the operative aspects of magic, one needs to nourish a faculty defineable in these terms: to be oneself beyond oneself, in the terms of an elan, an active self-overcoming, and an affirmation that situates itself beyond one's individuality. In everyday life, heroism, heroic and even orgiastic intoxication, the pleasure of risking one's life, and even certain times of readiness for sacrifice are already signs pointing in this direction. The power of a life free from itself, capable of going beyond itself in this active form, is as important to magical and theurgical practice as the principles of absolute comman and absolute obedience copresent in oneself.
58
There are two paths: one leads to servitude, the other to liberation. Its principles are: "I am this" and "I am not this." Man is bonded by the former and liberated by the latter.
71
Every teaching of ours is illusory until it is translated into a practice and an action...slowly build up a strength inside you, similar to a lord whose glance instills silence, respect or confusion in the servants around him. This is our Gold.
72
At the center of yourself, like a spider that keeps under control all the strings of its web and their vibrations, let there be a calm self-control and a scrutinizing lucidity, purified and fearless, open to every voice.
For the magician it is imperative to escape in any possible way from the atmosphere of enslavement and intoxications that is the "soul of the earth"; to enter in a conscious contact with the world beyond, and to act from there, directing corresponding reactions and effects in real life.
Dare and be silent.
The strongest force is the will of man who knows what he wants. Set the goal, then, and never change it. After you have started never, ever quit, no matter what, because, as I have told you before, the path of Magic does not have "dead corners." One does not have to embark upon it, but once you have done so, there are only 2 alternatives: succeed or perish.
78
In the highest potency, the Word realizes itself fully and perfectly because it contains in itself the principle of every manifestation, actualizing itself in it with a linear correspondence betweeen the realizing will and the realized being.
80
In Greek, the verb "sym-ballo" (to reunite) and the analogous term "sym-bolon" (symbol) designate the act of reunion, while the synthesis indicates the result of this action. The dynamic character of the symbol is opposed to the static, immanent character of the synthesis. In regard to the effect of the action, the verb "sym-ballo" (to reunite) is opposed to the verb "dia-bollo" (to separate, oppose). The attribution of dynamic and magical virtues to symbols in order to overcome diabolical opposition and adversities is philologically obvious. And just as the symbol leads to a synthesis, its opposite, the "devil," is what leads to the opposite of synthesis, namely to analysis: in fact "ana-lysis" is solution, breaking down, dissolution, death.
84
There is an analogy between the physical and the metaphysical, between exteriority and interiority, and between man and cosmos. Because of this, man is potentially God, and the microcosm is potentially a macrocosm.
89
V.I.T.R.O.L - Visita interiora terrae, rectificando invenies occultam lapidem
(Visit the interior of the earth. By rectification you will find the hidden stone."
92
The vessel, the grasale or chalice of the Holy Grail, is in fact of "earth"; but "earth"...is the human body.
92
Mithras is he who assumes and dominates the taurine cosmic force that carries and moves all things. After being experienced in a magical projection or image, this supreme principle, in a second phase, is directly realized. The Mithraic nature, evoked and mastered through a new "bellowing," is "fixed" by the initiate. He commands it to remain, for the perfection of the state of him who is free from necessity, birth, and death.
101
From an initiatic point of view it must be said that one feels "Self" precisely because of the reflection of a superior principle...nous=the mind seen as an Olympian and incorruptible principle.
146
The intiatic mystery is precisely that of metamorphosis, of the passage from one species to another.
149
In order to achieve immortality it is necessary to burn every tendency that would urge one to assume this or that superhuman "seat"...If the struggle for immortality occurred in truly a magical context, the task would consist of resisting the beings whom one encounters...by generating, in their exact direction, a higher intensity than theirs.
What is capable of surviving death and being immortal is not the "soul" but the mind as nous, as a supernatural element....a body of incorruptible light.
149-50
sic nos non nobis - thus we are not for ourselves
155
Self-overcoming, aside from being the object of rites, is connected to a renewed, heroicized perception of the world and of life, not as an abstract concept of the mind, but as something that pulsates in the rhythm of one's own blood. It is the sensation of the world as power, or the sensation of the world as a sacrificial act. A great freedom, with action as the sole law.
You must perceive yourself as a center of strength and know the action that is no longer dictated by this or that object, but for the sake of itself. You will no longer be moved: detached, you will move. The objects around you will cease to be objects of desire for you - they will become objects of action.
...vision without reference points, having as its only direct object reality itself. Action awakened as an elementary thing, simple, unrestrained. Power of commanding and power of obeying, both absolute, to be quintessentialized in the way that is required for evocations and identifications, as for those immediate, immaterial encounters with "presences," in which some may ascend and disappear, powerful and invisible, while others precipitate into bodily forms.
156-7
...remember that by hating you decline. Hatred alters and it prevents you from controlling the influence of your opponent, worse yet it opens you to his own influence which you can instead know and paralyze, if you remain calm, without reacting...that force and purity over which nothing has power...detachment, silence, solitude...distance between human beings.
...To overcome the brotherly contamination, the need to love and to feel loved, to feel together, to feel equal and joined with others.
You will feel united only with those who are on your same path, which is not the human path, having no regard for human ways.
158
Life is a heroic affair of every moment, made of symbols, illuminations, commands, ritual, and sacrificial actions.
159
The word "passion" designates a passive state, whereas the magus is always active and victorious. A magus in love, or a jealous or a lazy magus is a contradiction in terms...
The "Great Magical Agent," the natural mediator of human omnipotence, cannot be enslaved and directed by anything other than a supernatural principle, which is an independent will.
161
Do violence to yourself. Do not do what you like, but what costs you: on principle, always take the path of greatest resistance.
The magical act is one of concrete fluidification of the will, or an immaculate, androgynous conception in which the fluidic force operates as a feminine principle in the creative realization under the inspiring and masculine action of the solar principle.
...in order to "dissolve" a "metal" it is necessary to make it red-hot, and then immerse it in water, excite, exasperate an instinct, an impulse, a desire and then abruptly, when its fulfillment is at hand, suspend it. At that point, the supersensible "eye" will see flashes come out of the lower centers and run snakelike toward the higher centers of the head, which by absorbing the former's strength begins to shine with a formidable light. This virtue of theirs is powerful and dry, it is the golden virtue of absolute command and of the absolute conception in magical realizations.
162
In solar or high magic, what is at work is a clean and superhuman science.
The magical act is the conception of a lightning-flash, a swift operation in which the mental power fixes the command or conception of the goal and unleashes against it the ignified fluidic force.
164
The more the realization is perfect, the more exalted, energetic, and absolute in their respective virtue are the two principles joined together by Hermes wand; the more calm, dry lucid, icy is the power of the Sun; the more ardent, vehement, and wild is the power of the ignified fluidic force (perfected mercury)fixed by the Sun. It is the conjunction and embrace of the two enemies on the same bed of the magical androgynous alliance: it is the great mystery of the Ars Regia that cannot be communicated to any outsider.
165
...success in magic is never the result of effort...Magic always operates in a simple and direct way, as an instantaneous force or as an irresistible and subtle fragrant force. This is why Lao-tzu says that the virtue of the Tao is "to act without acting." Thus the Hermeticists talke about the Work as a "woman's game" or as "child's play."
This is why it is improper to talk about "will" in magic, because will as conceived by men is characterized by tension, violence, rigidity or exactly the opposite features favorable to magical realizations. One needs to feel superior, not limited by obstacles, powerful and ready in spirit, dwelling in a state of perfect justice. This is the necessary basis for the calm, determined placing of the image, which is accurately defined in all its parts, in the mental light that needs to be ignified and gradually exalted until you reach the state of sympathy. It is in this state, as a pure act of spirit, that the sudden flash of "projection" needs to occur.
166
He gains the wonderful path produced by the intensity, the constancy, and the concentration of will; the wonderful path produced by the intensity, the constancy, and the concentration of effort; the wonderful path produced by the intensity, the constancy, and the concentration of the mind; the wonderful path produced by the intensity, the constancy, and the concentration of investigation, and as a fifth the heroic spirit. And this disciple, who has thus become heroic fifteenfold, is capable of liberation, is capable of awakening, is capable of attaining incomparable security.
177-8
If instead an inner attitude is created, such that the force does not encounter something rigid in us, but something similar to air, it will no longer find a hold and, at worse, spin around itself. The technique consists in waiting for the moment when it is possible to reaffirm oneself against the force to which one had previously left open the door, and little by little to absorb and transform it in oneself. Sometimes this is equivalent to offering oneself in a sort of sacrificial action, drawing from it a positive effect, an elevation, and an intensification.
184
The magical body is invulnerable and immortal; only what is composed and dependent is liable to alteration and corruption. This body can properly be called vajra, namely "diamond-thunderbolt," something almost adamantine, incorruptible, made of power and fulminating light.
201
...a natural process leads Western man in the precise direction of the counter-initiation. According to Evola, beginning with the Renaissance, Western man wanted to be "free" and autonomous, cutting off in rapid succession all the remaining contacts with the higher world and pursuing the path of immanence and the conquest of the physical world. But when the end result is not materialism and a material reality dominated by technology, the individual separated from the spiritual world tends to a sort of asceticism that consists in the overamplification of the dominating will and its freedom, thus forging the myth of the Superman. Thus, the individual can only align himself with the line of influence of the counter-initiation, and appearances in this direction (of unknowing "ascetics of evil") already exist and are very significant. Probably these are the ways with which the destiny of an entire civilization will be sealed.
241-2
...magic is conceived synonymous with the art of those who know how to reopen the path leading to the earthly paradise, in order to partake of the "Tree of Life" found at its center. This obviously refers to the restoration of that primordial state, reintegration of power, and contact with the "center" which constitutes the main goal of initiation as such.
258
*** regal tradition vs priestly tradition ***
...the figure of the magus retains in a highly visible way the ideal of spiritual virility, which is most essential for the higher type of the initiate or adept. The magus has always called to mind the ideal of a dominating superiority.
...if we see in the priest one who simply mediates the relationship between the human and divine worlds and if in the king (according to his original dignity) we recognize one who is instead a directly divine being, so that he represents with his mere presence a mediating function - then we must recognize that the regal tradition is much closer than the priestly tradition to the primordial tradition, and consequently to the supreme ideal of adeptship.
Now, if the magical dignity, as we have said, leads one to think spontaneously of a spiritual virility and a dominating superiority, then the relationship that it has with the tradition of initiatic regality becomes evident.
...It is irrelevant that the tradition of initiatic regality has long since disapeared as a source of adepts such as visible heads of people and states. The secret tradition of initiatic regality has existed and continues to exist in its proper place, alongside the tradition of initiation in general. It is no coincidence that Hermeticism speaks of a "Royal Art" and of a rex physicorum; that the Rosicrucians referred to an Imperator; and that even in the degenerate residues and counterfeits of modern Freemasonry there are dignities that are connected to the idea the "Holy Empire."
...what matters most is a spiritual race of warriors and heroes.
259-60
YOU MUST NOT SEEK POWER, IT IS POWER THAT MUST SEEK YOU.
261
- from Introduction to Magic - Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus - Julius Evola and the UR Group - Inner Traditions, Rochester, VT, 2001.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Prescience
Muad'Dib could indeed, see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley. Just so, Muad'Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door." And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning "That path leads ever down into stagnation.
-Frank Herbert, Dune
-Frank Herbert, Dune
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Sunday, May 29, 2011
THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT DIE
The seasons had beleaguered Evan Thane
With many a ravenous yearly trumpeting,
Pinched his defenses into crookedness,
And triumphed at the corners of his flesh,
And yet he would not tumble. Beards had wagged
Upon the lurking pestilence of humors
Pent in the damps to gnaw an old man's bones,
But no beards wagged for frosty Evan Thane.
He said he was no rotten Jericho
To shake for village prophets' reputations,
And scorned the bench where others whittled out
Their easy days with amiable discourse
Of usual death, -- until at last they died.
Grimly he watched them coward it away;
Glowered contempt beneath the funereal cedars
Scarce long enough to hear the falling clods
Rattle the wood, --then lashed his horse and fled,
Like one who leaves a shameful battlefield.
And never on any day of rain or cold
Dared villager ask of Evan Thane his health,
Implying thus that human flesh may fail.
They saw the bright uplifted head advance
Most casually where others bent and ducked;
They dreaded bitter dartings from his eye,
The old flesh reddening, the pursing lips
Spitting staccato vengeance through his beard,
And kept their tongues to whisper after him.
His house, like him, an aged careful watchman,
Blinked wary windows over Hunter's Knob,
Eyes for his every acre. None could buy
A foot of land from Evan. But he kept
One window, even by night, with lamp awake
Against the shade that throttled all men's throats.
He would not tell how swiftly years moved now --
Days like a silver flash cleaving the sky,
Nights but a rested sough of dark and stars --
But from his viny porch, as from a tower,
He peered out on the world's processional,
The clack of new machines, the pageantry
Of glittering strange dress and stranger speech.
He crackled his morning paper fervently
And clung on fast to the frayed edge of time,
Not crustily, but carefully, awake
Against the seasons' annual battering
And maladies that steal an old man's youth.
For still he would not die. He strode the hills
As if he would re-teem them from his life,
And kept within his heart the natural fire
To fill the air with blooms and sudden May.
And so one day the newcome Parson met him,
Bracing a corner of sky near a mended fence
And asked the forbidden question of the sage.
The Parson had not seen an aged man
Who could grow tall upon a passing breath,
Tower like granite (so he said) and flush
Like a ravaged cliff stung into scarlet spring.
He saw the white hair shaken indignantly
And heard quick speech, sibyllic fragments flung
From some strange inner might that was the man
The Parson set it down, or afterwards
He strove to, but he found it measureless
In notebooks, sermons, prayers, and flexless things.
The insurgent splendor of an ancient joy
Bereft the hills of death, and Evan stood
Apostle to their rapture, crying, "No!
I will not die...."
Then Parson knew that death was not a friend
To this old man who hailed the growing corn,
Germinant, like its grains, --in love with time
Because it gave expectancy of dawns
And fervor for to-morrow and live hope
That something might be better than before.
The hill-top was all blazed with noise of worlds,
A whirling scroll of kingdoms, cities, islands,
Seeded like fields with fates men might behold;
Of rivers dredged, that swift gray ships might bring
Cargoes to lands that never knew the sea;
Of marble buildings, yet unreared, and streets
Made newly splendid for such folk as hear
Music yet to be thought and songs unwritten;
Of islands fabulous at last disclosing
Secrets of buried tongues, old monuments;
Young heroes and fair women not yet born;
Tales unprinted, and ways of coming men
Plying the tangled threads of world desire
To some dim ever far-off unity.
Whether he heard or thought such things as these
The Parson could not say. He seemed to wake
Alone upon the hill-top, wondering,
Questioning what old Evan told him there.
The lizards flicked along the rotting fence;
A blue-jay rasped a call across the field;
And at his feet the ants ran back and forth.
Then evening made the distant hills more blue
With shadow, and he sought the weed-fringed road.
He saw the cornstalks withered by the sun
And a hawk, first prowler, swooping in a field
With deathly skill, so that he pondered much
Upon the Resurrection and the Life,
Hearing forever, like a trumpet-song --
"I must not die."...And so came dreaming home.
His lamp burned late that night. At one o'clock
He swept the futile papers from his desk
And girded up his soul to look at stars.
But there were none. Impenetrably dull,
The firmament was cloud, unanswering,
Except that high on Hunter's Knob one lamp
Marked Evan's yellow star against the night,
Giving back answer to his lonely question.
The morrow was the Sabbath. So he preached
Most on the Resurrection and the Life,
And preached for one wild face of all the faces,
Evan Thane's who said he would not die.
-Donald Davidson
from An Outland Piper. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1924.
With many a ravenous yearly trumpeting,
Pinched his defenses into crookedness,
And triumphed at the corners of his flesh,
And yet he would not tumble. Beards had wagged
Upon the lurking pestilence of humors
Pent in the damps to gnaw an old man's bones,
But no beards wagged for frosty Evan Thane.
He said he was no rotten Jericho
To shake for village prophets' reputations,
And scorned the bench where others whittled out
Their easy days with amiable discourse
Of usual death, -- until at last they died.
Grimly he watched them coward it away;
Glowered contempt beneath the funereal cedars
Scarce long enough to hear the falling clods
Rattle the wood, --then lashed his horse and fled,
Like one who leaves a shameful battlefield.
And never on any day of rain or cold
Dared villager ask of Evan Thane his health,
Implying thus that human flesh may fail.
They saw the bright uplifted head advance
Most casually where others bent and ducked;
They dreaded bitter dartings from his eye,
The old flesh reddening, the pursing lips
Spitting staccato vengeance through his beard,
And kept their tongues to whisper after him.
His house, like him, an aged careful watchman,
Blinked wary windows over Hunter's Knob,
Eyes for his every acre. None could buy
A foot of land from Evan. But he kept
One window, even by night, with lamp awake
Against the shade that throttled all men's throats.
He would not tell how swiftly years moved now --
Days like a silver flash cleaving the sky,
Nights but a rested sough of dark and stars --
But from his viny porch, as from a tower,
He peered out on the world's processional,
The clack of new machines, the pageantry
Of glittering strange dress and stranger speech.
He crackled his morning paper fervently
And clung on fast to the frayed edge of time,
Not crustily, but carefully, awake
Against the seasons' annual battering
And maladies that steal an old man's youth.
For still he would not die. He strode the hills
As if he would re-teem them from his life,
And kept within his heart the natural fire
To fill the air with blooms and sudden May.
And so one day the newcome Parson met him,
Bracing a corner of sky near a mended fence
And asked the forbidden question of the sage.
The Parson had not seen an aged man
Who could grow tall upon a passing breath,
Tower like granite (so he said) and flush
Like a ravaged cliff stung into scarlet spring.
He saw the white hair shaken indignantly
And heard quick speech, sibyllic fragments flung
From some strange inner might that was the man
The Parson set it down, or afterwards
He strove to, but he found it measureless
In notebooks, sermons, prayers, and flexless things.
The insurgent splendor of an ancient joy
Bereft the hills of death, and Evan stood
Apostle to their rapture, crying, "No!
I will not die...."
Then Parson knew that death was not a friend
To this old man who hailed the growing corn,
Germinant, like its grains, --in love with time
Because it gave expectancy of dawns
And fervor for to-morrow and live hope
That something might be better than before.
The hill-top was all blazed with noise of worlds,
A whirling scroll of kingdoms, cities, islands,
Seeded like fields with fates men might behold;
Of rivers dredged, that swift gray ships might bring
Cargoes to lands that never knew the sea;
Of marble buildings, yet unreared, and streets
Made newly splendid for such folk as hear
Music yet to be thought and songs unwritten;
Of islands fabulous at last disclosing
Secrets of buried tongues, old monuments;
Young heroes and fair women not yet born;
Tales unprinted, and ways of coming men
Plying the tangled threads of world desire
To some dim ever far-off unity.
Whether he heard or thought such things as these
The Parson could not say. He seemed to wake
Alone upon the hill-top, wondering,
Questioning what old Evan told him there.
The lizards flicked along the rotting fence;
A blue-jay rasped a call across the field;
And at his feet the ants ran back and forth.
Then evening made the distant hills more blue
With shadow, and he sought the weed-fringed road.
He saw the cornstalks withered by the sun
And a hawk, first prowler, swooping in a field
With deathly skill, so that he pondered much
Upon the Resurrection and the Life,
Hearing forever, like a trumpet-song --
"I must not die."...And so came dreaming home.
His lamp burned late that night. At one o'clock
He swept the futile papers from his desk
And girded up his soul to look at stars.
But there were none. Impenetrably dull,
The firmament was cloud, unanswering,
Except that high on Hunter's Knob one lamp
Marked Evan's yellow star against the night,
Giving back answer to his lonely question.
The morrow was the Sabbath. So he preached
Most on the Resurrection and the Life,
And preached for one wild face of all the faces,
Evan Thane's who said he would not die.
-Donald Davidson
from An Outland Piper. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1924.
Friday, April 1, 2011
2 - Bacatus - The Magician
Trump: 2 - Bacatus - The Magician
-initiatic axiom
----
The creator of the natural or sensible universe is a wielder of "illusion." It is in the stead of this god that magicians act when working their wills upon the natural universe to cause changes to occur according to their wills...
The original meaning of this image was probably that of the magician, the primeval creator of the world according to will.
-Stephen E. Flowers, The Magian Tarok, 47-48
------
By means of willed performative or operative acts/speech the operator/magician (subject) is able to manipulate, or to participate in a complex of symbols which have an analytical ("sympathetic") connection to the indirect object of these acts. Because of the psycho-cosmological and social frame of reference for such operative acts ascribes a grammatically subjective nature t this indirect object of the action, it is considered a partner in a phenomenologically communicative process, and it in turn becomes the subject/agent of an action of which the magician or some other person(s) or thing(s) become the object...
[Magic is] a technique by which the human being is able, by the power of volition, to affect events in subjective and/or objective reality.
-Stephen E. Flowers, Runes and Magic, 14-15
------------------
¨There are three types of knowledge, Luke. First, there is knowledge acquired through experience, as in the case of the craftsman. Secondly, there is knowledge acquired through study, as in the case of the scholar. Finally there is knowledge acquired through initiation, and this is the special province of the Jedi Order.
Initiation does not teach you to know or do anything in particular. It is rather a process of awakening certain latent sensitivities within rare individuals. These sensitivities enable the Jedi to see situations and events around him with a clarity and objectivity unknown to non-Jedis. Thus he is able to impress his Will upon situations in a manner that is as effective as it is subtle. This Jedi characteristic, mysterious as it is to others, has resulted in our being suspect to those in positions of social power...
Now, the knowledge of the Jedi requires two factors. The initiation process is one factor; it is the deliberate sensitizing of the individual to the abilities that lie within his-or her- consciousness. This initiation may be encouraged and to some extent guided by others, but it is essentially a poersonal, private experience. Hence at the Citadel of the Jedi we never spoke of ´training´ Jedi - but rather of recognizing their respective levels of initiation.
...The other factor is the raw material. We have found that not everyone can respond to initiation, or respond to it at comparable levels. Nor is the capacity for initiation tied to the ability to acquire knowledge of the other two kinds, though of course a Jedi with such knowledge is all the more effective. In certain individuals - beings of all species throughout the galaxy - there is...the ´Force´, as we generally call it. It is the raw material, that, when refined through initiation, enables the Jedi to effect change in accordance with his Will...
The Jedi´s commitment is to change as something desirable in itself...but of course there are value judgments involved. There is nothing to be gained by influencing a peaceful, progressive society to disintegrate into war, for example. But a peaceful society which fails to progress may benefit in the long run from a destabilizing shock. The art of the Jedi lies in the ability to estimate when and if a change in the existing situation will stimulate positive evolution.
The strength of the Jedi lay in their ability to set processes in motion, not necessarily to force those same processes to conclusion...
Michael Aquino, The Dark Side, 47-8
-----------
There is a twofold reason that we want to retain the term "magic."
First of all, we want to emphasize the character of an experimental science and technique that is essential to the initiatic path in general and which distinguishes magic from everything that is mysticism, mediumism, and the like. In passing, we may note that in the body of positive religions the magical component is present in everything that is ritual with a definite and objective character, as opposed to the purely subjective and psychological domain of faith, sentiments, and states of mind.
The second reason is that despite all its counterfeits and fairy-tale adaptations, the figure of the magus retains in a highly visible way the ideal of spiritual virility, which is most essential for the higher type of the initiate or adept. The magus has always called to mind the ideal of a dominating superiority.
-Julius Evola, from Introduction to Magic, 258-9
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
beware the Ides of March...
Trump: 1 - Apis - The Fool
"You remember the story John use to tell us about the three chinamen playing Fantan? This guy runs up to them and says, "Hey, the world's coming to an end!" and the first one says, "Well, I best go to the mission and pray," and the second one says, "Well, hell, I'm gonna go and buy me a case of Mezcal and six whores," and the third one says "Well, I'm gonna finish the game."
"I shall finish the game, Doc."
-William H. Bonney, from Young Guns II
Saturday, January 8, 2011
The Inversion of Ghibellinism
In the so-called sect of Bavaria's Illuminati we find a typical example of the overturning of tendencies that I have previously described. This can be seen in the change of meaning undergone by the term Enlightenment. Originally the term referred to suprarational, spiritual illumination; slowly but inexorably, it became synonymous with rationalism, with the theory of "natural light," and with antitradition. We may speak, in regard to it, of a counterfeited subversive use of the right belonging to the initiate alone. The initiate, if truly such, may regard himself to be above the contingent historical forms of a particular tradition; denounce its limitations (if he received the mandate to do so) and place himself above their authority; reject dogmas, because he possesses something higher, namely, a transcendent knowledge that he regards as the ultimate authority; and finally claim for himself the dignity of a free being, because he has freed himself from the bonds of the merely human, inferior nature. To this effect the "free ones" constitute a community of equals, which may be regarded as a true confraternity.
Therefore, if we materialize, secularize, and democratize these aspects of the initiatory right and translate them into individualistic terms, what we have are the fundamental principles of the modern subversive and revolutionary ideologies. The light of mere human reason replaces the illumination, giving rise to the havoc brought about by "free inquiry" and secular criticism. The supernatural is banned or confused with nature. Freedom and equality are illegitimately claimed by the individual who is "conscious of his dignity" (though he is not conscious of being enslaved to his empirical self) and who now arises against any form of established authority, vainly setting himself up as his own ultimate reason for being. I say "vainly" because in the inexorable unfolding of the various phases of modern decadence, individualism has been only a short-lived mirage and a misleading intoxication; the collective and irrational element in the age of the masses and of technology has rapidly overcome the emancipated "individual" who is without roots and without traditions.
166-7
-----
...the initiate who knocks down the Temple's columns and steps over the cross, being admitted, after this, to the Mystery of the ascending and descending stairs with seven steps, must swear revenge and ritually actualize this oath by striking with a dagger the Crown and the Tiara, which are the symbols of the traditional double power, namely, of the regal and pontifical authority. All of this properly conveys the meaning of what Freemasonry, as an occult force of global subversion, has precipitated in the modern world, from the preparation for the French Revolution and the establishment of the American democracy to the revolutions of 1848, World War I, the Turkish revolution, the Spanish revolution, and other analogous events. While in the cycle of the Grail the initiatory realization was conceived in such a way as to be connected with the goal of resurrecting the king, in the abovementioned ritual we have exactly the opposite, namely, the counterfeit of an initiation that is tied to the oath (sometimes expressed with the formula "Victory or Death!) of striking or overturning any authority from above.
In any event, the reason behind these consideratins is to indicate the point where the "legacy of the Grail" and of analogous initiatory traditions stops and where, with the exception of the survival of a few surviving names and symbols, we can no longer detect any legitimate filiation from them. In the specific case of modern Freemasonry the following factors would make it appear as a typical example of a pseudoinitiatory organization: its confused syncretism; the artificiality of most of its hierarchy's degrees (something that even a layman would notice); and the banality of the moralistic, social, rationalistic, and modern exegesis applied to various borrowed elements that have an authentic esoteric character. And yet, considering the "efficient direction" of that organization in reference to the previously mentioned elements and to its revolutionary activity, one cannot help feeling that he is confronting a force that, on the spiritual plane, acts against the spirit itself: a dark force of antitradition and counterinitiation. In that case it is possible that its rites are more harmful than one may think, and that those who partake of it, without realizing it, establish contact with this force, which cannot be grasped by ordinary consciousness.
171-2
------
In its essence, Ghibellinism has been nothing less than a form of the reappearance of the sacred and spiritual ideal of the authority befitting a leader of a traditional political organization. Thus it is exactly the opposite of everything that is "secular," and of everything that is political and governmental in the modern, degenerate sense of the word.
One may wonder what is the point of shedding light on this essence of Ghibellinism, the Grail's kingdom, and Templarism, other than to reestablish the truth before the previously mentioned misunderstandings and counterfeits. The answer to this question must remain undetermined. Already in the arena of ideas, the character of the dominating culture is such that most people could not even imagine what the issue at stake is. After all, only a small minority could understand that just as the ascetic-monastic orders played a fundamental role during the material and moral chaos that brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire, likewise an order following in the footsteps of Templarism would have a decisive role in a world such as the modern one, which displays forms of greater dissolution and inner collapse than the previous period. The Grail retains the meaning of a symbol in which the antithesis between "priest" and "warrior" is overcome, but also retains the modern equivalent of this antithesis, that is to say, materialized, telluric, and titanic, or better yet, Luciferian forms of the will to power on the one hand, and the lunar forms of the surviving devotional religion and of confused mystical and neospiritualist impulses toward the supernatural and what is not ordinary.
If we just consider the individual and some people, the symbol always retains an intrinsic value, which is indicative for a given type of inner formation. But to go from this to the notion of an order, of a modern Templarism, and to believe that even if it were to come to be, it would be able to exercise an influence directly and sensibly on the general historical forces that are dominant today - that is hasty. Even the Rosicrucians (the real Rosicrucians), back in the eighteenth century, regarded this attempt as vain. Moreover, even those who have received the "sword" must wait for the right time to wield it, the right moment being only that in which forces, the power of which is still unknown owing to an intrinsic determinism, will encounter a real limit and the cycle will end. The right moment will be that in which, even before the most extreme existential situations, a desperate defense instinct rising from the deepest recesses (I almost said, from the memoire de sangc) will eventually regalvanize and give strength to myths and ideas connected to the legacy of better times. I believe that before this happens, a possible Templarism may play only an inner defensive role, in relation to the task of protecting the symbolic, yet not merely symbolic, "solar stronghold."
This will clarify the ultimate meaning of a serious and committed study of the witnesses and of the motifs of the Templar saga and of higher Ghibellinism. To understand and to live by these motifs means to enter into a dimension of suprahistorical realities and, in this way, to gradually reach the certainty that the invisible and inviolable center, the king who must awake, and the avenging and restorating hero are not mere fancies of a dead and romantic past, but rather the truth of those who, today, alone may legitimately be said to be alive.
174-5
-Julius Evola. The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit. Inner
Traditions. Rochester, Vermont: 1997.
Therefore, if we materialize, secularize, and democratize these aspects of the initiatory right and translate them into individualistic terms, what we have are the fundamental principles of the modern subversive and revolutionary ideologies. The light of mere human reason replaces the illumination, giving rise to the havoc brought about by "free inquiry" and secular criticism. The supernatural is banned or confused with nature. Freedom and equality are illegitimately claimed by the individual who is "conscious of his dignity" (though he is not conscious of being enslaved to his empirical self) and who now arises against any form of established authority, vainly setting himself up as his own ultimate reason for being. I say "vainly" because in the inexorable unfolding of the various phases of modern decadence, individualism has been only a short-lived mirage and a misleading intoxication; the collective and irrational element in the age of the masses and of technology has rapidly overcome the emancipated "individual" who is without roots and without traditions.
166-7
-----
...the initiate who knocks down the Temple's columns and steps over the cross, being admitted, after this, to the Mystery of the ascending and descending stairs with seven steps, must swear revenge and ritually actualize this oath by striking with a dagger the Crown and the Tiara, which are the symbols of the traditional double power, namely, of the regal and pontifical authority. All of this properly conveys the meaning of what Freemasonry, as an occult force of global subversion, has precipitated in the modern world, from the preparation for the French Revolution and the establishment of the American democracy to the revolutions of 1848, World War I, the Turkish revolution, the Spanish revolution, and other analogous events. While in the cycle of the Grail the initiatory realization was conceived in such a way as to be connected with the goal of resurrecting the king, in the abovementioned ritual we have exactly the opposite, namely, the counterfeit of an initiation that is tied to the oath (sometimes expressed with the formula "Victory or Death!) of striking or overturning any authority from above.
In any event, the reason behind these consideratins is to indicate the point where the "legacy of the Grail" and of analogous initiatory traditions stops and where, with the exception of the survival of a few surviving names and symbols, we can no longer detect any legitimate filiation from them. In the specific case of modern Freemasonry the following factors would make it appear as a typical example of a pseudoinitiatory organization: its confused syncretism; the artificiality of most of its hierarchy's degrees (something that even a layman would notice); and the banality of the moralistic, social, rationalistic, and modern exegesis applied to various borrowed elements that have an authentic esoteric character. And yet, considering the "efficient direction" of that organization in reference to the previously mentioned elements and to its revolutionary activity, one cannot help feeling that he is confronting a force that, on the spiritual plane, acts against the spirit itself: a dark force of antitradition and counterinitiation. In that case it is possible that its rites are more harmful than one may think, and that those who partake of it, without realizing it, establish contact with this force, which cannot be grasped by ordinary consciousness.
171-2
------
In its essence, Ghibellinism has been nothing less than a form of the reappearance of the sacred and spiritual ideal of the authority befitting a leader of a traditional political organization. Thus it is exactly the opposite of everything that is "secular," and of everything that is political and governmental in the modern, degenerate sense of the word.
One may wonder what is the point of shedding light on this essence of Ghibellinism, the Grail's kingdom, and Templarism, other than to reestablish the truth before the previously mentioned misunderstandings and counterfeits. The answer to this question must remain undetermined. Already in the arena of ideas, the character of the dominating culture is such that most people could not even imagine what the issue at stake is. After all, only a small minority could understand that just as the ascetic-monastic orders played a fundamental role during the material and moral chaos that brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire, likewise an order following in the footsteps of Templarism would have a decisive role in a world such as the modern one, which displays forms of greater dissolution and inner collapse than the previous period. The Grail retains the meaning of a symbol in which the antithesis between "priest" and "warrior" is overcome, but also retains the modern equivalent of this antithesis, that is to say, materialized, telluric, and titanic, or better yet, Luciferian forms of the will to power on the one hand, and the lunar forms of the surviving devotional religion and of confused mystical and neospiritualist impulses toward the supernatural and what is not ordinary.
If we just consider the individual and some people, the symbol always retains an intrinsic value, which is indicative for a given type of inner formation. But to go from this to the notion of an order, of a modern Templarism, and to believe that even if it were to come to be, it would be able to exercise an influence directly and sensibly on the general historical forces that are dominant today - that is hasty. Even the Rosicrucians (the real Rosicrucians), back in the eighteenth century, regarded this attempt as vain. Moreover, even those who have received the "sword" must wait for the right time to wield it, the right moment being only that in which forces, the power of which is still unknown owing to an intrinsic determinism, will encounter a real limit and the cycle will end. The right moment will be that in which, even before the most extreme existential situations, a desperate defense instinct rising from the deepest recesses (I almost said, from the memoire de sangc) will eventually regalvanize and give strength to myths and ideas connected to the legacy of better times. I believe that before this happens, a possible Templarism may play only an inner defensive role, in relation to the task of protecting the symbolic, yet not merely symbolic, "solar stronghold."
This will clarify the ultimate meaning of a serious and committed study of the witnesses and of the motifs of the Templar saga and of higher Ghibellinism. To understand and to live by these motifs means to enter into a dimension of suprahistorical realities and, in this way, to gradually reach the certainty that the invisible and inviolable center, the king who must awake, and the avenging and restorating hero are not mere fancies of a dead and romantic past, but rather the truth of those who, today, alone may legitimately be said to be alive.
174-5
-Julius Evola. The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit. Inner
Traditions. Rochester, Vermont: 1997.
Friday, January 7, 2011
FOLLOWING THE TIGER
When I was weary of toiling
I put on a beggar's clothes,
Borrowed a lute of the tinker,
And garnished my cap with a rose,
Left all the lands behind me
Far as ever I could
And followed the track of the Tiger
Into the thick of the wood.
For the feet of the Tiger pass
Where no man ever has trod.
The lair of the Tiger is blessed.
Its place is the place of God.
The stars turned softly in heaven;
The moon was a horn of dew.
The grasses trembled in music
On paths that the wild things knew.
I walked in the ways of the Tiger, --
I, with a rose and a lute,
But I feared not the fangs of the Tiger
Nor shrank at the white owl's hoot.
For the feet of the Tiger pass
Where evil never has trod.
The ways of the Tiger are blessed.
His home is the home of God.
I heard a sweet bell in the forest
When faint leaves whispered of dark,
Followed, and found in the woodland
A chimney, a smoke, a spark.
And I thought: Is he at the fireside,
Tiger's master and mine,
Warming his feet at the coals,
Nodding over his wine?
For the feet of the Tiger rest
Where harm's foot never has trod.
He has gone in the walks of peace.
His looks are lifted to God.
I knocked, for the door was mute,
And who should be waiting there
But the long-lost Queen of the Faeries,
Braiding her golden hair.
The Faery smiled down from the window
And opened the casement bars.
She loosened her hair in the shadow
And shook out a million stars.
And I thought: Oh, the claws of the Tiger
Are sheathed, and the Peace of God
Rests on this house, and beauty
Walks where the Tiger has trod.
And then was the latchstring lifted.
There were the lovely three, --
God, and the Queen, and the Tiger,
And God's hand welcomed me.
The Tiger slept on the hearthstone.
The Faery gave me her ring.
My rose began to blossom;
My lute began to sing.
It sang how the ways of the Tiger
Led me to beauty and God,
To the door of the hut of the Faery
By paths men never had trod.
-Donald Davidson
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Race In Savannah
From 1908 through 1911, Savannah, Georgia was the site of a series of international automobile races. By a fortunate play of circumstance, Frank Battey, president of the Savannah Automobile Club, was able to secure the privilege for the city after New York declared its unwillingness to host the events after multiple deaths and frustration due to heavily trafficked roads.
The races went by various names. There was the “International Light Car Race,” “Grand Prize Race of the Automobile Club of America,” “The Southern High-Powered Cup,” “The Vanderbilt Cup,” “The Savannah Challenge Cup,” “The Tiedeman Trophy,” “The Savannah Trophy Race,” and a couple of others. Awards were given in the form of gold or silver trophy cups worth anywhere from $2,000 - $5000.
The automobile was barely ten years old and racing, as a sport, even younger. The cars were primitive and dangerous yet colorful and exotic and the drivers were wild men. France, Italy, Germany, and the United States all sent teams to compete. Savannah prepared itself accordingly.
A track was created that looped through undeveloped portions on the south side of the city and dipped into parts of the historic district. The terrain must’ve been bizarre for people not familiar with the area. There were long stretches of track underneath oak tree tunnels with Spanish moss as well as stretches of palmetto trees, tall marsh grass, and tidal creeks. There were farms nearby selling fresh produce and also chickens, cattle, dogs, and other critters periodically crossing the road and causing wrecks. There were chain gangs cutting back the wilderness, clearing the track, and keeping it well-oiled; state militia armed with bayonets to maintain order; trains passing nearby carrying disbelieving visitors from Wall Street; buglers to warn drivers of approaching hairpin turns; flag-bearers to signal oncoming danger; medics to assist the injured; 30,000 spectators dressed in their best and worst and drinking whiskey at 50 cents a shot; and of course, there was the city of Savannah itself.
My idea is to recreate Savannah during this period as a comprehensive environment for a vintage racecar game. The city was at an interesting turning point. It was an idyllic, easy-going, rural, coastal town that had largely been forgotten since the Civil War except in regards to cotton. Savannah was one of two places in the country quoting international cotton prices, the other being New York. Most people still used horses and carriages to get around. Electricity was brand new. The automobile was the symbol of the impending industrial age of the 20th century. The mayor of nearby Thunderbolt(then Warsaw) actually made a public apology for having the audacity to purchase an automobile. But for the young, there was nothing so exciting as the thought of the new speeds that were possible behind the wheel of these mechanical chariots (top speed in 1911 – approx. 80 mph).
I want to emphasize the borderline between the old and the new, the rural and the cosmopolitan, the human and the machine and I think that cars racing would be an ideal way to journey through this type of space and time. I also am not aware of a racing video game that has taken up vintage automobiles.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Behind Blue Eyes
No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes
And no one knows what's like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies
But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
No one knows what it's like
To feel these feelings
Like I do, And I blame you!
No one bites back as hard
On their anger
None of my pain and woe
Can show through
But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
No one knows what it's like
To be mistreated
To be defeated
Behind blue eyes
No one knows how to say
That they're sorry and don't worry
I'm not telling lies
But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man,
To be the sad man,
Behind blue eyes.
-The Who
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaekgRtsTiQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MSqF_rQ6Mw
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes
And no one knows what's like
To be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies
But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
No one knows what it's like
To feel these feelings
Like I do, And I blame you!
No one bites back as hard
On their anger
None of my pain and woe
Can show through
But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
No one knows what it's like
To be mistreated
To be defeated
Behind blue eyes
No one knows how to say
That they're sorry and don't worry
I'm not telling lies
But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free
No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man,
To be the sad man,
Behind blue eyes.
-The Who
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaekgRtsTiQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MSqF_rQ6Mw
Sunday, November 21, 2010
The Fugitives
Though many American poets have attended universities and taught in them, the Fugitives remain the one outstanding poetic school which developed naturally from a campus environment. The fact that a university was as much the "native" environment for the Fugitives as the South tends to demonstrate that for a long time it was the last stronghold of European aristocratic culture in the midst of a thriving democratic society. If the American university is no longer such an aristocratic stronghold, being forced, like the South, to yield to egalitarian pressures, nevertheless, during the period when the Fugitives were most active, it could be said that the university was the South, or at least the most enduring part of it.
Something like this has to be said, in order to make clear the ambivalent role the Fugitives played as Southerners. That they were Southerners, there can be no doubt, as much as Robert Frost was a New Englander or Robinson Jeffers a Westerner. But from the first, their loyalties were mixed: "THE FUGITIVE flees from nothing faster than from the high-caste Brahmins of the Old South," they proclaimed in their first issue, and in all subsequent issues they continued to argue the point. There was at first no consciously regional bias in their poetry; in fact they quarreled publicly with what they took to be the restrictive view of Southern culture, as expressed in an editorial in Poetry magazine that seemed to call for a Southern poetry that would be nostalgically and quaintly local. When Harriet Monroe, the editor, disclaimed such a view in her next issue, The Fugitive editors explained that "we fear to have too much stress laid on a tradition that may be called a tradition only when looked at through the haze of a generous imagination." They made it clear that they were against both "atavism" and "sentimentality" in Southern writing, vices that were all too familiar in the "moonlight and magnolia" school that had arisen in the South after the Civil War. In an editorial in the June, 1924, issue of The Fugitive, Davidson listed among the "Fallacies of Modern Poetry" the assumption that "A Good Poet must have Local Color." He went on to explain:
"Frost has written of New England, Sandburg of Chicago, but whatever is good in their poetry is good not merely because they wrote of specific places. Place is incidental; it is subordinate; it may even form a definite limitation, and perhaps does in the case of much American poetry. At the best, it is merely a picturesque addition, not the inner substance of poetry."
Perhaps the best evidence that the Fugitives were not sentimentally, but critically, Southern is to be found in their poetry, where the ironic tone cuts through the veil of myth surrounding the scenes and characters, and reveals the age and decay crumbling the Old South into ruin. Ransom wrote of the "Antique Harvesters" that peopled the Southern landscape, looking like figures from a tapestry rather than real farmers with a field to plow, and he made of his "Captain Carpenter" a figure of gentle mockery, a sort of Southern Don Quixote who courageously but weakly defended his code of honor, until finally there was nothing left of him but a carrion for the kites; and he pictured himself in "Old Mansion" as an "intruder" who looked hard at the "house whose legend could in no wise be brief," and mused:
"It was a Southern manor. One need hardly imagine
Towers, white monoliths, or even ivied walls;
But sufficient state if its peacock was a pigeon;
Where no courts held, but grave rites and funerals."
The images of age and death that are present in so much Fugitive poetry are in one sense a link with the earlier Gothic South of Edgar Allen Poe ("Our Cousin, Mr. Poe" as Tate acknowledged in a discreetly appreciative essay), but they are also evidence of the obsolescence of Southern culture, and proof that the poets were much aware of its transience and fragility. In the most famous of Fugitive poems, Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," there is a similar point of reference to earlier Southern poetry (specifically, Henry Timrod's brief "Ode" for the dedication of the Charleston cemetery, just after the Civil War) but an equally strong disclaimer of blind loyalty to the past:
"What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?"
Though no solution is found to the poet's dilemma, poised as he is between an unrecoverable, heroic past and an indeterminate, chaotic present, he has no hope of clinging to remembered glories: the isolation of the figure in the cemetery is final, and his only consolation is that it is a common evil all men must face:
"Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush -
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!"
Tate's Southern version of The Waste Land shows man trapped in time, honoring the past but unable to live by it, a victim of his own self-consciousness, tempted like Narcissus to embrace his own image and drown, but too stoic to give in to the despair he feels in the presence of evil and death. As Davidson perceptively wrote to Tate after seeing an early manuscript version of the "Ode" in 1927: "Your Elegy is not for the Confederate dead, but for your own dead emotion..."
There is so much in Fugitive poetry, in fact, that directly parallels the experience so powerfully expressed in that other great writer of the modern South, William Faulkner, who was equally severe in criticizing the land he never ceased to love. To place Tate's "Ode" beside such novels as Sartoris or The Sound and the Fury, written at almost the same historical moment, is to see how strikingly they portray a common experience: that of the South in crisis, too weak to throw off the old shell of the past, so entangled in an outworn tradition that the only choice left to the sensitive individual is suicide, a choice actually taken by Bayard Sartoris and Quentin Compson in Faulkner's novels, and vividly imagined by the spokesman in Tate's poem. Only the tragic grandeur and sympathy of the portrayal in each case relieves the hopelessness of the human situation.
To place Faulkner beside the Fugitives is only to recognize the dominant roles they have played in the Renaissance of modern Southern literature. Between them, the spoils may be almost equally divided. If Faulkner is unquestionably greater as an isolated genius, the Fugitives have been greater as a civilizing instrument in Southern letters. There is still no novelist the equal of Faulkner anywhere in the South, and there are still no poets who can compare with the Fugitives in sustained achievement. If Faulkner is the prize example of the natural talent, or what might be called the rewards of self-education, the Fugitives are the prize examples of the tutored talent, or the rewards of formal education. What bound them together as artists and men was loyalty to their native region, in spite of its decadence, and adherence to the old ideal of Jeffersonian Agrarianism.
This is not to identify the Fugitives with the Agrarians, which would only lead to confusion. The Fugitives and the Agrarians were two separate schools, one of which was exclusively literary, the other just as exclusively social and political. The Agrarians were not organized until after the Fugitives had disbanded, and then they included only four members - albeit the major ones - of the previous group: Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren. The Southern Agrarians, whose symposium, I'll Take My Stand, aroused so much criticism as a "reactionary" social document, must be understood in the context of the Depression years, when radical solutions to the American financial crisis were being proposed on all sides. The Agrarians were political idealists of the South, who tried to take a broad view of the common predicament, and who believed as Jefferson had believed (and as Faulkner also believed) that human culture has its grass roots in agriculture: destroy the intimate relation between man and nature, their argument ran, and you destroy the fertility of human imagination, and with it both men's satisfaction with life and their pleasure in art. The belief in an agrarian society was too deeply rooted in Southern life and character to be easily out-grown, and when the crisis of the American industrial system came, it was natural for Southerners to turn to what they thought was the one sure way of sustaining life and character. The Fugitives had not been conscious regionalists; in fact, they had opposed the regional approach to poetry; but in becoming responsible critics of society, they discovered their regional bias.
As Tate put it for the whole Fugitive group:
"They were willing to draw upon all the resources of poetry that they knew, for it was obvious that their sectionalism, if it existed, and their nationalism, if that existed, would take care of themselves...Fugitive poetry turned out to be profoundly sectional in that it was supported by the prejudices, feelings, values, into which the poets were born."
What is most Southern in Fugitive poetry is more than Agrarianism; it is a special compound of local qualities, some of which are historical, some geographical, and some temperamental. Among the historical, one would include the many Classical references, the Greek names and Latin phrases, that so richly season this poetry. The Fugitive poets, like the little girls in Katherine Anne Porter's story, Old Mortality, seem to have been brought up in the belief that "one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments" But the historical would also include the broad perspective from which these poets view the contemporary world:
"Where we went in the boat was a long bay
A slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone -
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:"
So begins Tate's "The Mediterranean," with a majestic sweep of space and time that seems to place one above the earth, looking down from a great height. Again,
"We are the children of an ancient band
Broken between the mountains and the sea,"
writes Warren, seeing his westward-moving race in a more tragic Exodus to the Promised Land, which they can never quite reach or claim. Southern poetry, like Southern culture, is heavy with the historical sense, which as T.S. Eliot defined it in a famous passage
"compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer on and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order."
The geographical element is equally prominent in this poetry, not as quaint "local color," or painted backdrop, but as a felt relation to the land:
"Autumn days in our section
Are the most used-up thing on earth
(or in the waters under the earth)
Having no more color nor predilection
Than cornstalks too wet for the fire,
A ribbon rotting on the byre,
A man's face weathered as straw
By the summer's flare and winter's flaw."
It must have been just such a stanza that inspired so cosmopolitan an American poet as Wallace Stevens to exclaim: "Mr. Ransom's poems are composed of Tennessee." Reading through a collection of Fugitive poetry, one realizes anew that the South has a religion of place, a mystique of locale, that is impossible to defined by any means except poetry. Southerners specialize in local deities, and can raise a wild bear into an image of God, as in Faulkner's The Bear, or can penetrate deep into the wilderness, as in Davidson's "Sanctuary," where
"Men have found
Images carved in bird-shapes there and faces
Moulded into the great kind look of gods."
This same Southern love of place is what forms half its temperament, for the slowness of motion and speech, the indolence and "drawl," as well as the hot-bloodedness, are properties the climate instills in all races of the South. The other half of the Southern temperament, however, is not a matter of climate, but has to do with the feudal character of Southern society; it comes out in the courtly politeness of manner, the reverence for the aged and the dead, the sense of stability and permanence in human values - all vestiges of the older order of things. It does not matter that the South failed to establish this "old order" in the New World for more than a few generations, at most; what matters is that the feeling for a hierarchical social order remains, like the love of land and the faith in God, as a kind of essential rightness, to betray which would be to betray oneself, and to lose heart completely:
"True, it is said of our Lady, she ageth,
But see, if you peep shrewdly, she hath not stooped;
Take no thought of her servitors that have drooped,
For we are nothing; and if one talk of death -
Why, the ribs of the earth subsist frail as a breath
If but God wearieth."
------
Though the poets dropped their pseudonyms, after two issues of The Fugitive, and revealed their proper names, they left the name of their magazine undefined. "It seemed to be a secret among us, though no one knew what the secret was," Ransom said many years later. That it was a secret, even to members of the group, points to the esoteric nature of their compact, and links them with the Imagists before them, and still earlier, with the French Symbolists, the original group from which all modern poetry has sprung. But it points even further, to the necessary mystery surrounding poetry in all places and times, indicating its ultimately religious source. Sydney Hirsch may have been wrong in many of his fanciful etymologies, but he was right in his primary intuition that poetry is a sacred art, an attempt always to translate the Word of God into the words of men, and he is usually credited with inventing the name, "Fugitive." What he may have meant by it remains a mystery, but was probably best explained by Tate, who put it that "A Fugitive was quite simply a Poet: the Wanderer, or even the Wandering Jew, the Outcast, the man who carries the secret wisdom of the world." The shared belief of the Fugitives that poetry was something more than a pastime or diversion, that it was truly a divine calling, gave a dimension to their work that made even the most trivial poem seem somehow to participate in the universal human experience, passing beyond the limitations of the provincial.
Besides the esoteric sense of the term "Fugitive," there was also what might be called the emergent sense: that defined by the poems themselves. It is this sense that now gives fullest meaning to the world, in the light of more than half a century of accumulated poetry. In its emergent sense, the term "Fugitive" becomes one of the prime equivalents for "modern man." For, contrary, to their desire to recover an older, communal experience of men living together on the land they loved - call it the "Old South," the "Golden Age," the "Garden of Eden," what you will - the pull of modern experience forced them to express recurrent images of isolation and alienation. The Fugitives, like other modern artists, had their Existential moments of despair, and were brought to face loneliness as a permanent human condition. It is to be found in the earliest of their poems, as in the lines of Warren's "To a Face in a Crowd":
"we must meet
As weary nomads in this desert at last,
Borne in the lost procession of these feet."
It appears again in Davidson's "Sanctuary," and even more eloquently, in his late, fine tribute, "Lines Written for Allen Tate on his Sixtieth Anniversary," which speaks of
"us, deliberate exiles, whose dry rod
Blossoms athwart the Long Street's servile rage
And tells what pilgrimage greens the Tennessee sod."
The "weary nomads" and the "deliberate exiles" are other names for the Fugitives, who could not flee from the common fate of man in this century. Most convincing of all is Warren's "Ballad of Billie Potts," a story of outlaws in western Kentucky told to him as a child, which has essentially the same plot as Albert Camus' Le Malentendu (The Misunderstood), the strange Existential drama of a murder occurring in eastern Europe. It is unlikely that Warren's poem and Camus' play have a common source, but there is not mistaking the similarity of character and theme, for both are parables of the Prodigal Son in reverse: they show that when human identity becomes lost, man becomes a prey to man, and even parents may be brought by unforeseen circumstances to murder their own child.
To stress the Existential meaning of the name "Fugitive" is only to suggest that the poetry of the modern South, like the fiction of the modern South, has been as much an expression of the age we live in as the literature of any other region. What gives Southern writing its special perspective is the sense of the distance, in time and space, between the South as a last remnant of European feudal society, with a landed gentry and a peasantry still rooted to a single spot of earth, and the largely undifferentiated mass society of the modern industrialized metropolis, with its restless and haunted multitudes. Fleeing from a vanishing culture into a relatively cultureless world, the Southern writer has experienced a profounder sense of shock than many of his contemporaries - except for those expatriate Americans like Eliot and Pound, who made the long voyage from the New World to the Old, and who lived in a different kind of exile during their distinguished and controversial careers.
-William Pratt, excerpted from his essay entitled "In Pursuit of the Fugitives" introducing The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective. J.S. Sanders and Company, Nashville: 1991.
3D Art Portfolio
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| Digital Sculpture - 3D Max/Zbrush |
The process that I generally employ in my 3D projects is Technecromancy, which is a poetic way of describing the use of technology to bring history to life. Technology is about the future but it also offers humanity powerful new tools to amplify its reflective historic experience. Photographs, old paintings, sketches, and the dusty tomes accounting previous experience are not obsolete items. In my view, these older relics are the programs and specifications whereby we can reanimate the past and recombine it into a more dynamic present and future speculation. My thesis is that the energy of a culture depends on its ability to access its history imaginatively. By utilizing contemporary software developments, the past is no longer a dead yesterday but a living portal to another dimension.
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| Technecromancy - Using Technology to bring History to life |
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| game character - 3d max - "Thelucian" |
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| 3D Game Character - "Aquarius" |
Level Design -
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| 3d Max Scene - racetrack through oak tree tunnel in 1911 Savannah |
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| A recreation of the 1911 automobile races in Savannah, Georgia |
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| The red Fiat and white Lozier vie for the lead |
Vehicles -
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| 3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Mercer |
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| 3/4 view - Mercer |
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| 1911 Mercer - wireframe |
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| 1911 Mercer - solid |
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| 3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Fiat |
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| 3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Fiat |
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| 3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Fiat wireframe |
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| 3d Max Game Vehicle - 1911 Fiat solid |
Architecture
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| Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House |
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| Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - Textured |
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| Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - Textured 3/4 view |
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| Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - Textured Closeup Front |
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| Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - Textured Closeup Front Porch |
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| Gilded Age Mansion - Wilson House - wireframe |
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| Gilded Age Mansion - Interior - Wilson House Ballroom |
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| Gilded Age Mansion - Interior - Wilson House Ballroom CU - Chandelier |
Importing Levels into Unreal Tournament 2004
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| Unreal Tournament Environment - 3D Max/Photoshop/UnrealEd Infiltration of the Knights Templar Lodge |
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| Unreal Tournament Environment - 3D Max/Photoshop/UnrealEd Infiltration of the Knights Templar Lodge |
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| Unreal Tournament Environment - 3D Max/Photoshop/UnrealEd Uncle Sam's Amusement Park |
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| Unreal Tournament Environment - 3D Max/Photoshop/UnrealEd Uncle Sam's Amusement Park |
The Automaton Organism - Symbol of Avatar function and the bipolar operation of the US federal mechanism
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| The Automaton Organism - 3d Max / Photoshop / Zbrush |
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| The Automaton Organism - 3d Max / Photoshop / Zbrush 3/4 view |
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| The Automaton Organism - 3d Max / Photoshop / Zbrush - back view |
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| Uncle Sam's Amusement commences |
The Automaton Organism - Animation sequence
Miscellaneous
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| Game Weapon - The Magnetic Attractor - coded to attract enemy weaponry out of opponent's hands and into one's personal arsenal |
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| Maya model - Men of War |
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| 3d Max/ZBrush - The Super Eye |
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| 3d Max/ZBrush - The Super Eye variation |
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| 3D Max / Zbrush - Digital Rose |
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| 3d Max/ZBrush - Digital Rose variations |
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| 3d Max/ZBrush - Digital Rose variations |
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| 3d Max/ZBrush - Digital Rose variations |
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| The Grid - 3d Max - Tron-esque Digital Circuitry |
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| The Grid - 3d Max - Tron-esque Digital Circuitry variations |
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| The Grid - 3d Max - Tron-esque Digital Circuitry variations |
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| The Grid - 3d Max - Tron-esque Digital Circuitry variations |
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| 3d Max - The Caduceus Ride |
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| sketch for Caduceus Ride within USA |
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