Numinous Power
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

This text defines the 'numen' as a raw, active power rather than a personal deity, emphasizing that original religion was based on the direct experience of this transcendent presence.

...m—at least this is what is said about the ancient Pelasgians. The Romans themselves, for almost two centuries, did not portray their deities; at most, they represented them with a symbolical object. What characterizes the primordial times is not "animism" (the idea that an "anima" is the foundation of the general representation of the divine and of the various forces at work in the universe) but rather the idea or perception of pure powers, adequately represented by the Roman view of the numen.
The numen, unlike the notion of deus (as it later came to be understood), is not a being or a person, but a sheer power that is capable of producing effects, of acting, and of manifesting itself. The sense of the real presence of such powers, or numina, as something simultaneously transcendent and yet immanent, marvelous yet fearful, constituted the substance of the original experience of the "sacred." A well-known saying of Servius emphasizes that in the origins, "religion" consisted in nothing else but experience.
Even though more conditioned points of view were not excluded from exotericism (those traditional forms reserved for the common people), "inner doctrines" were characterized by the teaching that the personal forms of deities, variously objectified, are only symbols of superrational and superhuman ways of being. As I have said, the center consisted in the real and living presence of these states within an elite, or in the ideal of their realization through what in Tibet is called the "direct pat...
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The Seed of Renewal
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

The author explains the traditional view of cyclical time, where the transition between eras is marked by a total metaphysical mutation rather than gradual progress, preserved only by essential 'seeds' of the previous cycle.

...man and only the ignorance of modern man has induced him to believe that his civilization, which is characterized by the deepest roots in the temporal and contingent element, will enjoy a different and privileged fate. To those who have a vision in conformity with reality, the problem is rather to what degree can there be a relationship of continuity between the dying world and the world to come; in other words, what elements of the old world will survive and be carried forth into the new one?
The predominant view in the ancient traditional teaching is that some kind of gap separates one cycle from the next; the new cycle allegedly will be characterized not by a gradual getting up and reconstruction, but by a new beginning, a sudden mutation brought about by a divine and metaphysical event, just like an old tree does not flourish again, but dies and a new tree grows out of its seeds. This view clearly shows that the relationships of continuity between two cycles are only relative and, in any event, do not affect the masses and great structures of a civilization. These relationships only concern essential vital elements, much in the way the seed is related to the new plant.
Thus, one of the many illusions that needs to be rejected is the one nourished by those who try to see a superordained logic behind the processes of dissolution, and who think that somehow the old world had to die in order to bring forth the new world toward which mankind is heading. And yet, the only world toward which we are heading is simply that which picks up and reassumes in an extreme way that which has acted during the phase of destruction. Such a world cannot be the basis for anything...
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Individualism's Collectivist Backlash
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

The author posits that individualism inevitably leads to collectivism, resulting in a regression from the personal to the anonymous, chaotic realm of the 'herd.'

...ue, institution, and authority. Once the fides was secularized the revolt against spiritual authority was followed by the revolt against temporal power and by the revendication of "human rights"; by the affirmation of freedom and the equality of all human beings; by the definitive abolition of the idea of caste (which came to be understood in socioeconomic terms as "functional class") and of privilege; and by a disintegration of the traditional social structures promoted by libertarianism. But
The law of action-reaction determines a collectivist upheaval to follow automatically every individualistic usurpation. The casteless, the emancipated slave, and the glorified pariah (the modern "free man") has against himself the mass of the other casteless and, in the end, the brute power of the collectivity. Thus, the process of disintegration continues and what ensues is a regression from the personal to the anonymous, the herd, and the pure, chaotic, and inorganic realm of quantity.
Just as the scientific enterprise has sought, from the outside, to recreate the multiplicity of particular phenomena (while having lost that inner and true unity that exists only in the context of metaphysical knowledge), so have moderns tried to replace the unity that in ancient societies consisted of living traditions and sacred law with an exterior, anodyne, and mechanical unity in which individuals are brought together without an organic relation to each other, and without seeing any superi...
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Gold's Purity Lost
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

An esoteric interpretation of the 'twilight of the gods' as the loss of human contact with the divine, symbolized by the primordial 'gold' falling into the hands of subterranean, elemental beings.

...this is true especially if we consider that the myth mentions a generation of giants and elemental telluric beings, creatures that were defrosted by the warm current, and against whom the race of the Aesir is going to fight. In the Edda, the theme of ragna-rok or ragna-rokkr (the "destiny" or the "twilight of the gods") is the equivalent of the traditional teaching concerning the four-stage involutive process; it threatens the struggling world, which is already dominated by dualistic thinking.
From an esoteric point of view this "twilight" affects the gods only metaphorically; it also signifies the "dimming" of the gods in human consciousness because mankind loses the gods, that is, the possibility of establishing a contact with them. Such a destiny may be avoided, however, by preserving the purity of the deposit of that primordial and symbolic element—gold—with which the "palace of the heroes," the hall of Odin's twelve thrones, was built in the mythical Asgard. This gold, which could act as a source of good health so long as it was not touched by an elemental or by a human being, eventually fell into the hands of Albericus, the…
This clearly shows the echo of what in other traditions was the advent of the Bronze Age, the cycle of the Titanic-Promethean rebellion, which was probably connected with the magical involution in the inferior sense of previous cults. Over and against this stands the world of the Aesir, the Nordic-Germanic deities who embody the Uranian principle in its warrior aspect. The god Donnar-Thor was the slayer of Thym and Hymir, the "strongest of all," the "irresistible," the "Lord who rescues from t...
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The Pure Flowing Illusion
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

A reflection on the modern world's obsession with 'becoming' and history, which the author views as a metaphysical fall away from the stable categories of Tradition.

...f the two terms of this opposition, while the other term, which refers to the whole body of traditional civilizations, is characterized by the feeling of what is beyond time, namely, by a contact with metaphysical reality that bestows upon the experience of time a very different, "mythological" form based on rhythm and space rather than on chronological time. Traces of this qualitatively different experience of time still exist as degenerated residues among some so-called primitive populations.
Having lost that contact by being caught in the illusion of a pure flowing, a pure escaping, a yearning that pushes one's goal further and further away, and being caught in a process that cannot and does not intend to be satisfied in any achievement as it is consumed in terms of "history" and "becoming"—this is indeed one of the fundamental characteristics of the modern world and the limit that separates two eras, not only in a historical sense but most of all in an ideal, metaphysical, and morphological sense. Therefore, the fact that civilizations of the traditional type are found in the past becomes merely accidental: the modern world and…
Nevertheless, that accidental circumstance allows us to state with good reason that wherever a civilization is manifested that has as its center and substance the temporal element, there we will find a resurgence, in a more or less different form, of the same attitudes, values, and forces that have defined the modern era in the specific sense of the term; and that wherever a civilization is manifested that has as its center and substance the supernatural element, there we will find a resurgence...
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