In his farewell essay, closing the Krur journal and introducing La Torre, Julius Evola wrote that he had exhaustively expounded the esoteric knowledge that he was able to personally transmit (i.e. practices and states of consciousness that he could speak to from personal experience) in his previous writings (Introduction to Magic Volumes 1-3), and that to expound further in this direction would be pointless. He continues and makes the following points:
- Knowledge of the higher states (“the bite of the Dragon”), even if experienced like a flash of lightning, results in a permanent, indelible transformation of the being, even if one is unable to remain permanently in that state.
- Endure in esoteric work, regardless of the times we live in. Avoid doubt, cultivate patience, and seek communion with our “unknown friends”.
- Spiritual efforts in our world do not go unnoticed by the world of the Saints and Initiates.
- Our visible testament to the hermetic tradition serves not only as a guide to those who can understand, but as a sign and a prophecy to humanity in general.
- The spiritual crisis of the modern world cannot be overcome through merely political or external returns to the forms of previous world (the “return” must be spiritual and not formal).
- The small, thin chain of initiates and “unknown friends” who continue the chain of hermeticism will one day give rise to the rebirth of Tradition in the West.
The full essay can be read at Gornahoor Press.
It is scarcely worth saying, that the real relationships that bind us with those who have begun, can only subsist, unaltered. The “chain of Ur” remains. To the friends of “Ur” we exhort constancy and faith in the work. The times, today, are as sad as ever; as ever, they are adverse to every possibility of transcendent development. Still, one must hold firm: not with a violent effort or a revolt against the external circumstances of the epoch, but with the most subtle and most powerful energy of an interior persuasion and of a calm firmness enthroned silently where the echoes, the invasions, and the upheavals of the sensible life could not reach. The bite of the Dragon does not scar over: that which even if only once and even if only in a flash one has come to grasp, is no longer lost: even when no consciousness would any longer seem to correspond to it and when the great frost would seem to have pervaded the whole soul. “As the clouds pass and repass over the sky, so the experiences transmute in the soul of the One. And as all dark clouds cannot overshadow its emerald calm, so the sorrows and passions of the world cannot disturb the serenity of an illuminated soul.” These words of Shankara remain also as our teaching.
To the others, to those who still seek, we say not to give space to the doubt of being alone, in a vain and chimerical work. Let them have the courage to wait, to endure, and the sense that unknown friends are fighting on their same line. As with strange clarity certain sounds from the valley reach to the heights of the mountains, so let it be known that they are not ignored by those on the other shore: and they are awaited. Whatever mouths today have repeated the phrase, it remains nonetheless true that “when the disciple is ready, the master too is ready.” In their second manifesto, the Rosicrucians wrote: “If someone is seized by the desire to see us only out of curiosity, he will never communicate with us. But if his will truly and effectively leads him to inscribe himself in the register of our brotherhood, we, who judge by thoughts, will show him the truth of our promises; so much so, that we do not name the place of our residence, for the thoughts, joined to the real will of the reader, are capable of making us known to him, and him to us.” These words require no further comment.
It is rather to be added that, to make conscious that if our teaching essentially concerns an inner and invisible work that is accomplished in the intimacy of a few spirits, it also, and at the same time, constitutes itself as a symbol and a sign, as something that – we may indeed say it – can acquire, with regard to the world and to the epoch in which we have come to live, the value of a prophetic anticipation.
It is a commonplace, today, to speak of the crisis of modern civilization: this, however, does not prevent the fact from being real. A deep force carries the Western world beyond itself, with a rapidity that cannot fail to strike all observers. Every attempt to curb this force by means of “returns” and of extrinsic remedies, is vain…
…It may be that a world sets, that the heavens definitively close over the destinies of the peoples of the West. But it may also be that the transfiguration occurs. Then to have kept alive today, among the great, phantomlike masses in motion of the dark age, the sign of that Wisdom and the contact with those Forces, will have a universal meaning. The subtle and invisible chain of a few scattered and unknown men, will be that very one which will open into the central and regal stream of a great current of visions and of powers, of a great tradition of free men and of liberators.
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