There are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.
I’ve put off discussion of the final part of Julius Evola’s The Individual and the Becoming of the World, primarily because it is difficult for an Apollonian to critique the Dionysian. The latter wants to assert what the former prefers not to assert, and to deny what he would rather not deny. For example, Empedocles claims there are two forces: Love and Strife. Yet to admit this is tantamount to admitting Strife alone as the only force. The Apollonian wants to unite, harmonize, and reach the depths of agreement; hence, he can only admit the first force which has no opposite. Nevertheless, Evola brings a sword, not peace.
Now “is” can be used in two ways: it can refer to essence or it can refer to existence (as described in Essence and Existence).
So when Parmenides claims that change is impossible, he is referring to the realm of unchanging ideas or essences. Heraclitus claims there is nothing but change and he means the realm of prime matter, appearances, or existence. Evola, following Aristotle and the Medievals, takes the middle path.
Now the Apollonian can only speak of ideas and concepts which follow the laws of logic. Existence, however, is inexplicable to him, it is alogical (not illogical). Essence follows Thought, Existence follows Will.
To make his point, Evola contrasts three fundamental attitudes, or spiritual tendencies, that separate the religious attitude (Apollo) from the initiatic attitude (Dionysus). Yet how is this the end of the story? Beyond yin and yang is the Tao. In this early work, there is no mention of the Tao, or the alchemical marriage of the opposites. Also, Evola adopts the Lunar side, the path of darkness, power (Shakti), irrationality, intoxication and ecstasy. For easy reference, these attitudes are shown in the following chart.
| Religious Attitude | Attitude of the Mysteries |
|---|---|
| It believes that the world is fundamentally right from a principle of order, harmony, and goodness, and that everything opposed to it that is darkness, irrationality, indeterminateness, evil, either is illusion or something that must not be. | He faces up to reality, without veils, in its tragic, irrational, unprovidential nature |
| Consequently, it pushes such a principle back onto something “other than me” — to something transcendent. We say “consequently” since my actual experience is showing me a world totally different from one that is ordered and rational, I am not entitled to also admit the actual existence, alongside it, of a providential and rational world, unless I relate it to something that transcends me and to believe that this something exists. | He rejects the belief in the present existence of an optimistic order, and the necessity of postulating the transcendental, the God to guarantee it, and to explain how it can coexist with the order of existing things that contradict it; |
| If such a transcendent principle is intended to be the source of every reality, it must be said that the individual in himself is nothing and can be nothing. The “I” is annulled and its being is pushed back onto the other. | Thus the gulf remains between titanic pessimism and Dionysianism, bridged by recognizing or not recognizing the moral right to existence of a regulated, just, and rational world. In the case of the affirmative, he asserts the concept of the individual as a sufficient power in himself, capable of saving not only himself but also everything that he is connected to and that, at bottom, is the reflexion of what he concretely is. |
Order and Harmony
Apollo sees the world as ordered, harmonious, and providential. Whatever does not appear as such, is considered unreal or illusory. Dionysus, on the other hand, accepts the irrationality and tragedy of the world. Yes, but so do insects. For men, however, there have always been lawgivers, those who reveal the harmony hidden in the appearances and show the way to discover it. Even for Evola, the strong man is the one who can impose his will, as law. That the world is irrational and chaotic is the result of privation, that is, something that should not be.
Transcendence
Apollo notices that disharmony of existence. However, he does not thereby postulate a parallel existence of a rational and ordered world. Just the opposite. Unless he knows what is rational and harmonious, by what standard can he judge existence not to be so? Hence, Dionysus cannot even know whether existence is rational or irrational, without a transcendent standard. Hence, he must be his own lawgiver.
The Individual
If there is a transcendent order, then the individual himself is part of that order, and cannot be said to exist. For Dionysus, “man himself has a real possibility of ordering and controlling this chaos and thereby bringing about a cosmos that doesn’t already exist but demands its existence from him.” This gets to the crux of Evola’s point: the I is real, he orders his life, and the I knows himself from his life, which is his own reflexion.
The Royal Path
This is the beginning, then, the initiation into the Mysteries. For Evola, and for Dionysus, the Self is not known as a concept or an object, but rather knows himself as the subject, the author of his life, and indirectly through viewing the world as his reflexion. The knowledge of the Mysteries resides in the darkness, beyond rational thought. That is why Dionysus is the god of wine: In vino, veritas, not in clear-eyed logic. Dionysus is the god of ecstasy, yet cannot give a logical response when asked about it. That is not the point in any case and to insist on it is to destroy the magic. Evola makes this contrast:
To dare to tear away the veils with which Apollo hid primordial reality, to dare to transcend form in order to put oneself in contact with the primordial “atrocity” of a world in which good and evil, divine and human, rational and irrational, just and unjust no longer have any sense, being only power, naked, free, fiery power; to dare that, and not to be swept away from this bottomless precipice, but to be able to do it, to control in oneself and, not surpassed but surpassing, to realize the wild pleasure of existing tragically — such is the test of Dionysus, from which every will that truly wants to escape from the “God of the Earth” must have his consecration.
Cologero, I want to tell you how much I appreciate what you do here. Gornahoor is the most essential and greatest website there could possibly be.
Since I’m in university, I don’t have much time for Traditional readings on the side, so Gornahoor is an especially excellent resource at this time. It’s amazing that while I study philosophy in a profane academic setting I can simply search for the philosophers here and actually gain something truly valuable, see an understanding of Truth from what they have left us. Thank you.
I will become no-thing as I am anterior to every-thing; my essence is temporally inexplicable; unbound and glaring Pride, ever unsullied by any corporeal activities of whatever sort; shameless, flawless, Perfection, which even death flees from and in face of which every malevolent entity begs to die, and angels cry.
We have already embraced Our death and Our insignificance; and
We are to be forgotten, to be denied all honor of history, to be the foundation stone cast aside by the builders…
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Nice tshirt though.
The end of the story:
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{While it is no doubt true that in premodern times epistemology was subordinated to metaphysics, in our day it is the converse, so that metaphysics is subordinated to positivistic science, a strangely oedipal scenario in which the child murders its parent (and yet similar in form to how the left wishes to place the Constitution in an old-folks home and euthanize western civilization in order to seize their priceless inheritance; to paraphrase Don Colacho, leftists are simply “impatient heirs” — so impatient that they are now feverishly stealing from their descendants too, but that’s the subject of a different post).
Clarke writes that man innately possesses an “unrestricted drive” to know “all that there is to know about all that there is.”
Good credo for the masthead: All There is to Know about All There Is.
As such, our mind is by its nature “oriented toward the totality of being as knowable, as its final goal which alone can satisfy its desire to know.” Further, this is a kind of “natural hope” — to go along with our natural faith — “in the radical intelligibility in principle of all real being.”
In short, Mind is ordered to Being.} http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2012/03/all-or-nothing-cosmos.html
“Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, “My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.” Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, rests without willing, becomes angry without willing, loves without willing.” ~ Hippolytus of Rome
“…the “triumpher” is a “convalescent”, i.e. that the “triumpher” has triumphed over sickness or imbalance —spiritual, psychic and physical–which means to say that he is at the same time “righteous”, or the one who has triumphed over the four temptations by remaining faithful to the three sacred vows as well as to their root and synthesis: humility. In turn, this means to say that he is a “liberated man” or “master”. He is free of astrological planetary influences-—rediscovered in our time by C. G.Jung in the guise of the “collective unconscious” with its seven (!) principal psychic forces or “archetypes”. He is master of the “archetypes” (astrological planetary influences, or archontes of the ancient gnostics), i.e. the “shadow”, the “persona”, the “animus”, the “anima”, the “wise old man” or “father”, the “mother” and even the “self, above which is the “Self of Selves” or God. In other words, he holds in check the influences, in so far as they are baleful, of the moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and even the sun, above which he knows there exists the “Sun of suns” or God. He is not without the planets, archetypes or archontes (just as he is not without earth, water, air and fire) for these are what comprise that which is called the “astral body” (or psychic body) in occultism. The psychic body is a body in so far as it is composed of unconscious, collective or “planetary” psychic forces. It is the astrological planets (or Jung’s archetypes) which form the “stuff of the psychic or astral body. The “triumpher” of the seventh Arcanum is therefore the master of the astral body. . . master of the astral body —this means to say master of the seven forces which it comprises, holding them in equilibrium.” — Tomberg
The whole story:
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Remake, reform the consciousness. Let the light bleed out of your eyes and
mouth. Seek the answers to the question that constrain your mind to this futile
dimesion. We are the severed minds disconnected from the masses, a world of
free thinkers. We are longing for an understanding of the universe around us
when we barley understand the universe within our minds. Free your mind. Who
will answer the call when it comes from within? I stand before you baring a
flood of change. I stand before you to undo and rearrange. Remove the blind
fold, realize the lies told and see the world with new eyes. Abra su mente a la
realidad.
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EN-LIVE DIS-POSSESSION
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIPdH7vLmgQ
…at one with the Abyss when in your possession I am – against the blindness of men, thine eyes have been granted immunity so that my sight be clear when wielding the Sword of the Damned…
Gather! Gather! Raise the flames for so long scattered!
For aeons cursed, yet proud we stood,
Our liberation all that mattered
It’s time! It is time! The bells of Armageddon chime!
Rejoice ye now, oh hungry ones,
Harvest time has come…
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