Ian Dallas - That Point of Nihil

Human action in the technic society is an intervention. Man is a hiatus in an automated system. Woman, as has been noted, simply had to be abolished. It must not be forgotten that there is only one woman at the high tables of banking, and she achieved this with the death of her two former banker husbands in the social ethos of religion mysterious circumstances.
It is in perfect keeping with the ideology of political democracy, where everything named actually stands for its opposite, that the woman's movement should be the mechanism for robbing women of their political power. 'Political woman' in the technic system has to be a pseudo-man, a female eunuch, transvestite, hair cropped and pitiless. The genuine power of woman is the truth, one that cannot be submitted to systemic discipline. The marquis de Sade was the true ideologue of the Republic. Astonishingly, or one should say shamelessly, his works are in La Pleiade edition of France's great literature. The 'political woman' who has made the cross-over to men is tolerated, but woman as woman is banished to the acting-out of the sadistic punishment or to its fantasy.

As a result of this necessary removal of woman from the social nexus, and its replacement with the 'citizen' unit, a quite new psychology had to be invented. This was achieved by the splitting into two terms for one human condition - or rather where there had been two terms in nature, on banishing them two terms were created ideologically. Sex was separated from gender. This abolished woman at the same time, to redesign the human landscape, introduced a third sex between the two. Wyndham Lewis specifically traced this invention to the 1930s, and recognised it as different from the natural and historical evaluations of sexual identity. He also saw that the purpose of this third sex was to dislodge woman from her place of power and set her in an open, undefined space of choices that would end, as a result, with the abolition of the family. The family, of course, being the ultimate private bank, this gave the bankers a leveraged buy-out!
With territory, a recognisable land and its inhabitants, abolished, gobbled up in catchment areas for electoral and taxation purposes -
With the family dispersed as the enemy of individualism ("You have to find out who you are!")

With the person de-politicised from action to alter the hegemonic banking power by granting him sexual freedom to 'discover his sexuality' -
With the social ethos of religion destroyed, all religions being equal and thus irreverent, the personal belief system may remain since not impinging on the social nexus -
With currency virtually non-existent, a digital signal between two terminals -
With every citizen a debtor from birth to not even a debt but the deficit of a debt, itself one that through interest can never be cleared -
With all that on a planet, no longer slowly but swiftly being polluted, its air, its land, and its sea, ravaged by corporation mega-projects -
One thing emerges: the technic global system is in itself a psychosis.
In homeopathic terms it is a miasma, a zone in which the zone has become the pathology.
The proof - not all the factors above, but rather that, this being the unarguable case - not one person or group of persons seem capable of action to end the pathology.
When Libertas has degenerated into tyranny and when only those, all too understandably, who are outraged by this send their sons, the next generation, to blow themselves up in the despairing act of annihilating one's own future, and indeed leaving behind the son-murderers to continue in bitterness, when that point of nihil is reached - what is missing?

Preference
'Virtu'
Honour
Generosity
Allegiance

The beginning of this new cycle means the end of atheist capitalism and the opening to a new nomos on the earth.

- Ian Dallas, 'The Interim is Mine' [pp118-122]

Julius Evola - The Concept of Holy War

Historically, in order to comprehend what concerns us here, it must first be understood that the Islamic tradition, rather than having such a unique metaphysical point of origin, is essentially dependent upon its inheritance of the Persian tradition - Persia, as is well known, having possessed one of the highest pre-European civilizations. The original Mazdaist conception of religion, as military service under the sign of the 'God of Light', and of existence as a continuous, relentless struggle to rescue beings and things from the control of an anti-god, is at the centre of the Persian vision of life, and should be considered as the metaphysical counterpart and spiritual background to the warrior enterprises which culminated in the creation by the Persians of the empire of the 'kings of kings'. After the fall of Persia's power, echoes of such traditions persisted in the cycle of medieval Arabian civilization in forms which became slightly more materialistic and sometimes exaggerated, yet not to such an extent that their original elements of spirituality were entirely lost.

We bring up traditions of that kind here, above all, because they introduce a concept which is very useful in clarifying further the order of ideas set out in our latest articles; namely, the concept of the 'greater' or 'holy war', as distinct from the 'lesser war', but at the same time as related to the latter in a special manner. The distinction itself derives from a saying of the Prophet, who, returning from a warrior expedition, declared: "I return now from the lesser to the greater war."

The lesser war here corresponds to the exoteric war, the bloody battle which is fought with material arms against the enemy, against the 'barbarian', against an inferior race over whom a superior right is claimed, or, finally, when the event is motivated by a religious justification, against the 'infidel'. No matter how terrible and tragic the events, no matter how huge the destruction, this war, metaphysically, still remains a ‘lesser war'. The 'greater' or 'holy war' is, contrarily, of the interior and intangible order - it is the war which is fought against the enemy, the 'barbarian', the 'infidel', whom everyone bears in himself, or whom everyone can see arising in himself on every occasion that he tries to subject his whole being to a spiritual law. Appearing in the forms of craving, partiality, passion, instinctuality, weakness and inward cowardice, the enemy within the natural man must be vanquished, its resistance broken, chained and subjected to the spiritual man, this being the condition of reaching inner liberation, the 'triumphant peace' which allows one to participate in what is beyond both life and death.

Some may say that this is simply asceticism. The greater, holy war is the ascesis which has always been a philosophical goal. It could be tempting to add as well: it is the path of those who wish to escape from the world and who, using the excuse of inner liberation, become a herd of pacifist cowards. This is not at all the way things are. After the distinction between the two wars there is their synthesis. It is a feature of heroic traditions that they prescribe the 'lesser war', that is to say the real, bloody war, as an instrument in the realization of the 'greater: or 'holy war'; so much so that, finally, both become one and the same thing.

Thus, in Islam, 'holy war' - jihad - and 'the path of God' are interchangeable terms. The one who fights is on the 'path of God'. A well-known and quite characteristic saying of this tradition is: "The blood of heroes is closer to the Lord than the ink of scholars and the prayers of the pious."

Once again, as in the traditions already reviewed by us, as in the Roman ascesis of power and in the classical mors triumphalis, action attains the value of an inner overcoming and of an approximation to a life no longer mixed with darkness, contingency, uncertainty and death. In more concrete terms, the predicaments, risks and ordeals peculiar to the events of war bring about an emergence of the inner 'enemy', which, in the forms of the instinct of self-preservation, cowardice, cruelty, pity and blind riotousness, arise as obstacles to be vanquished just as one fights the outer enemy. It is clear from this that the decisive point is constituted by one's inner orientation, one's unshakeable persistence in what is spiritual in this double struggle, so that an irresistible and blind changing of oneself into a sort of wild animal does not occur, but, instead, a way is found of not letting the deepest forces escape, a way of seeing to it that one is never overwhelmed inwardly, that one always remains supreme master of oneself, and, precisely because of this sovereignty, one remains able to affirm himself against every possible limitation. In a tradition to which we will dedicate our next article, this situation is represented by a most characteristic symbol: the warrior is accompanied by an impassive divine being who, without fighting, leads and guides him in his struggle, side by side with him in the same war chariot. This symbol is the personified expression of a duality of principles, which the true hero, from whom something sacred always emanates, maintains unceasingly within himself.

[...]

As if by a circular path the reader is thus brought back to the same ideas which were examined in our previous writings on the subject of tradition, whether classical or Nordic-medieval: that is to say, to the idea of a privileged immortality reserved for heroes, who alone, according to Hesiod, pass on to inhabit symbolic islands, which image forth the bright and intangible existence of the Olympians.

Additionally, in the Islamic tradition, there are frequent references to the idea that some warriors fallen in the 'sacred war' are in reality not dead, in a sense which is not symbolic in any way, and which need not be referred to supernatural states cut off from the energies and destinies of the living. It is not possible to enter into this domain, which is rather mysterious and requires the support of references which would ill befit the present article. What we can say definitely is that, even today, and particularly in Italy, the rites by which a warrior community declares its most heroically fallen companions still 'present' have regained a special evocative force. He who begins from the belief that everything which, by a process of involution, retains today only an allegorical and, at best, moral character, whereas it originally possessed the value of reality, and every rite contained real action and not mere 'ceremony' - for him these warrior rites of today could perhaps provide material for meditation, and he could perhaps approach the mystery contained in the teaching already quoted: that is, the idea of heroes who really never died, and the idea of victors who, like the Roman Caesar, remain as 'perpetual victors' at the centre of a human stock.

- From 'Metaphysics of War'.

For more of Evola's views on this subject see here and here.

Evola On Holy War: The Nordic Tradition

Åsgårdsreien, Peter Nicolai Arbo (1872)

Considering that in the traditional view of the world every reality was a symbol and every action a ritual, the same was true in the case of war; since war could take on a sacred character, "holy war" and "the path to God" became one and the same thing. In more or less explicit forms, this concept is found in many traditions: a religious aspect and a transcendent intent were often associated with the bloody and military deeds of traditional humanity [...] 

The Nordic-Aryan mythology conceived Valhalla as the seat of heavenly immortality reserved for the heroes fallen on the battlefield, in addition to nobles and free men of divine origin. This seat was related to the symbolism of "heights" (as Glitnirbjorg, the "resplendent mountain," or Hmninbjorg, the "heavenly mountain," the highest divine mountain on whose peaks an eternal brightness shines beyond the clouds), and was often identified with Asgard, namely, with the Aesir's seat located in the Middle Land (Mitgard); the Lord of this seat was Odin-Wotan, the Nordic god of war and victory. According to a particular myth, Odin was the king who with his sacrifice showed to the heroes the path that leads to the divine dwellings where they will live forever and be transformed into his "sons." Thus, according to the Nordic races, no sacrifice or cult was more cherished by the supreme god and thought to bear more supernatural fruits than the one celebrated by the hero who falls on the battlefield; from a declaration of war to its bloody conclusion, the religious element permeated the Germanic hosts and inspired the individual warrior as well. Moreover, in these traditions we find the idea that by means of a heroic death the warrior shifted from the plane of the material, earthly war to the plane of struggle of a transcendent and universal character. The hosts of heroes were believed to constitute the so-called Wildes Heer, the mounted stormtroopers led by Odin who take off from the peak of Mount Valhalla and then return to rest on it. In the higher forms of this tradition, the host of the dead heroes selected by the Valkyrie for Odin, with whom the Wildes Heer eventually became identified, was the army the god needed in order to fight against the ragna-rokkr, the "twilight of the gods" that has been approaching for a very long time. It is written: “There is a very large number of dead heroes in Valhalla, and many more have yet to come, and yet they will seem too few when the wolf comes."


Julius Evola, "Revolt Against the Modern World" (1934)

Evola On Holy War: Greater and Lesser Jihad

In the Islamic tradition a distinction is made between two holy wars, the “greater holy war” (el-jihadul-akbar) and the “lesser holy war” (el-jihadul-ashgar). This distinction originated from a saying (hadith) of the Prophet, who on the way back from a military expedition said: “You have returned from a lesser holy war to a great holy war.” The greater holy war is of an inner and spiritual nature; the other is the material war waged externally against an enemy population with the particular intent of bringing “infidel” populations under the rule of “God’s Law” (al-Islam). The relationship between the “greater” and “lesser holy war”, however, mirrors the relationship between the soul and the body; in order to understand the heroic asceticism or “path of action”, it is necessary to understand the situation in which the two paths merge, the “lesser holy war” becoming the means through which a “greater holy war” is carried out, and vice versa: the “little holy war”, or the external one, becomes almost a ritual action that expresses and gives witness to the reality of the first. Originally, orthodox Islam conceived of a unitary form of asceticism: that which is connected to the jihad or “holy war”.

The “greater holy war” is man’s struggle against the enemies he carries within. More exactly, it is the struggle of man’s higher principle against everything that is merely human in him, against his inferior nature and against chaotic impulses and all sorts of material attachments. This is expressly outlined in a text of Aryan warrior wisdom: “Know Him therefore who is above reason; and let his peace give thee peace. Be a warrior and kill desire, the powerful enemy of the soul.” (Bhagavad-Gita 3.43)

The “enemy” who resists us and the “infidel” within ourselves must be subdued and put in chains. This enemy is the animalistic yearning and instinct, the disorganized multiplicity of impulses, the limitations imposed on us by a fictitious self, and thus also fear, wickedness, and uncertainty; this subduing of the enemy within is the only way to achieve inner liberation or the rebirth in a state of deeper inner unity and “peace” in the esoteric and triumphal sense of the word.

In the world of traditional warrior asceticism the “lesser holy war”, namely, the external war, is indicated and even prescribed as the means to wage this “greater holy war”; thus in Islam the expressions “holy war” (jihad) and “Allah’s way” are often used interchangeably. In this order of ideas action exercises the rigorous function and task of a sacrificial and purifying ritual. The external vicissitudes experienced during a military campaign cause the inner “enemy” to emerge and put up a fierce resistance and a good fight in the form of the animalistic instincts of self-preservation, fear, inertia, compassion, or other passions; those who engage in battles must overcome these feelings by the time they enter the battlefield if they wish to win and to defeat the outer enemy or “infidel”.

Obviously the spiritual orientation and the “right intention” (niya), that is, the one toward transcendence (the symbols employed to refer to transcendence are “heaven”, “paradise”, “Allah’s garden” and so on), are supposed as the foundations of jihad, lest war lose its sacred character and degenerate into a wild affair in which true heroism is replaced with reckless abandonment and what counts are the unleashed impulses of the animal nature.

It is written in the Qu’ran: “Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter fight for the cause of Allah; whether they die or conquer, We shall richly reward them.” (Qu’ran, 4:76) The presupposition according to which it is prescribed “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads, and when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly” (Qu’ran 47:4); or, “Do not falter or sue for peace when you have gained the upper hand” (Qu’ran 47:37), is that “the life of this world is but a sport and a past-time” (Qu’an 47:37) and that “whoever is ungenerous to this cause is ungenerous to himself” (Qu’ran 47:38). These statements should be interpreted along the lines of the evangelical saying: “Whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it: but whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). This is confirmed by yet another Koranic passage: “Why is it that when it is said to you: ‘March in the cause of Allah.’ you linger slothfully in the land? Are you content with this life in preference to the life to come?” (Qu’ran, 9:38) “Say: ‘Are you waiting for anything to befall us except victory or martyrdom?’” (Qu’ran, 9:52).

Another passage is relevant as well: “Fighting is obligatory for you, as much as you dislike it. But you may hate a thing although it is good for you, and love a thing although it is bad for you. Allah knows but you do not.” (Qu’ran, 2:216). This passage should also be connected with the following one:

“They were content to be with those that stayed behind: a seal was set upon their hearts, leaving them bereft of understanding. But the Apostle and the men who shared his faith fought with their goods and their persons. These shall be rewarded with good things. They shall surely prosper. Allah has prepared them gardens watered by running streams, in which they shall abide forever. That is the supreme triumph.” (Qu’ran, 9:88 – 9:89)

This place of “rest” (paradise) symbolizes the superindividual states of being, the realization of which is not confined to the post-mortem alone,as the following passage indicates: “As for those who are slain in the cause of Allah, He will not allow their works to perish. he will vouchsafe them guidance and ennoble their state; He will admit them to the paradise He has made known to them.” (Qu’ran, 47:5-7). In the instance of real death in battle, we find the equivalent of the mors triumphalis* found in classical traditions. Those who have experienced the “greater holy war” during the “lesser holy war”, have awakened a power that most likely will help them overcome the crisis of death; this power, having already liberated them from the “enemy” and from the “infidel”, will help them avoid the fate of Hades. This is why in classical antiquity the hope of the deceased and the piety of his relatives often caused figures of heroes and of victors to be inscribed on the tombstones. It is possible, however, to go through death and conquer, as well as achieve, the superlife and to ascend to the “heavenly realm” while still alive.


Julius Evola, "Revolt Against the Modern World" (1934)

* 'Triumphant death'.

Andrew Thickett - The Bourgeois Gods are Dead

We must un-mourn ourselves;
See life as a death-dance beneath the stars,
Where only rain-fall can admonish the de-tumescence
of our un-tombed lands.
Betwixt the darkness of half-night
and half-lit embers;
We wear lightning as our spines,
To traverse beneath the stillness
Of our still sibilant thoughts.
We move through the grass, blade-by-blade,
Seeking to catch sight of the hidden whispers
Inside the skulls of motion-less men.
Finding only synapse-upon-synapse,
We weep to end our weeping;
Hoping to find a door ajar,
To what is not there.
What is not there
Is not-there only in the recognition of our absence.
Recognised, the absence is dissolved.
Moving through the grass,
Both the agon and the agonal
Observe our desire to re-desire,
The un-explored atoms of our somnambulistic attire.
Bourgeois Gods have spent
their recesses,
Assessing their excesses,
As the mass expresses,
The animal woes of ordered chaos.
The death throes of a death-less stare:
Born to nothing, from nothing:
Their dusky hieroglyphs
Delineate their despair.
Un-born,
their bodies throw away everything except the body.
Yet, body-less and trembling,
The impartial yore binds the skull to the impartial question.
Whilst questing,
They are requesting, their apricity once more.
The Last Men
are suppressing,
The First
who are twice-born.
Creating un-civilisation
amongst the de-civilised hordes.
Finding action is the answer
To the quiescent concatenations
of the sleeping Gods.
Awakening,
We recite:
"Only our exile offers us the chance to journey home,
Blade-by-blade,
Through the grass --
To our waking Gods."

Hermann Hesse - Ode to Trees

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. 
I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

~ Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte