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Everything on Culture and related to the Maier files series. A cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings

Tertön Sogyal – Fearless in Tibet

Tertön Sogyal’s story. In the mid-19th century, the life of a horse-riding bandit in the eastern Tibetan region of Kham took a drastic turn that would alter the future of Tibetan Buddhism. After the young man rejected his father’s demands to lead a life that was harming others, he placed his trust in wise hermits and learned monks who nurtured...

Real intimacy is a sacred experience

Intimacy. In our culture, there is an excessive concentration on the notion of relationship. People talk incessantly about relationships. It is a constant theme on television, film, and in the media. Technology and media are not uniting the world. They pretend to provide a world that is internetted, but in reality, all they deliver is a simulated world of shadows....
Odin

Will the Real Odin Stand Up, Please?

Who’s Odin? To find Odin’s origins, how far back must we go? Although the most likely explanation for Snorri’s attempts to connect the Æsir with Troy is medieval literary fashion, it is tempting to see a possible source in folk memories of the migration of the Yamnaya culture from the steppes of the Caucasus and Urals into northern Europe four or five thousand years ago. Shaman Is Odin a shaman? Grundy and other critics of this theory point out that […]...

Hamingja and the supernatural guardians of the North

Hamingja, as used in the sagas, stands for an abstract conception, that of something belonging to an outstanding person which is partly a matter of character and partly of personality, and partly something more than either—that strange quality of ‘luck’ or luck-lessness’ which attaches itself to certain individuals more than others. It is something which can be handed on after...
Valkyries

Valkyries – The Choosers of the Slain

Valkyrie which is composed of two words: the noun valr (referring to the slain on the battlefield) and the verb kjósa (meaning “to choose”). Together, they mean ‘chooser of the slain’. The Old Norse valkyrja is cognate to Old English wælcyrge. A malevolent female demon, a sorceress or a female witch. Among the Anglo-Saxons the valkyries were female spirits of...

German & Celtic Women at War

Tacitus gives us some fascinating details in Books 7 and 8 of his Germania, written in about 98 CE, relating to the role of German women in war and battle. He points out that a major contribution to German military success lay in the fact that their fighting units were not made up of warriors randomly formed into motly crews. But rather are ‘composed of men from one family and that their households go with them to the battle, and […]...

What poets used to know – the sacred art

Poetry, in our time, is not only a misunderstood art, but one that has been subject to a systematic program of denaturing and falsification, at the hands of those Andrew Harvey has characterized as “official tastemakers who have outlawed the sublime, and… a contemporary poetry world addicted to cheap irony, unearned despair, bizarre pastiche, narcissistic confessionalism, and blindingly boring baroque...

The Demiurge of the Platonic dialogues

Plato, as the speaker Timaeus, refers to the Demiurge frequently in the Socratic dialogue Timaeus, circa 360 BC. The Demiurge as the entity who “fashioned and shaped” the material world. The Demiurge is the craftsman. The term demiourgos or craftsman is itself surprising – one might expect such a character to be rather grandly titled Nous or Logos. At Athens,...

Jón Leifs Edda – The Lives of the Gods

The music of Jón Leifs is often inspired by Iceland’s powerful nature and literary heritage. From early on he was profoundly influenced by the medieval tradition of Icelandic literature, preserved in a handful of manuscripts, including the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. Leifs’ magnum opus is the Edda oratorio, a massive (although incomplete) work in three large parts which occupied him on and off for most of his composing career – from around 1930 to his death in 1968. […]...
The Druids

The Druids were the psychic soldiers of their day

The Druids gathered and important questions were to be answered via divination. The means of determining the future? A human victim who was to be back-stabbed. From the movements of his death throes, the future was revealed to the forest magicians. As it is the practice of modern armies to attempt to destroy the intelligence-gathering capabilities of their enemies, so...

The Forms of Warlike Heroism

The fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human personality, is ‘heroism’. War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death. The moment...

Revolt against the Modern World

With unflinching gaze and uncompromising intensity Julius Evola analyzes the spiritual and cultural malaise at the heart of Western civilization and all that passes for progress in the modern world. As a gadfly, Evola spares no one and nothing in his survey of what we have lost and where we are headed. At turns prophetic and provocative, Revolt against the Modern World outlines a profound metaphysics of history and demonstrates how and why we have lost contact with the transcendent […]...

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