Gravity …. I fell. An introduction by Richard Panek. I had been sitting in a chair for a quarter of an hour, killing time in a bookstore. I had selected from a nearby shelf a book that I thought might relate to the subject I was researching at the moment—I no longer recall what. I’d pushed my chair away from a communal table, crossed my legs, and opened the book to a random page. The...
The short book called The Kybalion, published in 1908, is probably the most popular and, probably, most important occult work of the twentieth century. The book is rivaled in significance only by a much longer and very different work, Manly P. Hall’s magisterial encyclopedia arcana, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, which appeared twenty years later. The landscape of mythical and esoteric philosophies that the scholar Hall curated, illustrated, and documented in his volume are, in a sense, distilled...
Bacon
Francis Bacon was a great genius who helped to shape the modern world. But many people would be hard put to say exactly why. He made no new discoveries, developed no technical innovations, uncovered no previously hidden laws of nature. His achievement was to offer an eloquent account of a philosophy and a method for doing those things. And in that way he turned out to be as important as people famed for particular discoveries,...
Tristan and isolde painting Rogelio
Romantic love means a path to initiation, which leads through suffering and enlightenment. “Romantic love,” as described by the myth, is a mistake according to Robert A. Johnson―in fact it is the Occidental mistake par excellence. The levels of the anima on the one hand and of ego-awareness on the other are confused in that an attempt is made to live out at the earthly level the anima, which is not of this world. In...
John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged: “Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. … You went on crying that your code...
He who desires to philosophize must first of all doubt all things. He must not assume a position in a debate before he has listened to the various opinions, and considered and compared the reasons for and against. Never judge or take up a position on the evidence of what he has heard, on the opinion of the majority, the age, merits, or prestige of the speaker concerned, but he must proceed according to the...
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 the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment...
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...
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