17
The Greater and the Lesser Holy War
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.
Livy relates that the Samnite warriors looked like initiates;[1] similarly, among savage populations the magical and the warrior elements are often intermingled. In ancient Mexico the bestowal of the title of commander (tecuhtli) was subordinated to the successful outcome of difficult trials of an initiatory type; also, until recent times the Japanese warrior nobility (the samurai) was to a large degree inspired by the doctrines and asceticism of Zen, an esoteric form of Buddhism.
The ancient worldview and myths, in which the theme of antagonism repeatedly occurred, automatically propelled the elevation of the art of war to a spiritual plane. This was the case of the Persian-Aryan tradition and also of the Hellenic world, which often saw in material warfare the reflection of a perennial cosmic struggle between the spiritual Olympian-Uranian element of the cosmos on the one hand, and the Titanic, demonic-feminine unrestrained elements of chaos on the other hand. This interpretation is possible especially in those instances where war was associated with the idea of the empire, and also because of the transcendent meaning this concept evoked; it was then translated into a very powerful idea. The symbolism of Heracles’ labors, he being the hero fighting on the side of the Olympian forces, was applied to as late a figure as Frederick I of Hohenstaufen.
Special views concerning one’s fate in the afterlife introduce us to the inner meanings of warrior asceticism. According to the Aztec and Nahua races, the highest seat of immortality—the “House of the Sun” or the “House of Huitzilopochtli”—was reserved not only for sovereigns but for heroes as well; as far as ordinary people were concerned, they were believed to slowly fade away in a place analogous to the Hellenic Hades. 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.”[2] 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 Jed 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.[3] 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.”[4]
What has been said so far concerns the transformation of the war into a “holy war.” Now I wish to add some specific references found in other traditions. 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 the greater 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 the “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 recognize 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 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.[5] 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.”[6]
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, weakness, and uncertainty; this subduing of the enemy is the only way to achieve inner liberation or the rebirth in a state of a 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 to 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 the “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 gardens” and so on), are presupposed 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 animalistic nature.
It is written in the Koran: “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.”[7] 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”;[8] or, “Do not falter or sue for peace when you have gained the upper hand,”[9] is that “the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime”[10] and that “whoever is ungenerous to this cause is ungenerous to himself.”[11] 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” (Matt. 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? ”[12] “Say: ‘Are you waiting for anything to befall us except victory or martyrdom?” ’[13]
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.”[14] This passage should also be connected with the following one:
They were content to be with those who 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 for them gardens watered by running streams, in which they shall abide forever. That is the supreme triumph.[15]
This place of “rest” (paradise) symbolizes the superindividual states of being, the realization of which is not confined to the postmortem 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.”[16] 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 being alive.
The Islamic formulation of the heroic doctrine corresponds to that formulated in the Bhagavadgītā, in which the same meanings are expressed in a purer way. The doctrine of liberation through pure action, which is expounded in this text, is declared to be “solar” in origin and is believed to have been communicated by the founder of the present cycle to dynasties of sacred kings rather than to priests (brāhmaṇa).[17]
The piety that keeps the warrior Arjuna[18] from going to battle against his enemies, since he recognizes among them his own relatives and teachers, is characterized by the Bhagavadgītā as “lifeless dejection.” The text adds: “Strong men do not know despair, for that wins neither heaven nor earth.”[19] The promise is the same: “In death thy glory in heaven, in victory thy glory on earth. Arise therefore, with thy soul ready to fight.”[20] The inner attitude—the equivalent of the Islamic niya—that is capable of transforming the “lesser war” into a “greater holy war” is described in clear terms: “Offer to me all thy works and rest thy mind on the Supreme. Be free from vain hopes and selfish thoughts, and with inner peace fight thou thy fight.”[21] The purity of this type of action, which must be willed for its own sake, is also celebrated in clear terms: “Prepare for war with peace in thy soul. Be in peace in pleasure and pain, in gain and in loss, in victory or in the loss of a battle. In this peace there is no sin.”[22] In other words: you will not stray from the supernatural direction by fulfilling your dharma as a warrior.[23]
The relationship between war and “the path to God” is present in the Gītā too, though the metaphysical rather than the ethical aspect is more heavily stressed: the warrior reproduces somewhat the deity’s transcendence. The teaching Kṛṣṇa imparts to Arjuna concerns first of all the distinction between what is pure and undying and that which, as a human and naturalistic element, only appears to exist:
The unreal never is: the Real never is not. This truth indeed has been seen by those who can see the true. Interwoven in his creation, the Spirit is beyond destruction. No one can bring to an end the Spirit which is everlasting….If any man thinks he slays, and if another thinks he is slain, neither knows the ways of truth. The Eternal in man cannot kill: the Eternal in man cannot die….He does not die when the body dies … these bodies have an end in their time; but he remains immeasurable, immortal. Therefore, great warrior, carry on thy fight.[24]
The consciousness of the irreality of what can be lost or caused to be lost as ephemeral life and as mortal body (the equivalent of the Islamic view that this life is just a sport and a pastime) is associated with the knowledge of that aspect of the divine according to which this aspect is an absolute power before which every conditioned existence appears as a negation; this power becomes naked and dazzles in a terrible theophany precisely in the act of destruction, in the act that “negates the negation,” in the whirlwind that sweeps away every finite life, either destroying it or making it arise again in a transhuman state.
In order to free Arjuna from doubt and from the “soft bond of the soul,” Kṛṣṇa says:
I am the life of all living beings, and the austere life of those who train their souls. And I am from everlasting the seed of eternal life. I am the intelligence of the intelligent. I am the beauty of the beautiful. I am the power of those who are strong, when this power is free from passions and selfish desires. I am desire when this is pure, when this desire is not against righteousness.[25]
In the end, having abandoned all personifications, Kṛṣṇa manifests himself in the “wonderful and fearful form before which the three worlds tremble,” “vast, reaching the sky, burning with many colors, with wide open mouths, with vast flaming eyes.”[26] Finite beings—as lamps outshone by a much greater source of light, or as circuits pervaded by a much greater current—give way, disintegrate, melt, because in their midst there is now a power transcending their form, that wills something infinitely greater than anything that as individual agents they may will by themselves. This is why finite beings “become,” being transformed and going from the manifested into the unmanifested, from the material to the immaterial. On this basis the power capable of producing the heroic realization is clearly defined. The values are overturned: death becomes a witness to life, and the destructive power of time displays the indomitable nature hidden inside what is subject to time and death. Hence the meaning of these words uttered by Arjuna at the moment in which he experiences the deity as pure transcendence:
As roaring torrents of waters rush forward into the ocean, so do these heroes of our mortal world rush into thy flaming mouths. And as moths swiftly rushing enter a burning flame and die, so all these men rush to thy fire, rush fast to their own destruction.[27]
Kṛṣṇa also added:
I am all-powerful Time which destroys all things, and I have come here to slay these men. Even if thou dost not fight, all the warriors facing thee shall die. Arise therefore! Win thy glory, conquer thy enemies, and enjoy thy kingdom. Through fate of their own karma I have doomed them to die: be thou merely the means of my work … tremble not, fight and slay them. Thou shalt conquer thy enemies in battle.[28]
In this way we find again the identification of war with “the path to God.” The warrior evokes in himself the transcendent power of destruction; he takes it on, becomes transfigured in it and free, thus breaking loose from all human bonds. Life is like a bow and the soul like an arrow, the target being aimed at is the Supreme Spirit; another text of the same Hindu tradition says that what matters is to become united with the Supreme, as an arrow is united with its target.[29] This is the metaphysical justification of war and the transformation of the lesser into the greater holy war. It also sheds further light on the meaning of the traditions concerning the transformation, in the course of the battle, of a warrior or a king into a god. According to an Egyptian tradition, Ramses Merianun was transformed in the battlefield into the god Amon, and said: “I am like Baal in his own time”; when his enemies recognized him in the mêlée, they cried out: “This is not a man; he is Satkhu, the Great Warrior; he is Baal in the flesh.” In this context Baal is the equivalent of the Vedic Śiva and Indra; of the solar god Tiuz-Tyr, who is represented by a sword and by the rune Y, which is the ideogram of resurrection (“a man with raised arms”); and of Odin-Wotan, the god of battles and of victories. It should not be forgotten that both Indra and Wotan are conceived of as gods of order and as the overseers of the world’s course (Indra is called “the one who stems the tides”; as the god of the day and of clear skies he also exhibits Olympian traits). What we find in these examples is the general theme of war being justified as a reflection of the transcendent war waged by “form” against chaos and the forces of the inferior nature that accompany it.
Further on, I will discuss the classical Western forms of the “path of action.” As far as the Western doctrine of the “holy war” is concerned, I will refer here only to the Crusades. The fact that during the Crusades men who fought the war intensely and experienced it according to the same spiritual meaning were found on both sides demonstrates the true unity between people who shared the same traditional spirit; a unity that can be preserved not only through differences of opinion but also through the most dramatic contrasts. In their rising up in arms against each other, Islam and Christianity gave witness to the unity of the traditional spirit.
The historical context in which the Crusades took place abounds with elements capable of conferring upon them a potential symbolical and spiritual meaning. The conquest of the “Holy Land” located “beyond the sea” in reality had many more connections with ancient traditions than it was first thought; according to these traditions, “in the ancient East, where the sun rises, there lies the happy region of the Aesir and in it, the city of Ayard, where there is no death and where journeyers enjoy a heavenly peace and eternal life.”[30] Moreover, the struggle against Islam, by virtue of its nature, shared from the beginning several common traits with asceticism: “It was not a matter of fighting for earthly kingdoms, but for the kingdom of God: the Crusades were not a human, but a divine affair; consequently they should not be considered like all other human events.”[31] The holy war was at that time the equivalent of a spiritual war and of “a cleansing that is almost a purgatorial fire that one experiences before death,” to use an expression found in a chronicle of those times. Popes and preachers compared those who died in the Crusades to “gold tested three times and purified seven times in the furnace”; the fallen warriors were believed to find grace with the supreme Lord. In his De laude novae militiae, Saint Bernard wrote:
Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. What a glory it is for you to emerge from the battle crowned with victory! But what a greater glory it is to win on the battlefield an immortal crown….What a truly blessed condition, when one can wait for death without any fear, yearning for it and welcoming it with a strong spirit![32]
The crusader was promised a share in the “absolute glory” and “rest” in paradise (in the coarse language of the time: conquerre lit en paradis), which is the same kind of supernatural rest mentioned in the Koran.
Likewise, Jerusalem, the military objective of the Crusades, appeared in the double aspect of an earthly and of a heavenly city,[33] and thus the Crusade became the equivalent in terms of heroic tradition of a “ritual,” a pilgrimage, and the “passion” of the via crucis. Moreover, those who belonged to the orders that contributed the most to the Crusades—such as the Knights Templar and the Knights of Saint John—were men who, like the Christian monks or ascetics, learned to despise the vanity of this life; these orders were the natural retirement place for those warriors who were weary of the world, who had seen and experienced just about everything, and who had directed their spiritual quest toward something higher. The teaching that vita est militia super terram was instilled in these knights in an integral, inner, and outer fashion. Through prayers they readied themselves to fight and to move against the enemy. Their matins was the trumpet; their hair shirts, the armor they rarely took off; their fortresses, the monasteries; the trophies taken from the infidels, the relics and the images of saints. A similar kind of asceticism paved the way for that spiritual realization that was also related to the secret dimension of chivalry.
The military defeats the crusaders suffered, after an initial surprise and perplexity, helped to purify the Crusades from any residue of materialism and to focus on the inner rather than on the outer dimension, on the spiritual rather than on the temporal element. By comparing the unfortunate outcome of a Crusade with that of an unnoticed virtue, which is appreciated and rewarded only in the next life, people learned to see something superior to both winning and losing and to put all their values in the ritual and “sacrificial” aspect of an action as an end in itself, which is performed independently from the visible earthly results as an oblation aimed at deriving the life-giving “absolute glory” from the sacrifice of the human element.
Therefore, in the Crusades we find the recurrence of the main meanings of expressions such as: “Paradise lies under the shade of the swords,” and “The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful,” as well as the view of the seat of immortality as the “island of heroes,” (or Valhalla) and as the “court of heroes.” What occurs again is the same spirit that animated the warrior in Zoroastrian dualism. By virtue of this spirit, the followers of Mithras assimilated the exercise of their cult to the military profession; the neophytes swore by an oath (sacramentum) similar to that required of the recruits in the army; and once a man joined the ranks of the initiates, he became part of the “sacred militia of the invincible god of light.”[34]
Moreover, it must be emphasized that during the Crusades the realization of universality and of supernationalism through asceticism was eventually achieved. Leaders and nobles from all lands converged into the same sacred enterprise, above and beyond their particular interests and political divisions, to forge a European solidarity informed by the same ecumenical ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. The main strength of the Crusades, was supplied by chivalry, which as I have already remarked, was a supernational institution whose members had no homeland because they would go anywhere they could to fight for those principles to which they swore unconditional faithfulness. Since Pope Urban II referred to chivalry as the community of those who “show up everywhere a conflict erupts, in order to spread the terror that their weapons evoke in defense of honor and justice,” he expected chivalry to answer the call to a holy war. Thus, here too we find a convergence of the inner and outer dimensions; in the holy war the individual was afforded the experience of a meta-individual action. Likewise, the teaming up of warriors for a purpose higher than their own race, national interests, or territorial and political concerns was an external expression of the overcoming of all particularities, already an ideal of the Holy Roman Empire.[35] In reality, if the universality connected with the asceticism of the pure spiritual authority is the condition for an invisible traditional unity that exists over and above any political division within the body of a unitary civilization informed by the cosmic and by the eternal (in respect of which everything that is pathos and human inclination disappears and the dimension of the spirit presents the same characteristic of purity and power as the great forces of nature); and when this universality is added to “universality as action”—then we arrive at the supreme ideal of the empire, an ideal whose unity is both visible and invisible, material and political, as well as spiritual. Heroic asceticism and the untameability of the warrior vocation strengthened by a supernatural direction are the necessary instruments that allow the inner unity to be analogically reflected in the outer unity, namely, in the social body represented by many peoples that are organized and unified by the same one great conquering stock.
Moreover, those who love to contrast the past with our recent times should consider what modern civilization has brought us to in terms of war. A change of level has occurred; from the warrior who fights for the honor and for the right of his lord, society has shifted to the type of the mere “soldier” that is found in association with the removal of all transcendent or even religious elements in the idea of fighting.
To fight on “the path to God” has been characterized as “medieval” fanaticism; conversely, it has been characterized as a most sacred cause to fight for “patriotic” and “nationalistic” ideals and for other myths that in our contemporary era have eventually been unmasked and shown to be the instruments of irrational, materialistic, and destructive forces. It has gradually become possible to see that when “country” was mentioned, this rallying cry often concealed the plans of annexation and oppression and the interests of monopolistic industries; all talk of “heroism” was done by those who accompanied soldiers to the train stations. Soldiers went to the front to experience war as something else, namely, as a crisis that all too often did not turn out to be an authentic and heroic transfiguration of the personality, but rather the regression of the individual to a plane of savage instincts, ”reflexes,” and reactions that retain very little of the human by virtue of being below and not above humanity.[36]
The era of nationalism has known a worthy surrogate for the two great traditional culminations that are the universality of spiritual authority and heroic universality: I am referring to imperialism. Although in society the act of one who takes over somebody else’s goods by force, whether out of envy or out of need, is considered to be reprehensible, a similar behavior in the relationships between nations has been considered as a natural and legitimate thing; it has consecrated the notion of fighting; and it has constituted the foundation of the “imperialistic” ideal. It was thought that a poor nation “lacking living space” has every right, if not the duty, to take over the goods and the lands of other people. In some instances the conditions leading to expansion and to “imperialist conquest” have been fabricated ad hoc. A typical example has been the pursuit of demographical growth, inspired by the password “There is power in numbers.” Another example, more widespread and denoting a lower mentality since it is exclusively controlled by economic and financial factors, is that of overproduction. Once a nation experiences an excess of production and the demographical or commercial “need for space,” it desperately requires an outlet. When the outlet of a “cold war” or diplomatic intrigues are no longer sufficient, what ensues are military expeditions that in my view rank much lower than what the barbaric invasions of the past may have represented. Such an upheaval, which has recently assumed global proportions, is accompanied by hypocritical rhetoric. The great ideas of “humanity,” “democracy,” and “the right of a people to self-determination,” have been mobilized. From an external point of view, not only is the idea of “holy war” considered “outdated,” but also the understanding of it that people of honor had developed; the heroic ideal has now been lowered to the figure of the policeman because the new “crusades” have not been able to find a better flag to rally around than that of the “struggle against the aggressor.” From an inner point of view, beyond all this rhetoric, what proved to be decisive was the brute, cynical will to power of obscure, international, capitalist, and collectivist powers. At the same time “science” has promoted an extreme mechanization and technologization of war, so much so that today war is not a matter of man against man but of machines against man. Rational systems of mass extermination are being employed (through indiscriminate air raids, atomic weapons, and chemical warfare) that leave no hope and no way out; such systems could once have been devised only to exterminate germs and insects. In contrast to “medieval superstitions” that refer to a “holy war,” what our contemporaries consider sacred and worthy of the actual “progress of civilization” is the fact that millions of human beings, taken away en masse from their occupations and vocations (which are totally alien to the military vocation), and literally turned into what military jargon refers to as “cannon fodder,” will die in such events.
Footnotes
1. “Sacratos more Samnitium milites eoque candida veste et paribus candore armis insignes.” History of Rome, 9.44.9. And also: “They had also called in the aid of the gods by submitting the soldiers to a kind of initiation into an ancient form of oath (ritu quodam sacramenti verusta velut initiatis militibus).” Ibid., 10.38.2.
2. Ynglingasaga, 10.
3. The term ragna-rokkr is found in the Lokasenna (39), and it literally means “twilight of the gods.” More often we encounter the term ragna-rok(Voluspa, 44), which signifies the “doom” or the “end of the gods.” The term ragna-rokkr became prevalent because from the twelfth or thirteenth century on, Norse writers adapted it instead of ragna-rok. The Nordic view of the Wildes Heer corresponds to the Iranian view of Mithras, the “sleepless warrior,” who at the head of the fravashi leads the fight against the enemies of the Aryan religion (Yashna, 10.10).
4. Gylfaginning, 38.
5. R. Guénon, Le Symbolisme de la croix, 77. In reference to the Bhagavadgītā, a text written in the form of a dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and the Lord Kṛṣṇa, Guénon wrote: “Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna, who represent respectively the Self and the empirical ego, or personality and individuality, or the unconditioned ātman and the living soul (jivātmā), climbed into the same chariot, which is the vehicle of Being, considered in its manifested state. As Arjuna fights on, Kṛṣṇa drives the chariot without becoming involved in the action. The same meaning is also found in various Upaniṣads; ‘the two birds sitting in the same tree,’ and ‘the two birds who entered into a cave.’ Al Hallaj said: ‘We are two souls joined together within the same body.”’
The famous seal found in the Knights Templar tradition (a horse mounted by two knights wearing a helmet and a spike, and underneath the inscription sigillum militum Christi) may be interpreted along the same lines.
6. Bhagavadgrta 3.43.
7. Koran 4:76.
8. Ibid., 47:4.
9. Ibid., 47:37.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 47:38.
12. Ibid., 9:38.
13. lbid., 9:52.
14. Ibid., 2:216.
15. Ibid., 9:88–89.
16. Ibid., 47: 5–7.
17. Bhagavadgītā, 4.1–2.
18. Arjuna has the title of Gudakesha, which means “Lord of sleep.” Thus, he represents a warrior version of the “Awakened One”; Arjuna also ascended a “mountain” (in the Himalayas) to practice asceticism and to achieve superior warrior skills. In the Iranian tradition the attribute of “sleepless” was referred in an eminent sense to the god of light, Ahura-Mazda (Vendidad, 19.20) and to Mithras (Yashna, 10.10).
19. Bhagavadgītā, 2.2.
20. Ibid., 2.37.
21. Ibid., 3.30.
22. Ibid. 2.38. In the Chinese tradition mention is made of the brave and virile warrior who “regards equally defeat and victory” and of his noble countenance, which is unaffected by “tumultuous passions”: “When I journey inward I find a pure heart; even if I had to face a thousand or ten thousand enemies, I march against them without any fear.” Mencius, 3.2.
23. The Laws of Manu (5.98): “When a man is killed by upraised weapons in battle, in fulfillment of the duty of a ruler, instantly he completes both a sacrifice and the period of pollution caused by his death.” Also (7.89):
“Kings who try to kill one another in battle and fight to their utmost ability, never averting their faces, go to heaven.”
24. Bhagavadgītā, 2.16–20.
25. Ibid., 7.9–11.
26. Ibid., 11.20, 24.
27. Ibid., 11.28–29.
28. Ibid., 11.32–34.
29. Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, 42.7.8. Along these lines we may understand the “solar” transfiguration of the divine hero Karna described in the Mahābhārata: from his body, fallen on the battlefield, a thunderbolt of light tears the heavenly vault and pierces the “sun.”
30. B. Kugler, History of the Crusades (Milan, 1887). This region appears as one of the representations of the symbolic “center of the world”; in this context, though, it is mingled with motifs proper to the Nordic tradition, considering that Ayard is Asgard, the Aesir’s seat described in the Eddie saga, which is often confused with Valhalla.
31. J. Michaud, The History of the Crusades (Milan, 1909).
32. Saint Bernard, De Jaude novae militiae.
33. In the Judeo-Christian belief system, Jerusalem was often considered as an image of the mysterious Salem ruled by Melchizedek.
34. F. Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, xv-xvi.
35. An analogous form of universality “through action” was achieved to a large degree by the ancient Roman civilization. Even the Greek city-states experienced something higher than their political particularisms “through action,” that is, through the Olympic games and through the league of the Hellenic cities against the “barbarians.”
36. The reading of the so-called war novels written by E. M. Remarque (especially All Quiet On the Western Front) reveals the contrast between the patriotic idealism and rhetoric on the one hand and the realistic results of the experience of the war among European youth. An Italian officer, in the aftermath of World War I wrote: “When war is seen at a distance it may have idealistic and knightly overtones for the enthusiastic souls and some sort of choreographic beauty for aesthetes. It is necessary that future generations learn from our generation that there is no fascination more false and no legend more grotesque than that which attributes to war any virtue or influence on progress, and an education that is not based on cruelty, revolution and brutishness. Once stripped of her magical attractive features, Bellona is more disgusting than Alcina, and the youth who died in her arms have shivered in horror at her touch. But we had to go to war.” V. Coda, Dalla Bainsizza al Piave. It was only in the earlier works of Ernst Jünger, inspired by his personal experiences as a soldier in the German army, that we find again the idea that these processes may change polarity and that the most destructive aspects of modern technological war may condition a superior type of man, beyond the patriotic and “idealist” rhetoric as well as beyond humanitarianism and antimilitarism.