7

Spiritual Virility

So far I have discussed the roles that the Sacred, the gods, the priestly class, and the rites played in traditional societies. In the world of Tradition, these things hardly correspond to categories typical of the domain of “religion” in the current sense of the word, based as it is on the notion of deities conceived as self-sufficient beings and the notion of God as a personal being who providentially rules the universe. Moreover, the cult is essentially characterized by an affective disposition and by a sentimental and devotional relationship of the “believer” to this Supreme Being or deities. In this type of relationship the moral law plays a fundamental role.

One would look in vain for “religion” in the original forms of the world of Tradition. There are civilizations that never named their gods or attempted to portray them—at least this is what is said about the ancient Pelasgians. The Romans themselves, for almost two centuries, did not portray their deities; at most, they represented them with a symbolical object. What characterizes the primordial times is not “animism” (the idea that an “anima” is the foundation of the general representation of the divine and of the various forces at work in the universe) but rather the idea or perception of pure powers,^[1] adequately represented by the Roman view of the numen. The numen, unlike the notion of deus (as it later came to be understood), is not a being or a person, but a sheer power that is capable of producing effects, of acting, and of manifesting itself. The sense of the real presence of such powers, or numina, as something simultaneously transcendent and yet immanent, marvelous yet fearful, constituted the substance of the original experience of the “sacred.”^[2] A well-known saying of Servius emphasizes that in the origins, “religion” consisted in nothing else but experience.^[3] Even though more conditioned points of view were not excluded from exotericism (those traditional forms reserved for the common people), “inner doctrines” were characterized by the teaching that the personal forms of deities, variously objectified, are only symbols of superrational and superhuman ways of being. As I have said, the center consisted in the real and living presence of these states within an elite, or in the ideal of their realization through what in Tibet is called the “direct path,” and which generally corresponds to initiation conceived as an ontological change of nature. The saying from the Upaniṣads that best represents the traditional “inner doctrine” is: “So whoever worships another divinity than his Self, thinking: ‘He is one and I another,’ he knows not. He is like a sacrificial animal for the gods.^[4]

With regard to the rite there was nothing “religious” about it and little or no devout pathos in those who performed it. The rite was rather a “divine technique,” a determining action upon invisible forces and inner states similar in spirit to what today is obtained through physical forces and states of matter. The priest was simply a person who, by virtue of his qualification and the virtus intrinsic to the rite itself, was capable of producing results through this technique. “Religion” was the equivalent of the indigitamenta of the ancient Roman world, namely, of the body of formulations used with different numina. Thus it is easy to see that prayers, fears, hopes, and other feelings displayed before what has the character of numen had as little meaning and effect upon it as if one of our contemporaries were to employ prayers when confronting a machine. Instead, what was at stake was to be able to understand such relationships so that once a cause was established through a correctly performed rite, a necessary and constant effect would ensue on the plane of “powers” and invisible forces and states of being. Thus, the law of action reigned supreme. But the law of action is also the law of freedom; no bond can be spiritually imposed on beings who neither hope nor fear, but rather act.

Thus in the older Indo-Aryan view of the world only the brāhmaṇa caste, consisting as it did of superior natures, could tower over everybody else since it ruled over the power of the rite, or of Brahman, understood in this context as the vital and primordial principle. The “gods” themselves, when they are not personifications of the ritual action (that is, beings who are actualized or renewed by this action), are spiritual forces that bow before this caste.^[5] According to the Far Eastern tradition, the person who has authority also enjoys the dignity of a “third power between Heaven and Earth.”^[6] In ancient Egypt, even the “great gods” could be threatened with destruction by priests who knew special sacred incantations.^[7] “Kemotef” (“his mother’s bull”) was a title of the Egyptian king, emphasizing that as a man, the king possesses the primordial substance; he affects the divine more than being affected by it. One of the formulations recited by the Egyptian kings before the performance of the rites was: “O gods, you are safe if I am safe; your doubles are safe if my double is at the head of all living doubles; everybody lives if I live.”^[8] Formulations of glory, power, and total identification are recited by the soul “rendered like Osiris” in the course of its trials; these trials in turn can be assimilated to various degrees of solar initiation. Similar traditions are perpetuated wherever in Alexandrian literature mention is made of the “holy race of people without kings,” a race “autonomous and immaterial” that “acts without being acted upon.”^[9] This race is believed to be endowed with a “sacred science centuries old” that is proper to “the lords of the spirit and of the temple,” and communicated only to kings, princes, and priests; this science is related to the rituals of the pharaohs and later on it came to be known in the Western world as Ars Regia.^[10]

In the higher forms of the luminous Aryan spirituality, whether in Greece, ancient Rome, or the Far East, the role played by doctrine was minimal: only the rituals were mandatory and absolutely necessary. Orthodoxy was defined through rituals and practices and not through dogmas and theories. Sacrilege and impiety (ἀσέβεια) did not consist in “not believing” but rather in neglecting rites. This does not amount to “formalism”—as modern historians, who are more or less influenced by a Protestant mentality, would have us believe—but rather to the pure law of spiritual action. In the Doric-Achaean ritual, the relationship with the divine was not based on feelings but on an attitude characterized by do ut des.^[11] Even the gods presiding over funerals were not treated very “religiously”; they did not love men, nor were they loved by them in return. The reason behind their cult was to propitiate them and to prevent them from exercising an unfavorable action. The expiatio itself originally had the character of an objective operation, such as the medical procedure for an infection, without resembling either a punishment or an act of repentance on the part of a soul. The formulations employed by every patrician family and by every ancient city in their relationship with the forces controlling their destinies, had been previously employed by their divine forefathers to overcome spiritual forces (numina). Thus, these formulations were merely the legacy of a mystical domain; they were not the effusion of feelings but a supernaturally efficacious weapon, provided that not a single technique was changed in the course of the rite.^[12]

Wherever the traditional principle was applied in its entirety it is possible to find, in its hierarchical differentiations, a transcendent virility that finds its best symbolical expression in the synthesis of the two attributes of the Roman patrician class, namely, the lance and the rite. There one also finds beings who are reges sacrorum, innerly free, and often consecrated by Olympian immortality. With regard to invisible and divine forces these beings exercise the same function of centrality and the same role that leaders exercise among human beings. A very long downward path or degenerated process unwinds from this “peak” to what is currently and commonly considered “religion” and “priesthood.”

The world of “animism” represents a fall from and an attenuation of the world perceived under the species of “powers” and of numina. This attenuation and degeneration was destined to increase with the shift from a world in which “souls” were inherent in things and in the elements to a world in which the gods were conceived as persons in an objective sense rather than as figurative allusions to nonhuman states, forces, and possibilities. When the efficacy of the rite disappeared, man was motivated to give a mythological individuality to those forces with which he had previously dealt according to simple relationships of technique or which, at most, he had conceived under the species of symbols. Later on man conceived these forces in his own image, thus limiting human possibilities; he saw in them personal beings who were more powerful than he was, and who were to be addressed with humility, faith, hope, and fear, not only to receive protection and success, but also liberation and salus (in its double meaning of health and salvation). The hyperrealistic world that was substantiated with pure and sheer action was replaced with a subreal and confused world of emotions, imagination, hopes, and fears; this world became increasingly “human” and powerless as it followed various stages of the general involution and alteration of the primordial tradition.

Only vis-à-vis this decadence is it possible to distinguish the regal and the priestly functions. Even when a priestly class ruled without departing from the pure traditional spirit, as in the case of ancient India, it had a much more “magical” and regal rather than religious character, in the usual sense of the word “religious.”

When I say “magical,” I do not mean what today the majority of people think when they hear the term “magic,” which is almost always discredited by prejudices and counterfeits. Nor do I refer to the meaning the term acquires when referred to the sui generis empirical science typical of antiquity, which was rather limited in its scope and effects. Magic in this context designates a special attitude toward spiritual reality itself, an attitude of centrality that is closely related to regal tradition and initiation.

Secondly, it does not make sense to emphasize the relationship between the magical attitude, the pure ritual, the impersonal, direct, and “numinous” perception of the divine and the way of life of savage tribes, which according to the Judeo-Christian mentality are still unaware of “true religiosity.” In most cases, savage tribes should not be considered as precivilized states of mankind, but rather as extremely degenerated forms of remnants of very ancient races and civilizations. Even though the abovementioned particulars are found among savage tribes and are expressed in materialistic, dark, and shamanic forms, this should not prevent us from recognizing the meaning and the importance they assume once they are brought back to their true origins. Likewise, “magic” should not be understood on the basis of those wretched and degenerated remnants, but rather on the basis of the forms in which it was preserved in an active, luminous, and conscious way. These forms coincide with what I have called the “spiritual virility” of the world of Tradition. It does not come as a surprise that most noted modern “historians of religion” have no idea whatsoever about this concept; the confusions and the prejudices found in their highly documented works are most unfortunate.

Footnotes

1. G. F. Moore, Origin and Growth of Religion (London, 1921).

2. R. Otto (The Holy) has employed the term “numinous” (from numen) to designate the content of the experience of the sacred.

3. “Maiores enim expugnando religionem totum in experientia collocabunt.” Ad georgicas, 3.456

4. Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.10.

5. Somebody remarked that in the Hindu tradition the religious deed par excellence appears to have been thought of in terms of a magical procedure or of a quasi-mechanical operation, the good or bad outcome of which depended entirely on the person engaging in it; in this context, morality had no role to play.

6. Chung-yung, 24.1; 23.1; 31.1, 3, 4.

7. Porphyry did not fail to contrast this kind of attitude toward the divine with the attitude of fearful religious worship that emerged in some features of the Greco-Roman cult. Epistula Anebo, 29.

8. This explains why the first generation of Egyptologists was led by devotional religion to recognize in the features of pharaonic regality those of the Antichrist or of the princeps huius mundi.

9. This obviously corresponds to the principle of “acting without acting,” which according to the Taoist tradition is “Heaven’s Way”; accordingly, “those without kings” correspond to those whom Lao-tzu called “skillful masters” of the Tao (Tao te Ching, 15) and to the Iranian “men of the primordial law.”

10. See J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition, trans. E.E. Rehmus (Rochester, Vt., 1994). Even though the king may be called “son of the Sun,” or “son of Heaven” this does not contradict the abovementioned views, since such concepts do not evoke creationist and dualistic concepts. Rather, these views convey the idea of a descent that is the “continuation” of the same one influence, spirit or emanation. Agrippa remarked (De occulta philosophia, 3.36) that it is like “the univocal generation in which the son is similar to the father in all regards, and having been generated according to the human species, he is the same as the one who generated him.”

11. J.E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of the Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1903), 162.

12. Cicero, De haruspicina responsio, 11.23; Amobius, Adversus nationes (The Case Against the Pagans), 4.31.