Once again bathed in flowing, billowing, rays of crepuscular light my mentor appeared from behind a willow oak. He gazed into my eyes, and without words motioned at a note he was holding. Affixing it to the oak, he then dematerialised in a puff of vapour.
The note read as follows:
The internal principles of one's transfiguration must act harmoniously and in conjunction with one's purpose. Beware the salamander's beguiling breath and do not mistake it for the dragon's stern, taciturn speech. Frenzied are the fae when the mandrake sings, poisoned are they when that namesake stings.
Between warriors, it is desirable to exchange as few words as possible. Action will reveal the way. Knowledge is not gradual and accumulative, but filtrative, occlusive, born of the inherent fecundity of the asymptotic approach of time towards the limit of the eternal. We must embrace the irreducible mystery of life and time, seeking to become eternal and timeless.
The great power differential of our age is knowledge. In military terms, information is typically only considered correct and actionable when corroborated by three independent sources.
The mandrake is a snake, and represents the devil; he procures wealth, doubles the number of coins placed next to him, and he is an infernal and cursed being: whoever is his friend or has him will be happy in this world, but unhappy in the next. More generally, it is widely believed that whoever owns and keeps a root of the mandrake plant will be lucky, and the mandrake will be able to provide him with wealth, prosperity, and fulfil any desire.
Magicians and illusionists deceive people by showing non-existent things. There is nothing new that is archetypal, only of a different time. But modernity is woeful for the fact that it cements itself as 'the last to know', based on scientific reductionism and an abandonment of the perennial. The modern can wrap his head around atoms and molecules, but not around the fact that those atoms need metaphysical universal ordering principles to be interpreted meaningfully.
The violence so easily dispensed by modernity is as a perpetual motion machine generating infinite tragedy and resentment. For the modern, there are only two rules: 'be faithful to all vice'; deceive the righteous, rape the chaste, strangle the holy and hang them high, and sing loud the joy of evil. That would be the first rule. The second is 'accept every absurdity'; no matter what exists or what happens here.
Furnish yourselves in the very skins of these snakes, imbued with magic power. Let the modern hate, as long as she also fears. For the beasts of the modern show no sign of fervency, watching irresolutely from a distance.
We must be a kind of bright eye that shines in the night, shining at night like a lamp: glittering, glowing as the little light, brightly. For even the serpent king basilisk, who causes death to those who look into its eyes, is reputed to have a spot on its head like a diadem.
This is what I meant when I said: 'Behold the divine diadem of the flame imperishable. The fervor of the furnace which feeds the frenzy of fanaticism.' Even not knowing the way, it is better to act with absolute fervency and devotion, as if impelled by the ineffable force of the cosmos to one's purpose; it is better to die lacking meaning for the fight than to die never having taken up arms. I implore you to consider all my words to be falsity, or merely fingers pointing at the moon, but know it is better to be a serpent who represented something, than a modern, who stands for nothing.
Image: The Transfiguration, Raphael, c. 1516-1520
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Revolt against Time
SpiritualTranscendence is the revolt against the unbroken wheel of time, and the desire for a perfected state beyond the degenerating interdiction of time. There have been eras of peace and prosperity no one would have hesitated to stop the clocks forever fo...
