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Julius Evola — The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit


Sometimes we have to wonder who we're writing these little "reviews" for... our own entertainment and self-image issues, most likely. We like to self-appoint ourselves as "authorities" as much as anyone else with a DSL connection. But also we do run into people who seem to have an interest "occult" things who figure we must know about such topics. Esoteric concepts do saturate much of our music, after all. When next they ask us if we've read David Icke, or A. Crowley, or Baigent & Leigh, or some manual on McYoga, and proceed to tell us how we HAVE to read that stuff because it's SO earthshattering and incredible, how are we to respond? It's great that some people are finding something in those books. But to us it just looks like every potentially worthwhile discussion on some point of the Art is forcefully diverted into a maze of pseudo-referents supplied by the growing market of cheap "oriental" simulations and all that endless post-Theosophical clowning. Rarely is anyone even interested in Esoteric Philosophy; just watch the eyes glaze over when you make the mistake of engaging the subject in a way that doesn't lead within two minutes straight to the fucking aliens... Secret Knowledge? You couldn't get people to look at this stuff even if you were a world champion skywriter. Hell yes, we'll stoop to patronizing and macho paternalism. We do it all the time. You've probably noticed. But even then... I mean, with our hard won status as one of the world's champion rock star organizations/labels, with powerful influence over impressionable young minds (& all those psychotic freaks who collect every possible piece of detritus that flows out of the gate), you'd think that those who go so far as to INQUIRE as to the nature of such music could be persuaded to read even the basic and essential stuff like Corbin's Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, The Voyage and the Messenger or Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. Yeah RIGHT. There's a snowball melting in Hell right now, and Satan himself has got a branding iron with this paragraph on it, red hot and ready to stamp. Fsssssssssss.....

Anyway, for the five of you that have followed up, or even better those of you who already have an interest in things Grail, let it be our pleasure to introduce you to this simple little work. Don't be intimidated; this is still pretty "easy" stuff in that it reads like mid-century comparative Religion/Philosophy a la M. Eliade, J. Campbell etc. But its real strength is that its points resound all the better the more you bring to it, ie. the more background you have in, say, Sufism/Shi'ism or Qabala or Esoteric Christianity, the better this little book is.

Originally an appendix to Evola's Revolt Against The Modern World, which is also excellent, the Mystery of the Grail helps us grasp the scale of the "suprahistorical" geography from which the Grail cycles spring. Those familiar with Sufism and Islamic Mysticism will be struck by a great many concurrent and complimentary themes (the Cosmic North, the Pole, Qaf, Zulfiqar, numerological ideas, the Black Stone) - things Evola doesn't make much of because he's too busy traversing the other "hypoborean" side of this great mountain. All of which is rather astonishing — it gets to the point where it makes "comparative" anything just seem secondary, self-evident and beside the point. Nice. The text does not assume you are an educated ex-hippie who wants to get into "primitivism" or "archetypal psychology" & so doesn't have to spend its narrative time cautiously pampering readers as it gently weens them off of their habitual cognitive blockages. If you have a conditioned aversion to self-evident a priori facts & need such assurances, this might be rough for you. Evola assumes his readers are bright, educated Europeans in search of real roots and meaning who don't need to be intellectually mollycoddled. The writing just cuts to the chase and proceeds as a lucid exposition bordering on exegesis, but with clarity of style and a wonderfully multi-hued transparency that probably made most of his more famous scholarly contemporaries secretly hang their heads in shame.

The subject of the Grail is gargantuan. It may come as a surprise to some folks who consider this stuff just a hokey romance of shiny knights and flowing dresses draped upon palefaced maidens doing their best to look and sound "Elizabethan" — while a mead-drunk Richard Harris croons on idiotically about some Utopia or other... But don't let those elements fool you; this is the heart of the Western Esoteric Tradition. Believe it. In addition to the "Hypoborean" theme referred to above, there are strong issues of Hermeticism, Qabala, early Shi'ism, early Christianity, Mystical Islam and Sufism, Neoplatonism and Zoroastrianism, and Chaldaen cosmology at work here. But it's easy to see that with the Grail we are not dealing with an "ecclecticism," and even less a "syncretism." It often takes some impossible concordances between slightly overlapping traditions to illustrate to us that culture itself is a secondary phenomena. PAY ATTENTION! That was important. We might have all been trained by the secular/materialist womb we've been nurtured in to call a lot of things by the name "religion" or "superstition" or "myth" or some other derogatory term — especially those things which cannot be easily obtained by the planar stereoscopic view provided by our so-called "pragmatic" worldviews. True, it takes an experience of the Real to juxtapose against such two-dimensional banality for a person to fucking snap out of it and at least SMELL the perennial coffee. In our case, we had already been shot out of a cannon by the time this book fell into our laps. But it sure was nice to discover the remnant of the Western Tradition in a way that wasn't rotted over with pretension, pseudo-scholarship or formidable New Age weeds. In fact, there was too much good stuff in one tiny place to even believe...

Ok, yeah — Evola is a fireball. That's bad? No way. Before you call him a Fascist, remember that Mussolini's hitmen went after him and ended up paralyzing him from the waist down. Can YOU boast of having the cajones to piss off El Douce AND the Nazis and take a near mortal wound for standing up to those ignorant pricks? Then shut up, you uncomprehending piece of New Age milquetoast. Try looking a little deeper than the scum on the surface of your eyeball for once and you might see at least some of what's going on here.

If there's a better way to acquaint yourself with the subject of the Grail than between these covers, we haven't seen it. Again, it will certainly help to have some prior training - passing aquaintence with Sufi and Shi'ite symbolism won't hurt. A little brushing up on Parsifal and Le Morte d'Arthur, the abovementioned titles, and maybe a cursory glance at Rosicrucian manifestoes beforehand... even some of that Templar & Assassins bullshit you've read might serve the cause — but you're pretty much good to go, even if you're new to all this madness. So don't you procrastinate, compadre. This right here is "the shit." Ready to dive in or what?

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