pathofgods:

“According to a
certain mentality, being human — and nothing but human — is a glory in itself. The wretched, dark, painful and
broken aspects of the human condition are termed ‘tragic,’ and are
praised consistently with the premises adopted. The prototype of the ‘noble’
human spirit is found in whomever rebels against higher forces, in the Titans,
or in Prometheus.

Therefore,
one speaks of ‘deeply humane works’, of ‘humane awareness’, of a ‘vivid and
deep sense of humaneness’. One admires the ‘tragic greatness’ of a given life,
or a face brightened by ‘inner tragedy’. Finally, one praises the ‘Promethean
spirit’, the ‘noble spirit of rebellion’, the ‘Titanism of the will’, and so
on. The same tendency is also reflected by Carducci’s Hymn to Satan and by certain forms of Faustianism. This sort of lingo was common among
intellectuals, men of letters and the champions of a historicist and
progressive philosophy which they had largely inherited from the Enlightenment.
Its ridiculous and rhetorical nature went quite undetected, until an even
further step down was taken with the aforementioned ‘integral humanism’ of
collectivist and materialist Marxists, which dismisses even these
superstructures in order to proclaim the mystique of the beast of burden and
production. What we have here are clear indicators of the spiritually
anti-aristocratic character of a typically modern view of life.

To
get a vivid idea of the drop in level behind all this one might turn to the
Classical world, to aspects, myths and symbols that are specific to it — provided these
are not examined in the distorted or irrelevant form that is common to the
latest expositions. It may be useful here to refer to what Karl Kerényi has
written with regard to the meaning of Prometheus and the titanic spirit in his
work La
religione antica nelle sue linee fondamentali.

As
a preliminary step, Kerényi emphasises two points. The first is that the
ancient Classical world, in its loftiest and most original aspects, was
ignorant of ‘faith’ in the current sense of the term, since its religiosity was
essentially based on a sense of reality and of the actual presence of divine
powers. ‘Faith presupposes doubt and ignorance, which are overcome by
believing.’ ‘Faith’ did not play any relevant role in the world-view of ancient
men, because the perception of divine forces was as natural and direct a part
of their experience and life as the data from the sensible world. For this
reason — I should note
in passing — a deplorable confusion is produced whenever the term ‘religion’,
understood in its current, Christian sense, with faith as the centre, is
indiscriminately applied to ancient spirituality and to primordial spirituality
more generally. In this connection, one may refer to what I have already argued
with regard to traditional ‘myths’ and to what I will argue later when defining
the concept of initiation.

The
second point concerns the idea of the primordial unity between gods and men.
‘Gods and men have the same origin’, Hesiod tells us, echoed by Pindar. Two
races, the same ‘blood’. Vis-à-vis divine powers, the Orphic initiate states:
‘Mine is a heavenly race, and you know this too.’ Many other similar testimonies could be adduced. An echo of this
is even to be found in the Gospel, albeit in strident contrast with the climate
that distinguishes it, in the saying ‘You are gods.’ That the gods are looking at men, that they are even present
at their feasts and ritual banquets (the Romans had the distinctive ceremony of
the lectisternium), that they appear and take a seat alongside
men, and so on — these images from the ancient world are not mere fantasies.
They attest, in a figurative way, to man’s sense of being with the gods. They
are testimonies of a particular existential condition.

Nor
are we to think of any ‘mysticism’ here. Kerényi states: ‘Starting from Homer
and Hesiod, this absolute form of a non-mythical being-together might be
defined as follows: to sit together, to perceive and know oneself by
reciprocally gazing into the primordial state of existence.’  Kerényi
speaks of a primordial state of existence on account of the antiquity of the
testimonies that express this way of perceiving things.

Over
time, the feeling in question waned and had to be reawakened through specific
cultural actions, ultimately only manifesting itself sporadically. Already
Homer mentions the fact that the feeling of actually being with the gods, as in
the primordial state, is only experienced by special peoples ‘whose existence
fluctuates between divinity and humanity — indeed, they are closer to the gods than
to men.’”

 ~ Julius Evola, The Bow and the Club