Nietzsche read by RenΓ© Girard: sacrifice, violence and the sacred

A comparison between Β«archaic sacrificial wisdomΒ» and Β«Judaeo-Christian demystificationΒ» in Genealogy of morals di Nietzsche in the light of the reading of RenΓ© Girard, centered on the supposed original sacredness of the so-called Β«victim mechanismΒ» in archaic societies.

Nietzsche, the archer, the bow and the tightrope of the will

The vastness and complexity of Nietzschean thought find a happy synthesis in the evocative symbols of the archer, the bow and the arrow; metaphors that the philosopher often uses in his main writings, so much so that in the Prologue of the β€œZarathustra”, one of his first admonitions is: Β«Woe! The times are approaching when man will no longer shoot the longing arrow beyond man, and his bowstring will have unlearned to vibrate Β».

Children of a lesser god: Gnostic elements in the Nag Hammadi manuscripts

The discovery of an entire "Gnostic library" in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, revealed to the world the "cosmic pessimism" of some of the earliest Christian congregations in the Near East, based on the ontological difference between the unknowable God- Father of the Synoptic Gospels and the "God of this world", a figure who has notable correspondences but also sensitive distinctions with the Platonic Demiurge.

Thomas Mann, the nocturnal side of reason and the depth of the Myth

65 years ago, on August 12, 1955, Thomas Mann, one of the most influential storytellers and thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, left this world. Here we see how - taking a cue from Freud, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer - Mann considered the journey to the mythical and archetypal abysses of man as a return to the past, but with the prospect of delivering it, purified of irrational error, to the future.

Abyssal Thought: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Eternal Return

Through the revelation of doctrines such as the eternal return, the death of God and the transvaluation of values, Nietzsche undertakes to show us how only by understanding history as something alive and which constitutes us insofar as we are already always inserted in a historical world, we can have before us a future that is a Future, therefore a future herald of History and not of mere random events.

β€œThe Traveler of Agartha”: the magical realism of Abel Posse

In the initiatory novel by the Argentine writer and diplomat, published thirty years ago and set during the last bars of the Second World War, the "magical realism" of Pauwels and Bergier, the esoteric doctrines of the Theosophical School of the late nineteenth century, are combined. β€” which then influenced the Central European secret societies Thule and Vril β€” and the eastern legend of the underground kingdom of the Immortals. In the background, a Europe by now on its last legs and a Tibet that within a few years would have experienced the indelible tragedy of the Chinese invasion.

β€œAt the wall of time”: the question of history and the crisis of the modern world

Ernst JΓΌnger's work on cyclical time, published 60 years ago, marks the apex of what was called the "culture of the crisis", a current of thought focused on becoming aware of the drama of History and Historicism and on the image of time as an impetuous flow that overwhelms everything: intuitions that, before JΓΌnger, were brought to the surface by Oswald Spengler, RenΓ© GuΓ©non, Julius Evola and Mircea Eliade.

We do not live in time, but in "chronospheres"

The chronospheres are psychic experiences and dynamic spacetime events, like concentric circles in the water, they are different frequencies of the passing of time that involve us; if spacetime is like the ocean, the circles in the water are the traces and the different times that unfold and dilate, mixing and overlapping continuously

Kawah Ijen: Hell & Heaven

We made an excursion, among the indigenous sulfur collectors, on the slopes of the only volcano in the world that erupts blue lava: the Kawah Ijen on the Indonesian island of Java. The nocturnal catabasis and the morning ascent, similar to those of Dante in DorΓ©'s illustrations, gave rise to meditations in us on the power of the cataclysmic events that have always affected the Pacific "belt of fire", and on the necessity on the part of the man to accept them and to come to terms with them.