The True Leaders Of The World Are At Home In Their Graves.

The true leaders of the world are at home in their graves.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 23 November 1941

The mechanical habit of killing produces the same ravages in the facial features that mechanical sexuality does.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 18 December 1942

When something is right—right in the highest sense—it must not be demonstrable, it must be debatable. We mortals must strive for it in configurations that are accessible but not absolutely attainable. This then leads to areas where imponderable rather than quantifiable concepts honor the master and produce the artistic urge. Here it is especially the service to, and with, the word that enthralls me—that subtlest of efforts that takes the word to the dividing line that separates it from the ineffable. This also contains a longing for the correct dimensions according to which the universe was created, and which the reader should see through the word as through a window.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 18 July 1943

The philosopher’s stone stands at the culmination of a series of distillations that lead with ever-greater purity toward an absolute, undiluted state. Whoever possesses the stone no longer needs chemical analysis. We can think of this relationship as traversing a series of gardens where each surpasses the one before it. In each succeeding one, the colors and forms become richer and more luminous. Abundance necessarily reaches its limits at the point when it can no longer be enhanced. Then qualitative changes appear, which both simplify and conceptualize. In this way, the colors gradually become brighter, then as translucent as gems as they lose their tint and ultimately transmute into colorless clarity. The forms increase into ever-higher and simpler relationships, recapitulating the forms of crystals, circles, and orbs, ultimately eliminating the tension between periphery and center. At the same time, the demarcated areas and differences merge as fruit and blossom, light and shadow are transformed into higher entities. We emerge from this abundance into its source as we enter the glass-walled treasury rooms.

Ernst Junger, A German officer in occupied Paris, 23 May 1943

Sword of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria and Duke of Burgundy (1459-1519)