Yes, you read that right. Sometimes here at Scattered Roses we go into the super sexy stuff, the stuff to write home about. This time I want to share with you why I have moved away from Julius Evola, someone I used to be rather keen of. Now, I will not completely disown him, nor will I tell you not to read him (complete rejection of Evola is as passe as being an Evolian…sorry, not sorry). Just two posts ago I utilized an argument of Evola’s to make a symbolic point about planetary politics and why it has surpassed geopolitics, so, although I am not referencing Evola like I did before I had the revelation I will let you in on in a second, I still find value in his works. Enough nuance! Nobody likes it! It does not sell! My Estonian friend told me a joke about nuance, and it goes like this:
A soldier asks his captain what the definition of nuance is. The captain tells the soldier to take down his pants and bend over. The soldier is shocked and protests but is assured by the captain that it is necessary. The captain then slips inside the soldier and says, “well, you are in a stick in ass situation, and I am in a stick in ass situation, but there is some nuance.”
A bit vulgar for Scattered Roses, but I would like to avoid a stick in ass situation so I will cut any nuance possible and get right to the red meat.
Evola
In Evola’s magum opus, Revolt Against the Modern World, which was born from the labors of Evola’s involvement with the UR Group1, an occult group dedicated to practicing Hermetic and Kabbalistic magic, he lays out the essentials of his philosophy. Key to Evola’s interpretation of Traditionalism is the claim that there once existed a Golden Age in which god-kings ruled the world and the Divine was present in a way it is not currently. Let’s look at a few passages:
“The experience of traditional man used to reach well beyond these limits, as in the case of some so-called primitive people, among whom we still find today a faint echo of spiritual powers from ancient times. In traditional societies the "invisible” was an element as real, if not more real, than the data provided by the physical senses. Every aspect of the individual and of the social life of the people belonging to these societies was influenced by this experience.”2
“The traditional world knew divine kingship. It knew the bridge between the two worlds, namely, initiation; it knew the two great ways of approach to the transcendent, namely, heroic action and contemplation; it knew the mediation, namely, rites and faithfulness; it knew the social foundation, namely, the traditional law and the caste system; and it knew the political earthly symbol, namely, the empire.”3
Okay, so far, we have Evola saying that there once existed a time in which the invisible/spiritual was more real than the visible/sensible and that there once existed, in a time/place(?) known as “the traditional world”, divine kings who ruled by 1) rites 2) castes and 3) empire. I am sure to many of you this is a familiar account: a long time ago we did not live in a materialistic cosmos, our rulers were closer to God, and society was arranged hierarchically. Maybe there are some qualms about the specifics (do we want an empire, or a rigid caste system?), but you are at least familiar with this account if you do not accept it yourself. It should be no surprise, since Evola was the guru for post-war rightist movements in Europe until his death, and experienced a revival in English speaking countries (we had an Evola craze before, folks) through the now defunct forum Iron March (which played a considerable role in the development of the also defect Atomwaffen Division), and with Steve Bannon infamously requiring all of his staffers to read Revolt Through the Modern World and Camp of The Saints by Jean Raspail. By the time at least half of you came to this scene, Evola has been in the air for a number of years and you, in all likeliness, have been playing his game without knowing it. Someone on Iron March once said that “Evola is our Adorno”, and this is true in the sense that most on the right have not read Evola, but are acting out his ideas.
Now, let’s continue:
“As the age of Being the first era is also the era of the Living in the eminent sense of the word. According to Hesiod, death—which for most people is truly an end that bequeaths Hades—made its appearance only during the last two ages (the Iron and Bronze ages). During Kronos’s Golden Age "mortal people lived as if they were gods”, and "no miserable old age came their way.” That cycle ended, "but those men continue to live upon the earth" in an invisible way, "mantling themselves in dark mist and watching over mortal men”; these words allude to the previously mentioned doctrine according to which the representatives of the primordial tradition, as well as their original site, disappeared. In the realm of Yima, the Persian king of the Golden Age, before the new cosmic events forced him to withdraw into a "subterranean” refuge (the inhabitants of which were thus enabled to evade the dark and painful destiny befallen the new generations), there was "neither disease nor death.” Yima, "the brilliant, the most glorious of those yet to be born, the sunlike one of men,” banished death from his kingdom. Just as in Saturn’s golden kingdom, according to both Romans and Greeks, men and immortal gods shared one common life, the rulers of the first of the mythical Egyptian dynasties were called Qeol, "gods,” or "divine beings.” According to a Chaldean myth, death reigns universally only in the postdiluvian era, in which the "gods” left death to men while keeping eternal life for themselves. Tir na mBeo, the "Land of the Living,” and Tir na nOg, the "Land of Youth," are the names in the Celtic traditions of an island or a mysterious Atlantic land the Druids believed to be the birthplace of mankind. In the saga (ea) of Conall Cearnach where this land is identified with the "Land of the Victorious One” (Tir na Boadag), it is called "the Land of the Living, in which there is no death or old age.”4
What we have here are three key claims:
1.) There was once a time where men knew not death
2.) There was once a common life between men and gods
3.) After the Flood, men knew death, but the gods remained immortal
Like before, there is the general narrative that all on the right are familiar with, if not accept. Yet, more detail is added. First, death was a product of the Flood. Second, prior to the Flood, back when Man did not know death, he shared a common life with the gods. Some of you already have alarm bells ringing, but let’s add one more piece to this.
Evola is a Traditionalist, meaning he believes that there exists a primordial tradition that all civilizations, at one point, had access to. If you look closely, you can see the sophia perennis (perennial wisdom) crop up. My favorite example is to point out how Plato (in the Republic) has a caste system very similar to the Hindu tradition, and that both share a belief in reincarnation, a low view of the body, and the belief in a single One who is beyond the many gods. What differences exist between Platonism and Hinduism, Evola would argue, are deviations from the same perennial Tradition that both spring from and are either 1) corruptions of that Tradition or 2) cultural expressions of that tradition. Now, there was once a time where this Tradition was intact, and the above quote speaks of this in the negative, in the sense that there used to be representatives of this tradition, and it is the task of all good Traditionalists to go back to this Tradition (“Return to Tradition!”) to the extent that it is still possible.
Let’s take a pause here. We will circle back to Evola, but we need to look at what the Nephilim are. Evola is the esoteric bicycle. Riding a bicycle is faster than walking, and a shiny bike is cool to show your friends. Christianity’s esoteric side, which places an understanding of the Nephilim at the center of Biblical history, however, is like a motorcycle. You will go faster, it is a lot more exhilarating, it is for the spiritually grown up (kids can ride a bike…I saw a second grader do it the other day), and it will get you where you need to go (heaven).
The Nephilim
What are these Nephilim? Are they giants? According to Genesis 6:2-4, “When man began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took to themselves any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh; his days shall be 120 years.” The nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.”5
There are these sons of God who are going into the daughters of men and are giving birth to Nephilim. After this event, God floods the world and only a small number of survivors remain. Across all ancient civilizations, be it the ancient Greeks or Mesopotamia, there exists an account of a world flood that wiped out most of the world’s population and, because of this, most knowledge was lost. Think about what it would be like to survive a nuclear war or a meteor shower hitting earth. How many computers or libraries would survive? How many professors or scientists would survive? Not many. We are talking about a near complete reset of civilization. But, surely, an event as big as this surely should get more than a few chapters, and we would expect more detail as to why this flood took place, at least more than a few verses, right? Father Stephen Andrew Damick and Father Stephen de Young, on their episode “Land of Giants” from their podcast Lord of Spirits answer this very well. From the transcript available:
“Fr. Stephen: Well, also another product of that is that when ancient readers read the Torah and read the story of Noah in the flood, they weren’t receiving new information. Like, “Oh, really? There was this ancient civilization and it was wiped out by a flood?” This is something they already knew about, and the biblical story is speaking into that. To give a modern example, if I write a book about the American Civil War, most of the people who see that book and pick it up are not going to think, “What!? America had a civil war in the 19th century?” That’s not new information to them. But I’m going to be writing it to say, “Well, I have some information about the Civil War that you may not have yet,” or “I need to correct some misconceptions you have about the Civil War.” So that’s why I’m writing this, not just to give you new information you don’t already have.
So the story in Genesis, including the flood and the other stories we’re about to talk about, are not there—and that’s why the mention here of the nephilim is so brief and sort of in-passing. You say, “Why doesn’t Genesis go into the detail that you and I are about to go into?” Well, because Genesis didn’t have to. It’s commenting on things they already know, things that they already conceive of as part of their history. It’s commenting on them, not laying them all out and explaining them.
But another aspect of this has to do with that advanced civilization, the antediluvian advanced civilization. And that part, that it’s an advanced civilization, is another part of the story that’s sort of ubiquitous, that’s everywhere. So the Babylonian form of this is what’s called the story of the seven sages, a lot of times, in English translation. The word that’s translated “sages” there is the Babylonian word apkallu, and these apkallu are sort of divine beings. The first one is sort of half-fish, half-man, and the way you see a lot of divine beings in the ancient world being conceived of as sort of composites of human and animal forms, sort of theriomorph.”6
Genesis is not explaining the whole event because everyone at the time would have known about it, and by everyone we do not just mean Hebrews but pagans as well. What is not mentioned in the Genesis account is that there was knowledge lost after the flood, and that this is connected to divine beings that went away after the flood. To quote again from the Lord of Spirits, “the first of the seven sages is described in that way. He comes up out of the river, meaning the Euphrates, because we’re talking about Babylonian story. But then what you find is these seven sages become advisors to the Babylonian kings and Sumerian kings before the flood. This is laid out, for example, the Sumerian Kings List: you have each of these kings listed before the flood, and the apkallu, who was sort of their advisor, and what he taught them. He taught them the mysteries of astrology or magic or some kind of technology involving metallurgy, that kind of thing.” What it really cool is that at the end of Genesis 4, Cain names the first city after Enosh’s son, Irad which is the city of Eridu, a Sumerian city. There is a lot of overlap between different ancient accounts that we cannot get into here, and because the Lord of Spirits do it better than I ever could (go listen to them, that is a hard recommendation!). Cain and his descendants, when we compare pre-diluvian accounts, are engaged in the same kind of things that the pre-diluvian divine beings were.
Cain, in the Biblical narrative, is the bad guy. He is cursed and cannot engage in agriculture, so he takes on metallurgy, astrology and magic. Mankind, in its infancy, is messing with things far too dangerous for it at that stage. Like a kid running around with a gun, mankind takes this knowledge, runs with it, and what do you know, suffering multiplies. Father Stephen comments, “So notice how the pagan versions of this story have recast this. Who’s the bad guy in the pagan versions—all of them—of the story? The other gods who punished Prometheus or the apkallu. They’re the bad guys; they’re the ones who don’t want humans to have this knowledge. And the “good guys” are these spirits who want to reveal the knowledge. So that’s why—we may have said it on the show already—some of these pagan myths, if you understand the biblical version of this story, you can see how they’re kind of pro-devil propaganda.”
At the moment, we have discovered that Nephilim are some sort of divine beings that are mating with humans, giving birth to “mighty men”, and imparting advanced knowledge. Since the flood put an end to the reign of Nephilim, the beings imparting secret knowledge, ancient accounts speak of advanced civilizations disappearing after the global flood. With the fathers help, we can learn a bit more about the Nephilim:
“Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So we talked about this a little in the “Five(ish) Falls” episode, the idea that what’s being described here is sort of ritual that actually took place. We talked about Og’s bed which now has its own meme as a life verse in our Lord of Spirits group on Facebook. Og is one of the giant kings, and we’re going to talk more about him in a little bit, but his bed is described in sort of this random verse in Deuteronomy. Why do we care about his bed and how big it is? The reason for that, we now know, archaeologically, is we found a bed of exactly those dimensions and of the same metallic construction in the ziggurat of Etemenanki, which is the great ziggurat of Babylon, that was used for ritual purposes, for these sexual rituals.
Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so let’s talk about the dimensions. If I recall correctly, it would be a bed for someone who’s about 15 feet tall.
[…]
So why is this bed 15 tall? Well, that particular measurement is the way that ancient peoples said they saw spiritual beings appearing to them, that when a god shows up, that they’re about 15 feet tall.
Fr. Stephen: Now I’m going to flip it: We’ll talk more about bodies, divine bodies, in a future episode.
Fr. Andrew: There you go!
Fr. Stephen: But, yes, one of the bodies that a god had in the ancient world was what’s now called his liturgical body, and that’s 15 feet tall, pretty much uniformly across pagan cultures.
Fr. Andrew: All over the world.
Fr. Stephen: But if you’re talking about what a video camera would see, if you had a Tardis and you went back and took a video camera into Etemenanki and snuck in and videoed what was happening—
Fr. Andrew: On the bed.
Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] ...on the bed is that part of the festal cycle of these cultures, the king, as the high priest of the religion, would ritually embody the god whom they were worshiping…
Fr. Andrew: How does that happen? I mean, do they say prayers over him? What do they do? How do you get…?
Fr. Stephen: Yes. Sacrifices, probably blood-drinking and -anointing, likely the wearing of a mask. And then would go in and ritually have intercourse with a temple slave or a temple prostitute on this bed. That would be part of bringing about fertility for the crops and fields, consummating the relationship between the god they were worshiping and the people, the demonic spirit they were worshiping and the people. If a child was conceived to said king out of this ritual, that child would essentially have two fathers, the king who was regarded as divine himself [and] the god, and then one human mother, the temple slave who actually gave birth to him.
Fr. Stephen: So what you find in the Babylonian sources in particular is, for example, on that same Sumerian Kings List we mentioned that lists the apkallu for each king before the flood, after the flood each of the kings is two-thirds apkallu, one-third human. And you say, “How can you be two-thirds, one-third?” Well, if you have three parents, then you can. And Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, one-third human. Sometimes in some cultures, by the way, just so you know, this was reversed, where it would actually be the temple slave or prostitute or priestess who would embody a goddess, and the king would— in which case you would sort of have two mothers and one father. So you get that with Gilgamesh being an example of that. That happened there. But this is the kind of ritual activity. So this is idolatry, sexual immorality in the extreme, so it’s sort of saying: this is how bad it got before the flood.
Fr. Andrew: Right, and then this is the ritual that produces giants. I think it’s important to emphasize this, because the passage from Genesis 6 doesn’t give any of this kind of detail. It just has this idea of angelic beings and human women and you know. A lot of times people read that without the historical context, and they say, “How can a demon hybridize with a human being? Like they can’t… mate.” But that is a misunderstanding of the way that the nephilim ritual works. I know we’re going to talk a little bit more about that, but I think it’s just important to underline that what the whole thing with Og and his bed—who is just one example of this ritual activity; it’s happening all over the world—what that is actually there are two human beings involved and one divine being, although ancient peoples would have said that one of those human beings was effectively being divine during the activity.
Fr. Stephen: Well, the king was divine all the time, but doubly so when he’s embodying… yeah. The reason that Genesis doesn’t have to go into detail on this is because the original readers knew about this. Abraham lived most of his life, because he was old when he left, in Ur, where there was a ziggurat that had just been rebuilt to enormous size during his lifetime. The great ziggurat of Ur was literally built while he was there and alive, where these kind of rituals were taking place continuously. He had members of his own family—we’re told in Scripture and it’s reiterated at the beginning of Joshua—who were involved in that idolatrous worship. So this isn’t something Abraham didn’t know about; it wasn’t something people didn’t know about. There were versions of this going out: The pharaoh is divine in Egypt; he’s married, usually to his sister. The same kind of thing is going on. They’re aware of this.”
Nephilim are not just divine advisors, divine kings even, but their reproduction with “the daughters of men” is a highly ritualized act that was, quite literally, sex magic. I hope you appreciate how the date for this is sourced from multiple pagan myths and archeology…you can go visit Og’s bed if you would like, or just Google Image search it. Sex magic is not a meme, it is not a reductio ad absurdum to be used against Youtubers who played too much Dungeon and Dragons and get involved with the Occult…it was a real thing. Even if you do not believe it was efficacious, ancient pagans thought it did and engaged in it. Now, there is much more about the Nephilim that we can get into, but lest we lose track of Evola, and lest Scattered Roses becomes a mere transcription project for Lord of Spirits, I will quote from the transcript one last time:
“Fr. Stephen: “...the nephilim were in the earth.” So, yes, it even alludes to the fact that there are going to be some later, and since that’s right before the flood, it doesn’t mean before the flood. That would be “at this time.”
What we see when we see the giants again later, starting in Genesis and then especially when we get into Numbers and Deuteronomy and Joshua, is it’s not just sort of these isolated people, but there are whole sort of giant clans. There are clans, tribes, sort of these social units that are described as being sort of made up of giants. It’s not just there’s a bunch of poor, oppressed people who have this tyrant for their king, but they’re sort of all engaging in something, that they all get categorized this way. So this is related to sort of how identity worked in the ancient world.
This is something that we now, as modern people, understand DNA; we understand genetics. We have these ideas of ethnicity and race and these kind of things in our head. And we read those back into the Scriptures and into other ancient texts, and it really sort of distorts what we’re reading. This really makes hash of—we won’t go into this today, but this really makes hash of everything St. Paul has to say about Jews and Gentiles, if you think that’s a racial or ethnic thing.
But when we go back into the ancient, ancient world, you are a member of a social unit. Whether it be a tribe, a clan, a city, there is some social unit you belong to.
Fr. Andrew: It’s the people you live and work and eat and worship with. All of those.
[…]
Fr. Stephen: So in the case of ancient Israel, if you were an Israelite, if you were circumcised or the wife or daughter of a circumcised male, and you ate the Passover, that was sort of the basics.
Fr. Andrew: And that’s an important point because—and this is something I’ve learned from reading stuff that you’ve written—when Israel engages in the exodus from Egypt, there are people who are not what we would regard as ethnically descendants from Abraham—there are Egyptians, there are Canaanites—that participate in the Passover, eat the Passover, and make the exodus. Some of them even become leaders of Israel, like they’re so much a part of Israel that they’re leading Israel. And it’s not an ethnic thing at all. It has nothing to do with DNA; it has to do with ritual participation, especially in the Passover, which is so important in that particular account in Scripture that before the event happens, you get instructions on how to commemorate it. Fascinating, that you become part of this people by engaging in these participatory acts.
Fr. Stephen: And two big examples are Caleb, who, when he first shows up, is a Kenizzite, which is one of the Canaanite tribes, and ends up being an elder of the tribe of Judah; and Phineas, Aaron’s grandson Phineas, who was ethnically a black African who became the high priest of Israel. Yeah, the ethnic idea is right out. They were—Caleb and Phineas—no less a son of Abraham than anybody else.
Fr. Andrew: And this is underlined in the Church now, where you see all this language in liturgical texts about belonging to a new nation. This phrase is even used: “the race of Christians.” And what makes us all Christian together? It’s that we’ve been initiated through baptism, that we partake in the Eucharist together, that we live as have been commanded us by God through Christ—in Christ and through the apostles and prophets. It’s what we do that makes us Christians. It’s not genetic at all. It’s this ritual participation that makes us Christians—an ongoing ritual participation, which keeps us being Christians.
Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is where, in Orthodox canon law… The bare minimum to be an Israelite is you’re circumcised and you celebrate Pascha. If you look at Orthodox canon law, what makes you an Orthodox Christian is that you’ve been baptized and, at least on Pascha, you receive the Eucharist.
Fr. Andrew: Yep.
Fr. Stephen: If you don’t do that, you’re lapsed; you’re now outside the social unit and have to be brought back in, ritually.
So the same thing was true for these giant clans and tribes. They weren’t members of these giant clans and tribes just because they happened to be born into it, ethnically. They went through initiation rituals and they participated in the ritual life of this clan. And the ritual life of this clan not only involved sort of the sexually immoral rituals we’ve already discussed, but we get some clues again in the sources—I won’t read the full text in this, but if anyone wants to look up 1 Enoch 7:4-6, in describing the wickedness in the lifestyle of the giants, it talks about not only sort of the mass slaying of animals in sacrifice but cannibalism in human sacrifices. Sacrifices—we’ll do an episode on sacrifices eventually; I know people love when we do that—in the ancient world are not killing something; sacrifices are meals. So when we’re talking about human sacrifice, in most cases, it’s involving cannibalism, minimally in the form of blood-drinking, sometimes worse.
Fr. Andrew: I don’t know—maybe you know this off the top of your head—when the Catholic conquistadors came to South America and they encountered the Aztecs who were doing human sacrifice, was there cannibalism involved with that?
Fr. Stephen: Yes.
Fr. Andrew: Yep.
Fr. Stephen: And that was one of the motivations for: this has to be wiped out.
Fr. Andrew: Wiped out.
Fr. Stephen: Right, this is going to be important when we get to talking about Joshua, which people today want to present as genocide. They say, “Oh, well, this is going and murdering people because of their race or ethnicity,” and, no, there’s not a concept of race or ethnicity. This is not a popular thing in the modern world either, but this is the idea of wiping out these ritual and cultural practices. This is what has to stop.
Fr. Andrew: It’s not the way we tend to think of ritual and culture now. Again, we’re talking about people who are in communion with demons and are engaging in demonic fornication rituals in order to produce demonized human beings who have supernatural abilities. That’s what’s going on. That’s what’s being wiped out.”
To end the description of the Nephilim, we see that they are the beings that God is commanding Israel to wipe out. Genocide is permissible against these things on account of how twisted their demonic rituals are.
Evola Revisited
If you made the connection, you see why I said this would be a sexy post. For those who have not, let’s spell it out. Julius Evola, the “Adorno of the right”, has as the center of his philosophy a narrative that goes like this:
In Traditional civilizations, pre-diluvian civilizations to be precise, invisible realities were just as real, if not more real, than sensible realities, society was ruled by divine kings, and there existed a sophia perennis, a perennial and hidden wisdom, accessible to all Traditional societies. Thule and Hyperborea7 were two such Traditional civilizations that were highly advanced due to their knowledge of the sophia perennis. It is the task of every good Traditionalist to rediscover this sophia perennis and, if possible, align our current civilization with it.
Looking at Genesis and pagan flood stories, we see that these divine beings were the products of the sons of God having ritualistic sex magic with daughters of man. Nephilim imparted secret knowledge, knowledge that Man was not ready for, and were punished for this. The Biblical account the punishment of the Nephilim is depicted as just, but in pagan myths it is the Nephilim, with Promethius being the most famous stand in, who are in the right. So heinous were the Nephilim rituals, which likely involved the drinking of blood, cannibalism, if not worse acts, that God commanded Israel to wipe out the Nephilim tribes and not take the slightest bit of loot lest contact with even a single coin would contaminate the Israelites.
What Evola did, consciously or not, was construct a philosophy around the Nephilim, taking them to be the good guys, and attempting to rediscover the hidden knowledge they imparted. If there is ever a time to call Evola demonic, it is now.
It took Gandalf to defeat Saruman, so esotericism was needed to combat Evola. If I were in the business of nuance, now would be the time for saying how Israel can plunder the Egyptians and how there are things we can take from Evola and blah blah blah. That does not sell, it is a stick in ass situation, and it would look really bad now that I associated Evola with literal satanic sex magic blood orgies that caused God to flood the earth and bless genocide to put an end to the whole mess. However, I cannot break a toy and leave the kid toyless. So, let me recommend some esoterica that is rooted in Christ, not Nephilim.
-For podcast folks, The Lord of Spirits is one of the only podcasts I listen to, and I promise you it is worth your time.
-For Youtube junkies, Johnathan Pageau is an Orthodox iconographer who dives deep into symbolism and has a calm demeanor that makes for excellent viewing.
-For my book worms, I would highly recommend the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a 7th century monk who wrote under the pseudonym of the Athenian in Acts 17, Saint Gregory of Nyssa (his book The Life of Moses, is the textbook example of a symbolic reading of the Old Testament), Saint Maximus the Confessor, and Saint Gregory Palamas.
These are all Christian sources, which should not be a problem for most of you, and for good reason…we just saw how dark Evola got when digging into ancient sources, and if we are to get into any esotericism, we best cling to Christ.
Evola, Julius. Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus. Inner Traditions. xxiii
Evola, Julius. Revolt Against the Modern World. Inner Traditions. 4
Evola. Revolt Against the Modern World. 6
Evola. 185
ESV
Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World.184-187
What an excellent article. I would also recommend the works of Saint Symeon the New Theologian. 'Divine Eros' and 'First Created Man' are wonderful. 'The Roots of Christian Mysticism - Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary' by Olivier Clément is a very good introduction to the Orthodox mystical tradition.
I never read something this schizo