This is a thread to discuss the spiritual side of war, war as a spiritual path.
I know a little about this subject, so to kickstart discussion I will post Evola's take on the value of war in the four ages. If I get anything wrong or I don't enter in enough detail please explain further or correct me.
In the Golden Age, war is seen as a path towards transcendance, a way to reach the divine, it is seen as a positive. It is waged for such reasons on top of material ones. Similar to the Jihad of muslim thought. Honestly this stage is the least I know of so if someone can explain it better please do so. Tying in to this, I remember Evola explaining how through aproaching death, or other extreme conditions (though only in a specific way) one can reach Transcendental Realism, which I really can't explain either.
In the Silver Age, war is degraded from spiritual to more material concerns. It is fueled by loyalty to the King, or to the Nation, and such things. It may retain in this stage a semblance of spirituality.
In the Bronze Age, it has fallen down to defending the population of the state (only), to bring prosperity to it, and is seen as a tragedy, a "necesary evil", and while serving is still a honor, many would see it as a negative and to be avoided (iirc from this stems the implementation of compulsion in it, where in past ages, while compulsion still existed, the view on it was very different). Still, it remains within a nation and still retains some sort of loyalty to something, though the loyalty has shifted to a more mundane thing.
In the Iron Age, Evola predicted the complete abandonment of the idea of nation and it centering on purely economic matters. He gave the example of the communist revolution being such a war, though it has turned out that the iron war didn't manifest in such a way. While it did exist for a while as the communist revolution, a much better example would be the complete mechanization of war, removing Man from it, together with the waging of them for economic reasons (e.g. USA and Oil Wars). War shifted from being for the prosperity of the people to the stable existance of the economic system, or for the interests of corporate magnates.
All of this is accompanied by the constant devaluation and degeneration of military institutions (a modern example would be the forcing of women into the structure).
The use of "Age" might be confusing. There isn't a sharp boundarie between the ages, but as a constant existance (though periods can be roughly spearated), rather a "state" than a period of time. It being so, one can find events of one Age in a time where there is other, in the shape of renmants of a previous age -the crusades very much had a spiritual part to them- or of "pioneers" of a coming one -the communist revolution, of Iron, which happened on the Bronze Age, and, argueably, the Fascists/NS, which could be seen as a remnant of the gold age or a pioneer of the coming one-.
Another point is that War having one aspect doesn't bar it from having a lower one too, as such, Golden War has a national, an economic, and a material angle. (I'm not really sure about this though, how does fighting for the Race or for the Nation tie into this? Perhaps there is a spiritual component to such that I'm not aware of)
Now given this, it becomes obvious that one cannot come to War as a Path in modern, mainstream institutions -all of them being bronze or iron-. One can either follow it individually inside one of these organizations, or forming or joining of a sort of "traditionalist warband".
This is only one aspect of spiritual war though, so as not to give the thread tunnel vision.
While it would be nice to see the Murder/k/ube discussed in this topic, I would prefer it to be aproached seriously so the thread doesn't become shitposting.