Julius Evola has over recent years become increasingly known in less conventional strata of the English-speaking world, thanks to an upsurge of interest in metaphysics, as many more people are starting to look beyond the superficial life offered by the materialistic society.
Evola has also had an enduring impact on the post-war so-called 'New Right'. He is politically heretical within the Modern liberal-capitalist era. Despite his criticism of the Fascist regime of his native Italy, which resulted in the banning of his magazine The Tower. Mussolini endorsed Evola's Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race as providing a spiritual and cultural conception of race distinct from the biological determinism of German National Socialism.
Hence, if it were not for Evola's eminence as a writer on the mystical traditions of both the East and the West it seems more than likely that his name would have remained unknown to the English-speaking world. In post-war years, having successfully defended himself against charges of 'Fascism', Evola was sought out by a new generation of national revolutionaries' in Italy who were looking for an alternative to liberal-capitalism and communism that would surpass what they considered the now passe Fascism of their fathers and grandfathers. These youths wished to make themselves the 'revolutionary elite' or 'political soldiers' that Evola had written would emerge to revolt against the Modern world on an exalted, spiritual level.
The American metaphysical publishing house Inner Traditions International has been the most prominent in introducing Evola's works to a wider audience in the English-speaking world. Although apologetic as regards his "Fascist" past, they have so far published his Eros and the Mysteries of Love (1983), The Yoga of Power (1992), The Hermetic Tradition (1995) The Doctrine of Awakening (1995), Revolt Against the Modern World (1995), and Meditations on the Peaks (1998).
It is Revolt Against the Modern World which is Evola's most important work regarding the spiritual, and hence political and cultural plight of Western civilisation. For Evola the foundations of life are a reflection of the metaphysical, expressed in the mystical dictum, "as above, to below". While embracing the cyclical analysis of history of Oswald Spengler (for whom Evola was the Italian translator), Evola draws on the cyclic laws of history that were followed by traditional civilisations from Aztec America, to Vedic India to Eddie Scandinavia and Hellas.
WHO WAS EVOLA?
Baron Julius Evola was born in 1898 of a Sicilian family. In his youth he was a poet and painter adhering to the anti-traditional Dadaist and futurist movements in revolt against bourgeoisie society. After voluntary war service as an officer cadet in the artillery, Evola began to study mysticism and metaphysics. He saw in the mystical traditions of both East and West a common reality, and in 1927 founded his own magical order, the UR group.
Although born a Catholic, Evola was at odds with the Fascist regime over both its accord with the Vatican, and what he saw as the mass, proletarian nature of Fascism, which he regarded as fundamentally democratic. His view of life is aristocratic and reactionary, although occasionally converging with aspects of Fascism.
Although also at odds with the collectivist racism of Hitler's Germany, Evola hoped to find common ground with the more paganistic elements, and lectured there. His aim was to establish a transnational fraternity of knights who would restore tradition and chivalry. Evola saw hope in the SS as being such a knighthood. However, Himmler's adviser on esoteric and spiritual matters, Karl Mana Wiligut, for one reason or another, had Evola's lectures terminated. A report by Himmler's personal staff in 1938 succinctly summarised Evola's aims and ideas at this time: "The ultimate and secret goal of Evola's theories and projects is most likely an insurrection of the old aristocracy against the modern world... His overall character is marked by the feudal aristocracy of old".
He is described in the report as a reactionary Roman, and his aim of a "Roman-Germanic Imperium" is rejected. The report also refers to plans by Evola for "a secret international order". He was not only to be prevented from lecturing in Germany, but his activities in neighbouring countries were to be "carefully observed" Himmler endorsed the report.
Evola for his part was critical of the "centralism" and collectivism of National Socialism, criticising it as having renounced "the ancient, aristocratic tradition of the state". Writing in the Fascist newspaper Lo Stato (1935) he states:
Nationalistic Socialism has clearly renounced the ancient, aristocratic tradition of the state. It is nothing more than a semi-collective nationalism that levels everything flat in its centralism and it has not hesitated to destroy the traditional division of Germany into principalities, lands and cities which have all enjoyed a relative autonomy."
Hence, Evola's ideal for Western civilisation can be seen to be a return to the medieval, specifically the Ghibelline era of the Holy Roman Empire. His anti-collectivist doctrine as applied to race saw him at odds not only with National Socialism but also with some elements within the Fascist party, although Mussolini saw Evola's doctrine on race as preferable to the German influence. Evola considers race on three levels: the race of the body (biological), of the soul (character) and of the spirit (religious outlook).
Evola's seeks to define his attitude in a 1942 article in Vita Italiatia entitled The Misunderstanding of Scientific Racism: "We would like to make it clear that to us spirit means neither frivolous philosophy or theosophy, nor mystical, devotional withdrawal from the world, but is simply what in better times the wellborn have always said were the marks of race: namely, straightforwardness, inner unity character, courage, virtue, immediate and instant sensitivity for all values which are present in every great human being and which, since they stand well beyond all chance-subjected reality, they also dominate. The current meaning of race, however, which differs from the above by being a construction of 'science' and a piece out of the anthropological museum we leave to the pseudo intellectual bourgeoisie, which continues to indulge in the idols of nineteenth-century Positivism.
EVOLA'S HISTORICAL METAPHYSICS
To Evola, all traditional civilisations are based on spiritual aspirations: what we are more commonly familiar with as the 'divine right of kings' being a vestige of this. Hence the castes of a traditional society are based on a divine order. Any undermining of this spiritual order ushers in an era of chaos, the Kali Yuga or Dark Age in Hindu mythology of which all traditional civilisations were aware.
In this cosmic order, the king or emperor as a manifestation of god, is not only a political ruler, but also more importantly a priestly ruler whose most sacred duty is to attend to the spiritual concerns of his subjects, lest the forces of chaos return. Likewise, for the warrior caste the principal duty was not merely that of a soldier in the present sense, but a cosmic warrior, restoring the central focus to a civilisation. The Hindus refer to this in a Bha-gavad Gita as a dharmic or cosmic duty of the ksatriya or warrior caste. The Japanese equivalent is the Samurai just as Japanese civilisation has as its axis the 'divine emperor'. Those civilisations, which succumbed to anti-traditional or chaotic forces, would decline, again referring to the Japanese, whose emperor renounced his divinity following World War II under the dictate of the Americans.
Evola's cyclic view, which he calls "the metaphysics of history," rejects the lineal outlook, which can be called 'Darwinian' or progressive', which sees history as an ascending line, from primitive to 'Modern'. Like Spengler, Evola sees civilisations as going through the same cycles of birth, blossoming and decay. Since he regards civilisation to be a manifestation of the supernatural each civilisation was founded on a central myth. The further a civilisation goes from its founding myth, no matter how materially progressive it has become, like our present cycle of Western civilisation it slips further into chaos.
One is reminded of Yeats' poem The Second Coming that could be seen to encapsulate Evola's approach to the cycles of history: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon'the world..."
AXIS OF CIVILISATIONS
In Evola's historical metaphysics every civilisation has an axis around which everything is focused, and that axis in traditional civilisations is the priest-king, embodying the divine order, the apex of a pyramidal hierarchy of caste. We can only consider the present 'classes' of this Western cycle to be the most degenerate reflections of the old castes, based entirely on economics and devoid of spiritual content. In the pyramidal hierarchy of the traditional civilisations the king serves as a bridge, or the Pontifax Maximus as the Romans termed it, between the people and the eternal divine order. All else in traditional civilisation stems from this cosmic principle: caste, law, war, religion, and empire.
Writing in Revolt Against the Modern World. Evola explains: "In order to understand both the spirit of tradition and its antithesis, modern civilisation, it is necessary to begin with the fundamental doctrine of the two natures. According to this doctrine there is a physical order of things and a metaphysical one: there is a mortal nature and an immortal one; there is the superior realm of 'being' and the inferior realm of 'becoming'. Generally speaking, there is a visible and a tangible dimension and prior to and beyond it, an invisible and intangible dimension that is the support, the source, and true life of the former. "Anywhere in the world of Tradition, both East and West and in one form or another, this knowledge (not just a mere 'theory') has always been present as an unshakeable axis around which everything revolved"
This central focus upon which a traditional civilisation revolves is symbolised in the 'wheel'. The 'universal king' of Hindu cosmology is called the "lord" or "spinner of the wheel". The Helenes called this the "wheel of generation" or "the wheel of fate", with the motionless centre symbolising spiritual stability. The Hindu universal lord is called also the "Lord of the Law" or "The Lord of the Wheel of the Law". In the East, the axial symbol is represented by the mandala. We can also see it among the Occidental cultures in the swastikas and sunwheels.
MOUNTAIN AND THE GRAIL
Other symbols of the spirituality of traditional civilisation include the Grail Myth and the mountain. Evola was an accomplished mountaineer. His book Meditations on the Peaks - Mountain Climbing as a Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest, is a series of articles gathered together with Evola's permission in 1973 from works written between 1930 and 1942. His attitude towards mountains can be summarised in the quote he gives from Nietzsche: "Many meters above sea level - but how many more above ordinary men". Evola rejected the romantic and lyrical attitude of the bourgeoisie towards mountains that predominated in the 19th century, as well as mountaineering as a mere sport, that he regarded as typically "American".
Evola viewed mountain climbing as an aristocratic pursuit that takes the climber beyond the masses and the materialistic society, with the Nietzschean-type self-overcoming. Self-discipline and will was required, reaching states sought by Eastern and Western mystics.
The mountain itself is symbolic of the axis between the earthly and the divine. This spiritual view of the mountain Evola cites as existing in such diverse civilisations as the South American, Germanic, Roman, Indian, Tibetan, and that of the Gothic era with the tradition of Charlemange and Frederick sleeping within mountains, ready to arise and restore order to their impoverished kingdoms. Imposing mountains were the abode of the gods. One thinks immediately of Olympus, the term Olympian being applied to gods and to the actions of heroes struggling to ascend earthly boundaries.
The Mystery of the Grail originally formed an appendix to Evola's 1934 book Revolt Against the Modern World. Evola sought pre-Christian, pagan origins for the Grail legend, which he identified as "regal blood" or Sangreal. This myth of the Quest for the Grail is also representative of the heroic individual transcending mundane boundaries, for only the worthy knight can reach it. The legend is centred on the symbol of the dead, wounded or sleeping king, his kingdom stricken with ruin due to loss of faith, or the falling away from the sacred tradition. The Knight, who succeeds in the quest, undergoing many tests, restores the King to health (or assumes the mantle of kingship himself) and re- establishes the Kingdom. The legend of King Arthur is the most familiar rendition of this myth. The King sleeps but will return when Albion is in its greatest peril. Likewise, the Ghibelline emperor Frederick Barbarosa is said to lie sleeping in the Harz mountains, awakening to lead Germany at its darkest hour.
Evola considers the Ghibelline medieval culture as the apex of Western Civilisation. The Ghibelline during the medieval period was represented by the German Hohenstaufen imperial line in opposition to the papacy. The result in Italy was fierce fighting between the two contenders for authority, the papal faction of the Guelf, often represented by wealthy property owners and merchants. After the extinction of the Ghibelline line in 1268, Ghi-belleanism came to symbolise nostalgia for the return of the Holy Roman Empire, which had achieved European unity.
The Grail myth according to Evola is centred on the Ghibelline tradition. It continues as an expression to restore European Civilisation. The Knights of the Grail, states Evola, continued through the Templars, hence their suppression by the Vatican. The Rosicrucians also existed to restore Europe's tradition; hence, the reference in their manifestos to "Knights of the Golden Stone", and the resurrected King who wears a Templar's cross. To Evola the Grail legend remains a central myth for European revival and unity, a symbol of the warrior-priest whom he counsels to maintain spiritual purity amidst the present Dark Age.
TRADITIONAL SOCIAL ORDER
The aristocracy was not merely political but spiritual and the focus of tradition, with the divine king serving as the bridge between two ways of approaching the metaphysical - heroic action and contemplation. Contemplation manifested itself in the rites of the culture; the social order rested on traditional law and caste, and the earthly political expression was that of empire.
These foundations of traditional, civilisation, states Evola, have been wiped out by the triumph of man-centred or "anthropocentric" civilisation of the present day. The secularisation of the aristocracy in Western Civilisation had already started in the mid feudal period and had become thoroughly rotten by the time of the French Revolution. What replaced the nobility was the bourgeoisie with its money values. Evola refers to the decline of the traditional aristocracy as leading to an aristocracy of "intellectuality" rather than of the spirit. Hence, the original purpose of rulers as being a bridge to the divine has been dead in Western Civilisation for centuries.
Evola is unapologetically patriarchal, seeing the goddess worship of certain cultures not as the most primordial forms of worship, as it is now fashionable to claim, but as a later development arising from degraded cycles of history. Evola states that traditional civilisations in their original states were solar and heavenly directed, rather than goddess and earth directed. The ethic of traditional civilisations is therefore of a virile nature and includes valour, honour and character as manifested at the apex of a civilisation in its aristocratic caste.
HISTORY CYCLIC, NOT LINEAL
Evola rejects Darwinism both biologically and historically. Neither man nor nature proceeds in a linear manner. History does not proceed in a straight line of evolution or progress from 'primitive' to 'modern', with our own technological phase of Western civilisation being the apex of history. Rather, man has fallen from a high state through a succession of ages. Evola cites this tradition from numerous civilisations, which state that man's primal state, far from being animalistic, or ape-like was "more than human". Our present state biologically and culturally is therefore a debasement.
Contrary to orthodox historians, Evola considers the Renaissance as being the point from where Western civilisation began to decline, which was the beginning of the triumph of rationalism over the spiritual, ultimately leading to the ascent of materialism in the present day. During this period, traditional wisdom was carried underground by secret societies such as the Rosicrucians. In opposition to these societies were those that upheld the rationalistic and materialistic doctrines through the Illuminati and Freemasonry, which were influential in fomenting the French, American and other revolutions.
With the ascent of materialism, everything was de-sanctified, including the castes upon which traditional social order was based. There was a "shift in power" from the warrior to the merchant and to the capitalist oligarchies" which have replaced the divine priest-kings. The result has been increasing dehumanisa-tion, "from a human to a sub-human type. " Evola refers to the 'glorification of modern man" presented under the name of 'science' with the modern ideologies of evolution and progress. This means the abandonment of "traditional truths" which held that man has a "transcendent origin".
"and ... the West no longer believes in the nobility of the origins but in the notion that civilisation arises out of barbarism, religion from superstition, man from animal (Darwin), thought from matter, and every spiritual form from the 'sublimation' or transposition of the stuff that originates the instinct, libido, complexes....(Freud. Jung)..." (Revolt Against the Modern World).
The result of the 'evolutionary myth' in infiltrating every dimension has been destructive, overthrowing 'every value', and 'deconsecrating' mankind. Evola elaborates on an anti-Darwinian form of 'racism' in a pamphlet, Race as a Revolutionary Idea. Here he repudiates the idea that man arose from apelike creatures and evolved into higher forms and higher civilisations. Rather, he believes that if such apelike creatures did exist they belonged to an inferior line that was not continued through Homo sapiens. Evola states: "The true and essential origin of man is to be found elsewhere, in superior races who, already in prehistoric ages, possessed a civilisation of limited material development but of notable extremely elevated spiritual content, so much so as to be symbolically designated remembrances of all peoples, as 'divine races', as races of 'god-like men."
Evola's form of "racism" is posited "against the myth of the faceless proletarian mass without a fatherland". Evola considers the practical application of the revival of "racism" and "nationalism" as: "One of the preliminary conditions for re-organising those forces which, through the crisis of the modern world, are sinking in the quagmire of a mechanical, collectivistic and internationalistic indifferentiation. This duty is a question of life and death for the future of European civilisation."
This "racism" is a 'continuation of Fascism', "because like Fascism, it refuses to consider the single individual by himself, as an atom." Rather this "racism" regards every man as a member of a community as regards space, time and his continuity in the past and the future, "of a stock, of a blood, of a tradition."
However, "racism", to Evola, did not stop "at a mere biological level, otherwise racism would be worthy of the accusation by the Jew Trotsky of it being "zoological materialism".
Man is differentiated from the animal in having not only a body but also a soul and a spirit. Therefore, men are not only different in body but also in soul and spirit. A significant example is that of the Jews, who are termed "a race of the soul ", who have often had a disintegrating effect upon society. This "race of the soul " might exist within an individual whose bodily race is different.
DEHUMANISATION
To Evola the USA represents the materialistic triumph over the spiritual just as much as the USSR. This dehumanisation has resulted in a new human type. The economic classes have replaced the castes that were reflections of divine order. Hence, in the power structure, the merchant replaced the warrior; the kings of money replaced the "kings of blood and spirit". Evola writes of this state in Revolt Against the Modern World: "Moreover contemporary society looks like an organism that has shifted from a human to a subhuman type, in which every activity and reaction is determined by the needs and dictates of purely physical life."
This de-spiritualisation is reflected in architecture. Through cycles of regression the dominant building has shifted from the temple (divine ruler) to the fortress and castle (warrior caste), to the walled city-state (age of merchants), to the factory and finally to "the dull buildings that are the hives of mass man". The family has likewise slipped from being a manifestation of the sacred to that of a legalistic unit, and eventually will be replaced by "the people" and "society" and "party" (this being the stated ideal of the Communists).
Likewise, the concept of war went through "analogous phases", from the "sacred war", to war waged for the honour of one's lord (the warrior caste) to those fought by nations for economic interests (the caste of merchants). The Arabic culture is the vestige of a civilisation that continues to uphold the concept of sacred war (Jihad) in our own time.
In aesthetics, sacred art gave way to the epic art and poems of the warrior caste, psychological art produced for the consumption of the merchant caste, and finally the social art produced for the masses. At a time when the USSR was a triumphant spectre over much of Europe, Evola saw the final phase after the capitalistic (the merchant caste) as being those of the caste of serfs represented by communism.
However, Evola recognised that the impetus even for the Bolsheviks came from America as the centre for the technical and mechanical world. Evola cites several Soviet directives in the early days of the Bolshevik regime that look to America as having started a historical process of mechanisation. Evola states that America does not represent a "new" or youthful nation, but the end product of a cycle of European decay, "the exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition". The American ideal is soulless and mechanical.
Writing of American civilisation in a 1945 essay of that name, Evola states that although the popular notion of the USA is that it is a "young nation" with "the faults of youth" it is rather "the final stage of modern Europe". The representative of "the most senile aspects of Western Civilisation".
"What in Europe exists in diluted forms are magnified and concentrated in the US whereby they are revealed as the symptoms of disintegration and cultural and human regressions. Evola's metaphysics of history concludes that "...the final collapse will not even have the character of a tragedy".
Evola called for a "new unitary European consciousness". He thought it unavoidable that, "fate will run its course, that the river of history flows along the riverbed it has carved for itself."
TENDERS OF THE PERENNIAL FLAME
"The possibilities still available in the last time, concern only a minority..."
This minority exists throughout the world and those who comprise it are largely unknown to each other, but are united by a spiritual bond, "and form an unbreakable chain in the traditional spirits They shun the spotlight of modern popularity and culture. "They live on spiritual heights: they do not belong to this world".
This spiritual minority does not act in the world, but symbolically tends to the "perennial flame" of tradition, which ensures that the Earth is still connected to the "super-world". Evola states that what this minority can do is to enlist others to them who are confused by the modern world and yearn for liberation, though they do not know in the name of what". It is therefore necessary to have "watchers" who will bear witness to the values of tradition and firmly stand against the anti-traditional forces "to keep standing amid a world of ruins."
Another path that Evola suggests, reminiscent of Nietzsche's dictum "Push the falling", is to accelerate the process of destruction to hasten the advent of a new order. This would require taking on the most destructive processes of the modern era, whilst protecting one's own soul and spirit, in order to use them for liberation. Evola explained this simply by stating, "this would be like turning a poison against oneself or like 'riding a tiger', a term adopted from the Indo-Aryan or Hindu tradition. "... Although the Kali Yuga [Hindu Dark Age] is an age of great distractions, those who live during it and manage to remain standing may achieve fruits that were not easily achieved by men living in other ages".
Evola was paralysed during a Russian bomb attack on Vienna while researching the SS archives on Masonic groups in 1945. He had never sought shelter during air raids, but walked through the streets "calmly to question his fate". After several years in hospital, he returned to Rome. He was arrested in 1951 on charges of "glorifying Fascism" and intellectually inciting secret combat groups". Acquitted, he remained a host to a new generation of activists who addressed him as "maestro." Evola called for an "anarchism of the Right" to disrupt the old order, and inspired the leadership of national revolutionary groups in Italy, as well as political parties such as the MSI and the National Alliance.
"New Right" theorists from France to Russia laud him. His writings have been published in the English language 'New Right' magazine The Scorpion, whilst the upsurge of interest in alternative spirituality has prompted many who would not otherwise study ideas with such political implications to read his works.
Evola died in 1974. His ashes were scattered in a crevice of a particular legendary glacier on Mount Rosa.
Kerry Bolton
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