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* [http://www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Part-2-12.htm Fascist Occultism and its Close Relationship to Buddhist Tantrism], chapter 12 of Part II of ''[[The Shadow of the Dalai Lama]]'' by [[Victor Trimondi|Victor]] and [[Victoria Trimondi]].
* [http://www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Part-2-12.htm Fascist Occultism and its Close Relationship to Buddhist Tantrism], chapter 12 of Part II of ''[[The Shadow of the Dalai Lama]]'' by [[Victor Trimondi|Victor]] and [[Victoria Trimondi]].
* [http://www.futurism2.fsnet.co.uk/evola/evola_frames.htm Selection of Evola's Futurist and Dada works, 1917-20]
* [http://www.futurism2.fsnet.co.uk/evola/evola_frames.htm Selection of Evola's Futurist and Dada works, 1917-20]
* [http://www.juliusevola.com/ Julius Evola fansite]


{{Footer Works by Julius Evola}}
{{Footer Works by Julius Evola}}

Revision as of 13:14, 23 May 2007

Julius Evola born Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola, aka Baron Evola (May 19, 1898-June 11, 1974), was an Italian esotericist and occult author, who wrote extensively on Hermeticism, the metaphysics of sex, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism, mountaineering, the Holy Grail, militarism, aristocracy, on matters political, philosophical, historical, racial, religious, as well as the essence and history of civilizations, decadence and various philosophic and religious Traditions from the East and the West. He considered himself a representative and upholder of "Tradition" in an age of spiritual oblivion and organized deviancy.

Evola interacted (on an unaffiliated basis) with Italian Fascism from the late 1920s through the collapse of the regime in 1943, after which he fled to Nazi-ruled Germany. He opposed the socialist tendencies of the Salò Republic, and worked with the SS Ahnenerbe on research on Freemasonry. In the post-war period he returned to Italy where his writings enjoyed popularity among some on the far right, especially young neo-fascist groups. Many Radical Traditionalist, Nouvelle Droite, Conservative Revolutionary, Aryanist, and Third Positionist groups and intellectuals have been influenced by Evola in various degrees.

Biography

Early years

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome to a noble Sicilian family (his father, Vincenzo Evola, was born in Cinisi). He fought in World War I as an artillery officer on the Asiago plateau. After the war, attracted to the avant-garde, Evola briefly associated with Filippo Marinetti's Futurist movement, but became a prominent representative of Dadaism in Italy through his painting, poetry, and collaboration on the shortly published journal, Revue Bleu. In 1922, after concluding that avant-garde art was becoming commercialized and stiffened into academic convention, he reduced his focus on artistic expression such as painting and poetry (Evola - "Il Camino del Cinabro", 1963).

Entry into esotericism

Around 1920, his interests led him into spiritual, transcendental and "supra-rational" studies. He began reading various esoteric texts and gradually delved deeper into the occult, alchemy, magic, and Oriental studies, particularly Tibetan Lamaism and Vajrayanist tantric yoga.

In 1927, along with other Italian esotericists, he founded the Gruppo di Ur. The group's aim was to influence world history through magic rituals and offer insight into higher magic through the publishing of the study of esotericism texts. It is in this enterprise of the explication of esoteric philosophy, although only shortly with this group, that Evola would primarily work for the rest of his life.

Involvement with Fascism

In the late 1920s, Evola expressed his support for a Radical Fascist revolution to sweep modern Judeo-Christianity out of Italy and replace it with a "Pagan Imperialism" (à la Ancient Rome). He voiced his dissent against Mussolini's Lateran Accords with the Roman Catholic Church and rejected the Fascist party's nationalism and its focus on mass movement mob politics; he hoped to influence the regime toward Tradionalist values. Early in 1930, Evola launched Torre, a bi-weekly review, to voice his conservative-revolutionarism and denounce the demagogic tendencies of official fascism; government censors suppressed the journal and engaged in character assassination against its staff (for a time, Evola retained a bodyguard of like-minded radical fascists) until it died out in June of that year. From 1934 to 1943, he edited the cultural page of Roberto Farinacci's journal Regime Fascista.

Evola supported Fascism for his own ends, but was rebuked by the regime because his ends were not always theirs. When World War II broke out, he volunteered for military service in order to fight the Communists on the Russian front; he was rejected because he had too many detractors in the bureaucracy (Hansen 2002). Italian Fascism went into decline when, during the midst of the War, Mussolini was deposed and imprisoned. Evola, although not a member of the Fascist Party, and despite his apparent problems with the Fascist regime, was one of the first people to greet Mussolini when the latter was broken out of prison by Nazi commandos in 1943.

After the Italian surrender to the Allied forces in September 8, 1943, Evola moved to Germany, where he spent the remainder of World War II, also working as a researcher on Freemasonry for the SS Ahnenerbe in Vienna.

It was Evola's custom to walk around the city during bombing raids in order to better 'ponder his destiny'. During one such Soviet raid, in March or April of 1945, a shell fragment damaged his spinal cord and he became paralyzed from the waist down, remaining so throughout his life (Stucco 1992, xiii).

Post war

After World War II, Evola continued his work in esotericism. He wrote a number of books and articles on sexual magic and various other esoteric studies, including The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way (1949), Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex (1958), Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest (1974), The Path of Enlightenment According to the Mithraic Mysteries (1977). He also wrote his two explicitly political books Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1953), Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (1961), and his autobiography Il Cammino del Cinabro (1963).

In the post-war years, Evola's writings were held in high esteem by members of the Neo-fascist movement in Italy, and because of this, he was put on trial from June through November of 1951 on the charge of attempting to revive Fascism in Italy. He was acquitted because he could prove that he was never a member of the Fascist party, and that all accusations were made without evidence to prove that his writings glorified Fascism (Evola - "Autodifesa/Self-Defence" in appendix to "Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist"/1953).

Death

Evola died unmarried, without children, on June 11, 1974 in Rome. His ashes were deposited in a hole cut in a glacier on Mt. Rosa.

Occult philosophy

Tradition

Evola's systematic and detailed references to ancient and modern texts make it difficult to speak about influences. One can say he had affinities with such thinkers as Plato, Oswald Spengler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Meister Eckhart, Homer, Jacob Boehme, René Guénon and certain Catholic thinkers like Juan Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre. Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico provided Evola with the concepts of primordial "heroic law," "natural heroic rights" and the meaning of the Indo-European Latin term vir as indicative of "wisdom, priesthood and kingship." Crucial to Evola's formulation of the idea of "solar masculinity" versus "chthonic masculinity" and matriarchal regression was the maverick 19th-century Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen. Other prominent, philosophically foundational influences for Evola include the ancient Aryo-Hindu scripture that teaches the concept of "detached violence", the Bhagavad Gita and the Aryan kshatriya sage Siddartha Gotama, the historical Buddha (Evola, "Il Camino del Cinabro" 1963).

Like Guénon, he believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of unleashed, materialistic appetites of the Hindu tradition. The Kali Yuga is the last of four ages, which form a cycle from the Satya Yuga or Golden Age through the Kali Yuga or the Hesiodic Iron Age.

For Evola, the word Tradition had a meaning very similar to that of Truth. The doctrine of the four ages, a broad characterization of the attributes of Tradition and their manifestations in traditional societies makes up the first half of Evola's major work Revolt Against the Modern World. In Revolt Against the Modern World, he expounds according to the ancient texts that there is not one Tradition, but two: An older and degenerate tradition that is feminine, matriarchal, unheroic, associated with the telluric negroid racial remnants of Lemuria (continent); and a higher one that is masculine, heroic, "Uranian" and purely Aryo-Hyperborean in its origin. The latter one later gave rise to an ambiguous Western-Atlantic tradition, which combined aspects of both through the historical Hyperborean migrations and their degenerating assimilation of exotic spiritual influences from the South.

According to Evola, in the Golden Age there existed in the dominating elites, the "Divine Kings", a convergence of the two powers, namely the spiritual principle and the royal principle. From the Aryo-Hindu tradition, he sees the human type of the Rajarshi as an embodiment of the Golden Age ideal and quotes the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1.4.11): "This is why nothing is greater than the warrior nobility; the priests themselves venerate the warrior when the consecration of the king occurs." Evola argues that in the Hindu tradition there are plenty of instances of kings who already possess or eventually achieve a spiritual knowledge greater than that possessed by the later-times degenerated brahmana. This is the case, for instance, of King Jaivala, whose knowledge was not imparted by any priest, but rather reserved to the warrior caste; also, in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (4.3.1) King Janaka teaches the brahmana Yajnavalkya the doctrine of the transcendent Self. Evola explains that, according to tradition, the primordial gnosis was handed down, starting from Ikshvaku, in regal succession (cf. Bhagavadgita, 4. 1-2); the same Sun Dynasty (surya-vamsa) was connected with blue-eyed, fair-skinned ([1]) Gautama Buddha's aristocratic Aryan family (Sutta Nipāta, 3). In the laws of the second or Silver Age, the Laws of Manu, the text states "rulers do not prosper without priests and priests do not thrive without rulers" and that "the priest is said to be the root of the law, and the ruler is the peak" (11.321-2;11.83-4).

In reference to Christianity, Evola distinguished between 1) the mystical character of primitive Christianity and its later social history on the one hand, and 2) the primordial-Hyperborean elements and the decadent Judaic elements on the other. In Revolt Against the Modern World, he asserts "in the symbolism of Christ there are traces of a mysteric pattern" (p. 281) and "Jesus' saying in Matthew (11:12) concerning the violence suffered by the kingdom of Heaven and the revival of the Davidic saying: 'You are gods' (John 10:34), belong to elements that exercised virtually no influence on the main pathos of early Christianity" (Revolt, p. 284). Evola states "the Christian legend of the three magi is an attempt to claim for Christianity a traditional character in the superior sense I give to the term" (The Mystery of the Grail, p. 45). In the same work, Evola argues "the Jewish notion of a Messiah and the Christian notion of God's Kingdom, which many people believe to have greatly influenced the medieval imperial myth, are nothing but an echo of the ancient and pre-Christian Aryo-Iranian concept" of the Saoshyant as "lord of a future, triumphal kingdom of the God of Light" and "slayer of the Ahrimanic dark forces" (ibid., p. 39)

Evola recalls the mysterious figure of the priest-king Melchizedek as a primary point of juncture with the primordial sacral-royal Tradition of the origins. Abraham receives an almost feudal spiritual investiture from Melchizedek in the biblical episode of Genesis 14, giving the mysterious priest-king tithes, thus symbolizing the Abrahamic tradition's implicit dependency (cf. St. Paul: "It is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior", Heb. 7:1-3). Evola often notes the role of the "regal religion according to Melchizedek" in the Ghibelline ideology. Evola finds the testimony of Eginhard significant, who states that after Charlemagne was consecrated and hailed with the formula, "Long life and victory to Charles the Great, crowned by God, great and peaceful emperor of the Romans!" the pope "prostrated himself (adoravit) before Charles, according to the ritual established at the time of the ancient emperors." Evola emphasizes how the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund (1368-1437), founder of the militant-Catholic chivalric Order of the Dragon, continuing a long tradition of Christian-Roman and Byzantine imperial dominance in religious matters, summoned the Council of Constance (A.D. 1413) on the eve of the Reformation in order to purify the clergy from schisms and anarchy.

The classical Traditional polity is structured according to a strict hierarchy of sociopolitical functions, where the lower functions are concerned with mere matter and organic vitality and the ascending functions progressively ruled by spirit. This order, in which powers of spirit correlate to societal status, Evola finds crystallized in the Indian caste system, the Republic of Plato, ancient Iranian society and the medieval hierarchical class divisions between peasants, burghers, nobility and the clergy and military religious orders. The involution through the cycle of the ages was mirrored in the law of the regression of the castes, from the primal "heaven-born" kings to the deconsecrated slavish usurpers and raceless pariahs of the present. Evola saw the Ghibelline dynasty of Hohenstauffen emperors (1152-1271) as the Germanic champion of the primordial "sacred regality" in a renewed Holy Roman Empire. Once the solar, golden, sacred regality of the mythical first age fell, power devolved upon a lunar, silver, feminized priestly caste before an unconsecrated warrior nobility struggled against it, announcing the Bronze Age. Then power shifts to the mercantile caste, represented by the Italian comune, Freemasonry, the Jewish financial oligarchy of the Renaissance, and New World American Judeo-Protestant plutocracy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, organized labor and Marxist-Trotskyite subverters sought to transfer power to the last caste of slaves or sudras, or the consumer-pariah, reducing all values to matter, machines, dysgenic egalitarianism and the reign of abstract quantity.

Paths to Enlightenment

The path to enlightenment is the chief subject of a number of Evola's works. First and foremost is the Buddhist ascesis as he rediscovered it following over two thousand years of obstruction of the Buddha's teachings (The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts). He tries to show the ways that allow a man to survive spiritually intact in the modern age of obscuration and to achieve supra-human liberation or transcendence.

Even in his book Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest Evola discussed mountaineering as a possible approach or support on the way of initiatic ascesis in which heroic action is combined with specialized knowledge and training culminating in an initiation — the climbing of the mountain. In this way, and not as a sport or a recreation, mountaineering can be a "spiritual quest," as the subtitle of the book suggests.

Ascesis and Initiation

According to Julius Evola, Tradition in its purest form, encompassed asceticism, which he described in The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts as a discipline. He describes two basic and complementary types of asceticism — that of action and that of contemplation. The asceticism of action is personified by the warrior while that of contemplation by the pure ascetic; he described Buddhism as the highest form of the asceticism of contemplation, a form very suitable for the warrior in his preparation for inner and outer warfare.

Metaphysics of Sex

In The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way and also Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, Evola described the practice of sexual magic as an asceticism of action that allows one to achieve transcendent states through physical action, primarily sex.

To explain the metaphysics of sex, Evola cites the original meaning of the word "orgy" as "the state of inspired exaltation that began the initiatory process in the ancient Greek mysteries. But when this exaltation of eros, itself akin to other experiences of a supersensual nature, becomes individualized as a longing that is only carnal, then it deteriorates and ends finally in the form constituted by mere 'pleasure,' or venereal lust" (The Metaphysics of Sex, p. 48).

In his sexual philosophy, Evola followed the esoteric Hindu and Buddhist schools in the teaching of retention of semen as a means of ontological energization and ultimate self-mastery. "Virya, or spiritual manhood, if lost or wasted results in death and if withheld and conserved leads to life" (ibid., p. 219). Evola considered Traditional chastity as signifying "control, limit, anti-titanic purity, overcoming of pride, and immaterial unshakability, rather than a moralistic and sexuophobic concept" (The Mystery of the Grail, p. 80).

Evola considered sex as being "the greatest magical force in nature", but he fiercely opposed homosexuality, viewing it as a dysfunctional undermining of the magnetic polarity and complementary nature of the two sexes, and thus of the possibility of erotic transcendence. "In a civilization where equality is the standard, where differences are not linked, where promiscuity is in favor, where the ancient idea of 'being true to oneself' means nothing anymore--in such a splintered and materialistic society, it is clear that this phenomenon of regression and homosexuality should be particularly welcome, and therefore it is no way a surprise to see the alarming increase in homosexuality and the 'third sex' in the latest 'democratic' period, or an increase in sex changes to an extent unparalleled in other eras" (The Metaphysics of Sex, p. 64). Evola refers to Plotinus, who deemed homosexual loves to be shameful and abnormal, like diseases of degenerate persons "which do not arise from the essence of being and are not the outcome of the development thereof" (Enneads, III). The draconian harshness of the ancient Aryo-Zoroastrian view on homosexuality, as exemplified in the Vendidad, elicits Evola's full approval: sodomites were classed among the ranks of those criminals to be destroyed on the spot: "Four men can be put to death by any one without an order from the Dastur (high priest): the Nasu-burner (cannibal), the highwayman, the Sodomite, and the criminal taken in the deed" (Vendidad, 8:73-74 [2]). With equal vehemence, Evola scorned modern pornography, denouncing it as "dreadfully squalid not only in the facts and scenes described, but in its essence" (The Metaphysics of Sex, p. 4).

Politics

Evola held that politics, like everything else in life, should look upward and beyond the self. His political philosophy was more or less close to Plato, Hermann Wirth, Otto Weininger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, René Guénon, Oswald Spengler, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

Evola's earliest endeavors in politics occurred in the late 1920s, when he supported some European anti-democratic and anti-Jewish political currents. He participated in the promotion of Mussolini's National Fascist Party dictatorship in Italy, albeit as a wary supporter of the regime. He saw in Fascism the barest trace of what he believed to be the true path that the country (and civilization) should follow. He therefore attempted to influence the party in the conservative-revolutionary direction he believed it should go — the direction of radical Traditionalism; i.e. away from the exoteric modern Christian Church, the bourgeoisie, and the masses. His efforts to influence the regime were a failure, and he believed that by not following his advice, Mussolini's party failed to fulfill its function. He would maintain the view that a revolutionary movement, similar to Fascism but in harmony with "Tradition", was necessary for the return to a higher form of civilization.

When Evola met with esoteric Hitlerist Miguel Serrano, he denied that he was a fascist or Hitlerist, but rather saw Metternich as a conservative ideal. (Goodrick-Clarke 2001, 337)

In the decade immediately following the war Evola wrote two books which fall loosely into the categories "asceticism of action" and "asceticism of contemplation" in their prescriptions for political action.

In Men Among the Ruins Evola described a Traditional and aristocratic attitude — possibly leading to a reactionary revolution — like what he had hoped Fascism could have been with the right leaders. This attitude is a sort of asceticism of action calling for political action to reform current society in a conservative-revolutionary / radical Traditional direction. But he also felt that the acceleration of modernity following World War II's outcome and thus, the elimination of any truly opposing forces, made any such revolution rather impossible, unless the 'unforseeable' imposes a radical change of circumstances.

In Ride the Tiger he prescribed a so-to-speak apolitical asceticism of contemplation in which a man is advised to act in the modern world, while remaining intellectually and spiritually detached from and above it. Evola argued that in order to survive in the modern world an enlightened or "differentiated man" should "ride the tiger". As a man, by holding onto the tiger's back, may survive the confrontation once the animal ends exhausted, so too might a man, by letting the world take him on its inexorable path, be able to turn the destructive forces around him into a kind of inner liberation.

Racism

Evola called his work "racist", and indeed a number of his articles and books deal explicitly with the subject of race.

In Revolt Against the Modern World, he said that he considered himself to be a critic of the "racist worldview" by which he meant the demagogically-minded, simplistic, antisemitic theories of mainstream Nazis and others of his contemporaries. Evola published, and wrote an introduction to, an Italian language version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious antisemitic document alleging a Jewish conspiracy to run the world through control of the media and finance, and replace the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation. On the authenticity of the document, Evola followed the same line of thinking as Henry Ford and thought it did describe present reality. (Evola - "Men Among the Ruins" 1953)

In his 1938 introduction to the Italian edition of the Protocols, Evola wrote that the tract had "the value of a spiritual tonic," that Jews "destroy every surviving trace of true order and superior civilization," and that, "above all, in these decisive hours of western history, [the Protocols tract] cannot be ignored or dismissed without seriously undermining the front of those fighting in the name of the spirit, of tradition, of true civilization." For Evola this text represented a manipulation by occult powers trying to hide behind the Jewish and Freemason historical drive toward a merchant society soon to be replaced by the chaos of "mass society" which could eventually turn against both. (Evola - "Men Among the Ruins" 1953)

Evola differed from main antisemitic position (that Jews are responsible for what is wrong with the world), but agreed that they had a tendency to denigrate lofty "Aryan" ideals (of faith, loyalty, courage, devotion, and constancy) through a "corrosive irony" that ascribed every human activity to economic or sexual motives (à la Marx and Freud). Evola acknowledged the Nazi anti-Semitic view of Jewish power and influence in the modern world, but thought this was merely a symptom of the lack of true aristocratic leadership, i.e. of modern decadence, not its essence. (Evola - "Men Amomg the Ruins" 1953)

Evola believed that a race of "Nordic" people, anciently emanating from Golden Age Arctic Hyperborea, originally semi-immaterial and "soft-boned", had played a crucial founding role in Atlantis and the high cultures both of the East and West. In Evola's eyes, half-remembered, cryptic memories of a "more-than-human race" once existing in a "northern paradise" constitute the patrimony of the traditions of many diverse peoples (cf. [3]). According to Joscelyn Godwin's research: "the basic outlines of Evola's prehistory resemble those of Theosophy, with Lemurian, Atlantean, and Aryan root-races succeeding each other, and a pole-shift marking the transition from one epoch to another" (Arktos, p. 60). Evola's dualism between the Northern Light and the Southern Light, and also the capture of the Atlanteans by the latter, is also found in H.P. Blavatsky:

"The Atlanteans [gravitated] toward the Southern Pole, the pit, cosmically and terrestrially -- whence breathe the hot passions blown into hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is." (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p. 274.)

"Every beneficent (astral and cosmic) action comes from the North; every lethal influence from the South Pole. They are much connected with and influence right and left hand magic." (ibid., p. 400.)

The primal Boreal-Aryan race had practiced a Solar spirituality ennobled by a warrior ethos. According to Evola, the hierarchy of races is really a hierarchy of embodied spiritualities; the spirit, rather than ethnic substance, determines culture; but at the same time race is the biological "memory" of a certain spiritual orientation. In order to describe what he called the lower, telluric, Negroid races, he frequently made use of the term "Southern" whereas to him higher races were "Northern." "North" and "South" are indicated as having simultaneously metaphysical, geographical and anthropological meanings: "Especially during the period of the long icy winter, it was natural that in the northern races the experience of the Sun, of Light, and of Fire itself should have acted in a spiritually liberating sense. Hence natures which were Uranian-solar, Olympian or filled with celestial fire would have developed much more from the sacral symbolism of these races than from others. Moreover, the rigor of the climate, the sterility of the soil, the necessity for hunting, and finally the need to emigrate across unknown seas and continents would naturally have molded those who preserved that spiritual experience of the Sun, of the luminous sky, and of fire into the temperament of warriors, of conquerors, of navigators, so as to favor that synthesis between spirituality and virility of which characteristic traces are preserved in the Aryan races" (Revolt, p. 208). Evola quotes the Confucian Chung Yung (10.4) to reinforce his point: "To teach with kindly benevolence, not to lose one's temper and avenge the unreasonableness of others, that is the virile energy of the South that is followed by the well-bred man. To sleep on a heap of arms and untanned skins, to die unflinching and as if dying were not enough, that is the virile energy of the North that is followed by the brave man".

According to Evola, the more recent Northern, White and Indo-European peoples (despite racial mixing) implicitly preserved more of the primordial Arctic Hyperborean blood-memory and are objectively spiritually superior to the archaic, matter-obsessed degenerate remnants of the races of the South. Evola (Revolt, p. 245) sees the sign of the Hyperborean Tradition and its antagonism with the forces of Antitradition in the Indian mythology surrounding the Vedic divinity Indra (cf. Thor), who is "fair of cheek" (Rig Veda, I.9.3 [4]) and with his "fair-complexioned friends" (I.100.18 [5]) annihilates the lawless black Dasyu, "giving protection to the Aryan color" (III.34.9 [6]), blowing to nothingness "the swarthy skin which Indra hates" (IX.73.5[7]). On the "demonic" nature of the lower negroid races and their degenerating remnants, Evola relies on an old Aryo-Zoroastrian tradition that teaches negroids belonged to the dark side owing to their alleged origin in the union between a demon and a wicked witch: "Zohak, during his reign, let loose a dev (demon) on a young woman, and let loose a young man on a parik (witch). They performed coition with [the sight] of the apparition; the negro came into being through that [novel] kind of coition” (Bundahishn, XIVB [8]).

Flowering forth in the Greek, pre-Celtic, Indo-Aryan, Aryo-Persian, Roman, Germanic, Tiwanaku, Teotihuacán, early Chinese, Aztec-Nahua, Inca and first Egyptian dynasties' representatives, with more or less ethnic but great spiritual purity, the "Northern Light" was considerably lost to the Atlantean offshoot which defiled itself through spiritual integration into the spiritual lunar sphere of the world of the "Mother" or "Earth" of the "Southern Light" and further miscegenation with bestial, dark Lemurian stocks. Revolt Against the Modern World presents world-history to be the saga of dualistic conflict between the "Northern Light" and the "Southern Light": on one side stand the Uranian, patriarchal stocks of purer Hyperborean lineage, climatically harshly conditioned and heroic-minded celebrators of the winter solstice; on the other stand the chthonic and titanized inferior races and the spiritually/ethnically bastardized heirs of the fallen Atlantean civilization captured by the "Southern Light" and its sacerdotal and naturalistic-pantheist religion of promiscuous vegetal and animal fertility.

Evola cites Plato's description of the fall of Atlantis by Atlantean miscegenation with humankind (Critias, 110c; 120d-e; 121a-b) and the biblical myth of the benei elohim, the Sons of God catastrophically mixing with the "daughters of men" (Gen. 6: 4-13) as support for his esoteric, Aryanist anthropogenesis. Evola interprets archeological findings of semi-human hominid fossils as not purely primordial but evidence of the mismating of the celestial boreal race with inferior animalistic breeds as well, and most often, as remnants of degenerating, bestialized races in their final involutionary stages preceding extinction.

While characterizing race as something hereditary and biological, Evola also claimed that race was not simply and linearly defined by mere skin color and the various other hereditary factors. In other words, in addition to predominantly "Aryan" or, more broadly, "Northern" biology, the initial necessary precondition for further racial differentiation, one must prove oneself spiritually "Aryan". The fact that in India the term Arya was the synonym of dwija, "twice-born" or "regenerated" supports this point. To him higher race implied something akin to supra-human, spiritual caste. Evola wrote, "the supernatural element was the foundation of the idea of a traditional patriciate and of legitimate royalty."

Evola's ultimate viewpoint on race is clear with varying degrees of explicitness throughout his writings: "And if Fascist Italy, among the various Western nations, is the one which first wished for a reaction against the degeneration of the materialist, democratic and capitalist civilisation, against the League of Nations ideology, there are grounds for thinking, without even any scintilla of chauvinistic infatuation, that Italy will be on the front line among the forces which will guide the future world and will restore the supremacy of the white race" ('Problema della supremazia della razza bianca', Lo Stato, 1936).

"We have to remember that behind the various caprices of modern historical theories, and as a more profound and primordial reality, there stands the unity of blood and spirit of the white races who created the greatest civilizations both of the East and West, the Iranian and Hindu as well as the ancient Greek and Roman and the Germanic" (The Doctrine of Awakening).

Influence

Evola's writings have continued to have an influence in both the occult and political realms in Europe. He is widely translated in French, Spanish and partly in German. Although his impact on Italian Fascism and/or German Nazism was minor, his impact on post-War Neo-Fascism has been more considerable. He has influenced in truly various ways and to name just a few Miguel Serrano, Savitri Devi, GRECE, The Scorpion, the Movimento sociale italiano (MSI), Falange Espanola, Gaston Armand Amaudruz's Nouvel Ordre Européen, Guillaume Faye, Pino Rauti's Ordine Nuovo, Alain de Benoist, Michael Moynihan, Giorgio Freda, and the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari). Giorgio Almirante referred to him as "our Marcuse — only better".

At the start of the twenty-first century, his influence is most important in the U.S.A. where almost all of his books have been published in English within a few years by Inner Traditions. He has also gained some attention in Russia, where some of his work has been analyzed by Alexander Dugin and others from a nationalistic Russian view, with but few translations of some of his shorter texts. His work, still according to translation, is also read in the U.K., Spain, Poland, Scandinavia, Romania, Hungary, Mexico, Argentine, rest of South America and Turkey where his opus "Revolt Against the Modern World" has been published in 2006.

Some scholars of esoteric history consider Evola's ideas on the Holy Grail as sources for Pierre Plantard's later claims ([9]); Evola thus becomes indirectly responsible for the contemporary "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" popular-culture mythology.

See also

Books and selected articles

Books listed with titles in English are available in translation.

  1. Arte Astratta, Posizione Teoretica (1920)
  2. Le Parole Oscure du Paysage Interieur (1920)
  3. Saggi sull'idealismo magico (1925)
  4. Teoria dell'Individuo Assoluto (1927)
  5. Imperialismo Pagano: Il Fascismo Dinanzi al Pericolo Euro-Cristiano, con una Appendice sulle Reazioni di parte Guelfa (1928)
  6. Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus (1929)
  7. Fenomenologia dell'Individuo Assoluto (1930)
  8. The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art (1931)
  9. Maschera e volto dello Spiritualismo Contemporaneo: Analisi critica delle principali correnti moderne verso il sovrasensibile (1932)
  10. Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga (1934)
  11. Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem (1936)
  12. The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit (1937)
  13. Il Mito del Sangue. Genesi del Razzismo (1937)
  14. Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza (1941)
  15. The Elements of Racial Education (1941)
  16. Die Arische Lehre von Kampf und Sieg (1941)
  17. Gli Ebrei hanno voluto questa Guerra (1942)
  18. The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts (1943)
  19. The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way (1949)
  20. Orientamenti (1950)
  21. Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1953)
  22. Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex (1958)
  23. Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (1961)
  24. Il Cammino del Cinabro (1963)
  25. Il Fascismo. Saggio di una Analisi Critica dal Punto di Vista della Destra (1964)
  26. L'Arco e la Clava (1968)
  27. Il Taoismo (1972)
  28. Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest (1974)
  29. Ultimi Scritti (1977)
  30. The Path of Enlightenment According to the Mithraic Mysteries (1977)
  31. Zen: The Religion of the Samurai (1981)
  32. Rene Guenon: A Teacher for Modern Times (1984)
  33. Taoism: The Magic, the Mysticism (1993)
  34. Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory and Death in the World of Tradition (2007)

References

Wikiquote has quotations related to Julius Evola.

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