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Julius Evola

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Julius Evola born Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola, aka Baron Evola (May 19, 1898-June 11, 1974), was a controversial Italian esotericist and occult author, who wrote prolifically on matters political, philosophical, historical, racial, and religious from a Traditionalist School point of view. He wrote extensively on Hermeticism, sex magic, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism and various philosophic and religious Traditions of achieving Enlightenment from the East and the West.

Evola had associations with Italian Fascism from the late 1920s through the collapse of the regime in 1943, after which he fled to Nazi-ruled Germany, supported the creation of the Salò Republic, and worked with the SS Ahnenerbe. 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 (this was in spite of Evola's criticism of mass movements). Many Radical Traditionalist, Nouvelle Droite, Conservative Revolutionary, Aryanist, and Third Positionist groups and intellectuals have been influenced by, and continue to propagate, Evola's views.

Biography

Early Years

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome to a noble Sicilian family. He fought in World War I as an artillery officer on the Asiago plateau. 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 journal, Revue Bleu. In 1922, after concluding that avant-garde art was becoming commercialized and hardened into academic convention, he gave up painting and renounced poetry (Drake 1986, 63).

Entry into Esotericism

Around 1920, his interests led him away from the production of art and into his "trans-rational" philosophic 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 intellectuals, he founded the Gruppo di Ur for the study of esotericism, specifically of a Guénonian stripe. It is in this enterprise, although not exclusively 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 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 Catholic Church and rejected the Fascist party's nationalism and its focus on mass movement mob politics; he hoped to influence the regime toward Traditionalist School values. Early in 1930, Evola launched Torre, a biweekly review, to voice his elitist conservatism 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 where 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 and the execution of Mussolini at the hands of the Italian Resistance Movement, Evola moved to Rastenburg, Germany, where he spent the remainder of World War II as a guest of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, possibly working as a researcher for the SS (Sedgwick 2004).

In 1945, toward the end of the War, Evola was employed by the SS to research the Freemasonry archive 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). According to Mircea Eliade he was injured in the "third Chakra" (Godwin 1996, 61).

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 took an apolitical stance, but he made himself available to like-minded, especially young, individuals who turned to him for spiritual guidance. His 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 there was no evidence that any of his writings after the war "Glorified Fascism" (Hansen 2002).

Death

Evola died on June 11, 1974 in Rome; his ashes were deposited in a hole cut in a glacier on Mt. Rosa.

He never married (he regarded marriage as "the surest means of forging iron links with bourgeois society"), and never had children. (Drake 1986, 85)

Occult Philosophy

Tradition

Evola's primary influences came from such thinkers as Oswald Spengler, Friedrich Nietzsche and Meister Eckhart. He also drew heavily on ancient texts such as those of Homer, Plato, and certain Catholic thinkers. The two most important influences, however, were the Traditional School author René Guénon and the ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.

Like Guénon, he believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, the dark age of the Hindu tradition. The Kali Yuga is the last of four ages, which form an endlessly repeating cycle from the "Satya Yuga" or Golden Age through the Kali Yuga. This concept of time is therefore both cyclic and devolving. Evola held that ancient societies were aware of this cycle — as modern societies are unaware — and developed or were able to "see" the true paths for living and achieving transcendence in the Kali Yuga. These paths were traditions which correspond to the Truth that is Tradition.

For Evola, the word Tradition had a meaning very similar to that of Truth. The doctrine of the four ages and a broad characterization of the attributes of Tradition, and their manifestations in traditional societies compromised the bulk of Evola's major work Revolt Against the Modern World.

Evola is considered by most contemporary followers of René Guénon to have deviated from the core of Perennialist teaching on far too many points to be taken as part of Guénon’s legacy. Many followers of Evola read Guénon, but almost no followers of Guénon read Evola. By contrast with Evola’s involvement with Italian Fascism, René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon clearly avoided any political involvement. Ananda Coomaraswamy’s only political engagement was minor, and connected to movements for Sri Lankan and Indian independence.

Evola's books, and his perspective on the modern world, initiation and the relationship between action and contemplation have been strongly criticized by René Guénon and Titus Burckhardt. Whereas the Perennialist perspective is centered on contemplation and knowledge, Evola professes the superiority of action, inversing the hierarchy between Brahmans and Kshatryas and developing his own political theories and philosophy of history. In Revolt against the modern world, he argues that there is not one Tradition, but two: A lower tradition that is feminine; a higher one that is masculine and purely Aryan in its origin. Evola also develops a strong anti-Christian sentiment and has influenced neo-pagan movements whose aims may have been considered as purely illusory, if not anti-traditional by Guénon, had he lived longer.

Paths to Enlightenment

The path to enlightenment is the chief subject of a number of Evola's works. He felt that, despite the dire circumstances of life in the Kali Yuga, especially in the modern era, there are "ways" which have been revealed or passed on, which allow for a man to survive spiritually intact and to achieve a sort of transcendence.

In his book Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest Evola discussed mountaineering as a possible 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

Evola's Tradition encompassed asceticism, which he described in The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts as a teaching or discipline. He believed that there are two basic types of asceticism — that of action and that of contemplation. The asceticism of action is personified by the warrior and that of contemplation by the monk; he described Buddhism as an asceticism of contemplation.

Evola saw Traditionalist ascesis as exclusive and initiatic in character, opining that one who wishes to learn must undertake an apprenticeship and rigorous tests followed by a ritual initiation. He exemplified this by comparison with Buddhist monks who undertake years of training in meditation and various other skills before they are initiated into the order in a ritual often involving the climbing of a mountain.

Sex magic

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.

Evola postulated and described a hidden relationship between South Asian tantric rituals and the politics of power in Europe, citing numerous historical European instances of what he believed to be ritualized sexual practices, including the Cathars, Medieval alchemy, European knighthood, the troubadours, and the Knights Templar, as well as in the fictional works of Dante Alighieri and various romances about the Holy Grail.

As a practitioner of sex magic, he took a phallocentric and sadistic viewpoint, for he wrote that, "The young woman who is first 'demonized' and then raped, ... is essentially ... the basic motif for the higher forms of tantric and Vajrayanic sexual magic".

In his book L'Uome come Potenza [The Male as Might] Evola even recommended murder of women as a form of sex magic. Claiming that his ideas were based on traditional Indian Tantra, he wrote of the glorification of power generated through sexual energy that involved killing or sacrificing "the Female" -- which he linked with both compassion and, uniquely, to Bolshevism -- in order to strengthen what he called Aryan Masculinity, a masculinity whose power increased by sacrificing the "Other". (L'Uome come Potenza p.234)

Politics

The historian Mark Sedgwick, author of Against the Modern World, a history of Traditionalism, calls Evola "the most important political Traditionalist," due to "his involvement with Italian Fascism and German Nazism before and during the Second World War."

Evola held that politics, like everything else in life, should look upward and beyond the self. His political philosophy was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman 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 1920's, when he took an active and public role in the anti-democratic and Jew-hating political currents that swept Europe in the early to mid 20th century. 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 direction he believed it should go — in the direction of archaic Traditionalism; away from the 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 had sealed its own fate. He would maintain the view that a revolutionary movement, similar to Fascism but following his own Traditional School ideology, was necessary for the future 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 movement — a reactionary revolution — like what he had hoped Fascism would be. This movement is a sort of asceticism of action calling for political action to reform current society in a more Traditional direction. As in his experience with Fascism, Evola would later distance himself from this work. It is unclear whether he felt that the views he espoused were no longer true, or if he felt that they merely were impossible to implement in the modern world. He expressed disillusionment with the idea that a revolution and subsequent return to a more enlightened state of civilization was possible, and his political views took on a Sorelian flavor.

On the other side of the equation, Ride the Tiger prescribed an apolitical asceticism of contemplation in which a man is advised to take part in the modern world, while remaining intellectually and spiritually detached from or 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, 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. Evola described this attitude as "apolitea." It was in accordance with this attitude that Evola never joined a political party nor participated in the voting process.

Racism

Evola called his work "racist" [citation needed], 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 anti-Semitic theories of the Nazis and others of his contemporaries; however, his complicated intellectual characterizations of his views on race are undercut by the fact that he published, and wrote an introduction to, an Italian language version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic hoax 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. (Drake 1986, 85)

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."

Evola differed from main anti-Semitic 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 and 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 modern decadence, not its essence." (Drake 1986, 69-70)

Years after the destruction of Jewish society in Europe, which Evola had helped in his own way to foment, he stated in Men Among the Ruins that the tract which he had published could very well have been part of an anti-Semitic plot -- a confession that he himself was very likely an anti-Semitic plotter.

Like his contemporary, the Nazi mystic writer Savitri Devi, Evola believed that a race of "Nordic" people, originally Hyperborean-descended, had played a crucial role in Atlantis [citation needed] and that this Nordic-Aryan race had practiced a Solar religion ennobled by a warrior ethos. Revisionist Theosophical Root Race theories are here evident. According to Evola, the hierarchy of races is really a hierarchy of embodied mentalities; the spirit, rather than ethnic substance, determines culture; but at the same time race is the vehicle of a certain spirituality. In order to describe what he called the "lower", telluric, Negroidal and Afro-Asian races, he frequently made use of the term "Southern" whereas to him "higher" races were "Northern." According to Evola, the Northern, White and Indo-European peoples implicitly preserved more of the primordial Arctic Hyperborean blood-memory and are objectively superior to the matter-obsessed lower races of the South. While the Nordic-Aryan branch of Hyperborean descendents, eventually flowering forth in the Indo-Aryans and Germanics, retained a relative purity of ethnic and spiritual strength, the "Northern Light" was lost to the Atlantean offshoot which defiled itself through sinful miscegenation with bestial Lemurian stocks. In "Revolt Against the Modern World", the history of the world is revealed to be the saga of dualistic conflict between the "Northern Light" and the "Southern Light"; between the Uranian, patriarchal men of purer Hyperborean blood, harshly conditioned and heroic-minded celebrators of the winster solstice, and the chthonic, matriarchal, ethnically bastardized heirs of the fallen Atlantean civilization captured by the "Southern Light" and its naturalistic-pantheist religion of mere promiscuous vegetal and animal fertility.

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 which modern day usage connotes. In other words, in addition to predominantly "Northern" or "Aryan" biology, the initial necessary precondition for further racial differentiation, one must prove oneself spiritually "Aryan". To him race implied something akin to "caste" or Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of Slave and Master morality. 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 degress 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 caprices of modern historical theories there lies as a more profound and primordial reality; the unity of the blood and spirit of the White Races who created the greatest civilisations both of the East and West" (The Doctrine of Awakening).

Influence

Evola's writings have continued to have an influence in both the occult and political realms in Europe. Although his impact on Italian Fascism and/or German Nazism was minor, his impact on post-War Neo-Fascism has been great. He has specifically influenced GRECE, The Scorpion, the Movimento sociale italiano (MSI), Gaston Armand Amaudruz's Nouvel Ordre Européen, Pino Rauti's Ordine Nuovo, Alain de Benoist, Michael Moynihan, Giorgio Freda, and the ARN. Giorgio Almirante referred to him as "our Marcuse — only better". In 1998, a Goth/Darkwave compilation CD entitled Cavalcare la Tigre was released to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Evola's birth. At the start of the twenty-first century, his most greatest impact was in Russia, where his work was promoted by Alexander Dugin and others. His work was also widely read in Romania, Hungary, and South America.

Along with the occult writings of the Chilean "esoteric Hitlerist" Miguel Serrano and the French "Indo-Aryan" author Savitri Devi, Evola's works are cited as one of the sources of a specific form of Nazi mysticism as well as some post- War Aryan master race beliefs and Nazi escape scenarios, including conspiracy theories about reptilian humanoids, hollow earth civilizations, Hitler's status as an Avatar of the god Vishnu, and the existence of shadowy new world orders. Some even claim to see in Evola's attempts to link Vajrayana Buddhism with Aryanism a pattern for an influence that, through the works of his follower, Serrano, has had a philosophical impact upon the thinking of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. [citation needed]

In the 1996 book Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival, the scholar Joscelyn Godwin discussed Evola's occultist writings in the context of late 20th century pseudoscientific theories regarding "Nordic" races and surviving Nazi elements in Antarctica. Arktos presents material from sources currently unavailable elsewhere in English-language translation, including much about Julius Evola's mysticism.

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 Raza (1941)
  15. The Elements of Racial Education (1941)
  16. Die Arische Lehre von Kampf und Sieg (1941)
  17. Gli Ebrei hanno volute 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)

References

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