JULIUS EVOLA
Julius Evola (1898–1974) is today a prominent icon of fascist idealism.
His ideal was the Indo-Aryan tradition,where hierarchy, caste, authority and state ruled supreme over the material aspects of life.
Invoking the heroic and sacred values of this mythical tradition, Evola advanced a radical doctrine of anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism.
He scorned the modern world of popular rule and bourgeois values, democracy and socialism, seeing capitalism and communism as twin aspects of the benighted reign of materialism.
During the 1930s, Evola had enjoyed the reputation of a bold and controversial theorist in Fascist Italy and had also been well known in Conservative Revolutionary circles in Germany during the Third Reich.
Wounded at the close of the war, he had spent the postwar years in a wheelchair at his apartment on the Corso Vittoria Emanuelle in the center of Rome.
Secluded from practical politics, Evola held the aura of a fascist sage untainted by the fall of Mussolini until his death in 1974.
A young generation of neo-fascists was irresistibly drawn to this oracle of violence and revolution.
Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome on 19 May 1898, the scion of a noble Sicilian family.
He soon rebelled against his strict Catholic upbringing.
Alongside his high school studies in industrial engineering, he cultivated a keen interest in the Italian literary avant garde, dominated at the time by Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, and in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurist movement in art.
At the age of nineteen he joined the Italian army in the later stages of the First World War, serving as a mountain artillery officer at the Austrian front on the Asiago plateau in northern Italy.
After the war, Evola found it hard to adjust to settled life. Beset by spiritual restlessness, he embarked on a quest for self-transcendence, which implied a break with the bourgeois values of the past.
Dismissing futurism as loud and showy, he became the leading representative of the Dada movement in Italy. He gave readings of his avant-garde poetry in the Cabaret Grotte dell’Augusteo— Rome’s answer to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich—and exhibited his paintings in Rome,Milan, Lausanne and Berlin.
Repelled by the commercialization of avant-garde art and its hardening into convention, Evola gave up painting in 1922 and wrote three transrational philosophical books, which he published during the 1920s.3 Evola’s philosophical idealism of the absolute individual was but one expression of his quest for self-transcendence in a postwar age of shattered values and moral uncertainties.
He also became interested in oriental studies and became a profound student of magic, the occult, alchemy and Eastern religions. He experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, discovered the ancient Theravadin Buddhist text, the Majjhima-Nikaya, and wrote the introduction to an Italian translation of the Tao-Te-Ching in 1923. He frequented the Italian Independent Theosophical League and was introduced by its president, Decio Calvari, to the study of Tantrism, which especially captured Evola’s imagination.
He began corresponding with Sir John Woodroffe, the learned British orientalist, who revealed the secrets of this esoteric Hindu school in The Serpent of Power and other books published under his pseudonym, Arthur Avalon.
Evola presented his own study of Tantrism and kundalini yoga, based on Woodroffe’s works and original texts, as L’uomo come potenza [The Yoga of Power] (1925).
Tantrism originated in India around a.d. 400 as a radical Hindu cult focused on women, goddesses and sexual energy.
Rejecting customary Hindu abstinence, tantric rituals celebrated intoxicating beverages, meat, fish, mudras and ritual sexual intercourse.
Tantrism revolves around the notion of breaking all ties or bonds (pasha). Individuals with an animal nature, enslaved by appetite, lust, custom and religious conformity are necessarily disqualified.
By means of taboo and spiritually dangerous practices (orgies, intoxication), the superior adept (vira) can raise his consciousness to supreme levels of unity with the divine female power of Shakti, which animates and inspires the whole universe, thereby acquiring exceptional knowledge (vidya) and magical powers (siddhis). Tantric doctrine lays much emphasis on the the male god Shiva and his bride Shakti, whose sexual union is personified in ritual intercourse
While this act symbolizes the creative impulses of the cosmos, male ejaculation of semen is typically discouraged.
In this way the energy of orgasm is supposedly channeled away from the propagation of organic life toward a powerful ascent experience.
Tantrism complemented Western idealism in Evola’s quest for selftranscendence.
Its secrecy and elitism essentially negated the modern world of rationalism and democracy.
Evola wrote that the knowledge and powers pursued by the modern world are democratic, that is, available at educational institutions to anyone with enough intelligence.
Likewise, technology is democratic: an instrument or weapon can be used by anyone with sufficient training. By contrast, the tantric magical powers (siddhis) are always personal and exceptional achievements accessible only to the few.
But Evola also thought Tantrism arose specifically in fifth-century India at a time of spiritual decadence when men could no longer achieve an otherworldly liberation from the world.
Instead, they sought a full-blooded embrace of life’s delights—liberty within the world.
For this reason, Tantrism was more akin to Western modes of thought and also appropriate to the modern age characterized by density, coarseness and moral decline.
Tantric rituals essentially transformed “poison into medicine” for the strong and liberated individual.
During the 1920s Evola immersed himself in the study of the Western esoteric tradition.
Through Theosophical and Masonic circles he met Arturo Reghini (1878–1946), a Roman occultist immersed in alchemy, magic and theurgy. Reghini edited two journals, Atanòr (1924) and Ignis (1925), whose contents embraced initiate studies from Pythagoreanism to yoga, from Hebrew Cabalism to Cagliostro’s Egyptian Freemasonry.
Evola contributed numerous reviews and articles on Tantrism, on the nature of woman, on Rudolf Steiner, and an essay on Dionysius.
A circle soon gathered around Reghini and Evola.
A strong anthroposophical influence came from Giovanni Colazza and Duke Giovanni Colonna di Cesarò. Close to the group, which adopted the name UR, were Guiliano Kremmerz (1861–1939), founder of the Fraternity of Myriam that had an interest in sex magic, and an Indian alchemist, C. S. Narayana Ariar Shiyali.
Between 1927 and 1929 the group published Ur (renamed Krur in 1929), a monthly journal of essays and rituals, which included many of Evola’s magical studies.
Arturo Reghini sought the renewal of the classical tradition in a fiercely anti-Christian, pagan spirit.
He was a powerful influence on Evola during the years 1924 to 1930, introducing him to the traditional texts of alchemy,whose symbolism they regarded as a universal key to the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of man.
After presenting an initial study of alchemy in Krur, Evola published his book La tradizione ermetica [The Hermetic Tradition] (1931) on hermeticism as an ancient pagan tradition.
Evola believed that the veiled symbolism of hermetico-alchemical cosmology described the outlines of a heroic, pre-Christian worldview when a warrior aristocracy reigned supreme.
Evola instances the “tree” as a symbol of knowledge and immortality: in a heroic myth, one who succumbs in a bid to win the powers of the tree simply has more courage than luck; he may try again and regain his dignity. But in a postheroic religious era, he has sinned, and his action is a sacrilege and is damned.
Evola saw alchemy and hermeticism as an occult survival of the “Royal Art,” a universal secret science of human and natural transformation according to heroic concepts, now buried beneath pusillanimous Christian priestcraft.
The anti-democratic and anti-modernist tenor of Evola’s political thought may be traced to his readings of Plato, Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, whose famous work 'The Decline of the West' (1918–22) he later translated into Italian.
But Reghini was a more immediate force.
Both he and Evola regarded the Roman patrician world and the imperial constitution as a close approximation to their ideal state.
This strict hierarchy was but a pattern of a higher, transcendental and absolute order.
The leveling, egalitarian universalism of Christianity negated and ultimately dissolved this political order, heralding the disorder of the modern world.
Writing in Atanòr in 1924,Reghini reflected that he had already fifteen years earlier predicted the rise of an Italian regime based on the ancient world and welcomed Fascism.
The fasces—the bundle of rods containing an Etruscan bronze axe as the symbol of the magistrate’s power in ancient Rome—was presented to Mussolini in 1923 by a member of an order dedicated to such a revival. The Group of UR also performed rituals intended to inspire the Fascist regime with the spirit of imperial Rome. Evola began writing political journalism in 1925.
His articles reproached Fascism for its proximity to the church, the careerism of its functionaries, and its dependence on the bourgeoisie and the masses: Evola sought to transform Fascism in accordance with his precepts of spiritual aristocracy and monarchy.
These attacks reached a climax in the publication of his book Imperialismo Pagano [Pagan Imperialism] (1928), in which he celebrated the ideal of ancient Rome, denounced all the Christian churches, and scourged the secular universalism of both American democracy and Soviet communism.Mussolini, for his part, was sufficiently impressed and interested in these matters to write a journal article in reply to Reghini’s exhortation for Fascism to initiate an era of “pagan imperialism.”
In the political realities of Italy, Mussolini could never have afforded to follow an anti-Christian line.
The regime’s goal of a concordat with the Catholic Church eventually led to the Lateran Treaty of 1929 with the Vatican, thus dashing the Group of UR’s hopes of influencing the new order.
Evola underpinned his anti-modernist political doctrine through his oriental and esoteric studies. Through Reghini he discovered the work of the French orientalist René Guénon (1886–1951), who invoked the notion of a primordial Tradition, implicit in the metaphysical structure of the universe and reflected in the authentic religious traditions of East and West.
Brought up in a Catholic family, Guénon studied philosophy at Paris before immersing himself in the French occult revival at the turn of the century.
Besides a passing interest in Theosophy and Freemasonry, he was especially receptive to Advaita Vedanta, which was becoming better known in the West through Vivekananda, and studied Indian philosophy under Hindu teachers.
In his books, 'A General Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines' (1921) and 'Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta' (1925), Guénon described the ultimate reality according to Vedanta.
Beyond all reason or discursive thought, this metaphysical unity could only be grasped from the inward-directed point of view, the suprarational intellectual intuition by which the Self (Atman) communicates with the ego.
Guénon considered that Hindu Vedanta represented a “primordial Tradition” whose transcendent truths were also preserved in the authentic religions of Islam and medieval Catholicism.
The modern West, by contrast, had almost entirely lost any connection with the Tradition. In his seminal work of pessimism, 'The Crisis of the Modern World' (1927), Guénon showed how the West had, since the end of the Middle Ages, succumbed to a spiritual decline.
A process of materialization embraced all life; art and culture pursued mere externalities, while thought and science lost themselves in endless analysis, division and multiplicity.
Western life was completely absorbed in “becoming,” with its attendant focus on rational means, speed and technical efficiency.
The “humanistic” concern with man’s importance and consciousness, his social and political emancipation had displaced all transcendent references in an aberrant cult of individualism.
Guénon regarded this decline as the fulfillment of the Hindu Puranic divisions of time.
The four yugas, each of successively shorter duration, corresponded to the golden, silver, bronze and iron ages of classical antiquity.
The West had now been passing through the fourth age, the Kali Yuga or “dark age,” for more than six thousand years.
Evola felt a deep affinity with Guénon’s esoteric pessimism.
Here, in sparse outline, he found all the reasons for the decay of a primordial heroic world based on sacred authority and metaphysical absolutes.
He applauded Guénon’s scathing attack on the vacuous relativism and chaotic liberalism of the modern world. Forthwith he began work on his own anti-modernist text, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno [Revolt against the Modern World] (1934), which remains his best-known and most important book.
Here Evola described a metaphysical Aryo-Vedic tradition that allegedly governed the religious and political institutions of archaic Indo-European societies.
He traced the accretion of golden age myths relating to polar symbolism and the Arctic origin of the white Aryan race through ancient Indian, Iranian, Greek and Amerindian texts, with acknowledgments to Bâl Gangadhar Tilak, a Brahman scholar, and Herman Wirth, the amateur prehistorian of an Atlantis culture and later director of Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe.
The sacred nature of regal authority, the mystery of ritual, initiation and consecration, the divine origins of patrician rule, chivalry and a rigid caste hierarchy defined this traditional world in utter opposition to the secular, individualistic and liberal concerns of the modern world.
Like Guénon, Evola subscribed to the Hindu cycle of the ages and equated the modern world with the dark age or Kali Kuga, in which all tradition is forgotten, disorder is rife and society is degenerate.
Evola’s view of history and political theory were grounded in a fundamental “doctrine of two natures,” the “primordial Tradition,” which distinguishes the metaphysical order of things from the physical, the immortal from the mortal world, the superior realm of “being” from the inferior realm of “becoming,” the dominant, virile principle of spirit from the lower, feminine domain of matter.
For Evola, the predominance of spirit in Traditional societies was evident in their strict hierarchy of functions, which still survived in the caste system of Aryan-Hindu society.
While the lower functions are concerned with mere matter and organic vitality, the ascending functions are progressively ruled by spirit.
In the Hindu caste hierarchy, one finds the slaves or workers (sudras), who are subordinated to the bourgeoisie or merchants (vaisyas). Higher up one finds the warrior nobility (kshatriyas), and all are subject to the spiritual authority of the priests (brahmins).
This order, in which powers of the spirit corresponded to caste, prevailed in all Traditional societies; Evola cites its presence in Plato’s Republic, in ancient Iranian society and even in the social divisions of peasants, burghers, nobility and clergy in the European Middle Ages.
The priestly caste stood at the apex of the caste hierarchy, however, in the world of primordial Tradition this was no professional priesthood but royalty itself. In Evola’s view, the roots of authority had a metaphysical character and every temporal power proceeded from spiritual authority.
Quoting the Aryo- Vedic Laws ofManu, Evola claimed that the ruler was no“meremortal” but “a great deity standing in the formof a man” in societies still based on Tradition.
Thus, the Egyptian pharaoh was regarded as a manifestation of Ra or Horus, while the kings of Rome were the incarnations of Zeus; the Assyrian kings, of Baal; the Persian shahs, of the gods of light.
More especially, kings and the patriciate performed the sacred rites that linked the human domain with the gods, thus forming a “bridge” to the supernatural realm.
The possession and practice of these sacred rites defined the priestly caste, who were simultaneously the leaders of the state, itself invested with the current of divine power. “The supernatural element was the foundation of the idea of a traditional patriciateandof legitimate royalty:whatconstitutedanancient aristocratwasnot merely a biological legacy or a racial selection, but rather a sacred tradition.”
The doctrine of caste was closely linked in Evola’s thought to the idea of history as a process of regression or involution.
Basing his cyclical view of history on the Puranic divisions of time, Evola asserted civilization inevitably declined from the Satya Yuga or golden age, where the primordial Tradition was observed and upheld, through the successively shorter and more decadent Treta and Dvapara Yugas, until the onset of the Kali Yuga or dark age, when the Tradition is wholly forgotten.
Social disorder, spiritual alienation and violence characterize this wretched epoch to a point of cataclysmic dissolution when the next Satya Yuga once more begins its redemptive cycle.
Evola recognized that this prehistoric account of a golden age and subsequent decline hardly accorded with the evolutionist ideas of Darwin.
He insisted that ancient testimonies and writings from all great world cultures make no mention of bestial cavemen but “more-than-human” beings in a better, brighter and superhuman (“divine”) past.
He speculates that the absence of fossil remains of a superior primordial mankind might indicate its existence prior to materialization.
Evola ultimately dismisses evolutionism as a science typical of dark-age myth, which derives the higher from the lower and man from animal in total ignorance of Tradition.
Evola offers a sweeping panorama of prehistoric cycles of civilization corresponding to the four traditional yugas. The epoch of remote prehistory corresponding to the golden age was a real location in the Arctic, accounting for the many polar myths of origin.
Some spiritual disaster was matched by a catastrophic tilt in the earth’s axis, causing a forced migration of a primal Hyperborean (extreme northern) race in a first wave toward North America and the northern regions of Eurasia, and then in a second wave toward a now lost continent in the mid-Atlantic.
Using occult ideas from Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Evola speculated that a large Atlantean group became mixed with aboriginal Southern races of proto-Mongols and proto-Negroes who may have originated in the lost continent of Lemuria.
In accordance with the doctrine of two natures, Evola tended to see “spirituality” as the prior determinant of a culture rather than its ethnic, racial population, however, since certain races were the carriers of Southern “spirituality,” they were in turn identified as decadent factors.
Thus, while the first wave of Hyperborean emigration remained wholly Nordic, the Western civilization of Atlantis absorbed many Southern-Lemurian traits, thus giving rise to the dichotomy of solar, male or Uranian spirituality (Northern-Atlantic races) and lunar, female or Demetrian spirituality (mixed Southern-Atlantean races).
Evola adopted Bachofen’s idea of matriarchy not as a prior linear phase of evolution, but as an independent Southern world, inhabited by other races that eventually clashed with Northern-Atlantic traditions.
This Southern “mother-culture” was later typifed by the Asiatic-Mediterranean goddesses of life, such as Isis, Ishtar, Cybele and Demeter, who subordinate the male, solar principle, and by images such as the child on the lap of the Great Mother.
By contrast with the virile spirituality implicit in intelligible essences and dramatized in gods of war, sky and the sun, the “mothers” preside over a telluric and cthonic world of earth, darkness and moon.
In accordance with the maternal principle, in which we are all children of the earth, this culture encouraged social structures of a collectivist nature with ideals of sharing, brotherhood and equality.
Evola saw these “lunar” themes of peace and community as typical of Demetrism, representing the second silver age or Treta Yuga, in which a priestly caste ruled without virile, regal authority.
He saw further evidence of this feminized spirituality in ancient cults of emasculation and even in priests wearing robes redolent of female attire.
Evola’s dualism of male-female spirituality owed an even greater debt to the young Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903), whose famous book Geschlecht und Charakter [Sex and Character] (1903) expounded a metaphysical view of the principles of male and female sexuality.
Weininger glorified higher reason, Platonic truth and Kantian imperatives while negating the fallen,mundane sphere of matter and nature.
Only man aspires to the eternal life of the spirit,while woman embraces the lower life of the earth and the senses.
Man may choose between that life which ends with physical death, or that life for which death means a restoration of complete purity.
Woman, on the other hand, is part of the material world.
Void of any higher spirit, she knows nothing of logic and morality.
She has no ego, no individuality but leads a purely sexual, impersonal existence.
Man is a subject and woman is an object whose only desire is to be formed and given meaning by male attention and sexual coitus.
Ontologically, she is a nullity, and her existence simply guarantees the continued reproduction of the material, sensate world. Evola’s celebration of virile spirituality was rooted in Weininger’s work, which was widely translated by the end of the First World War.
Evola traced the progress of Northern-Atlantic heroic spirituality among the ancient Aryans of India and Iran, commenting that in India the term arya was a synonym for dvija, meaning “twice-born” or “regenerated,” however, he noted that India eventually followed a contemplative path and abandoned the regal and solar path of a spiritual patriciate.
Evola attributed the rise of a professional brahmin caste to the decay of the original dynasties responsible for the Aryan conquest of India.
The disintegration of the Aryan worldview in India followed the identification of Brahman (God) with all nature in a pantheistic sense that reflected the spiritual influence of Southern races. In Iran the heroic spirituality led to the warrior cult of Ahura Mazda, the Aryan ethic of truth and loyalty, and the view of the cosmos as an order maintained through sacred rites.
Some decline caused by lunar naturalism and decadent priestcraft led to a solar reaction in the doctrine of Zarathustra, which Evola compared to Buddha’s reforming role in decadent Hindu India.
Mithraism again inaugurated a new heroic cycle of Aryan, solar spirituality opposed to all telluric cults of earth and darkness.
Once Mithraism declined in Iran, Evola saw its later revival in the Roman Empire as a spiritual path that the West might have followed instead of Christianity, a speculation incidentally shared with Carl Gustav Jung. Turning to Western history during the present Kali Yuga, Evola celebrated the Roman Empire as a major attempt to reverse the forces of Mediterranean- Southern decadence and forge a new unitary state based on heroic Aryan- Western spirituality.
He speculated that Rome’s new rigor and ascent were due to the influence of prehistoric immigrant “reindeer” and “battle-axe” peoples of Hyperborean origin, who formed regenerative nuclei among the aboriginal races of Etruscans, Sabines, Sabellians, Siculians and others in the pre-Roman Italian peninsula.
Those aboriginal peoples who adhered to the worship of lunar, female deities typically formed the lower stratum of plebeians beneath a patriciate devoted to notions of authority and imperium.
Roman spirituality was henceforth characterized by an absence of pathos and mysticism toward the divine. Its key virtues were duty, loyalty, heroism, order and dominion.
The revolt of the Roman patriciate against the foreign Tarquin dynasty (509 b.c.), the fall of Capua, and the destruction of Carthage (146 b.c.) were representative events in Rome’s methodical liquidation of the centers of earlier Southern influence.
As Rome rose to imperial power, the virile idea of the divinely ordered state supplanted all earlier hieratic, Demetrian forms of society.
The patriciate performed the sacred rites under a precise law, and all society was subject to strict paternal rights.
Continuing his dualistic theme of Northern and Southern spirituality, Evola saw Rome maintain its heroic Aryan-Western culture of hierarchy and state through constant rejection of Dionysian and Aphrodistic influences, such as the banning of the Bacchanalia. Roman suspicion of mystery- religions of Asian origin and Pythagorean philosophers was likewise rooted in a spiritual antipathy toward Demetrian throwbacks, while its famous civil wars involving such figures as Pompeius, Cassius and Anthony were contests with Southern revisionism.
Through its single-minded dedication to heroic civilization, “Rome shifted the centre of the historical West from the telluric to the Uranian mystery, from the lunar world of the Mothers to the solar world of the Fathers.”
By the time of Augustus, the imperial cult had effectively restored the spiritual “genius” of the emperor as a bridge with the supernatural realm, while Roman universalism seemed to stretch to the limits of the known world. Evola regarded the advent of Christianity as a process of unprecedented decline.
The Christian ideal of a religion open to everyone irrespective of race, tradition and caste was a solvent of Roman order and hierarchy.
By positing mere faith over heroic and initiatory spiritual growth, Christianity appealed to the plebeian mentality with promises of salvation from subjection, the world and even death. Christian egalitarianism, based on principles of brotherhood, love and collectivism, militated against all Roman ideas of duty, honor and command.
The Christian God was not the god of the patricians, invoked while standing erect and carried in front of the legions, but a crucified god-man, to whom one prayed in the sense of sin and atonement.
The spread of Christianity marked a shift from the masculine to the feminine, from the solar to the tellurian, from martial aristocratic values to mystical plebeian sentiment.
Evola detected the revival of female, lunar spirituality in its myths of a sacrificed and regenerated (agricultural) god and the Virgin birth, and its iconography of Mother and Child.
Nevertheless, Christianity was only a symptom of decline, as Evola believed the Roman heroic cycle was already exhausted in “ethnic chaos and cosmopolitan disintegration.” Evola’s “Northern” bias led him to regard the German peoples as a powerful countervailing force to Christianity’s female culture.
Nevertheless, Christianity was only a symptom of decline, as Evola believed the Roman heroic cycle was already exhausted in “ethnic chaos and cosmopolitan disintegration.” Evola’s “Northern” bias led him to regard the German peoples as a powerful countervailing force to Christianity’s female culture.
As descendants of Northern-Aryan racial stocks, the Germans had preserved their prehistoric purity outside the cosmopolitan late Roman Empire.
Their Norse myths and tribal ethos preserved traces of the primordial Tradition.
The god Wotan- Odin granted victory, possessed esoteric wisdom and had secrets not granted to any woman; he was the leader of the dead heroes.
The oldest Nordic stocks regarded Asgard in the far north as the home of the gods, an ancestral memory that linked them with the Indo-Aryans in the East.
Initially a barbarian force of destruction at the close of the Roman cycle, the German tribes brought warrior leadership, fealty and freedom into the medieval European political order.
While laying the basis of feudal caste society, these values represented solar spirituality against the feminizing Church.Chivalry upheld the hero over the saint, the conqueror over the martyr.
Loyalty and honor were the highest virtues, while cowardice was a greater evil than sin. Evola regarded the quest for the Grail and the Crusades as symbols of a solar tradition within Christian civilization. In the medieval struggle of popes and emperors for precedence, Evola identified the Ghibelline dynasty of Hohenstauffen emperors (1152–1272) as the Germanic champion of “sacred regality” in a revived Holy Roman Empire.
Evola saw the Italian communes of the Renaissance as pioneers of the profane and anti-traditional idea of society based on economic and mercantile factors, leading to the Jewish trade in gold and the rise of banking and capitalism.
Evola applauded Dante’s condemnation of the revolt of the Lombard cities and the principle of self-government.
The Hohenstauffen emperors fought over Italy, not for German aggrandizement, but “against the rebellious race of merchants and burghers in the name of honor and spirit.”
Evola thought it highly significant that the Renaissance should have started in Italy, not on account of its Roman heritage, but as the perennial crucible of the antagonism between North and South, between solar and lunar spirituality.
In his view, the Renaissance did not represent a revival of classical civilization but only a borrowing of its decadent forms for a wholly new spirit of atomization and independence.
Where emperors had once ruled by nobility and supernatural authority, the new political ideal was demonstrated by Machiavelli’s Prince, where the individual can only rule in his own name by employing cunning, violence and diplomacy.
Evola regarded Renaissance humanism as the harbinger of modern thought, limited to the exploration of the human dimension in the arts, philosophy and science.
Humanism embraced individualism in this negation of the transcendent world by glorifying the “self ” as an illusory center.
The Reformation opposed Rome precisely because of its hierarchy and dogma, remnants of Tradition, and set up individual conscience as the sole authority in religion.
The private interpretation of the Bible emphasized critical judgment and human reason, which would ultimately challenge all authority and metaphysical reality.
Rationalism joined forces with empiricism and expermentalism to create modern science, whose sole object was the material world.
Science is exclusively concerned with the physical dimension, the discovery of mathematical relations, laws of consistency and the calculation of outcomes.
With its uniform criterion of truth based on “soulless numbers” and indifference to quality and symbol, science also paved the way for the rise of lower social orders by degrading and democratizing the idea of knowledge. Denying all transcendence, science vainly attempts to compensate the human spirit with power over material objects, titanic technology and huge industries. Evola traced the continued descent of the Kali Yuga in European politics.
Emperors now foresook imperial consecration, and Frederick III was the last emperor to be crowned in Rome (1452).
Kings and princes began to claim an absolute power, thus subverting the universal ecumene with the idea of the national state.
Free cities and republics began to assert their independence, not only against imperial authority but also against the nobility.
The principle of a common body of law declined, and chivalry decayed into a defense of temporal and territorial ambition.
Raison d’état destroyed the foundation of Christendom and European unity with wars of kings against emperors, alliances with the sultan, and the rise of territorial princes in virtual independence from the empire. Royalty became increasingly secular, divorced from its former spiritual authority.
With the Reformation, states themselves began to act as schisms from superordained authority. The assertion of the “divine right” of kings in Catholic states in the age of the Counter-Reformation after the Council of Trent was no more than an empty formula concealing the spiritual vacuity of kingship divorced from authentic universalism.
Evola saw the rise of national monarchies as an intermediate stage in the cycle of decline. Just as national monarchies once asserted their own absolute power, they in turn would be confronted by individuals demanding emancipation in the name of their own free, sovereign autonomy.
Spiritual secession from the sacred center ultimately weakened the very principle of hierarchy. The collapse of supernatural authority encouraged the emergence, revolt and liberation of lower strata in society.
The atomization of the European imperial order presaged the rise of mercantile classes, ideas of popular sovereignty and the French Revolution, when all authority and law are only legimate as the will of the citizens. This principle of authority “from below” formed the basis of democracy and liberalism in modern bourgeois states.
A further stage in this process of egalitarianism led to the collectivism of mass consumer society or communism, typified by America and Soviet Russia.
As this decadent downsweep in the Kali Yuga progresses, matter rules over form, leveling occurs on every plane, and anti-traditional values of secular humanism, hedonism and utilitarianism dominate.
Evola’s involution or regression through the cycle of the ages was mirrored in the law of the regression of castes.
Once the sacred regality of the mythical golden age is lost, power devolves upon the second warrior caste, represented in Europe by national monarchs and absolute sovereigns.
Then in time, the aristocracy decays, and power shifts to the third caste (the mercantile class). The Italian communes, merchants and Jewish bankers of the Renaissance eventually led to the capitalist oligarchs and middle classes, who consolidated their power by exploiting liberal and democratic ideologies to drive bourgeois revolutions in the nineteenth century.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, organized labor and communist revolution sought to transfer power to the fourth caste of slaves, reducing all values to matter, machines and the reign of quantity.
This cycle of castes extended to the international arena. Evola regarded the First World War as a global struggle between the third caste (the Entente democracies) and the residual forces of the second caste (the feudal and aristocratic Central Powers).
The Second World War began with the anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes of Germany and Italy challenging the plutocracies in the name of fascist collectivism, but eventually this war became a crusade of democracy, allied with the fourth caste of the Soviet Union, against “regression” to warrior castes.
The outcome was the division of Europe, with America and Russia as the dominant mass societies, united in their crass materialist and utilitarian civilization.
Evola’s notion of race was spiritual, subject to spirit and tradition.
He spoke of “a man of race,” meaning “a man of breeding” with its aristocratic implications. Evola elaborated a tripartite racial thory of body, mind (religion and adherence to Tradition), and soul (character and emotions), in which the inner determined the outer forms.
Discussing Arthur de Gobineau’s racial thought, Evola asserted that races only declined once their spirit failed. Evola actually rejected Alfred Rosenberg and other biological racists of the Third Reich, implying that their physical anthropology was based on reductionist and materialist science.
Evola’s interpretation of the word “Aryan” was similarly idealistic.
In his book on Buddhism, he had translated arya to mean aristocratic or high caste and illuminated in a spiritual sense as well as related to the Nordic, light-skinned Aryan conquerors of India. It will be recalled that Evola’s ideal of the “Aryan-Roman” race was essentially defined by its sacral and aristocratic quality. Mussolini actually adopted Evola’s ideas as the official Fascist racial theory in 1938, when Italy enacted its own racial laws distinct from those of Nazi Germany.
Evola’s anti-Semitism was also metaphysical, whereby he regarded Jewry as a symbol for the rule of money, individualism and economic materialism in the modern world.
Here again one sees the influence of Otto Weininger, who defined Jewishness (Judentum) as an “intellectual tendency” or “psychic constitution” manifest in all individuals and races, but finding its fullest expression in historical Jewry.
Weininger maintained that the Jews resembled women in their metaphysical essence.
Like women, the Jews had neither a soul nor a need for immortality.Weininger highlighted the Jewish contribution to science as an urge to deny all transcendence through a mechanistic-materialist worldview.
The Jewish devaluation of all higher meaning, he argued, was evident in their support of Darwinism and man’s descent from the apes, Marxism and the economic interpretation of history.
The Jews lack all conviction, they are ambiguous and endlessly flexible.
Significantly, they have no desire for property but prefer coin and mobile capital so that they can quickly change direction for gain.
Weininger regarded the modern age with its increasing emphasis on business and journalism as a social universe in the image of the Jews.
Otto Weininger’s critique of the “psychic constitution” of Jewishness was central to Evola’s anti-modernist idealism. Evola detected the fatal Jewish influence in early modern Europe through rational calculation and banking.
From its origin in the ghettos, the trade with gold and interest ultimately conquered and refashioned the world.
But the Jews were not the sole pioneers, for Evola follows Karl Marx and Werner Sombart in seeing a revival of the “Hebraic spirit” in Protestant puritanism, rationalism and capitalism.
But the Jews were not the sole pioneers, for Evola follows Karl Marx and Werner Sombart in seeing a revival of the “Hebraic spirit” in Protestant puritanism, rationalism and capitalism.
The Jews had only taken advantage of humanism and the Reformation to create the secularized scientistic and mechanistic world of modernity.
However, it was the “Jewish spirit [which] destroys everything through rationalism and calculation, leading to a world consisting of machines, things and money instead of persons, traditions and fatherlands.”
Quoting the notorious text of Jewish conspiracy theory, 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion', Evola sees the Jewish press and finance as systematic means of spreading the liberal virus, which would destroy the monarchical and aristocratic residues ofWestern culture.
Evola published his own preface and an essay, “The Authenticity of Protocols as Proven by Jewish Tradition,” in the Italian edition of the Protocols, which recycled contemporary anti-Semitic slurs and falsehoods.
He found abundant evidence of the erosive influence of individual Jews in American banking and industry as well as in the Russian Revolution. Likewise, Jews were always at the forefront of modernistic ideas, such as Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity, Emile Durkheim and the “sociology” of religion.
Under stress, Evola could indulge in vicious anti-Semitism in his journalism. After the murder of his friend Corneliu Codreanu (1899–1938), the leader of the fascist Romanian Iron Guard, Evola railed against “the Judaic horde,” describing a potential communist takeover in Romania as “the filthiest tyranny, the talmudic, Israelite tyranny.”
Finding Italian Fascism too compromising, Evola began to seek recognition in the Third Reich, where he frequently lectured from 1934 onward.
Although National Socialism opposed liberalism and “Jewish culture,” Evola was repelled by Nazi populism, plebeian culture and nationalism as manifestations of modernity.
Nazi racism was rooted in biological materialism, and the Führer principle, whereby Hitler drew his legitimacy from the Volk, and likewise ignored all transcendent reality.
Evola praised the SS as a vehicle of the state, of hierarchy, racial heritage and a new warrior elite, but the SS authorities rejected Evola’s ideas as supranational, aristocratic and thus reactionary.
Evola found his closest allies among the Conservative Revolutionaries in Germany and Austria such as Edgar Julius Jung, Wilhelm Stapel and Othmar Spann.
Several of his books were translated into German, and many of his articles appeared in German conservative and right-wing periodicals between 1928 and 1943.
Several of his books were translated into German, and many of his articles appeared in German conservative and right-wing periodicals between 1928 and 1943.
In August 1943 Evola conferred with the deposed Mussolini at Hitler’s field headquarters in East Prussia and was involved in the short-lived Republic of Salò.
Following his flight from Rome before the Allies in late 1943, Evola spent the remainder of the war in Vienna.
Working with fascist leaders across Central Europe, he performed liaison services for the SS in recruiting a pan-European army for the defense of the Continent against the Soviet and American invaders.
Severely injured in an air raid on 12 March 1945, he was permanently paralyzed in both legs.
After his return to Italy he lived in Rome, the guru of the neo-fascist right, until his death in 1974.
How did Evola’s lofty mythological discourse and profound pessimism inspire neo-fascist activism and violence?
In the early 1950s, Evola directed his writings more toward practical politics.
His journalism and his pamphlet Orientamenti [Orientations] (1950) stressed the “legionary spirit” and “warrior ethic” while outlining how ideals, elites and order could be maintained with the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) neo-fascist party, police and army taking over the state. In his book Gli Uomini e le Rovine [Men Among the Ruins] (1953), he restated his doctrine in terms of counter-revolution, the transcendent character of state against the economy, and the need for an antibourgeois, warrior’s view of life.
By the time Evola penned his work Cavalcare la Tigre [Riding the Tiger] (1961), he despaired of such remedies.
The postwar economic miracle and consumerism were now sweeping away all that remained of tradition, hierarchy and order.
Evola’s critique was scathing: nothing in this final stage of the Kali Yuga was worthy of survival.
Evola sets up the ideal of the “active nihilist”who is prepared to act with violence against modern decadence. What did this mean in practice?
While Evola held himself above all political parties, he exerted a strong influence on young right-wing Italians who despaired of Italy’s return into the mainstream of liberal development.
Many compared their fate to that of Dante, who had lamented the passing of the Ghibelline order.
Young postwar neo-fascists sat at Evola’s feet to hear this oracle of aristocratic values and war with modernity.
Guiliano Salierni, a young MSI activist in the early 1950s, recalled Evola’s call for violence.
The neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo (ON) was founded in 1956 by Pino Rauti, one of Evola’s closest disciples. ON ideology was replete with Evolan terminology, including aristocracy, hierarchy, elite rule, political soldiers and warrior asceticism.
Its strategy corresponded to Evola’s initial postwar ideas, namely the reinforcement of the state, including the seizure of power by police, armed forces, veteran groups and youth organizations.
Giorgio Almirante, the MSI leader, hailed Evola as “our Marcuse—only better,” alluding to the Frankfurt School veteran Herbert Marcuse’s status as the doyen of the 1968 student revolutions.
The use of violence in Italian neo-fascism escalated with numerous bomb attacks and massacres, beginning with the Piazza Fontana explosion in Milan in April 1969.
Adriano Romauldi, a leading young neo-fascist, identified Evola in 1971 as the intellectual hero of militant right-wing youth in Italy “because the teaching of Evola is also a philosophy of total war.”
By 1975, the far-right underground adopted a leftist strategy in mounting attacks against the state itself (murders of officials, robberies in ministries).
The trend toward violence continued, so that by the late 1970s a cult of action replaced ideology itself, elevating the idea of combat to an existential duty.Neo-fascist terrorists such as Franco Freda and Mario Tuti frequently reprinted and cited Evola’s two most militant tracts, Metafisica della guerra (1935) and Dottrina ariana (1940), in praise of “heroic,” “exemplary” action without an instrumental purpose.
Inspired by these ideas of metaphysical stuggle, the underground bulletin Quex (1978–81) (from Hitlerjugend Quex, a Nazi youth hero) glorified Corneliu Codreanu’s “legionaries” and “fulfillment in heroic death” in the same breath as Evola’s “luminous forces against all tellurism and chaos.”
Groups such as Movimento Revoluzionario Popolare, Terza Positione and Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari subsequently unleashed a surge of black terrorism in Italy until the majority of militants had been captured or killed and a handful fled abroad. In late 1980, a cell of Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionarice (NAR) fugitives arrived in London, where they made contact with Britain’s far-right National Front (NF).
Roberto Fiore, a close associate of the imprisoned Mario Tuti; Massimo Morsello and his wife Marinella Rita; and Amadeo de Francisci and Stefano Tiraboschi were all subsequently convicted in absentia by a Rome court for NAR terrorist offenses involving armed conspiracy.
Inspired by Evola and Codreanu, Roberto Fiore would have a catalytic influence on the new ideological direction of the NF.
After its dramatic increases in membership and success at the polls in the strife-torn 1970s, the NF had seen its support draining to the new Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, which vigorously addressed industrial unrest, rising crime and weak immigration control.
This weakening and isolation of the NF had a radicalizing effect on its leaders and their ideology.
A younger generation of university-educated NF activists, represented by Nick Griffin, Derek Holland and Patrick Harrington, felt that the NF’s soggy mixture of reaction, concern over law and order and the immigrant threat to jobs and homes lacked any theoretical sophistication.
While the older NF leaders John Tyndall and Martin Webster were tainted by British neo-Nazism, the young men embraced the ideals of Italian neo-fascism.
Roberto Fiore and his colleagues helped the NF forge a new militant elitist philosophy that foreswore electoral strategies in favor of educating and training a fanatical, quasi-religious “New Man” in select cadres for a national revolution.
By 1983, this group—led by Griffin, Holland and Harrington—had broken away to form the NF “Political Soldier” faction. Cadres similar to Iron Guard legionary “nests” became the organizational unit, and training seminars were held at the Hampshire country house of Rosine de Bounevialle, the publisher of the Catholic anti-Semitic magazine Candour, originally founded by A. K. Chesterton.
Backed by Fiore, the “Political Soldiers” published a new journal, Rising (1982–85), which emphasized the spiritual and cultural basis of a new social order.
A revival of the countryside and a return to feudal values reflected Codreanu’s prewar attack on the decadence and materialism of urban life; nationalist communes were planned in upland areas of Britain.Archaic woodcut art juxtaposed knights and rural idylls with consumerism and modernity.
Evola’s most militant tract was discussed, especially his call for a “Great Holy War” fought for personal spiritual renewal paralleling the physical “Little Holy War” on a material plane against national or ideological enemies.
Like the hero of the Bhagavad Gita, Christian Crusaders, ancient Norse warriors and Roman legionaries were all united in the Aryan struggle for selftransformation and a nobler reality.
Some indication of this struggle was given in a paean to Franco Freda, Italy’s most notorious neo-fascist terrorist.
Derek Holland published 'The Political Soldier' (1984) as a manifesto of the new NF elite of racial nationalism to counter “the forces of Evil swamping the entire globe in an ocean of Filth, Corruption and Treason.”
Both the global dark age and the past failures of the NF could only be remedied by the Political Soldier, a “New Type of Man.”
Holland evoked Codreanu’s Legionary Movement of the Romanian Iron Guard, with its cult of death, as the outstanding example of political soldiery in the twentieth century: “[Men] willing to sacrifice anything and everything for the victory of their Ideal.”
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards of Iran were also cited as fanatical, spiritual warriors with a similar contempt for death. Evola’s anti-modernity and warrior ethics of the “Holy War” led the NF “Political Soldiers,” like their Italian models, to embrace pro-Islamic positions, with public support for the anti- Western, national revolutionary regimes of Muammar Qaddafi and Rûhollâh Khomeini in Libya and Iran.
By the end of 1989, Nick Griffin, Derek Holland and the Italians had finally left the NF to establish the International Third Position (ITP).
Evola’s ideas had a much wider impact beyond this Anglo-Italian revolutionary nationalist sect.
From the late 1970s, neo-fascist intellectuals sought to engage mainstream society in the discourse of the New Right. Following the founding of GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d’études sur la civilisation européenne) in Paris in 1969, new glossy magazines such as Elements, Totalité, Vouloir, Diorama Letterario and Elementi sprang up in France, Belgium and Italy to challenge liberal, egalitarian ideology.
The market and utilitarianism were rejected in the name of a superior spiritual view of life. Organic community was compared favorably with capitalist society and its quantitative, abstract relationships.
Racial origins, differences, and identity were mobilized to counter egalitarian and multiracial ideas.
Again, Roberto Fiore and the Italians in London acted as catalysts in promoting this intellectual discourse in Britain. Fiore was a close friend of Michael Walker, a former NF organizer in central London who began publishing the journal National Democrat in late 1981 (renamed The Scorpion in spring 1983).
As a linguist and translator, Walker was well placed to edit a New Right magazine in Britain, which offered readers articles on nationalism, anti-egalitarianism and the Conservative Revolution by Robert Steukers, the Belgian editor of Vouloir, and Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye of GRECE.
This new radical discourse had ample scope for Evola’s ideas of tradition against progress, hierarchy against equality, rule from above against democracy and the primacy of aristocratic over plebeian values. Evola’s contempt for America as the most advanced center of Western alienation from Tradition also interacted with a widespread mood of anti-Americanism during the 1980s.
Both the left and right condemned the cultural colonization of Europe by U.S. multinationals, Hollywood film and American television soaps, and the rapid rise of American-style consumerism.
McDonald’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola became key symbols of a banal American mass culture and its massive penetration of the postwar vassal states of Europe.Widespread opposition to the United States’ stationing of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe and attendant fears of the likely sacrifice of the Continent in any nuclear exchange between the superpowers also stoked these anti-American sentiments.
Michael Walker introduced Evola’s life and work to a wider English readership in 'The Scorpion' between 1984 and 1986.
His spiritual theory of race, anti-modernity and views on Jewish influence were located within his “superior, heroic and aristocratic conception of existence.”
The entire summer 1984 issue of the magazine was devoted to an attack on the secular, liberal notion of American statehood, divorced from any ethnic roots or culture.
Among its articles was a translation of Evola’s 1945 essay “American ‘Civilization,’” which saw America as the final stage of European decline into the “interior formlessness” of vacuous individualism, conformity and vulgarity under the universal aegis of money-making. Its mechanistic and rational philosophy of progress combined with a mundane horizon of prosperity to transform the world into an enormous suburban shopping mall.
This anti-American theme was extended by Evola’s ideas on a unified Europe’s need for a spiritual and supranational basis.
Only by opposing the current Westernization of the world could Europe challenge both superpowers for global hegemony.
Through these articles,Walker presented Evola as the champion of a European spiritual and national revival against the liberal, multiracial quagmire of the United States.
The international export of Julius Evola has added a vital strand to the contemporary radical right in the Anglo-American world and elsewhere.
Once Evola had embraced the mythic ideology of cultural decadence and rebirth, he identified self-transcendence with the higher, timeless spirituality of a lost world, which could only be reborn through catastrophic change.
Evola’s studies in Tantrism, oriental religions and the Western esoteric tradition also offer new intellectual horizons and widening access to fascist idealism.
His works on Zen and Taoism were matched by translations of Pascal Beverley Randolph’s Magia sexualis and several of Gustav Meyrink’s occult novels.
His dualist metaphysics of sex, derived from Otto Weininger, provided a key to world religions and occult doctrine highlighting the abyss of emancipatory, collectivist politics based on lunar spirituality.
His notion of the “Jewish spirit,” also from Weininger, has influenced Miguel Serrano’s “Esoteric Hitlerism.” Evola’s aristocratic world of Tradition, painted in the exotic colors of Hyperborean and Eastern mythology, juxtaposed with the “Jewish spirit,” offers an esoteric mystique to reactionary discourse and is attracting new audiences.
His rigorous New Age spirituality speaks directly to those who reject absolutely the leveling world of democracy, capitalism,multiracialism and technology at the outset of the twenty-first century.
Their acute sense of cultural chaos can find powerful relief in his ideal of total renewal.
The year 1998 witnessed a plethora of publications and conferences marking the anniversary of Evola’s birth.
A major U.S. New Age publisher, Inner Traditions, has so far published English-language editions of eight of Evola’s major monographs, while the right-wing Arun-Verlag has published several titles in German. Kshatriya, a Viennese intellectual right-wing journal devoted to Evola and Codreanu, provides a forum for Russian, German and Hungarian Evolans.
Even Black Metal music has taken up Evola, and Michael Moynihan, a rightwing U.S. industrial musician, has translated 'Men among the Ruins'.
In order to head toward a united Europe, the first step should consist of a concerted exit of all European nations from the United Nations, which is an illegitimate, promiscuous, and hypocritical association. Another obvious imperative should be to become emancipated in every aspect and in equal measure from both the United States and the USSR.
Here I will only hint at what concerns the form and the spiritual and doctrinal presuppositions of a united Europe.
The only genuine solution must have an organic character; the primary element should be a shaping force from within and from above, proper to an idea and a common tradition.
As I have indicated in another chapter, the concepts of fatherland and nation (or ethnic group) belong to an essentially naturalistic or "physical" plane. In a united Europe, fatherlands and nations may exist ...
What should be excluded is nationalism (with its monstrous appendix, namely imperialism) and chauvinism—in other words, every fanatical absolutization of a particular unit. Thus "European Empire," and not "Nation Europa" or "European Fatherland" should be the right term, in a doctrinal sense.
In the Europeans we should appeal to a feeling of higher order, qualitatively very different from the nationalistic feeling rooted in other strata of the human being.
The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) was previously displayed in the European medieval world, which safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity. In this world, individual States have the character of partial organic units, gravitating around a unum quod non est pars ("a one that is not a part," to use Dante's expression)—namely, a principle of unity, authority, and sovereignty of a different nature from that which is proper to each particular State. But the principle of the Empire can have such a dignity only by transcending the political sphere in the strict sense, founding and legitimizing itself with an idea, a tradition, and a power that is also spiritual. The limitations of the sovereignty of the single national units before an eminent right of the Empire have as their sole condition this transcendent dignity of the Empire; as far as structure is concerned, the whole will appear as an "organism composed of organisms," or as an organic federalism similar to that realized by Bismarck in the second German Reich, which was not acephalous. These are the essential traits of a true Empire.
What are the conditions and the opportunities for the realization of such an idea in Europe today? […] Because what is needed is an organic unity, the premise should rather be the integration and consolidation of every single nation as a hierarchical, united, and well-differentiated whole. The nature of the parts should reflect the nature of the whole.
What matters is the synergy and the opportunity for every common action.
Every organic unit is characterized by a principle of stability. We should not expect a stability of the whole, where there is no stability guaranteed in its very components. Even from this point of view, the elementary presupposition of an eventual united Europe appears to be the political integration of the single nations. European unity would always be precarious if it leaned on some external factor, like an international parliament lacking a common, higher authority, with representations from various democratic regimes; such regimes, because they are constantly and mutually conditioned from below, cannot in any way ensure a continuity of political will and direction.
What is required is not to impose a common regime on every European nation; however, an organic, hierarchical, anti-individualistic, and antidemocratic principle should be adequately implemented, even though in various forms adopted to different circumstances. Thus, the preliminary condition is a general antidemocratic cleansing, which at the present appears to be almost utopian. Democracy, on the one hand, and a European parliament that reproduces on a larger scale the depressing and pathetic sight of the European parliamentary systems on the other hand: all this would bring ridicule upon the idea of a united Europe. In general, we should think of an organic unity to be attained from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Only elites of individual European nations could understand one another and coordinate their work, overcoming every particularism and spirit of division, asserting higher interests and motives with their authority. A well-established "center" should exist in every nation; as a result of the harmony and the synergy of such centers, the higher European unity would organize itself and operate.
Overall, what should be promoted is a twofold process of integration: on the one hand, national integration through the acknowledgment of a substantial principle of authority that is the basis for the organic, anti-individualistic, and corporative formation of the various sociopolitical national forces; on the other hand, supernational European integration through the acknowledgment of a principle of authority that is as super-ordained toward that which is proper of single units (individual States), as it is toward the people included in each of these units. Without this, it is useless to talk about an organically united Europe.
Having put the problem in these terms, there are serious difficulties regarding the spiritual, not merely political, foundations required to implement this European unity. Where should we find these foundations ?
Obviously, it would be a pure Utopia to yearn to oppose in practical terms all the material aspects of modern civilization: among other things, this would involve surrendering the practical means that are necessary today for every defense and attack. However, it is always possible to establish a distance and a limit. It is possible to enclose that which is "modern" in a well-controlled material and "physical" domain, on the plane of mere means, and to superimpose upon it a higher order adequately upheld, in which revolutionary-conservative values are given unconditional acknowledgment. The Japan of yesterday demonstrated the possibility and the fecundity of a solution of this type. Only in that case could Europe represent something different, distinguish itself, and assume a new dignity among world powers.
The first European detoxification should concern this obsession with "antifascism," which is the catchphrase of the "crusade" that has left Europe in a pile of rubble. However, we cannot side either with those pro-European sympathizers who can only refer to what was attempted in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany before the war, toward the creation of a new order. These groups fail to recognize that Fascism and National Socialism were movements and regimes in which different and even contrasting tendencies coexisted; their development in the right, positive, revolutionary-conservative sense could have occurred only if circumstances had allowed for an adequate, further development, which was stricken down by the war they ignited and by their ensuing defeat. This is how we should at least proceed to a precise distinction, if we want to draw reference points from those movements.
Besides doctrinal difficulties, which I have examined, a radical European action finds its major obstacle in the lack of something that could represent a starting point, a firm support, and a center of crystallization. Before 1945 we could at least witness the wonderful sight of the principle of a supernational European Army, and the legionary spirit of volunteers from many nations who, having been organized in several divisions, fought on the Eastern front against the Soviets; at that time the foundation was the Third Reich. Today the only concrete, though partial, European initiatives of various governments are taken on a mere economic plane, without any deep ideological and ideal counterpart. Those who are sensitive to the idea of a united Europe in a higher sense are only isolated individuals, and not only are they not supported, but also they are even opposed by their own countries; and much more so, let me add, if their necessary antidemocratic and anti-Marxist profession of faith is openly declared. In effect, a European action must proceed in parallel with the rebirth and the revolutionary-conservative reorganization of the individual European countries: but to recognize this also means to acknowledge the disheartening magnitude of the task ahead.
Despite this, we could suggest the idea of an Order, whose members would act in the various nations, doing what they can to promote an eventual European unity, even in such unfavorable conditions. The enthusiasm of young militants who conduct an active propaganda should be commended, but it is not enough. We should count on people with a specific qualification, who occupied or intended to occupy key positions in their own nations. What kind of men could be up to this task? Assuming bourgeois society and civilization as a reference point, it is necessary to win over to the cause and to recruit people who neither spiritually belong to the bourgeoisie nor are affected by it, or who are already beyond it. A first group should be composed of members of ancient European families that are still "standing" and who are valuable not only because of the name they carry, but also because of who they are, because of their personality. It is very difficult to find such men but there are some exceptions, and even during and after the last World War, some of these figures emerged. Sometimes it is a matter of awakening something in the blood that has not been entirely lost but still exists in a latent state. In these elements we would expect to find the presence of congenital, "racial" dispositions (racial in the elitist and non biological-racist sense of the term) that guarantee an action and a reaction according to a precise and secure style, free from theories and abstract principles, in a spontaneous and complete adherence to those values that every man of good birth considered obvious before the rise of the Third Estate and of what followed it.
In regard to a second and more numerous section of the Order, I have in mind men who correspond to the human type shaped here and there through selections and experiences of an essentially warrior character, and through certain disciplines. Existentially speaking, this type is well versed in the art of "demythologization": it recognizes as illusion and hypocrisy the entire tenacious legacy of the ideologies that have been employed as instruments, not to bring down this or that European nation, but to deal a deadly blow to the whole of Europe. These men harbor a healthy intolerance for any rhetoric; an indifference toward intellectualism and politicians' gimmicks; a realism of a higher type; the propensity for impersonal activity; and the capability of a precise and resolute commitment. In the past, in some elite fighting units, today among paratroopers and analogous corps (e.g., Marines and others), some disciplines and experiences favor the formation of this human type, which displays the same traits in various nations. A common way of being constitutes a potentially connective element, beyond nationalities. By winning over these elements to the European cause, we could constitute, with a "force at the ready," the most active cadres of such an Order. If direct and integrating communications were established between these two groups (which is not as difficult as it may first appear), the foundation would be laid. For these men, the most important concerns should be the European idea in terms of values and of worldview, followed by the Order and then by the nation.
Naturally, the personality of an authentic leader at the center and head of the Order is of the utmost importance. Unfortunately, no such person exists today: it would be dangerous and rash to see him in any of the figures who are currently working here and there, albeit with the best of intentions, selflessly and bravely, to form European groups. One has to consider here that no one could have detected in advance the potential of any of the men who later became leaders of great movements. Nevertheless, it is easy to see the great advantages in the case where such a man, in whom authority and status now became manifest, had been there from the beginning.
We do not need to repeat what the basic requirement is for such a European action to mature and bear any results. One must first get rid of the political class, which holds the power in almost all European countries in this time of interregnum and European slavery. This would be immediately possible if a sufficient mass of today's peoples could be reawakened from their stupefied and stultified condition that has been systematically created by the prevailing political-social ideas.
But the greatest difficulty for the true European idea is the deep crisis of the authority principle and the idea of the State. This will seem contradictory to many, because they believe the strengthening of that principle and that idea would bring in its wake a schismatic division and thus a rigid, anti-European pluralism. We have already shown why this is not at all the case, when we were speaking of the Männerbünde and indicating the higher level that characterizes the idea of a true State and its authority, in contrast to everything that is merely "folk" or "nation." For the individual, true political loyalty includes, besides a certain heroic readiness, a certain degree of transcendence, hence something not merely nature-bound. There is no break, but rather continuity when one crosses from the national level to the supernational: the selfsame inner readiness will be required as in the times of Indo-European origins and of the best feudal regimes, in which it was also a matter of the voluntary union of free powers, proud to belong to a higher order of things that did not oppress but rather embraced them. The real obstacles are only fanatical nationalism and the collapse of society and community.
In summary, let it be said that breaking through into more thoughtful minds is the idea that in the current state of affairs, the uniting of Europe into a single bloc is the indispensable prerequisite for its continuation in a form other than an empty geographical concept on the same materialistic level as that of the powers that seek to control the world. For all the reasons already explained, we know that this crisis involves a dual inner problem, if under these circumstances one hopes to establish a firm foundation, a deeper sense, and an organic character for a possible united Europe. On the one hand, an initiative in the sense of a spiritual and psychic detoxification must be taken against what is commonly known as "modern culture." On the other, there is the question of the kind of "metaphysics" that is capable, today, of supporting both a national and a supernational principle of true authority and legitimacy.
The dual problem can be translated into a dual imperative. It remains to be seen which and how many men, in spite of it all, still stand upright among so many ruins, in order that they may make this task their own.
MEN AMONG THE RUINS
EXCERPTS
In order to head toward a united Europe, the first step should consist of a concerted exit of all European nations from the United Nations, which is an illegitimate, promiscuous, and hypocritical association. Another obvious imperative should be to become emancipated in every aspect and in equal measure from both the United States and the USSR.
Here I will only hint at what concerns the form and the spiritual and doctrinal presuppositions of a united Europe.
The only genuine solution must have an organic character; the primary element should be a shaping force from within and from above, proper to an idea and a common tradition.
As I have indicated in another chapter, the concepts of fatherland and nation (or ethnic group) belong to an essentially naturalistic or "physical" plane. In a united Europe, fatherlands and nations may exist ...
What should be excluded is nationalism (with its monstrous appendix, namely imperialism) and chauvinism—in other words, every fanatical absolutization of a particular unit. Thus "European Empire," and not "Nation Europa" or "European Fatherland" should be the right term, in a doctrinal sense.
In the Europeans we should appeal to a feeling of higher order, qualitatively very different from the nationalistic feeling rooted in other strata of the human being.
The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) was previously displayed in the European medieval world, which safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity. In this world, individual States have the character of partial organic units, gravitating around a unum quod non est pars ("a one that is not a part," to use Dante's expression)—namely, a principle of unity, authority, and sovereignty of a different nature from that which is proper to each particular State. But the principle of the Empire can have such a dignity only by transcending the political sphere in the strict sense, founding and legitimizing itself with an idea, a tradition, and a power that is also spiritual. The limitations of the sovereignty of the single national units before an eminent right of the Empire have as their sole condition this transcendent dignity of the Empire; as far as structure is concerned, the whole will appear as an "organism composed of organisms," or as an organic federalism similar to that realized by Bismarck in the second German Reich, which was not acephalous. These are the essential traits of a true Empire.
What are the conditions and the opportunities for the realization of such an idea in Europe today? […] Because what is needed is an organic unity, the premise should rather be the integration and consolidation of every single nation as a hierarchical, united, and well-differentiated whole. The nature of the parts should reflect the nature of the whole.
What matters is the synergy and the opportunity for every common action.
Every organic unit is characterized by a principle of stability. We should not expect a stability of the whole, where there is no stability guaranteed in its very components. Even from this point of view, the elementary presupposition of an eventual united Europe appears to be the political integration of the single nations. European unity would always be precarious if it leaned on some external factor, like an international parliament lacking a common, higher authority, with representations from various democratic regimes; such regimes, because they are constantly and mutually conditioned from below, cannot in any way ensure a continuity of political will and direction.
What is required is not to impose a common regime on every European nation; however, an organic, hierarchical, anti-individualistic, and antidemocratic principle should be adequately implemented, even though in various forms adopted to different circumstances. Thus, the preliminary condition is a general antidemocratic cleansing, which at the present appears to be almost utopian. Democracy, on the one hand, and a European parliament that reproduces on a larger scale the depressing and pathetic sight of the European parliamentary systems on the other hand: all this would bring ridicule upon the idea of a united Europe. In general, we should think of an organic unity to be attained from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Only elites of individual European nations could understand one another and coordinate their work, overcoming every particularism and spirit of division, asserting higher interests and motives with their authority. A well-established "center" should exist in every nation; as a result of the harmony and the synergy of such centers, the higher European unity would organize itself and operate.
Overall, what should be promoted is a twofold process of integration: on the one hand, national integration through the acknowledgment of a substantial principle of authority that is the basis for the organic, anti-individualistic, and corporative formation of the various sociopolitical national forces; on the other hand, supernational European integration through the acknowledgment of a principle of authority that is as super-ordained toward that which is proper of single units (individual States), as it is toward the people included in each of these units. Without this, it is useless to talk about an organically united Europe.
Having put the problem in these terms, there are serious difficulties regarding the spiritual, not merely political, foundations required to implement this European unity. Where should we find these foundations ?
Obviously, it would be a pure Utopia to yearn to oppose in practical terms all the material aspects of modern civilization: among other things, this would involve surrendering the practical means that are necessary today for every defense and attack. However, it is always possible to establish a distance and a limit. It is possible to enclose that which is "modern" in a well-controlled material and "physical" domain, on the plane of mere means, and to superimpose upon it a higher order adequately upheld, in which revolutionary-conservative values are given unconditional acknowledgment. The Japan of yesterday demonstrated the possibility and the fecundity of a solution of this type. Only in that case could Europe represent something different, distinguish itself, and assume a new dignity among world powers.
The first European detoxification should concern this obsession with "antifascism," which is the catchphrase of the "crusade" that has left Europe in a pile of rubble. However, we cannot side either with those pro-European sympathizers who can only refer to what was attempted in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany before the war, toward the creation of a new order. These groups fail to recognize that Fascism and National Socialism were movements and regimes in which different and even contrasting tendencies coexisted; their development in the right, positive, revolutionary-conservative sense could have occurred only if circumstances had allowed for an adequate, further development, which was stricken down by the war they ignited and by their ensuing defeat. This is how we should at least proceed to a precise distinction, if we want to draw reference points from those movements.
Besides doctrinal difficulties, which I have examined, a radical European action finds its major obstacle in the lack of something that could represent a starting point, a firm support, and a center of crystallization. Before 1945 we could at least witness the wonderful sight of the principle of a supernational European Army, and the legionary spirit of volunteers from many nations who, having been organized in several divisions, fought on the Eastern front against the Soviets; at that time the foundation was the Third Reich. Today the only concrete, though partial, European initiatives of various governments are taken on a mere economic plane, without any deep ideological and ideal counterpart. Those who are sensitive to the idea of a united Europe in a higher sense are only isolated individuals, and not only are they not supported, but also they are even opposed by their own countries; and much more so, let me add, if their necessary antidemocratic and anti-Marxist profession of faith is openly declared. In effect, a European action must proceed in parallel with the rebirth and the revolutionary-conservative reorganization of the individual European countries: but to recognize this also means to acknowledge the disheartening magnitude of the task ahead.
Despite this, we could suggest the idea of an Order, whose members would act in the various nations, doing what they can to promote an eventual European unity, even in such unfavorable conditions. The enthusiasm of young militants who conduct an active propaganda should be commended, but it is not enough. We should count on people with a specific qualification, who occupied or intended to occupy key positions in their own nations. What kind of men could be up to this task? Assuming bourgeois society and civilization as a reference point, it is necessary to win over to the cause and to recruit people who neither spiritually belong to the bourgeoisie nor are affected by it, or who are already beyond it. A first group should be composed of members of ancient European families that are still "standing" and who are valuable not only because of the name they carry, but also because of who they are, because of their personality. It is very difficult to find such men but there are some exceptions, and even during and after the last World War, some of these figures emerged. Sometimes it is a matter of awakening something in the blood that has not been entirely lost but still exists in a latent state. In these elements we would expect to find the presence of congenital, "racial" dispositions (racial in the elitist and non biological-racist sense of the term) that guarantee an action and a reaction according to a precise and secure style, free from theories and abstract principles, in a spontaneous and complete adherence to those values that every man of good birth considered obvious before the rise of the Third Estate and of what followed it.
In regard to a second and more numerous section of the Order, I have in mind men who correspond to the human type shaped here and there through selections and experiences of an essentially warrior character, and through certain disciplines. Existentially speaking, this type is well versed in the art of "demythologization": it recognizes as illusion and hypocrisy the entire tenacious legacy of the ideologies that have been employed as instruments, not to bring down this or that European nation, but to deal a deadly blow to the whole of Europe. These men harbor a healthy intolerance for any rhetoric; an indifference toward intellectualism and politicians' gimmicks; a realism of a higher type; the propensity for impersonal activity; and the capability of a precise and resolute commitment. In the past, in some elite fighting units, today among paratroopers and analogous corps (e.g., Marines and others), some disciplines and experiences favor the formation of this human type, which displays the same traits in various nations. A common way of being constitutes a potentially connective element, beyond nationalities. By winning over these elements to the European cause, we could constitute, with a "force at the ready," the most active cadres of such an Order. If direct and integrating communications were established between these two groups (which is not as difficult as it may first appear), the foundation would be laid. For these men, the most important concerns should be the European idea in terms of values and of worldview, followed by the Order and then by the nation.
Naturally, the personality of an authentic leader at the center and head of the Order is of the utmost importance. Unfortunately, no such person exists today: it would be dangerous and rash to see him in any of the figures who are currently working here and there, albeit with the best of intentions, selflessly and bravely, to form European groups. One has to consider here that no one could have detected in advance the potential of any of the men who later became leaders of great movements. Nevertheless, it is easy to see the great advantages in the case where such a man, in whom authority and status now became manifest, had been there from the beginning.
We do not need to repeat what the basic requirement is for such a European action to mature and bear any results. One must first get rid of the political class, which holds the power in almost all European countries in this time of interregnum and European slavery. This would be immediately possible if a sufficient mass of today's peoples could be reawakened from their stupefied and stultified condition that has been systematically created by the prevailing political-social ideas.
But the greatest difficulty for the true European idea is the deep crisis of the authority principle and the idea of the State. This will seem contradictory to many, because they believe the strengthening of that principle and that idea would bring in its wake a schismatic division and thus a rigid, anti-European pluralism. We have already shown why this is not at all the case, when we were speaking of the Männerbünde and indicating the higher level that characterizes the idea of a true State and its authority, in contrast to everything that is merely "folk" or "nation." For the individual, true political loyalty includes, besides a certain heroic readiness, a certain degree of transcendence, hence something not merely nature-bound. There is no break, but rather continuity when one crosses from the national level to the supernational: the selfsame inner readiness will be required as in the times of Indo-European origins and of the best feudal regimes, in which it was also a matter of the voluntary union of free powers, proud to belong to a higher order of things that did not oppress but rather embraced them. The real obstacles are only fanatical nationalism and the collapse of society and community.
In summary, let it be said that breaking through into more thoughtful minds is the idea that in the current state of affairs, the uniting of Europe into a single bloc is the indispensable prerequisite for its continuation in a form other than an empty geographical concept on the same materialistic level as that of the powers that seek to control the world. For all the reasons already explained, we know that this crisis involves a dual inner problem, if under these circumstances one hopes to establish a firm foundation, a deeper sense, and an organic character for a possible united Europe. On the one hand, an initiative in the sense of a spiritual and psychic detoxification must be taken against what is commonly known as "modern culture." On the other, there is the question of the kind of "metaphysics" that is capable, today, of supporting both a national and a supernational principle of true authority and legitimacy.
The dual problem can be translated into a dual imperative. It remains to be seen which and how many men, in spite of it all, still stand upright among so many ruins, in order that they may make this task their own.
Julius Evola
(from "Men Among the Ruins")
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