Julius Evola

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (Roma, 19 de maio de 1898 11 de junho de

1974), mais conhecido como Julius Evola, foi um filsofo, escritor, pintor e
poeta italiano do sculo XX, em cuja obra se tm inspirado algumas correntes
esotricas contemporneas e pensadores tradicionalistas.[1] Evola
consideradava suas posies e valores espirituais como aristocrata,
tradicionalista, masculino, herico e desafiadoramente reacionrio.

Seu pai, Vicenzo Evola, pertencia pequena nobreza da Siclia. Sabe-se muito
pouco acerca da sua infncia e adolescncia, mas ter-se- sentido atrado
bem cedo pela filosofia de Nietzsche, Michelstaedter e Otto Weininger, bem
como pela esttica e filosofia do futurismo de Papini e Marinetti, e pelo
Dadaismo. Evola comeou por ser conhecido como pintor dadasta.

Em 1917 mobilizado para a Primeira Guerra Mundial como oficial de

artilharia, mas no chega a combater. Contacta com a filosofia budista em
1921, comeando a dedicar-se poesia e filosofia.

Em 1926 publica L'uomo come potenza, adotando uma viso tntrica da

natureza. Evola frequentava ento os crculos antroposficos inspirados na
obra Rudolf Steiner, tendo vindo a colaborar desde 1924 na revista Ultra,
ligada ao ambiente romano teosfico de Decio e Olga Calvari, Ignis, Biyichnis
e Atanor.

Na Itlia vigorava o regime fascista de Mussolini, estando ento Evola ligado

s correntes aristocrticas antifascistas, colaborando em ll Mondo e Lo Stato
democratico. Em 1928, publica o livro Imperialismo pagano, onde critica
violentamente o cristianismo e pede que o Fascismo rompa com a Igreja
Catlica. Evola retomava ali o velho conflito entre guelfos e gibelinos,
tomando partido pelos segundos, que afirmavam que o Imprio romanogermnico, herdeiro dos Csares de Roma era, tanto como a Igreja, uma
instituio de carcter sobrenatural.

Em 1930, conclui a publicao dos dois volumes de Teoria e fenomenologia

dell 'Indivduo Assoluto, onde quer superar a dicotomia do "Eu" e "No Eu"

numa perspectiva gnstica e budista. No mesmo ano, funda com o

psicanalista Emilio Servadio a revista La Torre caracterizada por um
antimodernismo neopago de pendor hermtico.

Em 1934, publica Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, considerada nos

ambientes neofascistas como a sua obra mais importante. Nessa obra, sob a
influncia da interpretao do mito de Schelling, da viso cclica das
sociedades humanas de Jacob Bachofen, e da hiptese de Herman Wirth
sobre a existncia de um centro rctico primordial,[2] Evola apela a um
regresso s fontes pags da antiguidade e a um passado "hiperbreo"
comum s estirpes indo-europeias.

A sua aproximao ao crculo poltico de Mussolini d-se durante os anos 30,

quando se acende a luta entre o regime fascista e a Igreja Catlica. Em 1937,
Evola manifesta-se contrrio ao "racismo biolgico", defendendo em
alternativa um "racismo espiritual", publicando em 1941 o livro Sintesi di
dottrina della razza, bem acolhida no seio do regime.

Em 1945, Evola est em Viena, quando a cidade foi bombardeada, sendo

ferido na coluna vertebral e ficando com membros inferiores paralisados.

Aps a queda do Fascismo, Evola vai fazer uma sua avaliao crtica do
regime de Mussolini - considerando-o plebeu, demaggico e esttico - e
lanar alguns das grandes linhas de pensamento do que vir a ser
neofascismo na segunda metade do sculo XX.

Publicou o seu ltimo livro em 1970: Il fascismo: Saggio di una analisi critica
dal punto di vista della destra. Evola sublinhou um herico pessimismo e a
necessidade de restaurar valores tradicionais sob uma nova elite. Na sua
viso, a histria desenvolve-se por ciclos, e o mundo moderno, que classifica
de "igualitrio, materialista e hedonista", dirige-se para uma crise e
catstrofe final, a partir da qual uma nova elite criar um novo tipo de
Estado, numa nova ordem que ser a civilt solare uma civilizao do sol
que restabelecer a Tradio. A Itlia, sendo na sua opinio uma terra de
sntese ou mistura de paganismo Nrdico e Mediterrnico, tinha potencial
para liderar o processo que levar a essa nova civilizao solar.

A urna contendo as cinzas de Julius Evola, de acordo com as suas ltimas

vontades, foi transportada para o glaciar do Monte Rosa, a quatro mil e
duzentos metros de altitude, por uma "patrulha" de discpulos conduzida por
guias alpinos.

In english

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (Italian: [vola];[1] 19 May 1898 11 June 1974),
better known as Julius Evola, was an Italian philosopher, painter, and
esotericist. Evola regarded his perspectives and spiritual values as
aristocratic, masculine, traditionalist, heroic and defiantly reactionary.

Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of
unleashed materialistic appetites, spiritual oblivion and dissolution. To
counter this and call in a primordial rebirth, Evola presented his world of
Tradition. The core trilogy of Evola's works are generally regarded as Revolt
Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins, and Ride the Tiger.
According to one scholar, "Evolas thought can be considered one of the most
radically and consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and
antipopular systems in the twentieth century."[2] Much of Evola's theories
and writings is centered on Evola's own idiosyncratic spiritualism and
mysticismthe inner life. The philosophy covered themes such as
Hermeticism, the metaphysics of war and of sex, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism,
mountaineering, the Holy Grail, the essence and history of civilisations,
decadence, and various philosophic and religious Traditions dealing with both
the Classics and the Orient.

Evola's work was influential on fascists and neofascists,[3][4] though he was

never a member of the Italian National Fascist Party or the Italian Social
Republic and declared himself an anti-fascist.[5] He regarded his position as
that of a sympathetic right-wing intellectual, saw potential in the movement
and wished to reform its errors, to a position in line with his own views. One
of his successes was in regard to the racial laws; his advocacy of a spiritual
consideration of race won out in the debate in Italy, rather than a solely
biological reductionism concept popular in Germany. Since World War II many
Radical Traditionalist, New Right, Conservative Revolutionary, fascist, and
Third Positionist groups have taken inspiration from him, as well as several

apolitical occultists, such as Thomas Karlsson and Massimo Scaligero.

Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Early years
1.2 Entry into esotericism
1.3 Relationship with Fascism
1.4 Post-World War II
1.5 Death
2 Philosophy
2.1 Tradition
2.2 Views on Christianity
2.3 Paths to enlightenment
2.4 Ascesis and initiation
2.5 Metaphysics of war
2.6 Metaphysics of sex
2.7 Politics
2.8 Schutzstaffel
2.9 Race
3 Influence
4 Selected books and articles
5 Footnotes
6 References
7 External links
Biography[edit]
Early years[edit]

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome to a Sicilian family of

aristocratic cultural ethos corresponding, in unknown degree of "nobiliary
legitimacy", to the honorific and local title of reverential politesse, "Baron".
Whether extrinsically of "legal-official" titular peerage, literally "baronial", the
status of Evola and his ancestry is not currently known; in any event, the
family was culturally ultra-aristocratic and old-guard Catholic, and this
constituted the formation of his earliest personality (Evola himself would
dismiss the matter as irrelevant following his hyper-metaphysical world-view).
[citation needed] During his youth, he studied engineering and received
excellent grades, but did not complete his studies because he "did not want
to be bourgeoisie". In his teenage years he immersed himself in painting,
which he considered to be one of his natural talents, and literature including
Oscar Wilde and Gabriele d'Annunzio, and served as his first introduction to
philosophers such as Nietzsche and Otto Weininger. He served during World
War I as an artillery officer on the Asiago plateau. After the war, attracted to
the avant-garde, Evola briefly associated with Filippo Marinetti's Futurist
movement, but became a prominent representative of Dadaism in Italy
through his painting, poetry, and collaboration on the shortly published
journal, Revue Bleu. In 1922, after concluding that avant-garde art was
becoming commercialized and stiffened into academic convention, he
reduced his focus on artistic expression such as painting and poetry.[6]

Entry into esotericism[edit]

Around 1920, his interests led him into spiritual, transcendental, and "suprarational" 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. He had also used
hallucinogenic drugs to experience altered states of consciousness during
this period, but later came to criticize such drugs in Ride the Tiger, as he did
not consider stimulation as a means to transcendence.

In 1927, along with other Italian esotericists, he founded the Gruppo di Ur

(the Ur Group). The group's aim was to provide a "soul" to the burgeoning
Fascist movement of the time through the revival of an ancient Roman
Paganism.[7]

Relationship with Fascism[edit]

Evola never joined Mussolini's National Fascist Party, he considered himself

an anti-fascist, and catalogued fascist squadristi as peasants.[5] Mussolini

considered Evola one of the "hysterical fanatics" who could serve the fascist
interests.[5] According to Daniel McCarthy:

At one point, il Duce or one of his underlings asked Evola why he

hadnt joined the Fascist Party proper. Evola replied that the continued
existence of the party proved the failure of fascism. After all, if the state had
become all and absorbed all lesser allegiances, how could there be such a
thing as a party, which, as the word indicates, represents a partial or
special interest?[8]
Evola was one of a number of right-wing intellectuals who opposed Benito
Mussolini's Lateran Accords with the Roman Catholic Church and rejected the
Fascist party's nationalism and its focus on mass movement mob politics; he
hoped to influence the regime toward his own variation on fascist racial
theories and his "Tradionalist" philosophy. Early in 1930, Evola launched La
Torre [The Tower], a bi-weekly review, to voice his conservative-revolutionary
ideas 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 likeminded 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 [The Fascist Regime].

Mussolini read Evola's Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race (Sintesi di Dottrina

della Razza) in August 1941, and met with Evola to offer him his praise. Evola
later recounted that Mussolini had found in his work a uniquely Roman form
of fascist racism distinct from that found in Nazi Germany. With Mussolini's
backing, Evola launched the minor-journal Sangue e Spirito [Blood and Spirit].
While not always in agreement with German racial theorists, Evola traveled to
Germany in February 1942 and obtained support for German collaboration on
Sangue e Spirito from leading Nazi race theorists.[9]

Evola consistently and publicly criticized Fascism, but has often been wrongly
accused of being a Fascist himself or a Fascist supporter, because he
critiqued Fascism from the right rather than from the left. 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.[10] Italian Fascism went into decline when,
during the midst of the war in 1943, 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 Otto Skorzeny in 1943.

After the Italian surrender to the Allies on 8 September 1943, Evola moved to
Germany, where he spent the remainder of World War II, also working as a
researcher on Freemasonry for the SS Ahnenerbe in Vienna[citation needed].
The research on Freemasonry resulted in a document titled "Freimaurerei:
Geschichte und Mythos" [Freemasonry: History and Myth], published by the
Ahnenerbe in limited copies with his name as editor-in-chief.[citation needed]

It was Evola's custom to walk around the city during bombing raids in order to
better 'ponder his destiny'. During one such raid, in March or April 1945, a
shell fragment damaged his spinal cord and he became paralyzed from the
waist down, remaining so for the remainder of his life.[11]

Post-World War II[edit]

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
The Path of Cinnabar (1963).

In the post-war years, Evola's writings were held in high esteem by members
of the neo-fascist movement in Italy, and because of this, he was put on trial
from June through November 1951 on the charge of attempting to revive
Fascism in Italy. He was acquitted because he could prove that he was never
a member of the Fascist party, and that all accusations were made without
evidence to prove that his writings glorified Fascism.[12] Ride the Tiger,
Evola's last major work, which saw him examining dissolution and subversion
in a world in which God was dead, saw him rejecting the possibility of any
political/collective revival of Tradition due to his belief that the modern world
had fallen too far into the Kali Yuga for any such thing to be possible. Instead

of this and rather than advocating a return to religion as Rene Guenon had,
he crafted what he considered an apolitical manual for surviving and
ultimately transcending the Kali Yuga. This idea was summed up in the title of
the book, the Tantric metaphor of "Riding the Tiger" which in general practice,
consisted of turning things that were considered inhibitory to spiritual
progress by mainstream Brahmanical society for example, meat, alcohol,
and in very rare circumstances, sex were all employed by Tantric
practitioners into a means of spiritual transcendence. The process that Evola
described involved potentially making use of everything from modern music,
hallucinogenic drugs, relationships with the opposite sex, and even
substituting the atmosphere of an urban existence for the Theophany that
Traditionalists had identified in virgin nature.[13]

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

Philosophy[edit]
Friedrich Nietzsche heavily affected Evola's thought. However, Evola criticized
Nietzsche for lacking the "transcendent element" in his philosophy, thus
ultimately leading to the latter's mental collapse in 1889. A reference point is
needed according to Evola, and this point cannot be reached with senses or
logic but with transcendental experiences achieved through symbolism of the
heroic element in Man.[14]

Tradition[edit]
Evola's systematic and detailed references to ancient and modern texts make
it difficult to speak about influences, though affinities could exist between
Evola and Plato, Oswald Spengler, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur de
Gobineau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Meister Eckhart, Homer, Jacob Boehme, Ren
Gunon and several Catholic thinkers like Juan Donoso Corts and Joseph de
Maistre. The Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico provided Evola
with the concepts of primordial heroic law, "natural heroic rights", and the
meaning of the Indo-European Latin term vir as indicative of "wisdom,
priesthood and kingship." Crucial to Evola's formulation of the idea of "solar
masculinity" versus "chthonic masculinity" and matriarchal regression was
the maverick 19th century Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen. Other
prominent, philosophically foundational influences for Evola include the

ancient Aryo-Hindu scripture that teaches the concept of "detached

violence", the Bhagavad Gita, and the Aryan kshatriya sage Siddartha
Gotama, the historical Buddha.[15]

Like Gunon, he believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga of the Hindu
tradition, the Dark Age of unleashed, materialistic appetites. The Kali Yuga is
the last of four ages, which form a cycle from the Satya Yuga or Golden Age
through the Kali Yuga or the Hesiodic Iron Age. Evola argued that both Italian
fascism and National Socialism held hope for a reconstitution of the
primordial "celestial race."[16]

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

In the Golden Age existed in the dominating elites, the "Divine Kings", a
convergence of the two powers, namely the spiritual principle and the royal
principle. From the Aryo-Hindu tradition, he sees the human type of the
Rajarshi as an embodiment of the Golden Age ideal and quotes the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1.4.11): "This is why nothing is greater than the
warrior nobility; the priests themselves venerate the warrior when the
consecration of the king occurs." Evola argues that in the Hindu tradition are
plenty of instances of kings who already possess or eventually achieve a
spiritual knowledge greater than that possessed by the later-times
degenerated brahmana. This is the case, for instance, of King Jaivala, whose
knowledge was not imparted by any priest, but rather reserved to the warrior
caste; also, in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (4.3.1) King Janaka teaches the
brahmana Yajnavalkya the doctrine of the transcendent Self. Evola explains
that, according to tradition, the primordial gnosis was handed down, starting
from Ikshvaku, in regal succession;[17] the same Sun Dynasty (surya-vamsa)
was connected with blue-eyed, fair-skinned[18] Gautama Buddha's

aristocratic Aryan family (Sutta Nipata, 3). In the laws of the second or Silver
Age, the Laws of Manu, the text states "rulers do not prosper without priests
and priests do not thrive without rulers" and that "the priest is said to be the
root of the law, and the ruler is the peak" (11.321-2;11.83-4).

Views on Christianity[edit]
In reference to Christianity, Evola distinguished between 1) the mystical
character of primitive Christianity and its later social history on the one hand,
and 2) the primordial-Hyperborean elements and the decadent Judaic
elements on the other. In Revolt Against the Modern World, he asserts "in the
symbolism of Christ are traces of a mysteric pattern":p:281 and "Jesus' saying
in Matthew (11:12) concerning the violence suffered by the kingdom of
Heaven and the revival of the Davidic saying: 'You are gods' (John 10:34),
belong to elements that exercised virtually no influence on the main pathos
of early Christianity" (Revolt, :p:284). Evola states "the Christian legend of
the three magi is an attempt to claim for Christianity a traditional character in
the superior sense I give to the term." [19] In the same work, Evola argues
"the Jewish notion of a Messiah and the Christian notion of God's Kingdom,
which many people believe to have greatly influenced the medieval imperial
myth, are nothing but an echo of the ancient and pre-Christian Aryo-Iranian
concept" of the Saoshyant as "lord of a future, triumphal kingdom of the God
of Light" and "slayer of the Ahrimanic dark forces".[20] Evola recalls the
mysterious figure of the priest-king Melchizedek as a primary point of
juncture with the primordial sacral-royal Tradition of the origins. Abraham
receives an almost feudal spiritual investiture from Melchizedek in the biblical
episode of Genesis 14, giving the mysterious priest-king tithes, thus
symbolizing the Abrahamic tradition's implicit dependency (cf. St. Paul: "It is
beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior", Hebrews 7:1-3).
Evola often notes the role of the "regal religion according to Melchizedek" in
the Ghibelline ideology (the medieval Italian faction supporting the Holy
Roman Emperor against the papacy). Evola finds the testimony of Eginhard
significant, who states that after Charlemagne was consecrated and hailed
with the formula, "Long life and victory to Charles the Great, crowned by God,
great and peaceful emperor of the Romans!" the pope "prostrated himself
(adoravit) before Charles, according to the ritual established at the time of
the ancient emperors." Evola emphasizes how the Holy Roman Emperor
Sigismund (13681437), founder of the militant-Catholic chivalric Order of the
Dragon, continuing a long tradition of Christian-Roman and Byzantine
imperial dominance in religious matters, summoned the Council of Constance
in 1413, to be held 1414-18 in order to purify the clergy from schisms and
anarchy.[21] The Ghibelline conspiracy being the overwhelming of the
Vatican's spiritual authority with the secular power of the city state. The

internecine warfare led to an apocalyptic interpretation by Russian Symbolists

of Nietzsche's appropriations.[22]

The classical Traditional polity is structured according to a strict hierarchy of

sociopolitical functions, where the lower functions are concerned with mere
matter and organic vitality and the ascending functions progressively ruled
by spirit. This order, in which powers of spirit correlate to societal status,
Evola finds crystallized in the Indian caste system, the Republic of Plato,
ancient Iranian society, and the medieval hierarchical class divisions between
peasants, burghers, nobility and the clergy and military religious orders. The
involution through the cycle of the ages was mirrored in the law of the
regression of the castes, from the primal "heaven-born" kings to the
deconsecrated slavish usurpers and raceless pariahs of the present. Evola
saw the Ghibelline dynasty of Hohenstauffen emperors (11521271) as the
Germanic champion of the primordial "sacred regality" in a renewed Holy
Roman Empire. Once the solar, golden, sacred regality of the mythical first
age fell, power devolved upon a lunar, silver, feminized priestly caste before
an unconsecrated warrior nobility struggled against it, announcing the Bronze
Age. Then power shifts to the mercantile caste, represented by the Italian
comune, Freemasonry, the Jewish financial oligarchy of the Renaissance, and
New World American Judeo-Protestant plutocracy. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, organized labour and Marxist-Trotskyite subverters sought
to transfer power to the last caste of slaves or sudras, or the consumerpariah, reducing all values to matter, machines, dysgenic egalitarianism and
the reign of abstract quantity.

Paths to enlightenment[edit]
The path to enlightenment is the chief subject of a number of Evola's works.
First and foremost is the Buddhist ascesis as he rediscovered it following over
two thousand years of obstruction of the Buddha's teachings (The Doctrine of
Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist
Texts). He tries to show the ways that allow a man to survive spiritually intact
in the modern age of obscuration and to achieve supra-human liberation or
transcendence. Evola based his interpretation of Buddhism on the original
Pali Canon, rejected western interpretations of Buddhism as a humanitarian
religion of compassion for all beings, held reincarnation as a false tenet not
found in the original Pali Canon and saw the Mahayana tradition as heterodox
along with certain aspects of Theravada.[23]

Even in his book Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor

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

Ascesis and initiation[edit]

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

Metaphysics of war[edit]
In his Metaphysics of War, Evola describes how adapting the language of war
can be a means through which the warrior can be called to a higher form of
spiritual existence. Towards this aim he adopts the language of greater and
lesser jihad, explaining how the greater jihad of spiritual struggle can help
one transform oneself and create a metaphysical basis for opposing
modernity. He also explains how the use of spiritual language in warfare is
metaphysically appropriate.

Evola rejected pacifism as it, according the theory, was materialistic and
made people comfortable and weak in their existence, while war breaks the
routine of "comfortable life" and offers a transfiguring knowledge of life: "life
according to death". Evola writes that war always has an anti-materialist
value, a spiritual value. In his works Evola calls for the "reawakening of heroic
ideals" and spiritualism through war.

Metaphysics of sex[edit]
In The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way and also Eros and

the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, Evola described the practice
of sexual magic as an asceticism of action that allows one to achieve
transcendent states through physical action, primarily sex. To explain the
metaphysics of sex, Evola cites the original meaning of the word "orgy" as
"the state of inspired exaltation that began the initiatory process in the
ancient Greek mysteries. But when this exaltation of eros, itself akin to other
experiences of a supersensual nature, becomes individualized as a longing
that is only carnal, then it deteriorates and ends finally in the form
constituted by mere "pleasure, or venereal lust"[24]

In his sexual philosophy, Evola followed the esoteric Hindu and Buddhist
schools in the teaching of retention of semen as a means of ontological
energization and ultimate self-mastery. "Virya, or spiritual manhood, if lost or
wasted results in death and if withheld and conserved leads to life".[25] Evola
considered Traditional chastity as signifying "control, limit, anti-titanic purity,
overcoming of pride, and immaterial unshakability, rather than a moralistic
and sexuophobic concept"[26]

Evola considered sex "the greatest magical force in nature", which through
the magnetic polarity and complementary nature of the two sexes brings
about the possibility of erotic transcendence. But, according to Evola
homosexuality...forms a complex problem from the point of view of the
metaphysics.[27]

He names eros as essence of Platonic love and sees its carnal development
as a first stage in the fall. Plato...referred not only to heterosexual love but
also to love for epheboi and male paramours. Now let us consider "eros" in
those of its exalted forms that are linked to the aesthetic factor, according to
the Platonic sequence...We should pass...to rapture that can be aroused by
incorporeal beauty...There is no real problem if the accidental starting point is
a being of the same sex. The word "uranism," which some use to mean
homosexuality, springs from Plato's...Aphrodite Urania...the goddess of a
noble love which is not carnal and unconcerned with procreation, as is the
love which has woman as its object... But...this eros...led increasingly to
carnal developments as the ancient customs in Greece and Rome
declined.[28]

For him If, therefore, we assume homosexuality to conform to these carnal

conditions...then we may well describe it as a deviation...from the standpoint

of the metaphysics of sex. Refuting Plato, Evola sees homosexuality lacking
magic force or transcendency. It is inappropriate to apply, as Plato does, the
metaphysical meaning made evident by the myth of the hermaphrodite to
homosexual love or to love as practiced between pederasts or lesbians. In
fact, in the case of such love, it is no longer allowable to speak of the impulse
of the male or female principle, as present in the primordial being, to be
reunited. The essential...loses its meaning, namely, the idea of the polarity
and the complementary nature of the two sexes as the basis of the
magnetism of love and of a "transcendency" in eros, and of the blinding and
destructive revelation of the One.[29]

Evola sees the two forms of homosexuality whether inborn or acquired, on a

lower level. To find an explanation it is necessary to descend to a lower level
and examine various empirical possibilities. Normally two forms of
homosexuality are distinguished in sexology: One has an inborn, natural
character, whereas the other has an acquired character and is conditioned by
psychological and sociological factors influenced by a person's environment.
But in the second of these forms it is necessary to give a proper value to the
distinction between forms having a vicious nature and forms that presuppose
a latent predisposition which is aroused under given circumstances. He sees
inborn homosexuality as an incomplete sexual development. It is important,
however, not to consider the inborn form of homosexuality in a rigid way but
to allow a certain possibility of variation. In natural homosexuality...the
process of sexual development in its physical and, even more so, in its
psychic aspects can be incomplete.[29]

For Evola, acquired homosexuality is driving the contemporary homosexuality

boom. But it is necessary to...also bear in mind cases of regression...the
surroundings and the general atmosphere of society can play a not
unimportant part...In a civilization where equality is the standard, where
differences are not linked, where promiscuity is in favor, where the ancient
idea of 'being true to oneself' means nothing anymorein such a splintered
and materialistic society, it is clear that this phenomenon of regression and
homosexuality should be particularly welcome, and therefore it is no way a
surprise to see the alarming increase in homosexuality and the 'third sex' in
the latest 'democratic' period, or an increase in sex changes to an extent
unparalleled in other eras"[30]

Defining homosexuality furthermore Evola adds the decidedly manly pleasure

and perversion driven mutual masturbator as a different variety of

homosexual. But the reference to...an incomplete process of the
development of sex or to a regression, does not explain all the varieties of
homosexuality. In fact, there have been male homosexuals who have not
been effeminate...but even men of war, individuals decidedly manly in their
appearance and behavior, powerful men who have had or could have had the
most beautiful women at their disposal. Such homosexuality is hard to
explain, and we have the right here to speak of deviation and perversion, or
"vice" linked, perhaps, to a fashion...However, there is reason to suppose that
it is merely a matter of "mutual masturbation" and that the conditioned
reflexes are exploited for "pleasure" since not only the metaphysical but also
the physical premises for a whole and destructive union are lacking.[31]

Finally, Evola rebukes bisexuality for expressing a chaotic desire to try

everything. On the other hand, classical antiquity bears witness...(to)a
bisexual attitude in which both women and young men were used...Here it
seems that the governing motivation was simply the desire to try everything.
However...we may also refer to the crude saying...that if one has had enough
from a girl as a girl, she can always play the part of a boy...As to the claim for
an ideal nature of hermaphroditic wholeness in the pederast who acts both as
man and as woman sexually, that is obvious fallacious beyond the level of
straightforward sensations; hermaphroditic wholeness can only be
"sufficiency," for it has no need of another being and is to be sought at the
level of a spiritual realization that excludes the nuances that the "magic of
the two" can offer in heterosexual unions. And Evola repudiates Turkish and
Japanese homosexuality justifications through feelings of power. Even the
rationale sometimes found in countries such as Turkey and Japan, that
homosexual possession gives a feeling of power, is not convincing. The
pleasure of domination can also be felt with women and with other beings in
situations free of sexual intercourse. Besides, such a pleasure could be
involved only in a completely pathological context where it would develop
into a true orgasm. Thus Evola concludes that when homosexuality is not
"natural" or else cannot be explained in terms of incomplete inborn forms of
sexual development, it must have the character of a deviation, a vice, or a
perversion.[32]

Even extreme erotic homosexual intensity has no higher meaning for Evola
than experience rooted in the displacement of eros. And if some instances of
extreme erotic intensity in relations between homosexuals should be
adduced, the explanation is to besought in the possibility of the displacement
of eros. Indeed, it is enough to go through any treatise on sexual

psychopathology to see in how many unthinkable situations the erotic

potential of a human being can be aroused, sometimes to the level of
orgiastic frenzy (from fetishism even to animal sodomy and necrophilia). The
same anomalous background could include the case of homosexuality,
although the latter is much more frequent: a displaced eros for which a being
of the same sex can serve as a simple, occasional cause or support, as in so
many cases of psychopathy, although it must wholly lack every profound
dimension and every meaning higher than experience because of the
absence of the necessary ontological and metaphysical premises.[33]

Evola's attitude towards homosexuality is reflected in his reference to

Plotinus, who deemed homosexual loves to be shameful and abnormal, like
diseases of degenerate persons "which do not arise from the essence of
being and are not the outcome of the development thereof" (Enneads, III).

Evola scorned modern pornography for being a "scanty source" of erotic

experience, denouncing it as "dreadfully squalid not only in the facts and
scenes described, but in its essence"[34]

Politics[edit]
There are contradictory views among scholars as to Evola's political
categorization and his possible relationship with fascism and neofascism. He
has been described as a "fascist intellectual,"[35] a "radical
traditionalist,"[36] "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and
antipopular,[37] and as having been "the leading philosopher of Europe's
neofascist movement."[37] Gregor writes that, "Evola opposed literally every
feature of Fascism."[38] A key difference[citation needed] between Evola's
Traditionalism and Italian Fascism is Evola's rejection of nationalism, which he
viewed as a conception of the modern West and not of a Traditional
hierarchical social arrangement. Heinrich Himmler's SS kept a dossier on him,
and in dossier document AR-126 described him as a "reactionary Roman,"
with a secret goal of "an insurrection of the old aristocracy against the
modern world," and recommended that the SS "stop his effectiveness in
Germany" and provide no support to him.[39] When he met with "esoteric
Hitlerist" Miguel Serrano, Evola denied that he was a fascist or Hitlerist, but
rather saw Metternich as a conservative ideal. Serrano himself was critical of
Evola and saw him as an "old-style traditionalist."[40] Evola's first published
political work was an anti-fascist piece in 1925, and he wrote a second in
1928.[41] Evola called Italy's fascist movement a "laughable revolution,"

based on empty sentiment and materialistic concerns. He opposed the

futurism that Italian fascism was aligned with, along with the "plebeian"
nature of the movement.[42] In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola
clearly cites Monarchism as his preferred form of government, given that a
Monarch would hold spiritual principles above the State and enforce a
hierarchy of warriors, priests, merchants and scholars which he viewed as
universal in traditional societies. Although he never[citation needed] formally
aligned himself with such school, one can see strong similarities between
Evola's thought and the Conservative Revolutionary movement in Germany,
such as a traditionalist worldview rejecting a purely biological concept of race
and the 'self'.

Evola held[citation needed] that politics, like everything else in life, should
look upward and beyond the self. The main argument against modern
"demagogic" politics is its materialistic focus and mentality, stemming from
an inverted order of castes. Accordingly, in modernity, due to what he calls
the regression of the castes, the once-preeminent warrior caste (crystallized
in the medieval military religious orders and ethical chivalry and its warrior
code) has been downgraded into the figures of the mere democratic soldier
and mercenary, who are servants of the artificial, soulless needs of the nowdominant mercantile and industrial interests. As Evola states, "Opposite to
the 'soldier' was the type of the warrior and the member of the feudal
aristocracy; the caste to which this type belonged was the central nucleus in
a corresponding social organization. This caste was not at the service of the
bourgeois class but rather ruled over it, since the class that was protected
depended on those who had the right to bear arms"[43]

On the meaning of his anti-middle-class stance, Evola stated:

We are "anti-bourgeois" not in the descending sense of subversive

collectivists but in the sense of opposing the dominance of the lower
manifestations of the modern bourgeois spirit: effeminate materialism,
commercialism, gangsterism, etc.). The bourgeois tendency has its inevitable
role in society, but must not be absolutized; rather, the bourgeoisie must be
purified, contained, its values given their space but subordinated to superior
values. We are anti-bourgeois because the bourgeois type, while ranking
above the proletarian, yet stands inferior to the soldierly-heroic and spiritualpriestly orders. The bourgeois type, compared to the sacral-warrior, only
represents a lesser degree of progressive manhood.[44]

Evola attempted to influence Italy's fascist movement in the conservativerevolutionary direction he believed it should go the direction of radical
Traditionalism; i.e. away from the esoteric modern Christian Church, the
bourgeoisie, and the masses. His efforts to influence the regime were a
failure, and he believed that by not following his advice, Mussolini's party
failed to fulfill its function. He would maintain the view that a revolutionary
movement, similar to Fascism but in harmony with "esoteric-tradition", was
necessary for the return to a higher form of civilization.[45] 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.[citation needed]

In Men Among the Ruins, Evola described a traditionalist attitude possibly

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

In Ride the Tiger, he prescribed a so-to-speak apolitical asceticism of

contemplation in which a man is advised to act in the modern world, while
remaining intellectually and spiritually detached from and above it. He had
come to hold this view after coming to the conclusion that, in his view, the
modern world was so decadent that a return to a "traditional" civilization was
impossible. Evola argued that in order to survive in the modern world an
enlightened or "differentiated man" should "ride the tiger". As a man, by
holding onto the tiger's back, may survive the confrontation once the animal
ends exhausted, so too might a man, by letting the world take him on its
inexorable path, be able to turn the destructive forces around him into a kind
of inner liberation.

Schutzstaffel[edit]
"But in spite of all these negative aspects, there was something in National
Socialism that attracted Evola: the concept of a state ruled by an Order,

which he felt was embodied by the SS. 'We are inclined to the opinion that we
can see the nucleus of an Order in the higher sense of tradition in the 'Black
Corps,' he wrote in Vita Italiana (August 15, 1938). Again in Vita Italiana
(August 1941), 'Per una profonda alleanza italo-germanica'[46] he writes:
'Beyond the confines of the party and of any political-administrative
structure, an elite in the form of a new 'Order'that is, a kind of asceticmilitary organization that is held together by the principles of 'loyalty' and
'honor,' must form the basis of the new state.' As mentioned, Evola held the
SS, which Himmler strove to design according to the model of the Teutonic
Order, to be this elite.

The castles of the SS Order, with their 'initiations,' the emphasis on

transcending the purely human element, the prerequisite of physical valour,
as well as the ethical requirements - loyalty, discipline, defiance of death,
willingness to sacrifice, unselfishness - strengthened Evola in his conviction.
He also was of the opinion that the ethics of the SS were borrowed from the
Jesuits.[47]

Race[edit]
A number of Evola's articles and books deal explicitly with the subject of race.
In February 1939, the Race Office in Italy had a nationalist, "Mediterranean"
change of personnel. The new President of High Council of Demography and
Race, Giacomo Acerbo, replaced a nutrition professor. The political rise of
Alberto Luchini, and the institutionalized racists from May 1941, coincided
with Evola's school of thought.[48] The convergence of the esoteric and
metaphysical theories in Italy marked an effective adoption of more Nordic
radicalism in Blood and Spirit [49]

A.J. Gregor comments: "In the [German translation of Imperialismo pagano],

Evola considered principled anti-Semitism one of the essentials of a salvific
'racial rebirth' in the modern world. Not only did Evola make a point of
identifying Karl Marx, one of the architects of the modern world of
materialism, inferiority, pretended equality, and cultural decay, as a Jew--but
he spoke of a Jewish capitalistic yoke that obstructed every effort at racial
regeneration"[50] 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 theories of mainstream Nazis and others of his contemporaries. However,
he wrote an introduction to an Italian language version of The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, that alleges 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.

Evola was indifferent as to whether the document was authentic or not. He

classified it as a 'myth'. "Myth" here does not have its contemporary
connotation of a 'falsehood'. In Fascist parlance, myths were stories that,
properly cultivated, were productive of a reality that an elite desired, such as
the mobilisation of the masses.[51] In 1937, a year after the publication of
Giovanni Preziosi's Italian edition in 1936, when it was claimed to be a fiction,
Evola wrote as follows:

Whether or not the controversial Protocols of the Learned Elders of

Zion are false or authentic does not affect the symptomatic value of the
document in question, that is, the fact, that many of the things that have
occurred in modern times, having taken place after their publication,
effectively agree with the plans assumed in that document, perhaps more
than a superficial observer might believe.[52][53][54]

In short, he was unconcerned that could be a forgery, because that did not
alter what he believed was the essential truth enciphered in the document.

In his introduction to the 1938 Italian edition of the Protocols, Evola wrote
that the tract had "the value of a spiritual tonic," that Jews "destroy every
surviving trace of true order and superior civilization," and that, "above all, in
these decisive hours of western history, [the Protocols tract] cannot be
ignored or dismissed without seriously undermining the front of those fighting
in the name of the spirit, of tradition, of true civilization."

For Evola this text represented a manipulation by occult powers trying to hide
behind the Jewish and Freemasonic historical drive toward a merchant society
soon to be replaced by the chaos of "mass society" which could eventually
turn against both.[55]

Evola attributed to Jews, as well as to what he termed the "semitic spirit,"[56]

a corrosive effect on the "Nordic" race (a race that was, in Evola's mythology,
analogous to the Nazi's "Aryans"). Evola argued that not only Jews, but even
non-Jews "Judaicized in their souls" must be combated by a "coherent,

complete, impartial" anti-Semitism given the means to "identify and combat

the Jewish mentality."[57] Evola supported the Nazi anti-Semitic view that
there was a hidden form of Jewish power and influence in the modern world;
he thought this Jewish power was a symptom of the "modern" world's lack of
true aristocratic leadership. To some Evola was "to the right of Fascism",
although he remained a non-combatant theorist, he was identified with
"Mediterranean nationalist" scholars who believed Jewishness and Italians
were incompatible.[58] Evola further held that Jewish people denigrated lofty
"Aryan" ideals (of faith, loyalty, courage, devotion, and constancy) through a
"corrosive irony" that ascribed every human activity to economic or sexual
motives ( la Marx and Freud).[59] In a 1938 article Evola accused Sigmund
Freud, Karl Marx, and Cesare Lombroso of being "proponents of Jewish
materialistic culture in the nineteenth century;[60] two years later, in an
essay entitled "Jews and Mathematics," Evola characterized Judaism as the
antithesis of "Aryan civilization," and broadly attacked a range of what he
considered examples of Jewish influences, from Pythagoreanism to
mathematics.[60] The article was illustrated with pictures of notable Jews
interspersed with classic anti-Semitic representations.[60]

In The Metaphysics of Sex (Inner Traditions, 1st US edition 1983, pps. 9-10),
Evola discoursed on his philosophy of de-evolutionary spiritual racism: "Our
starting point will be not the modern theory of evolution but the traditional
doctrine of involution. We do not believe the man is derived from the ape by
evolution. We believe that the ape is derived from man by involution. We
agree with Joseph De Maistre that savage peoples are not primitive peoples,
in the sense of original peoples, but rather the degenerating remains of more
ancient races that have disappeared. We concur with the various researchers
(Kohlbrugge, Marconi, Dacque, Westenhofer, and Adloff) who have rebelled
against the evolutionary dogma, asserting that animal species evince the
degeneration of primordial man's potential. These unfulfilled or deviant
potentials manifest as by-products of the true evolutionary process that man
has led since the beginning."[61]

Evola believed that a race of "Nordic" people, anciently emanating from

Golden Age Arctic Hyperborea, originally semi-immaterial and "soft-boned",
had played a crucial founding role in Atlantis and the high cultures both of the
East and West. In Evola's eyes, half-remembered, cryptic memories of a
"more-than-human race" once existing in a "northern paradise" constitute the
patrimony of the traditions of many diverse peoples. In this occult belief,
Evola was additionally influenced by Arctic Home in the Vedas by Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, which posited the polar North as the original home of the

white Ur-Aryan tribes before their later separation into Western (Hellenic,
Roman, Celtic, Germanic) and Eastern (Iranian, Indo-Aryan) divisions.

According to Joscelyn Godwin's research: "the basic outlines of Evola's

prehistory resemble those of Theosophy, with Lemurian, Atlantean, and Aryan
root-races succeeding each other, and a pole-shift marking the transition
from one epoch to another".[62] Evola's dualism between the Northern Light
and the Southern Light, and also the capture of the Atlanteans by the latter,
is also found in the writings of Theosophy's co-founder Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky:

The Atlanteans [gravitated] toward the Southern Pole, the pit,

cosmically and terrestrially -- whence breathe the hot passions blown into
hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is."[63]

Every beneficent (astral and cosmic) action comes from the North;
every lethal influence from the South Pole. They are much connected with
and influence right and left hand magic."[64]
Victor A. Shnirelman, a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, has noted
that cosmological racial ideas also appear in the Neo-Theosophical writings of
H. P. Blavatsky's one-time disciple Alice Bailey. Shnirelman wrote that in
Bailey's teachings, "Jews were depicted as the 'human product of the former
Solar system,' linked with 'World Evil'"; he identified "similar ideas" in the
works of Bailey and Evola.[65]

The hierarchy of races is really a hierarchy of embodied spiritualities; the

spirit, rather than ethnic substance, determines culture; but at the same time
race is the biological "memory" of a certain spiritual orientation. In order to
describe what he called the lower, telluric, Negroid races, he frequently made
use of the term "Southern" whereas to him higher races were "Northern."
"North" and "South" are indicated as having simultaneously metaphysical,
geographical and anthropological meanings:

Especially during the period of the long icy winter, it was natural that in
the northern races the experience of the Sun, of Light, and of Fire itself
should have acted in a spiritually liberating sense. Hence natures which were
Uranian-solar, Olympian or filled with celestial fire would have developed
much more from the sacral symbolism of these races than from others.

Moreover, the rigor of the climate, the sterility of the soil, the necessity for
hunting, and finally the need to emigrate across unknown seas and
continents would naturally have molded those who preserved that spiritual
experience of the Sun, of the luminous sky, and of fire into the temperament
of warriors, of conquerors, of navigators, so as to favor that synthesis
between spirituality and virility of which characteristic traces are preserved in
the Aryan races (Revolt, p. 208).
Evola quotes the Confucian Chung Yung (10.4) to reinforce his point:

To teach with kindly benevolence, not to lose one's temper and avenge
the unreasonableness of others, that is the virile energy of the South that is
followed by the well-bred man. To sleep on a heap of arms and untanned
skins, to die unflinching and as if dying were not enough, that is the virile
energy of the North that is followed by the brave man.

According to Evola, the more recent Northern, White and Indo-European

peoples (despite racial mixing) implicitly preserved more of the primordial
Arctic Hyperborean blood-memory and are objectively spiritually superior to
the archaic, matter-obsessed degenerate remnants of the races of the South.
Evola saw the sign of the Hyperborean Tradition[66] and its antagonism with
the forces of Antitradition in the Indian mythology surrounding the Vedic
divinity Indra (cf. Thor), who is "fair of cheek" (Rig Veda, I.9.3) and with his
"fair-complexioned friends" (I.100.18) annihilates the lawless black Dasyu,
"giving protection to the Aryan color" (III.34.9), blowing to nothingness "the
swarthy skin which Indra hates" (IX.73.5).

On the "demonic" nature of the lower negroid races and their degenerating
remnants, Evola relies on an old Aryo-Zoroastrian tradition that teaches
negroids belonged to the dark side owing to their alleged origin in the union
between a demon and a wicked witch: "Zohak, during his reign, let loose a
dev (demon) on a young woman, and let loose a young man on a parik
(witch). They performed coition with [the sight] of the apparition; the negro
came into being through that [novel] kind of coition" (Bundahishn, XIVB).

Flowering forth in the Greek, pre-Celtic, Indo-Aryan, Aryo-Persian, Armenic,

Roman, Germanic, Tiwanaku, Teotihuacn, early Chinese, Aztec-Nahua, Inca
and first Egyptian dynasties' representatives, with more or less ethnic but
great spiritual purity, the "Northern Light" was considerably lost to the
Atlantean offshoot which defiled itself through spiritual integration into the

spiritual lunar sphere of the world of the "Mother" or "Earth" of the "Southern
Light" and further miscegenation with bestial, dark Lemurian stocks. Revolt
Against the Modern World presents world-history to be the saga of dualistic
conflict between the "Northern Light" and the "Southern Light": on one side
stand the Uranian, patriarchal stocks of purer Hyperborean lineage,
climatically harshly conditioned and heroic-minded celebrators of the winter
solstice; on the other stand the chthonic and titanized inferior races and the
spiritually/ethnically bastardized heirs of the fallen Atlantean civilization
captured by the "Southern Light" and its sacerdotal and naturalistic-pantheist
religion of promiscuous vegetal and animal fertility.[67]

Evola cites Plato's description of the fall of Atlantis by Atlantean

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

Just as Evola affirmed the natural hierarchy between different individuals of

the same race, so he affirmed a natural rank ordering of the different human
races. As the best-preserved remnants of the primordial celestial
Hyperboreans, Evola affirmed the white race in its different branches as the
creator of the greatest planetary civilizations:

"We have to remember that behind the various caprices of modern historical
theories, and as a more profound and primordial reality, there stands the
unity of blood and spirit of the white races who created the greatest
civilizations both of the East and West, the Iranian and Hindu as well as the
ancient Greek and Roman and the Germanic".[68] In fact, Evola publicly
celebrated Italian Fascism as a means to ensure and restore in a modern
decadent world white supremacy:

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

In 'Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist,'
Thomas Sheehan points out that "Evola prided himself on developing a
theory of races that went beyond the merely biological to the spiritual. What
constitutes a superior race for Evola is the spiritual orientation of a given
stock, the subsumption of the requisite biological material (and that did mean
the Aryan races) under a qualitatively elevating form, namely reference to
the realm of the spirit. But in fact all that Evola's theory does is to promote
biological-ethnic racism a step higher. There are enough references in his
works to the 'inferior, non-European races,' to the 'power of inferior strata
and races,' to disgusting 'Negro syncopations' in jazz, to 'Jewish
psychoanalysis'--and enough adulation of the Aryansfor us to divine that
Evola's 'spiritual' racism may have had something other than disinterested
Apollonian origins."

In Mussolini's Intellectuals, A. James Gregor discusses Evola's racism as

follows: "[In the German rendering of Imperialismo pagano], Evola argues
that it is out of the creativity of an 'ur-Aryan' and 'solar-Nordic' blood that
world culture emerges. Conversely, culture decline is a function of the
feckless mixture of Aryan, with lesser 'animalistic,' blood ... According to
Imperialismo pagano, the 'natural' and endogamous caste system of antiquity
that sustained the 'purity' of the culture-creating 'Hyperborean-Nordics'
slowly disintegrated over time under the corrosive influence of Semitic
religion and the 'Semitic spirit'.

While Evola was clear about the relative insignificance of the physical
attributes of race, he did acknowledge that the 'original Hyperboreans,' which

he was critically concerned, were probably 'dolichocephalic, tall and slender,

blond and blue-eyed'[70] Evola held that the physical mixture of races,
particularly between Aryans and races that were 'alien' (i.e., non-Aryan), was
always hazardous but mixture between 'related' races might produce
hybrid vigor. Given his generous notion of what constituted an Aryan race
(Evola was convinced of the Hyperborean origins of most Europeans, the
indigenous peoples of North and South America, as well as those of the Indian
subcontinent), those candidate races Evola considered to be truly 'alien' were
never explicitly cataloguedexcept in terms of Semites and the deeply
pigmented peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.[71] What seemed eminently clear,
for all the qualifiers, was that all the material races Evola identified as
capable of serving as hosts for the extrabiological and supernatural spiritual
elements were purportedly biological descendents of the 'Aryan-Nordics' of
Hyperborea.

In the golden age, the celestial race was spiritualonly gradually, over time,
taking on material properties ... As a necessary consequence of
miscegenation, there was a continual and irreversible decline of the celestials
in ancient times a tenuous revival under the Romans, and another by the
Nordic-Germans during the course of the Holy Roman Empirebut by the
time of the Renaissance, with its humanism, rationalism, universalism and its
gradual submission to the theses of the equality of all humans, humankind
had entered the kali-yuga, the terminal age of 'obscurity,' the end of this
current race cycle. Evola identifies the Jews as providing a 'ferment of
decomposition, dissolution and corruption' in antiquity;[72] For Evola, given
the fateful path traversed by history, there remained only one course for
contemporary humanity: an attempt at reconstitution of the primordial
celestial race, amid the debris of previous race cycles, employing the racial
remnants of the Hyperboreans.

For Evola, spiritual forces shaped races for their own inscrutable purposes.
The notion that mutations, governed from 'on high,' might be the source of
raciation was a relatively common conviction among German esoterics.[73]
Geneticists, Evola argued, failed to provide a compelling account of how
mutations occur. He maintained, as a consequence, that 'the cause is to be
found elsewhere, in the actions of a superbiological element not reducible to
the determinism of the physical transmission of genetic materials.' The true
cause of hereditary variation was to be found 'rather by starting from another
point of view that affords one an entirely different set of laws' than those of
empirical science.

Given this supposition, Evola proceeded to argue that Fascism or National

Socialismwith their heroism, their sacrificial and ascetic ethic, their
authoritarian and hierarchical order, together with their appeal to myth and
ritualprovided an environment compatible with the 'spirit' of the celestials.
That might be enough to prompt a cosmic, if gradual, reemergence of the
celestial race. In such circumstances, the formative spiritual principle that, in
the ultimate analysis, governs the transcendent 'superhistory' of humankind
might literally reconstitute the individuals of the primordial creative race of
Hyperborea. Evola sought to show that such an outcome would not be
essentially determined by biology, but by the cosmic spiritthat its formative
influence could transform individuals into persons accommodating a properly
corresponding soul and spiritto render them once again 'pure.'" Evola held
rascism at the core of his beliefs.[74]

The eminent scholar of Fascism, Renzo De Felice, maintained that while

Evola's spiritual, neo-idealist racial theories were wrong, they had a notable
intellectual ancestry, and Evola defended them in an honorable way: "Evola
for his part completely refused any racial theorizing of a purely biological
kind, which went so far as to draw to himself the attacks and sarcasms of a
Landra, for example. This does not mean that the 'spiritual' theory of race is
acceptable, but it had at least the merit of not totally failing to see certain
values, to refuse the German aberrations and the ones modeled after them
and to try to keep racism on a plane of cultural problems worthy of the
name".[75]

Christophe Boutin, in his major work on Evola, Politique et Tradition: Julius

Evola dans le sicle, 1898-1974 (Paris, 1992), discusses Evola's views on
racism and Negroes.[76] Boutin mentions that in Evola's 1968 collection of
essays, LArco e la clava[77] there is a chapter on "America Negrizzata," in
which Evola criticizes the "Telluric" Negroid influence on popular American
culture, while acknowledging that there has been little actual miscegenation.
Evola also argues against American racial integration in this chapter. The
unadulterated 1972 Italian edition of Men Among the Ruins ends with an
appendix entitled "Appendix on the Myths of our Time," of which number 4 is
"Taboos of our Times".[78] In this section Evola argues that modern irrational
taboos forbid an honest, frank discussion on the working classes and
Negroes. Evola notices that the mere word 'Negro' had connotations of
offensiveness in the left-wing atmosphere of the era: "la tabuizzazione che
porta fino ad evitare l'uso della designazione 'negro,' per le sue implicazioni

'offensive'".[79] Evola opines that a true Rightist movement will not

compromise with this sort of moralistic development.[80]

Influence[edit]
Evola's writings have continued to have an influence both within occult
intellectual circles and in European far-right politics. He is widely translated in
French, Spanish and partly in German. Amongst those he has influenced are
Miguel Serrano, Savitri Devi, GRECE, the Movimento sociale italiano (MSI),
Falange Espaola, Gaston Armand Amaudruz's Nouvel Ordre Europen,
Guillaume Faye, Pino Rauti's Ordine Nuovo, Troy Southgate, Alain de Benoist,
Michael Moynihan, Giorgio Freda, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed
Revolutionary Nuclei), Eduard Limonov, Forza Nuova and CasaPound Italia.
Famed author Herman Hesse was an admirer of Evola, calling him "A very
dazzling and interesting, but also very dangerous author". Giorgio Almirante
referred to him as "our Marcuseonly better."[81] According to one leader of
the neofascist "black terrorist" Ordine Nuovo, "Our work since 1953 has been
to transpose Evolas teachings into direct political action."[82] The now
defunct French fascist group Troisime Voie was also inspired by Evola.[83]
Jonathan Bowden, English political activist and chairman of the New Right,
has spoken highly of Evola and his ideas and has given lectures on his
philosophy. German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Drckheim based part of
his "initiatory therapy" on Evola's work.[84]

Evola's work heavily influences Thomas Steiner, the German intellectual.

Evola's work is available in the United States through publisher Inner

Traditions. He has also gained some attention in Russia, where some of his
work has been analyzed by Alexander Dugin and others from a nationalistic
Russian view, and is also popular among Monarchists with a view of an
imperial Moscow as the "Third Rome", but few translations of some of his
shorter texts. His work is also available in translation in the U.K., Spain,
Poland, Scandinavia, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Mexico, Argentina, and
Turkey where his Revolt Against the Modern World was published in 2006. In
2010 Revolt Against the Modern World was published in Brazil by a small
traditionalist group, in an edition limited to 100 copies.

In addition to Evola's political influence on right-wing radical-conservatives,

"black terrorist" (neofascist) factions and traditionalist groups worldwide, he

has also considerably influenced followers of certain occult traditions. Of note

is Thomas Karlsson, founder and head of Dragon Rouge, a Left-Hand Path
order which cites Evola's thought as one of its influences, and Daniel
Pinchbeck, a spiritual writer who is most known for his writings on 2012, has
cited Evola's writings on Hermeticism and sex magic as influences on his
writings