Although not in the political news as much these days, in 2016, the twentieth century Italian far-right esoteric philosopher Julius Evola was a name to drop among Trump's then fellow travellers. Read by Steve Bannon and idolised by the now forgotten Alt-Right, Evola even made it to the New York Times. I write about him in Politics and the Occult (2008) and Dark Star Rising (2018). This article, from a special issue of Fortean Times in 2004, was my first shot at the ever-controversial Baron. Twenty years on, my closing remarks seem disturbingly apt.
In the late spring of 1980, Italians felt the return of a terrorist threat that for the previous decade had kept a low profile. Since the end of World War II and the rise of the cold war, neo-fascism had been a fact of life in Italian politics, the right-wing ideals of “tradition” and “order” seeming the only alternative to American domination or the threat of communism. In December 1969, the destabilizing tactics employed by the neo-fascists reached a new height with the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, a violent spark that ignited a wave of far-right terrorism. By the mid-1970s, however, the neo-fascist threat appeared to have faded, only to be replaced by its left-wing opposite when radical groups took to shattering university professors’ kneecaps for teaching the doctrines of “the establishment.”
Their counterparts, however, were merely lying low, and on May 28, 1980, it was clear that they were back and ready for action. On that day, an Italian policeman Franco Evangelista – nicknamed “Serpico,” after the legendary New York cop, for his success in arresting drug dealers – was assassinated by right-wing terrorists in Rome. Then, in June, a judge who had led an investigation into right-wing terrorist activities was murdered. But the major attack came last, on August 2, when a bomb in the Bologna railway station killed 85 people and wounded hundreds more. Many of the victims, including children, were maimed horribly. Like the Omagh bombing and 9/11, the event punched a hole in the nation’s psyche – which was precisely what its authors intended.
Keeping to its “strategy of tension,” the group responsible for the blast kept its identity secret, yet the police had a good idea who to look for. Names were mentioned: Paolo Signorelli, Franco Frela, Claudio Mutti, Stefano delle Chiaie and others from the right-wing “usual suspects” list were questioned. And, when the investigation began to close in, several members of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, an influential far-right group, fled the country for Britain. One man, however, whose name was mentioned by all, had no need to fear the police, as he had been dead for the last six years. But if a single person could be held accountable for the Bologna bombing, the dead man was a good candidate. His name was Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola, better known to his more recent English speaking readers as Baron Julius Evola, author of several books on magic, esotericism and the occult, as well as a withering attack on Western civilization, Revolt Against the Modern World (1934).
Born on May 19 1898 to a noble Sicilian family, Julius Evola was a bright but self-willed child who early on rebelled against his strict Catholic upbringing. This resentment against Christianity remained with him throughout his life, and fuelled a Nietzschean disdain for the “weak” and ignorant masses. Although he left university before earning a degree, a sense of precision and objectivity, a cold clarity and logic, came from his studies in industrial engineering. But it was the new movements in modern literature that had the most influence on Evola’s early years. In later life he was to become a staunch defender of tradition, but in his teens Evola came under the spell of the literary avant-garde, absorbing the work of writers like Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini. Papini introduced him to new ideas in art and fashion, as well as to the writings of Meister Eckhart and several Oriental sages.
But the most influential discovery was the work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose Futurist movement would later find favor with Italy’s Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, a position Evola himself would occupy in years to come. Marinetti, who sang the praises of the modernity Evola would eventually come to despise, may seem an unlikely mentor for a philosopher whose polemics against the modern world would later guide several violent attacks on it. Yet Marinetti’s own fascistic sensibility – a virulent rejection of nature, a celebration of regimen and machine-like efficiency, and above all an embrace of speed and violence for their own sake – are in keeping with Evola’s character.
Marinetti’s Futurists scandalized the bourgeoisie with their penchant for avant-garde hooliganism and artistic thuggery, starting fights at art galleries, and shouting abuse at poetry readings, tactics that less cultured individuals would later employ against a variety of human targets. War, for Marinetti, was an aesthetic affair, and his reports from the Turkish front in World War I spoke of the “joy” of hearing “the machine guns screaming a breathlessness under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tum…” These and other brutal onomatopoeia informed Marinetti’s ideas of parole in libertia, “free words”, which in some ways seems an early twentieth century anticipation of today’s rap and “performance poetry”.
At 19, Evola had an opportunity to test Marinetti’s theory when he joined the Italian army in the last days of the war. Although serving as an artillery officer at the Austrian front, Evola saw no action, yet the discipline, order and hierarchy of the military impressed him and left him unsuited for civilian life, with its muddling chaos and growing egalitarianism. It was then that he began his search for “transcendence”, first through drugs, then through a study of the occult.
These experiences seemed only to increase Evola’s sense of purposelessness and the idea of suicide came to dominate his consciousness, a morbid opinion made attractive through his interest in the brilliant but disturbed Austrian writer Otto Weininger (whom I write about in Dead Letters: The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides). The Jewish Weininger wrote an influential book, Sex and Character (1903), in which he argued that man alone is a spiritual creature, yearning for the celestial heights, while woman, a denizen of the Earth, tries to trap him in her corrupting embrace: the archetype of the femme fatale. He also argued that the Jews as a race displayed distinctly “feminine” characteristics, most importantly a hatred of all things of a “higher” nature: hence Marx and his reduction of religion to the “opium of the people.” An unhappy individual, obsessed with sex and his own Jewishness, Weininger committed suicide at 23, in a room in Vienna once occupied by Beethoven. His ideas about women and Jews, however, lived on in several minds, not the least of which was Evola’s.
A Buddhist text saved Evola from suicide, and the discovery of a new avant-garde movement gave him a sense of direction. Futurism, he came to believe, was vulgar and showy. But Dada, the new anti-art movement seeping across the border from Switzerland, struck him as more intellectual, as well as more ambitious. Dada seemed more than a mere art movement, something along the lines of a total reconstruction of the world, the need for which Evola had come to believe in passionately. It is also quite possible that in Dada’s leader, Tristan Tzara, Evola found a new role model: photographs of Evola displaying his elegant, smoothly shaven face, immaculate dress and imperious gaze – complete with monocle – are strikingly similar to Tzara. For the later advocate of tradition this is ironic, as Tzara, with his hunger for notoriety and scandal, would today more than likely be at home on talk shows and Twitter, than in the workshops of anti-art.
Evola plunged into Dada, reading his poetry to the music of Schoenberg, Satie and Bartok at the Cabaret Grotte dell’ Augusteo, Rome’s version of Zürich’s infamous Cabaret Voltaire. He also took up painting, and exhibited his work in Rome, Milan, Lausanne and Berlin; today his “Inner Landscape at 10:30 am” still hangs in Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Evola also wrote an influential essay on abstract art, arguing that it is only in abstraction that the existence of an “eternal self” could be expressed – an indication, again, of his anti-natural, anti-earthly bias.
Yet Dada was not enough. Disgusted with the increasing commercialization of the avant-garde, in 1922 Evola abandoned painting and poetry. He now gave himself to philosophy, writing several books of an idealistic character in which he spelled out the metaphysics of the “absolute individual.” This boiled down to the doctrine that such an individual enjoyed “the ability to be unconditionally whatever he wants,” and that for him “the world is my representation.” For the nobly born Evola, this spiritual solipsism seems appropriate: it provided an ontological underpinning for his near-absolute lack of interest in other people.
This focus on the “unconditional” freedom of the self led to a still deeper study of occultism. Evola became involved with an Italian theosophical group, and wrote an introduction to a translation of the Tao Te Ching. A correspondence with Sir John Woodroffe – as Arthur Avalon, author of several works on Hindu philosophy – led to a fascination with Tantra, which surfaced in Evola’s books The Yoga of Power (1949) and The Metaphysics of Sex (1958) – this last also shows the influence of Weininger. Evola soon lost interest in theosophy, but not in the occult, and by the mid-1920s he had become involved in an esoteric society, the UR group, who looked at magic as “the science of the ego.” Formed around the occultist Arturo Reghini, editor of two influential occult journals, Atanòr and Ignis , the UR group embarked on a variety of esoteric investigations. Along with Tantra, Evola studied alchemy, Taoism and Buddhism. The link between these studies was the idea of “initiation”, the sense that through them Evola was participating in ancient initiatory practices, living manifestations of a lost, primal tradition.
Yet he soon felt the need for something more than study and ritual. Linking his vision of Dada as an attempt to refashion the world to his new pursuits, Evola saw in politics and society a means of expressing his occult beliefs. He was impressed with Nietzsche’s vision of a coming world-nihilism, and later translated Oswald Spengler’s bestselling study of cultural decay, The Decline of the West (1918) into Italian. Mussolini’s Fascism was, Evola believed, an attempt to introduce elements of a traditional culture into a corrupt modern world. What it lacked was a spiritual basis. Evola saw himself as the means of supplying this.
The UR group took to performing magical rituals with the intent of inspiring the new Fascist movement with the spirit of ancient Rome. On a more concrete level, Evola and his colleagues published a journal, La Torre, to which he contributed a series of political articles. Although he celebrated Mussolini’s attempts to revive the ancient Roman empire – which he did in 1935 at the expense of the Ethiopians – Evola argued that Fascism was too involved with the Church and too ready to pander to the masses. It needed, he said, to anchor itself in a “spiritual aristocracy,” an argument made clear in his book Pagan Imperialism (1928). Here Evola attached Christianity, and heaped scorn on both American democracy and the Soviet regime.
Mussolini was impressed with Evola’s thought and interested enough to write an article about it for Reghini. In the world of Realpolitik, however, Mussolini knew that in Catholic Italy he had little chance of success without the Church. It was his refusal to alienate the Pope, as well as his shrewd manipulation of the masses, that eventually lost him Evola’s sympathies. Evola never joined the Fascist party, a fact that years later served him in good stead, and although his political beliefs are at best questionable, one must at least admire his determination to stand by his own values. It would have been easy to secure a comfortable niche in the Fascist hierarchy. Yet Evola’s criticism of Mussolini was unequivocal: after being told that Il Duce disagreed with something he had written, Evola replied “Tanto peggio per Mussolini” – “Too bad for Mussolini.” Yet after 10 issues, La Torre had to stop publishing , and for a time Evola said he had to employ bodyguards. Later Mussolini softened, and embraced some of Evola’s less politically intransigent ideas.
A more powerful influence on Evola by this time was the French orientalist René Guénon, through whose forbidding books on metaphysics, esotericism and tradition, Evola found a formidable exponent of his own basic vision. Like Evola, Guénon had been brought up Catholic. Yet after studying philosophy he plunged into the world of fin-de siècle occultism, and for a time was attracted to Theosophy and Freemasonry. He soon abandoned these for Hindu philosophy, through which he had discovered an insight into the ontological structure of the universe. This, he believed, had been intuited by the ancients, who had codified this knowledge in the form of a “primordial tradition.” Although remnants of this primal truth could be found in the great religions, it was lost to the vast mass of humanity. The modern world was, in fact, caught in its own death throes, a product of the last stages of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age that the West has been subject to for the last 6,000 years. Guénon marshalled his argument in a short but incisive work, The Crisis of the Modern World (1927). Evola followed suit and brought out his own incendiary polemic seven years later.
Revolt Against the Modern World must stand as one of the fiercest attacks on Western civilization ever written; I wouldn’t be surprised if it was among the bedside reading of today’s “traditionalist terrorists”. (For what it’s worth, although Evola remained partial to Hinduism, Guénon converted to Islam and spent his last years in Cairo.) A massive work, the book's two parts are divided into an account of what the ancient traditional world was like, and an unremitting assault on the evils of modernity. Like many out of sympathy with secular society, Evola found no redeeming value in liberalism, democracy, humanism or science. Towards the end of his life, when fledging neo-fascists sat at his feet seeking guidance and insight, Evola boiled the essence of his daunting tome down to a provocative and deadly epigram. “ It is not a question of contesting and polemicizing,” he told them, “but of blowing up everything.” In Bologna in 1980, at least some of his readers took him at his word.
The argument of Revolt Against the Modern World, insofar as there is one, is lengthy and complex, but there is really very little argument in any philosophical sense. For the most part, Evola engages in an imperious declamation of his insights into tradition. His central insight is what he calls “the doctrine of the two natures.” The world of tradition, he tells us, is based on the reality of an eternal truth, what he calls “being,” which lies outside of time. The modern secular world, however, is one of “becoming”, the messy, aimless, ever-changing stream of nature and history.
The distinction is a classic one, first posited by the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides centuries before Plato, and has occupied philosophers ever since. Yet how Evola arrives at an entire civilization based on it is unclear. He scorns historians who labor over facts and evidence. Such busywork is outside tradition and so “unreal.” Evola, on the contrary, achieves his insights through having attained a “superindividual and non-human perspective.” Having done so, he eschews “debating and ‘demonstration’”. “The truths that may reveal the world of Tradition,” he tells us, “are not those that can be ‘learned’ or ‘discussed’: either they are or they are not.”
For Evola, evidently, they are, and he’s managed to secure his knowledge by becoming “free of the obstacles represented by various human constructions,” such as specialized historical research and reasoned argument. “Human constructions,” he tells us, are to be avoided as the truth of tradition can only be divined from a nonhuman perspective. Contra Evola, the point is debatable, but whatever one may think of his “truths”, the present writer has no difficulty finding some of them nonhuman.
Looking at the book today, its’ difficult to think that the most important people taken with it at the time, Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s Nazis (understandably, its mass appeal was nil) were less impressed by Evola’s aristocratic disdain for argument – according to Evola, a distinctly Jewish pastime – that for his championing of a rigid social hierarchy, the belief in the supremacy of the noble Aryan race, and the glorification of the ruthless warrior. The Nazis had already drawn on some homegrown savants in this regard, pulling Nietzsche’s remarks about a “good war that hallows any cause,” and “the blonde beast” out of context. (Unlike Evola, Nietzsche did see military action in the Franco-Prussian War; the experience made him a lifelong anti-militarist, and when the Nazis hacks cottoned to this, they gently shunted him to the side. The fact that he also vigorously rejected anti-Semitism didn’t help.) But Evola built an entire sociology around the idea of the Kshatriya, the “holy Warrior” of the ancient Hindu caste system, based on the Laws of Manu.
Christianity, democracy, and humanitarianism were cancers eating away at the noble pagan soul, and the militaristic regimes of Mussolini and Hitler were a profound attempt to rejuvenate the race. Or at least part of it. In Evola’s cosmic history, the noble Aryan people originated in the bleak but bracing realms of the North Pole, in the legendary land of Hyperborea (“beyond the north wind”). These manly types, exemplars of what Evola calls “virile spirituality,” worshipped a solar god, “lived dangerously” in a static hierarchical system in which everyone knew their place, and enjoyed the beauty and vigor of a Golden Age, before the rot set in.
This started when a catastrophic shift in the Earth’s axis led to a mass migration of the Hyperboreans, an exodus from their Arctic paradise into less bracing climes. Adopting some of Madame Blavatsky’s ideas, Evola argued that his Arctic warriors migrated to North America and Siberia, then gradually down to the now-lost continent of Atlantis. At this point some of these Atlanteans mixed with an aboriginal southern race – possibly the Lemurians. These southern types were a different breed: nature oriented, they worshipped an Earth Goddess, were peaceful, lived in collective communities characterized by egalitarianism and sharing. They were also responsible for all the character traits the Evola and his friends found nauseating.
Gradually, through the cyclical nature of history, the Hyperborean virtues were eroded. As the world passed through its inevitable descent, the southern, feminine traits became predominant, housed specifically in various racial types, until now, having passed through three previous Yugas, we’ve hit rock bottom with the decadent democracies of the West. (The clincher, apparently, was the Renaissance and the rise of humanism.)
The fact that we are in the last phase of the Kali Yuga was, Evola believed, actually cause for celebration, as it meant that it had nearly come full circle, with a new Golden Age about to be born. All that was needed was a little help, and this, evidently, was where Benito and Adolf came in.
Although Revolt Against the Modern World was published to practically no public notice (the German nationalist writer Gottfried Benn was one of the few to review it) the idea of a vast historical support for the supremacy of an Aryan warrior type caught on with the right people. Evola was once again in Mussolini’s good graces, and wrote extensively for a number of Fascist newspapers. He also wrote two influential books, Aspects of the Jewish Problem (1936) and Outline of a Racist Education (1941) and gave lectures on his racial ideas to university students. Less crude than the Nazi racial doctrines, which he found altogether too materialistic and biological, Evola argued that race was really a spiritual question. This meant, in effect, that one might be Jewish by birth, but still harbor an Aryan soul; likewise, a “true-blooded” Aryan could be possessed by a Semitic spirit. (This, to some extent, explained how a lazy, undisciplined people like the Italians – at least to the average National Socialist’s eye – could have descended from the Romans and were able to participate in the glorious Aryan struggle.)
Fastidious, cultured and at bottom influenced by his profound study of esotericism, Evola found Nazi racial ideas vulgar, and tried to pass on to them some of his own insights, once again attempting to put into practice his beliefs about tradition. He lectured to SS study groups and at the University of Berlin, and was courted by Heinrich Himmler, who treated him to a tour of SS castles. Several of his books were translated into German, and he addressed influential gatherings, like Berlin’s elite Herrenklub. This cachet had great effect at home; in 1938, when Mussolini enacted his own race laws, he used Evola as his guide. Three years later, in 1941, in an attempt to present himself as more than Hitler’s puppet, Il Duce told the Baron that his book, The Synthesis of Racial Doctrine (1941), was the one the Fascists needed.
Evola’s supporters cite his subtle thinking on the “race question” as evidence that he was never really anti-Semitic, but it’s difficult to square this claim with his pronouncements that the Jews were “the anti-race par excellence,” nor with the fact that he argued for the authenticity of the notoriously spurious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with its ludicrous “evidence” of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. He was also less than subtle in his response to the murder of his friend Corneliu Codreanu, the leader of the fascistic Romanian Iron Guard, that numbered the religious historian Mircea Eliade among its members. When he heard the news, Evola spoke of the “Judaic horde” and hurled invective against the “filthiest tyranny, the Talmudic, Israelite tyranny.” At different times his rhetoric also included rants about “inferior, non-European races,” “Negro syncopation,” and “sexual tormentresses” who had the audacity to wiggle their hips in very tight pants.
Evola’s attempt to influence Nazi doctrine was unsuccessful: they weren’t interested in Aryan Jews or vice versa, and in any case the difficulties in telling which from which were probably insurmountable. And although he made many German contacts, the pragmatic Himmler finally saw no use for him. Being rejected by Himmler may be a mitigating factor, but it hardly exonerates Evola for his ideas about race. It’s difficult to think that his “spiritual racism” could have saved many Jews, but easy to imagine that some “spiritual undesirables” might have met a sorry end.
Although he was the first person at Hitler’s Rastenburg HQ to greet Il Duce after his daring rescue from prison in 1943, Evola’s contact with the Nazis convinced him that Mussolini was second rate. Evola briefly became involved with the short-lived Fascist republic of Salò, but he soon left Italy for Austria. Here, in 1945, during the blistering Soviet siege of Vienna, Evola was wounded in an air raid, and left with both legs paralyzed, a handicap the spiritual warrior had to live with for the rest of his life. After the war, he returned to Italy, his hopes of a revival of tradition, courtesy of the Axis powers, profoundly dashed.
Yet his belief in occult politics remained. During the 1950s, Evola wrote about the “legionary spirit,” and the “warrior ethic,” but the triumphant tone of his earlier work had shifted. He called on l’uomo differenziato – “those who are different” – to drag their feet against the pull of democracy and materialism. A 1951 edition of Revolt Against the Modern World no longer spoke of the heroic efforts of international Fascism, and instead advised a philosophy of stoic resistance.
However, his polemics aroused the authorities and he was summoned to court, accused of trying to revive Fascism. The fact that he had never joined the party – oversight, or shrewd calculation? – as well as his eloquent defense, cleared him of the charge, and in his book Men Among the Ruins (1953) , he outlined the need for a counter-revolution. Yet age and the times were against him, and in one of his last books, Ride the Tiger (1961), a meditation on how the believers in tradition could survive the final days of the Kali Yuga, Evola advocated “apolitia”, an “active nihilism.” There was little hope, he said, of salvaging anything of value; all that was left to l’uomo differenziato was aristocratic disdain and the more visceral expedients of violence.
Ironically, it was the radical leftism of the 1960s that revived interest in Evola, and in the midst of the social, sexual, and psychedelic “revolutions” of that decade he was re-discovered by disaffected right-wing Italian youth who, strangely enough, linked his work to that of their other hero, J.R.R. Tolkien. Dubbed “our Marcuse” by his new devotees – a nod to the reigning doyen of leftist ideology, Herbert Marcuse – by the early 70s, half-paralyzed and grimly pessimistic, Evola held forth to wide-eyed young neo-fascists, who absorbed his invectives against the intolerable modern world, along with reminiscences of Hitler, Himmler, and Il Duce.
“Nothing in this system deserves to be saved,” he told them and, by all accounts, they seemed to have taken this to heart. Some of those who frequented the stuffy rooms in his palazzo on Corso Vittorio Emanuele in Rome later carried on the Baron’s struggle to make the world safe for “virile spirituality” – some by writing far-right tirades themselves, others by courageously blowing up innocent people.
After Evola’s death and his posthumous notoriety, his ideas reached the English speaking world via the members of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionarice who fled Italy after the Bologna bombing. Reaching England, they made contact with the National Front, whose younger members absorbed Evola’s exciting new doctrines. By the late 1980s, his ideas had spread to wider audiences via the New Right magazine The Scorpion. By the 1990s his ideas on spirituality, anti-modernism, and tradition found a place in the New Age movement, and by 1998 Inner Traditions, a major US esoteric publisher (who publishes me as well), had brought out English translations of many of his works. Perhaps the most ironic new advocate of Evola’s ideas is Michael Moynihan, an Oregon-based “industrial musician,” whose group, Blood Axis, released a CD in 1995, The Gospel of Inhumanity, which featured readings from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, as well as the poet Ezra Pound’s works – Pound was imprisoned for his pro-Fascist propaganda during WWII – as well as selections from the writings of the convicted killer Charles Manson.
Moynihan is interested in the ancient martial religion of Mithraism, a favorite among the Roman legions and briefly a serious contender against Christianity. Manson, convicted for the planning of several brutal murders, is, Moynihan believes, a kind of tragic Gnostic hero, a fate he shares with Alfred Rosenberg, chief ideologue of National Socialism, whose book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), sanctioned German imperialism and racial superiority. Along with a variety of neo-fascist endeavors, Moynihan has been a devotee of the Church of Satan, as well as a supporter of the neo-Nazi James N. Mason, and in 1998 he published Lords of Chaos, a celebration of far-right and neo-fascist Black Metal rock groups. Most recently he’s edited an English translation of Evola’s late political work Men Among the Ruins. What’s ironic about this is not that Moynihan should be attracted to Evola’s ideas, but that any society which actually put them into practice would more than likely eliminate him and other such advocates of “ Reich and roll” as cultural undesirables.
Ultimately, there is a real danger connected with Evola’s thinking. Not his obvious Fascism or racism, but the fact that his writings are not merely the ravings of a lunatic. The modern world has, after all, thrown up some very real problems, and the materialism and spiritual poverty of the West have given rise to some very unwelcome responses. It may be an understatement, but human beings should be motivated by something more than consumerism and the dubious cachet of having “fuck” misspelled on their clothes. But a hierarchical society based on racial superiority and a warrior breed is not, perhaps, the answer. Yet if history tells us anything, it’s that if moderate individuals don’t come up with a better idea soon, the resulting ideological gap will be filled by the less moderate among us. Current readers of Julius Evola, I suspect, are banking on history repeating itself.