The Italian thinker Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World (RMW) was published between the wars, in 1934. What was then the Great War, and obviously was not yet known as World War I, had been the most destructive ever and was supposed to be the end of all war. But another was inevitable as Evola was writing RMW, and the book’s tensions reflect its place in history. It could be seen as the final book in a trilogy which includes Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) and René Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (1927). These books influenced Evola, and he translated both into Italian.

Evola’s central thesis is partly historiographical and partly metaphysical, and it is that the modern world has lost touch with its traditionalist, spiritual past. This is not merely a conservative appeal to nostalgia, a yearning for the 1950s or the Edwardian era. Evola’s time-frame was far larger. But there is one advantage we moderns have over the pre-lapsarian, traditionalist, deeply spiritual age the passing of which Evola laments: “Almost every people retains the memory of a catastrophe that ended the previous cycle of mankind.”

We moderns have not just history but historiography. Those past ages who knew there had been a cycle-ending catastrophe didn’t know what it was, what had caused it, or how another might be avoided. They were children, with no real memories. This is the meaning of the scene in Plato’s Timaeus, in which Solon is lightly scolded by a priest for the fact that the Greeks had no written language for so long, and thus were themselves like children. We, at least, have been forewarned by history and its cycles and dramatic interludes. And a strong voice among those warning us is that of Evola.

What the Italian calls “chthonic”, or earth-based, religions have superseded pagan, spiritualistic belief-systems with disastrous results. With respect to history, it is the mythology of the ancient past to which Evola looks for enlightenment concerning what has been lost in our post-lapsarian age:

From the perspective that I adopt, what matters in history are all the mythological elements it has to offer, or all the myths that enter into its web, as integrations of the ‘meaning’ of history itself.

This echoes J. G. Frazer’s mythical quest in The Golden Bough, a wonderful book which Evola references in RMW. But the search for meaning is conditioned by the metaphysical for Evola, specifically concerning the role of the invisible world:

In traditional societies the ‘invisible’ was an element as real, if not more real, than the data provided by the physical senses. Every aspect of the individual and of the social life of the people belonging to these societies was influenced by this experience.

As for any reconnection with the pre-lapsarian age Evola sees in the revival of the classical world, he does not take the traditional route, which is via the Renaissance. This, he claims, is false historiography, and he suggests an alternative bridge between the modern and the traditionalist world:

The truth is that after the collapse of the ancient world, if there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins.

This is an important point. Perhaps we have been sold the Renaissance, with its wonderful statuary, art, and palazzi, as the fons et origo of our present civilization (such as it is) when we should have been looking further back in time. Philosophically speaking, the Anselms and Abelards and Augustines brought more life to linguistic philosophy than Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (who I admire very much) or Giordano Bruno, who Evola makes time to mock here. Evola finds the Renaissance overblown, and has no time for Humanism. It is linked far too closely to individualism, which in its turn is responsible for democracy. All these elements Evola finds responsible for our modern plight, or at least his, almost a century ago.

Traditional civilizations, Evola writes, differ from our decadent present by virtue of their conception of “supreme authority”. There was no political dimension to this regal sanction – this was a later and ruinous development – and the guarantor of authority was not “mere strength, violence, or natural and secular qualities such as intelligence, wisdom, physical courage… The roots of authority, on the contrary, always had a metaphysical character.”

There must, of course, be a point of mediation between the invisible and visible planes which provide the commerce for Evola’s Golden Age to prosper. Evola compiles a list of ancient and traditional societies whose rulers were sanctioned by the non-temporal, but performed the office of a bridge or pontifex between the gods and the people ruled by this emissary of the divine. Myth and ritual here are not outliers linked with some vague metaphysical realm, but part of the office of the ruler. Rulers are linked with the sun, the King of the Wood, and other natural and supernatural phenomena – again, this is similar territory to Frazer’s – but it is the realm of the invisible which provides the imprimatur of the ruler over the ruled. Such a society is profoundly anti-democratic.

Guénon influenced Evola by being critical both of democracy and individualism, and by introducing the concept of the Kali Yuga, the “Dark Age” or final civilizational cycle. This has only become darker in almost a century since RWM was published. Individualism is the delivery system for a will which would fragment and disassemble the sanctity of tradition, leading to the false Grail of democracy:

The ‘will,’ in the sense of an individualistic freedom, of those who own the land to divide their property, break it up, and separate it from the legacy of blood and the rigorous norms of the paternal right and primogeniture, truly represents one of the characteristic manifestations of the degeneration of the traditional spirit.

Individualism, by its very nature, tends away from the tribe, the cadre, the pack. Away, ultimately, from tradition, which is what unites us, or ought to if we are to live in healthy societies. This atomization can only lead to degeneration as the superior races are dying out before the ineluctable logic of individualism, which especially in the so-called contemporary “higher classes,” has caused people “to lose all desire to procreate”. So it is today among the white races.

Evola is equally dismissive of democracy, going as far as to smother it in its cradle:

Greek democracy, rather than a conquest of Greek civilization should be regarded as a victory of Asia Minor and of the Southern Hemisphere over the primordial Hellenic stocks that were too weak and scattered to react.

Evola’s attitude to democracy is entirely understandable. He was an aristocrat. Had he wished to do so before his death in 1974, he would have been eligible to become a full, “made” Mafia mobster, his family being traceable all the back to Sicily. (That might have made a good movie). Evola might also, therefore, be forgiven for a little special pleading concerning his own bloodline’s role in his analysis:

[T]he ethos of superiority over the world, of dominating calm and of imperturbability combined with readiness for absolute command, which has remained the characteristic of various aristocratic types even after the secularization of nobility, must be considered an echo of that element that was originally the regal, spiritual, and transcendent element.

As for the tribe which we now suspect dominates the world from the shadows, Evola sounds a note of caution. Even in the introduction to his own printing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Evola warned against the obsession with seeing “the Jew everywhere as deus ex machina”. It does not do to underestimate the power of the Jews, but it is also unhealthy to see their influence in every detail of life and become obsessive.

Evola was also an accomplished student of the occult (rather than an occultist). Much of the occult “works” through correspondences, and Evola’s occult training transfers itself easily to his mystical anthropology:

An essential feature of myth and symbol is that both are apt to convey multiple meanings, which must be separated in a clear-cut fashion and assigned methodically to different categories by means of adequate interpretations.

Deciphering the past is made doubly difficult if that past is itself written in cipher. The mystical nature of ritual and observance can thus be understood as an interpretation, and one which centered around the performance of the ceremony of initiation (such as the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, for example):

I wish to emphasize that in the world of Tradition, initiation in its highest forms was conceived as an intensely real operation that was capable of changing the ontological status of the individual and of grafting onto him certain forces of the world of Being, or of the overworld.

As for the difference and compatibility of men and women, just as today’s Left see the patriarchy everywhere, so Evola saw the matriarchy, and it does not bode well for a civilization:

The periods in which women have reached autonomy and preeminence almost always have coincided with epochs marked by manifest decadence in ancient civilizations.

And, as the scientistic took over at pace, the nature of time itself changed. Time is mechanized now, divided into units which actually make it quasi-spatial. Evola finds a different temporal calibration in the ancient world: “In many ways we can agree with Hubert-Mauss, who said that the ancient calendar marked the periodicity of a system of rites.”

As for the charges of racism and fascism made towards Evola, these are based on the naïve assumption that these are not desirable positions, which is not necessarily the case, depending on one’s ethnic perspective. The left often defends communism by claiming that it has yet to be correctly applied, and we have yet to experience the “right kind” of communism and its attendant benefits. Could the right not counter this in kind, and claim that we have yet to experience the “right kind” of fascism?

The right should never waste time defending this or that writer against a charge of racism. For us, it is not even a charge. “Racism” is simply leftist shorthand for the “race realism” we espouse. Evola was not, however, interested in race from a biological or genetic point of view:

Race, blood, hereditary purity of blood: these are merely ‘material’ factors. A civilization in the true, traditional sense of the word arises only when a supernatural and nonhuman force of a higher order—a force that corresponds to the ‘pontifical’ function, to the component of the rite, and to the principle of spirituality as the basis of a hierarchical differentiation of people—acts upon these factors.

Evola vigorously defends the various caste systems, as well as the principles of chivalry, which he sees as super-individualistic and therefore healthy, as well as instantiating the correct relationship between men and women. He also makes a point concerning caste which is acutely relevant to our cultural situation regarding race and the past:

If the modern world has disapproved of the ‘injustice’ of the caste system, it has stigmatized much more vibrantly those ancient civilizations that practiced slavery; recent times boast of having championed the principle of ‘human dignity.’ This too is mere rhetoric.

Evola reserves his ire, in the main, for the petty distractions of the modern West. Again, he was writing almost 100 years ago, and who can say what he would have made of modern fripperies? Sport, fashion, the press, jazz music, intoxication; Evola sees a fallen world, spiritually and, as a direct result, culturally:

[M]odern man needs these degraded and desecrated forms of action as if they were some kind of drug; he needs them to elude the sense of his inner emptiness, to be aware of himself, and to find in exasperated sensations the surrogate for the true meaning of life.

This degraded man seeks “elation and stupefaction” rather than experiences of spiritual worth.

Can we ever hope to return to Evola’s pre-lapsarian times? It is hard to imagine. For Evola, there is a too great a rift between modern man and his enlightened ancestors, a difference which:

…concerns the experiential possibilities available to each and the way in which the world of nature is experienced according to the categories of perception and the fundamental relationship between I and not-I.

Our philosophical position, degraded and weakened over centuries, now stands against us.

Revolt Against the Modern World is a dense yet eminently readable history of the decline of the religious spirit in the West, the creeping progress of the Kali Yuga. Philosophy, and epistemology, represent an essential failing in this decline, and Evola takes us back, not to some rude and bucolic epoch in which we can all dress up as Norsemen and cosplay our way back into spirituality, but an era which was as Heideggerian as it was religious: “The first era is essentially the era of Being, and hence of truth in a transcendent sense.”

Should you wish to revolt against the modern world, the revolution starts here.

https://counter-currents.com/2025/05/julius-evolas-revolt-against-the-modern-world