Remembering Julius Evola
Over the course of his life (1898-1974), Julius Evola published at least 36 books and more than 11,000 articles. Especially in the last decade, few thinkers have experienced such renewed interest on the right. Dressed all in black with his imperious expression and looming monocle, he appeals both aesthetically and intellectually to many young men disillusioned with the modern world.
Evola can be read as a representative of an “authentic right,” one who responds to the same discontents that made someone like the psychoanalyst Jordan B. Peterson famous: How does one survive in the modern world when it seems so decadent, morally bankrupt, and materialistic? What is the proper response for someone who wants more than is offered by a society is stripped of any higher ideals or purposes, of faith, of spirituality, of meaning?
In this way, Evola’s life’s work might be seen as a detailed response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous declaration that “God is Dead,” one that avoids succumbing to total nihilism. How can one escape the daily depravations that have only intensified in the years since Evola died? How can one become, as he put it, a “differentiated man,” an “aristocrat of the soul?” What can be done personally? What can be done politically? Evola addressed all these questions in ways that at times were—to say the least—controversial.
His career had three distinct phases, during which his thinking itself underwent no changes, though his proposed solutions did. This was partly because of changing circumstances in the world and partly because of his increased age, experience, and wisdom. We might demarcate them as follows:
- The Youthful Evola of Pagan Imperialism (1928), full of piss and vinegar, ready to take on the world with aggressive energy.
- The Middle Evola of Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), the esoteric sage of Perennial Traditionalism, who nonetheless still sought to bring about political change in the real world.
- The Mature Evola of Ride the Tiger (1961), who had all but given up hope on radical real-world solutions and instead focused on how the individual might become the steel on which the modern world breaks.
The transitional point between the Middle and Mature Evola can be seen in Man Among the Ruins (1953). Shortly before, in 1951, Evola stood trial in post-war Italy on the charge of trying to resurrect fascism. He defended himself in court with a widely quoted statement: “My ideas are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.” He was acquitted.
The futility and sad desperation of youthful rebellion against the profane modern world that characterized the Mature Evola can be seen in this passage from Ride the Tiger:
On the one hand there were the ‘rebels without a cause,’ the ‘angry young men’ with their rage and aggression in a world where they felt like strangers, where they saw no sense, no values worth embracing and fighting for. As we have seen, that was the liquidation, in the world where God is dead, of those previous forms of revolt that, despite everything—and even in utopian anarchism—still had a fundamental belief in a just cause to defend, at the price of any destruction and at the sacrifice of one’s own life. ‘Nihilism’ there referred to the negation of the values of the world and of the society against which one was rebelling, not those of the rebels themselves. But in its current forms, the rebellion is a sheer, irrational movement ‘without a flag.’ … It is irrational, anarchic, and instinctive in character. For want of anything else, it calls on the abject minorities of outsiders, on the excluded and rejected, sometimes even on the Third World (in which case Marxist fantasies reappear) and on the blacks, as being the only revolutionary potential. But it stands under the sign of nothingness: it is a hysterical ‘revolution of the void and the underground,’ of ‘maddened wasps trapped in a glass jar, who throw themselves frantically against the walls.’
Despite the fact that he wrote this in the 1960s, modern readers may be struck by how accurately this describes the energies on both the left and the right during the past decade or so. Implicitly, all these people are yearning for something they are missing, grasping at something they cannot know, and, according to Evola, in their blindness they are grasping for Tradition. It takes a special sort of inner character and strength, which must be cultivated through various techniques, to be able to stand in a world such as this both unaffected by it and, somehow, apart from it. Such a path is not easy, and most will never make it, since there are too many seductions in the way. Evola does not pretend to write for those people, but only the exceptional, differentiated few who have some chance of becoming men or women of true character and distinction.
While Evola’s work contains many influences from ancient traditions, religions, and thinkers, it is possible to summarize the core as capital “T” Tradition in opposition to modernity. He believed the modern world is not only the exact opposite of Tradition, but also nearly every institution or media that bears the mark of power is designed to snuff out any potential of Tradition breaking out. The modern world is not simply “not traditional”, it is anti-Tradition—it is actively hostile to Tradition, it will seek out and attempt to destroy Tradition.
The modern materialist mind cannot process or understand Tradition, because Tradition is so alien to modernity that it appears to us not merely as fanaticism but as madness. Tradition asserts that there is an Absolute, an immaterial “Truth” that exists beyond the material plane, a metaphysical Transcendent. In the correctly ordered world of Tradition, corresponding to humanity’s Golden Age, society was oriented “upwards,” hierarchically, as we might imagine the medieval Great Chain of Being. At the top of this order sits a ruler of combined temporal and spiritual power, a kind of warrior-priest, who embodies the ideals of regality.
The examples for such figures necessarily come from myth rather than history. For our chivalric king we must look to King Arthur (or perhaps, for Lord of the Rings fans, King Aragon), not to any real king, since the ideal is more important, “truer,” than the reality which—especially in our modern Iron Age (or Kali Yuga)—will more than likely fall short of Platonic perfection.
To Evola, what is important is not the actual realization of these ideals, but a fundamental orientation towards them. In his system, any steps towards transcendent self-actualization, or the societal recognition of the true nature of The Absolute, leads towards Tradition. Any steps away from those ideals lead toward the profane materialism of modernity.
One of the more unusual aspects of Evola’s concept of Tradition is that it is of no particular tradition, but a kind of amalgamation of that which is common across all traditions. For Evola, as a perennialist, particular traditions are simply local manifestations of one primordial Truth. This universalist aspect of Evola’s thought comes into some natural conflict with the particularism of most forms of nationalism, which, in its petty and chauvinist form, Evola dismissed as a profane modern conception. Evola regarded not nation-states but “the Imperium,” which transcended national boundaries. He liked the basic idea of the Holy Roman Empire and even suggested (in Pagan Imperialism)that the differences between Italy and Germany were largely superficial and that they and other European nations might one day unite under a single banner. While Evola would almost certainly not have supported the soulless bureaucratic entity that is the European Union today, he would not have objected to it on nationalist grounds. He once interviewed the (now infamous) Count Kalergi, and as such did not object to his pan-Europeanism.
To this basic orientation, we can add a few more distinct ideas, which I discussed at greater length in my book The Prophets of Doom (2023). For Evola, history has a cyclical and downwards trajectory according to two interrelated doctrines: “The Doctrine of the Castes” and “The Doctrine of the Four Ages.” The Four Castes are the workers, the bourgeoisie, the warriors, and the priests. The Four Ages are Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron. During each age in a series of decline, one of the four castes dominates:
During the Golden Age: a Warrior-Priest
the Silver Age: Priests
the Bronze Age: Warriors
the Iron Age: Merchants
For Evola, the degeneration from Golden Age to Silver Age represents an inversion of a solar, masculine, and aristocratic spirituality to a lunar and feminine priestly one. Meanwhile, the warrior of the Bronze Age, although more masculine, is a “mere brute” and lacks the transcendent and spiritual aspect of the Golden Age priest. Finally, the Iron Age, typically ruled by the merchant, severs the dimming light of the Absolute, cuts off Tradition, and embodies a dark time, known as the Kali Yuga, which eventually devolves into the worst barbarism of all, the reign of the mass peasantry, which is something like Soviet Communism.
On this score, one of Evola’s most distinctive critiques is in his almost wholly negative view of American culture, which he saw as bourgeois, conformist, and materialist in the worst ways and the exact opposite of Tradition. In a sense, he viewed the United States as the quintessentially anti-Tradition culture and, for this reason, as even more dangerous than the USSR. While the Soviets were brutal, American ideas were more like a corrosive acid that might rot your culture from within. Some of Evola’s most vicious essays tend in this direction, but there is little in them that would contradict critiques from American conservative writers who similarly viewed the USA as having developed a vulgar “anti-culture.” It is not difficult to imagine someone like Russell Kirk, Allan Bloom, or even Pat Buchanan nodding along to even the most scathing of Evola’s points.
Nevertheless, Evola was not a prude and seldom went in for petty moralizing—for him, that was too bourgeois and polite. There was always a more radical individualist element in his thinking, which puts him beyond “mere conservativism.” His focus was always on the orientation towards or away from Tradition. For example, in an essay on modern divorce laws (divorce was not legalized in Italy until 1970, so it was a live debate), he comments that modern marriage is so far away from the Traditional conception of what marriage is or is meant to be that what the law says scarcely even matters, since it is questionable as to whether those couples were truly married in the first place. For Evola, divorce, like other liberal reforms, elevates the individual’s fleeting desires above the eternal principles that once governed human relations.
Evola is distinct from other right-wing figures in his total and uncompromising rejection of democracy and egalitarianism. It may be shocking to some people, but Evola wrote books with titles such as Fascism Viewed From The Right (1964), in which he is critical of the likes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (both of whom he apparently met in person) “from the right.” This does not mean he was trying to be “more fascist” or “more Nazi” than either of them, but that he offered a critique of both “from the point of view of Tradition” and deplored that which was plebian, populist, and distinctly “modern” in the Fascist and Nazi regimes.
Although Evola’s life was eventful, he considered its details superfluous to his ideas. His autobiography, The Path of Cinnabar (1963), focuses nearly exclusively on his intellectual and spiritual journey. Despite the fact that he was known by some as “Baron Evola,” he was not really an aristocrat but grew up in a modest bourgeois Catholic household in Rome. As a teenage soldier during World War I, he served as an artilleryman.
After the war, he had a brief period in the early 1920s as a notable Dadaist painter, during which he was filled with existential angst and attempted suicide. In 1927, he founded an esoteric cult which practiced magic with the Ur Group (later earning him the nickname “The Magic Baron”) under the influence of the mathematician Arturo Reghini. The ostensible purpose of this group was to attempt to magically influence Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini to abandon populism for a more aristocratic regime based on Ancient Roman virtues and a caste system. It was in this spirit that he wrote Pagan Imperialism in 1928. The book was controversial, however, because of its attacks on the Catholic Church, which led to Evola being something of a pariah under the direct censure of the Fascist authorities.
Evola believed Christianity had become soft and emptied of its esoteric, mystical, and spiritual potential by a deadening temporal exotericism, which he believed had also corrupted the Catholic Church. Over the course of his career, he learned to curb the edges of his criticism of Christianity, perhaps as a matter of politics, but the basics of his critique would remain throughout his work. However, Evola would fall out with Reghini over the latter’s support of Freemasonry, and the Ur Group seems to have dissolved in 1929.
Around this time, Evola became infatuated with the work of the Perennial Traditionalist René Guénon, whom he would call his “master” and biggest influence. Evola’s chief disagreement with Guénon had to do with Guénon’s insistence that European man cannot flourish under the priestly Brahmin caste, unlike some Eastern cultures. For Evola, Europeans were always a warrior culture, not a priestly one, and always did best when they wielded the sword. Hence, Evola is always on the side of the Imperium against the Papacy, the Ghibellines against the Guelphs. Evola saw the spiritual and heroic potential in war, but as in everything, his conception was chivalric and idealist, the duel as opposed to the profane and mechanized “total war” of the mass man during the World Wars.
Guénon inspired Evola’s masterpiece, Revolt Against the Modern World. This book, along with a moderately circulated column (in the philosophical supplement Diorama Filosofico in the newspaper Il Regime Fascista from 1934 to 1943), gained Evola some limited fame and influence within Mussolini’s Italy, and he accordingly sought to try to influence the country’s Fascist regime, again, with a view to making it more aristocratic and traditional.
His work at this time can be divided largely into two categories: the first represents spiritual explorations of specific religious traditions: The Hermetic Tradition, (Western occultism) The Doctrine of the Awakening (Buddhism), The Yoga of Power (Hindu). These works have an audience beyond the political right are read in spiritual circles. The second are attempts to infuse the biological racism coming from Hitler’s Germany with a more spiritual aspect, which won the approval of Mussolini himself. These works, which include Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race and The Myth of the Blood, are among his least-read today, especially because even among those interested in questions of race today, the preferred direction is more scientific than spiritual. During this period, Evola also came to be known to some of Hitler’s high command, especially the SS, as Heinrich Himmler’s own interest in the occult had led him at least to know of “the magic baron.” This led to Evola being invited to Germany for a lecture tour, but he made little impact, and internal documents have since shown the SS thought Evola to be a subversive but ultimately harmless figure. Even after the war, the leftist resistance to Mussolini regarded Evola as a harmless crank rather than a Nazi collaborator.
Nonetheless, when Fascist Italy fell, Evola was allowed to flee to Germany as part of a delegation that traveled to the ill-fated puppet Republic of Salò. He was reportedly part of an entourage that accompanied Mussolini to meet Hitler at his headquarters in 1943, but not much is known about Evola’s involvement in this meeting, or even why he attended. Subsequently, he went into hiding in Vienna where, famously, he enjoyed taking strolls during Allied bomb raids, perhaps as a supreme demonstration of his mastery of “mind over matter.” His luck ran out one day in 1945, when he was struck by shrapnel and paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.
After the war, Evola moved to an apartment in Rome where, wheelchair-bound, he would remain for the rest of his life, writing ceaselessly and maintaining correspondences with many other prominent figures in the post-war right intelligentsia, including Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, and René Guénon (who died in 1951). Evola remained influential with young Italian right-wingers throughout this period, who not only read him but also sometimes sought him out as a kind of pilgrimage to learn at the feet of their sage.
Evola kept busy writing cultural and philosophical articles for Il Mondo (The World, which, strangely for him, was a liberal newspaper) and Ordine Nuovo (New Order, a rightist publication, where his articles were collected in the book A Handbook for Right-wing Youth, which is not a bad introduction to Evola’s basic thought, especially the essay “Orientations”). He also wrote for Il Conciliatore, Il Borghese, and Roma, which were all conservative publications closer to something like Chronicles today, in which he chiefly wrote about post-war cultural decline as a sort of mystical Italian version of Peter Hitchens. These last essays are some of Evola’s most amusing and enjoyable to read, as we witness him grumpily complaining about everything from women in jeans (a crime for which he bombastically declared they should be made to work in labor camps), to Montessori schools, American radio stations, jazz, the Beat movement, hippies, and The Beatles. A good smattering of these is available in collections such as The Bow and The Club (1968) and Recognitions (1974).
Evola’s value for us today is twofold. First, in his practical advice about “self-actualization” for those who would otherwise feel absolutely surrounded by the depravities of the modern world. The second is in leading the right toward the idealized goal “Tradition,” in much the same way as leftists embrace a socially engineered, globalist future as their vision.
One might ask why any American who believes in constitutional government and Christianity might read Evola, who was unmistakably critical of his convictions as well as his country. One answer is that Evola confronts the left from a radically different perspective than almost anything one may have encountered before. Evola examines the essential characteristics of traditional practices that hold true across cultures. He furnishes the “why” for tradition in a way that few others do. His is not a non-rational conservatism, in the mode of Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott, but a fully reasoned, cross-cultural system that provides explicit answers why, for example, one might wish to maintain traditional gender roles or avoid a strictly materialist organization of society. Evola was anti-egalitarian, well-disposed toward the notion of hierarchy, and fixed on the spiritual core of social structures. For all his idiosyncrasies and deplorable judgments, he was an erudite, insightful man of the right.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/remembering-the-right/remembering-julius-evola