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Julius Evola

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Julius Evola
Evola during 1920s
Born
Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola

(1898-05-19)May 19, 1898
Rome, Italy
DiedJune 11, 1974(1974-06-11) (aged 76)
Rome, Italy
Cause of deathRespiratory-hepatic problems
NationalityItalian
Notable workTheory of the Absolute Individual (1927)
Revolt Against the Modern World (1934)
The Mystery of the Grail (1937)
Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race (1941)
The Yoga of Power (1949)
Men Among the Ruins (1953)
Ride the Tiger (1961)
Era20th century
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolTraditionalism
Actual idealism
InstitutionsSchool of Fascist Mysticism
Main interests
History, religion, esotericism
Notable ideas
Fascist mysticism, spiritual racism
Websitewww.fondazionejuliusevola.it

Baron Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (Italian pronunciation: [ˈɛːvola];[2] 19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974), better known as Julius Evola (/ˈdʒuljəs ɛˈvoʊlə/), was an Italian philosopher, painter, and esotericist.

Evola was a theorist of racism, personally praised by Benito Mussolini for his "Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race".[3] He has been described as "one of the most influential fascist racists in Italian history."[4] Evola's work was and is influential on fascists and neofascists,[5][6] as well as today's Alt-right movement, including President Donald Trump chief advisor Steve Bannon's Breitbart News[7][8] and Vladimir Putin advisor Aleksander Dugin.[9][10]

According to one scholar, "Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century."[11] Many of Evola's theories and writings were also centered on his idiosyncratic mysticism and esoteric religious studies, accordingly, he influenced apolitical esotericists as well.[12]

Biography

Early years

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome to a Sicilian family of minor aristocracy. He was occasionally attributed with the title "Baron". Little is known about his early upbringing except that he considered it irrelevant. Evola studied engineering in Rome and was involved in the Italian social and artistic Futurist movement until he broke with a leading figure. He joined the artillery as an officer in the First World War. Returning to civilian life, Evola was a painter and poet in the Dada movement.[12][13]

Esotericism

A keen mountaineer, Evola found the experience a source of revelatory spiritual experience. Evola describes a spiritual crisis after his return from the war. He had experimented with drugs and with magic until, around age 23, Evola considered suicide. He says he avoided suicide thanks to a revelation he had while reading an early Buddhist text. The text dealt with shedding all forms of identity other than absolute transcendence.[12]

Subsequently Evola developed the doctrine of "magical idealism", which held that "the Ego must understand that everything that seems to have a reality independent of it is nothing but an illusion, caused by its own deficiency." For Evola, this ever-increasing unity with the absolute involved expanded participation in the absolute individual understood as unconstrained liberty, and therefore unconditioned power.[12]

Evola wrote prodigiously on Eastern mysticism, tantra, hermeticism, the myth of the holy grail and western esotericism. He held that the alleged superiority of the West over the East lay in the fact that in mythical times the warrior and priestly paths converged.[12]

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 ancient Roman Paganism,[14] and influence the fascist regime through esotericism.[12]

Spiritual racism

Friedrich Nietzsche heavily affected Evola's thought. However, Evola criticized Nietzsche for lacking the "transcendent element" in his philosophy. A reference point is needed according to Evola, and this point cannot be reached with senses or logic. Transcendental experiences and spiritual racism supply this reference point, achieved through the heroic element in Man.[4]

Evola expanded racism to include racism of the body, soul and spirit, giving primacy to the latter alleged factor, and asserting that "races only declined when their spirit failed."[6] He developed a "general objective law: the law of the regression of the castes", claiming that "[t]he meaning of history from the most ancient times is this: the gradual decline of power and type of civilization from one to another of the four castes - sacred leaders, warrior nobility, bourgeoisie (economy, "merchants") and slaves - which in the traditional civilizations corresponded to the qualitative differentiation in the principal human possibilities."[12]

As noted by Furlong,

It was this caste-based perspective that was developed in the 1930s and during the war in Evola's extensive writings on racism; for Evola, the core of racial superiority lay in the spiritual qualities of the higher castes, which expressed themselves in the in physical as well as in cultural features but were not determined by them. The law of the regression of castes places racism at the core of Evola's philosophy, since he sees an increasing predominance of lower races as directly expressed through modern mass democracies.[12]

Like René Guénon, 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 a four age cycle. Evola argued that both Italian fascism and Nazism held hope for a reconstitution of the "celestial" Aryan race.[15] He drew on mythology of super-races and their decline, particularly alleged hyperboreans, and maintained that traces of their influence could be felt in Indo-European man, which he nevertheless felt devolved from those alleged higher forms.[12]

Furlong noted Evola's frequent use of the term "Aryan" to denote the nobility imbued with traditional spirituality prior to the end of World War II, after which he used it very rarely.[12] Evola also endorsed the views of the Jewish people provided by the self-hating Jew Otto Weininger, and viewed Jews as corrosive and anti-traditional. However, he described Hitler's more fanatical anti-Semitism as a paranoid idée fixe which damaged the reputation of the Third Reich.[6]

Relationship with Fascism

There are contradictory views among scholars as to Evola's political categorization and his specific relationship with fascism and neofascism. He has been described as a "fascist intellectual,"[16] a "radical traditionalist,"[17] "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular,”[18] and as having been "the leading philosopher of Europe's neofascist movement."[18] A James Gregor, however, writes that, "Evola opposed literally every feature of Fascism."[19] A difference 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.[20] 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."[21] Evola's first published political work was an anti-fascist piece in 1925, and he wrote a second in 1928.[22] 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.[23]

Evola developed a complex line of argument, synthesizing and adapting the spiritual orientation of writers such as Rene Guenon with the political concerns of the European Authoritarian Right.[12] Evola hoped to influence Mussolini's 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 like-minded 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).

Finding Italian Fascism too compromising, Evola began to seek recognition in the Third Reich, where he lectured from 1934 onward. He held hope in the Nazi SS, though took issue with Nazi populism and biological materialism. SS authorities rejected Evola's ideas as supranational, aristocratic, and thus reactionary.[6]

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 "key figures in the German racial hierarchy."[4]

Italian Fascism went into decline when, 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.[24]

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.[25]

Post-World War II

Evola's occult ontology exerted influence over post-war fascism and neo-fascism.[4] Nevertheless, Evola attempted to dissociate himself from totalitarianism, preferring the conception of the "organic" state which he put forth in his text Men Among the Ruins.[12]

Evola sought to develop a strategy for the implementation of a "conservative revolution" in post World War II Europe.[12] He rejected nationalism, advocating instead for a European Imperium, which he desired to be expressed in various forms according to local conditions, but be "organic, hierarchical, anti-democratic, and anti-individual."[12]

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.[26]

Ride the Tiger, Evola's last major work, saw him examining a world in which God was dead, 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 Tantric metaphor of "Riding the Tiger" which consisted of turning things that were considered inhibitory to spiritual progress by mainstream Brahmanical society. The process that Evola described potentially made use of everything from modern music, hallucinogenic drugs, non-possessive "Dionysian" relationships with the opposite sex going beyond "bourgeois norms" and sexual exclusivism while also encouraging sexual polarity, and even substituting an urban existence for the Theophany in virgin nature.[27] Furlong considers this text, in the context of his work contemporary to its writing, as a proposition that a potential elite immunize itself from modernity as they attempt to rebel against it via "right wing anarchism."[12]

Death

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.[citation needed]

Influence

On Breitbart News, Milo Yiannopoulos has cited Evola's works as being an essential part of the alt-right philosophy.[7]

Evola's writings have continued to influence many European far-right political, racist and neo-fascist movements. He is widely translated in French, Spanish and partly in German. Amongst those he has influenced are the American Blackshirts Party (who are not white nationalist), Miguel Serrano, Savitri Devi, GRECE, the Movimento sociale italiano (MSI), Falange Española, Gaston Armand Amaudruz's Nouvel Ordre Européen, 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, CasaPound Italia, Tricolor Flame and the Conservative People's Party of Estonia. 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 Marcuse—only better."[28] According to one leader of the neofascist "black terrorist" Ordine Nuovo, "Our work since 1953 has been to transpose Evola’s teachings into direct political action."[29] The now defunct French fascist group Troisième Voie was also inspired by Evola.[30] Jonathan Bowden, English political activist and chairman of the New Right, spoke highly of Evola and his ideas and gave lectures on his philosophy. German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim based part of his "initiatory therapy" on Evola's work.[31]

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.

Selected books and articles

Footnotes

  1. ^ Piero Vassallo (15 June 2014). "L'ateismo mistico e anti-italiano di Julius Evola". Riscossa Cristiana. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
  2. ^ Rai DOP
  3. ^ Evola, Julius. "Mussolini and Racism"
  4. ^ a b c d Aaron Gillette. Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. London: Routledge, 2002.
  5. ^ Stanley G. Payne. A History of Fascism, 1914–1945
  6. ^ a b c d Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity By Nicholas Goodrick-Clark
  7. ^ a b Bokharia, Allum (March 29, 2016). "An Establishment Conservative's Guide To The Alt-Right". Breitbart. Retrieved October 20, 2016.
  8. ^ McClarey, Donald. "Remarks of Stephen Bannon at the Vatican", American Catholic 2016 [1]
  9. ^ Zubrin, Steve. "Putin's Rasputin Endorses Trump", The Weekly Standard
  10. ^ Meyer, Henry and Ant, Onur. "The One Russian Linking Putin, Erdogan and Trump", Bloomberg [2]
  11. ^ Ferraresi, Franco. "The Radical Right in Postwar Italy," Politics & Society, 1988 16:71-119, Pg. 84
  12. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Paul Furlong, "The Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola", London: Routledge, 2011
  13. ^ Julius Evola, Il Camino del Cinabro, 1963
  14. ^ Isotta Poggi. "Alternative Spirituality in Italy." In: James R. Lewis, J. Gordon Melton. Perspectives on the New Age. SUNY Press, 1992. Page 276.
  15. ^ A. James Gregor, Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
  16. ^ Blamires, Cyprian, and Paul Jackson. World Fascism: a historical encyclopedia, vol 1, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006. p. 208.
  17. ^ Packer, Jeremy. Secret agents popular icons beyond James Bond. New York, NY: Lang, 2009. p 150.
  18. ^ a b Atkins, Stephen E.. Encyclopedia of modern worldwide extremists and extremist groups . Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. p 89.
  19. ^ Gregor, A James The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science. Cambridge University Press, 2006. p 93.
  20. ^ H.T. Hansen, "A Short Introduction to Julius Evola" in Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p xviii.
  21. ^ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press 2002, p.337)
  22. ^ Gregor, A James The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science Cambridge University Press, 2006. p 86.
  23. ^ The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science. Cambridge University Press, 2006. p 86.
  24. ^ Roger Griffin, Matthew Feldman. Fascism: Post-war fascisms. Taylor & Francis, 2004. p. 223
  25. ^ Stucco 1992, xiii
  26. ^ Evola - "Autodifesa/Self-Defence" in appendix to Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist 1953
  27. ^ Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul. Inner Traditions, 2003.
  28. ^ Thomas Sheehan. Italy: Terror on the Right. The New York Review of Books, Volume 27, Number 21 & 22, January 22, 1981
  29. ^ Quoted in Ferraresi, Franco. "The Radical Right in Postwar Italy." Politics & Society. 1988 16:71-119. (p.84)
  30. ^ Institute of Race relations. "The far Right in Europe: a guide." Race & Class, 1991, Vol. 32, No. 3:125-146 (p.132).
  31. ^ Victor Trimondi, "Karlfried Graf Dürckheim"
  32. ^ "Bibliografia di J. Evola". Fondazione Julius Evola. Retrieved 25 April 2015.

References

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