The Life & Writings of Julius Evola
by Gwendolyn Taunton
If the industrious man, through taking action,
Does not succeed, he should not be blamed for that –
He still perceives the truth.
～The Sauptikaparvan of the Mahābhārata (2,16)
If we could select a single aspect by which to define Julius Evola, it
would have been his desire to transcend the ordinary and the world of
the profane. It was characterized by a thirst for the Absolute, which
the Germans call mehr als leben – “more than living.” This idea
of transcending worldly existence colours not only his ideas and
philosophy, it is also evident throughout his life which reads like a
litany of successes. During the earlier years Evola excelled at whatever
he chose to apply himself to: his talents were evident in the field of
literature, for which he would be best remembered, and also in the arts
and occult circles.
Born in Rome on the 19th of May in 1898, Giulio
Cesare Andrea Evola was the son of an aristocratic Sicilian family, and
like many children born in Sicily, he had received a stringent Catholic
upbringing. As he recalled in his intellectual autobiography,
Il cammino del cinabro
[1963, 1972, The Cinnabar's Journey], his favourite pastimes consisted
of painting, one of his natural talents, and of visiting the library as
often as he could in order to read works by Oscar Wilde, Friedrich
Nietzsche, and Otto Weininger.[1] During his youth he also studied
engineering, receiving excellent grades but chose to discontinue his
studies prior to the completion of his doctorate, because he "did not
wish to be bourgeois, like his fellow students." At the age of nineteen
Evola joined the army and participated in World War I as a mountain
artillery officer. This experience would serve as an inspiration for his
use of mountains as metaphors for solitude and ascension above the
chthonic forces of the earth. Evola was also a friend of Mircea Eliade,
who kept in correspondence with Evola from 1927 until his death. He was
also an associate of the Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci and the Tantric
scholar Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon).
 |
| Sir John Woodroffe |
During his younger years Evola was briefly involved in art circles, and
despite this being only a short lived affair, it was also a time that
brought him great rewards. Though he would later denounce Dada as a
decadent form of art it was
within the field of modern art that Evola first made his name, taking a particular interest in Marinetti and Futurism. His oil painting,
Inner Landscape, 10:30 a.m., is hanging today on a wall of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.[2] He also composed
Arte Astratta (Abstract Art) but later, after experiencing a personal crisis, turned to the study of Nietzsche, from which sprang his
Teoria dell, individuo assoluto
(Theory of the Absolute Individual) in 1925. By 1921 Evola had
abandoned the pursuit of art as the means to place his unique mark on
the world. The revolutionary attitudes of Marinetti, the Futurist
movement and the so-called avant-garde which had once fascinated him, no
longer appeared worthwhile to Evola with their juvenile emphasis on
shocking the bourgeois. Likewise, despite being a talented poet, Evola
(much like another of his inspirations – Arthur Rimbaud) abandoned
poetry at the age of twenty four. Evola did not write another poem nor
paint another picture for over forty years. Thus, being no longer
enamored of the arts, Evola chose instead to pursue another field
entirely that he would one day award him even greater acclaim.
To this day, the magical workings of the Ur Group and its successor Krur
remain as some of the most sophisticated techniques for the practice of
esoteric knowledge laid down in the modern Western era. Based on a
variety of primary sources, ranging from Hermetic texts to advanced
Yogic techniques, Evola occupied a prominent role in both of these
groups. He wrote a number of articles for Ur and edited many of the
others. These articles were collected in the book Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus,
which alongside Evola’s articles, are included the works of Arturo
Reghini, Giulio Parese, Ercole Quadrelli and Gustave Meyrink. The
original title of this work in Italian, Introduzione alla Magia quale scienza dell’lo, literally translates as Introduction to Magic as a Science of the “I”.[3]
In this sense, the 'I' is best interpreted as the ego, or the
manipulation of the will – an idea which is also the found in the work
of that other famous magician, Aleister Crowley and his notion of
Thelema. The original format of Ur was as a monthly publication, of
which the first issue was printed in January 1927.[4]
Contributors to this publication included Count Giovanni di Caesaro, a
Steinerian, Emilio Servadio, a distinguished psychoanalyst, and Guido de
Giorgio, a well-known adherent of Rudolph Steiner and an author of
works on the Hermetic tradition. It was during this period, that he was
introduced to Arturo Reghini, whose ideas would leave a lasting
impression on Evola. Arturo Reghini (1878-1946), who was interested in
speculative Masonry and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, introduced
Evola to Guénon's writings and invited him to join the Ur group. Ur and
its successor, Krur, gathered together a number of people interested in
Guénon's exposition of the Hermetic tradition and in Vedanta, Taoism,
Buddhism, Tantra, and magic.
Arturo Reghini was to be a major influence on Evola, and himself was a
representative of the so-called Italian School (Scuola Italica), a
secret order which claimed to have survived the downfall of the Roman
Empire, to have re-emerged with Emperor Frederic II, and to have
inspired the Florentine poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, up to Petrarch. Like Evola, Reghini had also written
articles, one of which was entitled "Pagan Imperialism." This appeared
in Salamandra in 1914, and in it Reghini summed up his
anti-Catholic program for a return to a glorious pagan past. This piece
had a profound impact on Evola, and it served as the inspiration for his
similarly titled Imperialismo pagano. Imperialismo pagano,
chronicling the negative effects of Christianity on the world, appeared
in 1928. In the context of this work, Evola is the advocate of an
anti-Roman Catholic pagan imperialism. According to Evola, Christianity
had destroyed the imperial universality of the Roman Empire by insisting
on the separation of the secular and the spiritual. It is from this
separation that arose the inherent decadence and inward decay of the
modern era. Out of Christianity’s implacable opposition to the healthy
paganism of the Mediterranean world arose the secularism, democracy,
materialism, scientism, socialism, and the "subtle Bolshevism" that
heralded the final age of the current cosmic cycle: the age of
"obscurity" the Kali-Yuga.[5] Imperialismo pagano was to be later revised in a German edition as Heidnischer Imperialismus. The changes that occurred in the text of Evola’s Imperialismo pagano in its translation as Heidnischer Imperialismus
five years later were not entirely inconsequential. Although the
fundamental concepts that comprised the substance of Evola’s thought
remained similar, a number of critical elements were altered that would
transform a central point in Evola's thinking. The "Mediterranean
tradition" of the earlier text is consistently replaced with the
"Nordic-solar tradition" in this translation.[6] In 1930 Evola founded
his own periodical, La Torre (The Tower). La Torre, the
heir to Krur, differed from the two earlier publications Ur and Krur in
the following way, as was announced in an editorial insert:
"Our Activity in
1930 – To the Readers: Krur is transforming. Having fulfilled the tasks
relative to the technical mastery of esotericism we proposed for
ourselves three years ago, we have accepted the invitation to transfer
our action to a vaster, more visible, more immediate field: the very
plane of Western 'culture' and the problems that, in this moment of
crisis, afflict both individual and mass consciousness […] for all these
reasons Krur will be changed to the title La Torre (The Tower), a work
of diverse expressions and one Tradition."[7]
La Torre was attacked by official fascist bodies such as L’Impero and Anti-Europa, and publication of La Torre ceased after only ten issues. Evola also contributed an article entitled Fascism as Will to Imperium and Christianity to the review Critica Fascista,
edited by Evola's old friend Giuseppi Bottai. Here again he launches
vociferous opposition to Christianity and attests to its negative
effects, evident in the rise of a pious, hypocritical, and greedy middle
class lacking in all superior solar virtues that Evola attributed to
ancient Rome. The article did not pass unnoticed and was vigorously
attacked in many Italian periodicals. It was also the subject of a long
article in the prestigious Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes (Partie Occultiste) for April 1928, under the title Un Sataniste Italien: Jules Evola.
Coupled with the notoriety of Evola's La Torre, was also another,
more bizarre incident involving the Ur Group's reputation, and their
attempts to form a "magical chain." Although these attempts to exert
supernatural influence on others were soon abandoned, a rumour quickly
developed that the group had wished to kill Mussolini by these means.
Evola describes this event in his autobiography Il Cammino del Cinabro.
"Someone reported
this argument [that the death of a head of state might be brought about
by magic] and some yarn about our already dissolved 'chain of Ur' may
also have been added, all of which led the Duce to think that there was a
plot to use magic against him. But when he heard the true facts of the
matter, Mussolini ceased all action against us. In reality Mussolini was
very open to suggestion and also somewhat superstitious (the reaction
of a mentality fundamentally incapable of true spirituality). For
example, he had a genuine fear of fortune-tellers and any mention of
them was forbidden in his presence."
It was also during this period that Evola also discovered something
which was to become a profound influence on many his ideas: the lost
science of Hermeticism. Though he undoubtedly came into contact with
this branch of mysticism through Reghini and fellow members of Ur, it
seems that Evola’s extraordinary knowledge of Hermeticism actually arose
from another source. Jacopo da Coreglia writes that it was a priest,
Father Francesco Olivia, who had made the most far-reaching progress in
Hermetic science and – sensing a prodigious student – granted Evola
access to documents that were usually strictly reserved for adepts of
the narrow circle. These were concerned primarily with the teachings of
the Fraternity of Myriam (Fratellanza Terapeutica Magica di Myriam),
founded by Doctor Giuliano Kremmerz, pseudonym of Ciro Formisano
(1861-1930). Evola mentions in The Hermetic Tradition that Myriam’s Pamphlet D
laid the groundwork for his understanding of the four elements.[8]
Evola’s knowledge of Hermeticism and the alchemical arts was not
limited to Western sources either, for he also knew an Indian alchemist
by the name of C.S. Narayana Swami Aiyar of Chingleput.[9] During this
era of history, Indian alchemy was almost completely unknown to the
Western world, and it is only in modern times that it has been studied
in relation to the occidental texts.
 |
| M is for Mussolini |
In 1926 Evola published an article in
Ultra (the newspaper of the
Theosophical Lodge in Rome) on the cult of Mithras in which he placed
major emphasis on the similarities of these mysteries with
Hermeticism.[10] During this period he also wrote
Saggi sull’idealismo magico (1925; Essays on Magic Idealism), and
L’individuo ed il divenire del mondo
(1926; The Individual and the Becoming of the World). This article was
to be followed by the publication of his treatise on alchemy,
La Tradizione ermetica
(The Hermetic Tradition). Such was the scope and depth of this work
that Karl Jung even quoted Evola to support his own contention that "the
alchemical opus deals in the main not just with chemical experiments as
such, but also with something resembling psychic processes expressed in
pseudo-chemical language."[11] Unfortunately, the support expressed by
Jung was not mutual, for Evola did not accept Jung's hypothesis that
alchemy was merely a psychic process.
Taking issue with René Guénon's (1886-1951) view that spiritual authority ranks higher than royal power, Evola wrote L’uomo come potenza (Man as power); in the third revised edition (1949), the title was changed to Lo yoga della potenza
(The yoga of power).[12] This was Evola's treatise of Hindu Tantra, for
which he consulted primary sources on Kaula Tantra, which at the time
were largely unknown in the Western world. Decio Calvari, president of
the Italian Independent Theosophical League, introduced Evola to the
study of Tantrism.[13] Evola was also granted access to authentic
Tantric texts directly from the Kaula school of Tantrism via his
association with Sir John Woodroofe, who was not only a respected
scholar, but was also a Tantric practitioner himself, under the famous
pseudonym of Arthur Avalon. A substantial proportion of The Yoga of Power
is derived from Sir John Woodroofe's personal notes on Kaula Tantrism.
Even today Woodroofe is regarded as a leading pioneer in the early
research of Tantrism.
Evola's opinion that the royal or Ksatriya path in Tantrism outranks
that of the Brahmanic or priestly path, is readily supported by the
Tantric texts themselves, in which the Vira or active mode of
practice is exalted above that of the priestly mode in Kaula Tantrism.
In this regard, the heroic or solar path of Tantrism represented to
Evola, a system based not on theory, but on practice – an active path
appropriate to be taught in the degenerate epoch of the Hindu Kali Yuga
or Dark Age, in which purely intellectual or contemplative paths to
divinity have suffered a great decrease in their effectiveness.
In the words of Evola himself:
"During the last years of the 1930s I devoted myself to working on two of my
most important books on Eastern wisdom: I completely revised L’uomo come potenza (Man As Power), which was given a new title, Lo yoga della potenza
(The Yoga of Power), and wrote a systematic work concerning primitive Buddhism entitled La dottrina del risveglio (The Doctrine of Awakening)."[14]
Evola's work on the early history of Buddhism was published in 1943. The
central theme of this work is not the common view of Buddhism, as a
path of spiritual renunciation – instead it focuses on the Buddha's role
as a Ksatriya ascetic, for it was to this caste that he belonged, as is
found in early Buddhist records.
The historical Siddharta was a prince of the Śakya, a kṣatriya
(belonging to the warrior caste), an "ascetic fighter" who opened a path
by himself with his own strength. Thus Evola emphasizes the
"aristocratic" character of primitive Buddhism, which he defines as
having the "presence in it of a virile and warrior strength (the lion's
roar is a designation of Buddha’s proclamation) that is applied to a
nonmaterial and atemporal plane…since it transcends such a plane,
leaving it behind." [15]
 |
| Siddharta's warrior youth. |
The book considered by many to be Evola’s masterpiece,
Revolt Against the Modern World was published in 1934, and was influenced by Oswald Spengler's
Decline of the West (1918) and René Guénon's
The Crisis of the Modern World
(1927), both of which had been previously translated into Italian by
Evola. Spengler's contribution in this regard was the plurality of
civilizations, which then fell into patterns of birth, growth and
decline. This was combined with Guénon's ideas on the "Dark Age" or
Hindu Kali Yuga, which similarly portrays a bleak image of civilizations
in decline. The work also draws upon the writings of Bachofen in
regards to the construction of a mythological grounding for the history
of civilizations. The original version of Julius Evola's
The Mystery of the Grail formed an appendix to the first edition of
Rivolta contra il mondo moderno,
and as such is closely related to this work.[16] Three years later he
reworked that appendix into the present book, which first appeared as
part of a series of religious and esoteric studies published by the
renowned Laterza Publishers in Italy, whose list included works by
Sigmund Freud, Richard Wilhelm, and C. G. Jung, among others. In this
book Evola writes three main premises concerning the Grail myths: That
the Grail is not a Christian Mystery, but a Hyperborean one, that it is a
mystery tradition, and that it deals with a restoration of sacred
regality. Evola describes his work on the Grail in the epilogue to the
first edition (1937).
"To live and
understand the symbol of the Grail in its purity would mean today
the awakening of powers that could supply a transcendental point of
reference for it, an awakening that could show itself tomorrow, after a
great crisis, in the form of an “epoch that goes beyond nations.” It
would also mean the release of the so-called world revolution from the
false myths that poison it and that make possible its subjugation
through dark, collectivistic, and irrational powers. In addition, it
would mean understanding the way to a true unity that would be genuinely
capable of going beyond not only the materialistic – we could say
Luciferian and Titanic – forms of power and control but also the lunar
forms of the remnants of religious humility and the current
neospiritualistic dissipation."[17]
Another of Evola’s books, Eros and the Mysteries of Love, could
almost be seen as a continuation of his experimentation with Tantrism.
Indeed, the book does not deal with the erotic principle in the normal
of sense of the word, but rather approaches the topic as a highly
conceptualized interplay of polarities, adopted from the Traditional use
of erotic elements in eastern and western mysticism and philosophy.
Thus what is described here is the path to sacred sexuality, and the use
of the erotic principle to transcend the normal limitations of
consciousness. Evola describes his book in the following passage:
"But in this study,
metaphysics will also have a second meaning, one that is not unrelated
to the world's origin since 'metaphysics' literally means the science of
that which goes beyond the physical. In our research, this 'beyond the
physical' will not cover abstract concepts or philosophical ideas, but
rather that which may evolve from an experience that is not merely
physical, but transpsychological and transphysiological. We shall
achieve this through the doctrine of the manifold states of being and
through an anthropology that is not restricted to the simple soul-body
dichotomy, but is aware of 'subtle' and even transcendental modalities
of human consciousness. Although foreign to contemporary thought,
knowledge of this kind formed an integral part of ancient learning and
of the traditions of varied peoples."[18]
Another of Evola's major works is Meditations Among the Peaks,
wherein mountaineering is equated to ascension. This idea is found
frequently in a number of Traditions, where mountains are often revered
as an intermediary between the forces of heaven and earth. Evola was an
accomplished mountaineer and completed some difficult climbs such as the
north wall of the Eastern Lyskam in 1927. He also requested in his will
that after his death the urn containing his ashes be deposited in a
glacial crevasse on Mount Rosa.
Evola's main political work was
Men Among the Ruins. This was to be the ninth of Evola's books to published in English. Written at the same time as
Men Among the Ruins, Evola composed
Ride the Tiger
which is complementary to this work, even though it was not published
until 1961. These books belong together and cannot really be judged
separately.
Men among the Ruins shows the universal standpoint of ideal politics;
Riding the Tiger
deals with the practical "existential" perspective for the individual
who wants to preserve his "hegomonikon" or inner sovereignty.[19]
Ride the Tiger
is essentially a philosophical set of guidelines entwining various
strands of his earlier thought into a single work. Underlying the more
obvious sources, which Evola cites within the text, such as Nietzsche,
Sartre and Heidegger, there are also connections with Hindu thoughts on
the collapse of civilization and the Kali Yuga. In many ways, this work
is the culmination of Evola's thought on the role of Tradition in the
Age of Darkness – that the Traditional approach advocated in the East is
to harness the power of the Kali Yuga, by ‘Riding the Tiger’ – which is
also a popular Tantric saying. To this extent, it is not an approach of
withdrawal from the modern world which Evola advocates, but instead
achieving a mastery of the forces of darkness and materialism inherent
in the Kali Yuga. Similarly, his attitude to politics alters here from
that expressed in
Men Among the Ruins, calling instead for a type of individual that is apoliteia.
"[...] this type
can only feel disinterested and detached from everything that is
'politics' today. His principle will become apoliteia, as it was called
in ancient times. [...] Apoliteia is the distance unassailable by this
society and its 'values'; it does not accept being bound by anything
spiritual or moral."[20]
In addition to Evola’s main corpus of texts mentioned previously, he also published numerous other works such as The Way of the Samurai, The Path of Enlightenment According to the Mithraic Mysteries, Il Cammino del Cinabro, Taoism: The Magic, The Mysticism and The Bow and the Club.
He also translated Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, as well as
the principle works of Bachofen, Guénon, Weininger and Gabriel Marcel.
In 1945 Evola was hit by a stray bomb and paralyzed from the waist
downwards. He died on June 11, 1974 in Rome. He had asked to be led from
his desk to the window from which one could see the Janiculum (the holy
hill sacred to Janus, the two-faced god who gazes into this and the
other world), to die in an upright position. After his death the body
was cremated and his ashes were scattered in a glacier atop Mount Rosa,
in accordance with his wishes.
NOTES
[1] Julius Evola,
The Yoga of Power, Shakti, and the Secret Way (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992) ix
[2] ibid., x
[3] Julius Evola,
Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2001) ix
[4] ibid., xvii
[5] A. James Gregor,
Mussolini's Intellectuals (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005)
[6] ibid., 201
[7] Julius Evola,
Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2001) xxi
[8] Julius Evola,
The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teaching of the Royal Art (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992) ix
[9] ibid., ix
[10] ibid., viii
[11] Julius Evola,
The Yoga of Power, Shakti, and the Secret Way (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992) xii
[12] ibid., xiv
[13] ibid., xiii
[14] Julius Evola,
The Doctrine of the Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992) xi
[15] ibid., xv
[16] Julius Evola,
The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1997) vii
[17] ibid., ix
[18] Julius Evola,
Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1991) 2
[19] Julius Evola,
Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2003) 89
[20] Julius Evola,
Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2003) 174-175
