Julius Evola

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Julius Evola (Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola, 1898–1974) was an Italian writer, painter, and theorist who became one of the principal figures of the twentieth-century Traditionalist current — the school, associated above all with René Guénon, that held the modern world to be a late and degraded phase of a sacred order it had forgotten. Evola gave that conviction a harder, more combative edge than Guénon allowed, and tied it, across his career, to a politics of the radical right.

He began as an artist. In the years after the First World War he worked as a Dadaist painter and poet in Rome, then turned to philosophy, publishing dense idealist treatises on what he called the absolute individual. In the 1920s he gathered a circle of occultists in the UR Group, whose collective program of ritual and meditative exercises aimed, in their own account, at the awakening of latent spiritual power. From that work came the books on which his esoteric reputation rests: The Hermetic Tradition (1931), which read European alchemy not as proto-chemistry but as a coded science of inner transformation, and Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), his fullest statement of the Traditionalist case — a contrast between a hierarchical, sacred, “solar” civilization of the past and the leveling, materialist present he saw replacing it. Later works extended the program to Indian sources: The Yoga of Power treated Tantra as a discipline of mastery rather than dissolution.

The political dimension is a matter of record, not inference. Evola moved in the orbit of Italian Fascism and of National Socialism, advancing a doctrine of spiritual race and of aristocratic, anti-egalitarian order; he was never a party functionary and was at times regarded with suspicion by both regimes, but he sought to influence them and supplied the vocabulary on which later movements drew. After the war he became a reference point for the European and Italian neofascist right, and Ride the Tiger (1961) offered those who felt themselves stranded in a hostile age a stance of inner detachment — the posture of one who endures the modern world without belonging to it.

Scholarship treats Evola as a case in which esoteric metaphysics and reactionary politics were not separable accessories but a single structure of thought: the same hierarchy that ordered his cosmos ordered his society. Within Traditionalist and esoteric circles his readings of alchemy and Tantra are still studied, sometimes apart from the politics, sometimes not; outside them he is read as much by historians of the far right as by students of Western esotericism. The two readings rarely meet, and that division is itself part of what there is to understand about him.

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