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. Where Guénon withdrew from the world — contemplation, initiation, eventual silence in Cairo — Evola wanted the descent reversed by act. The difference is the whole of him: a single structure in which a doctrine of the eternal and a politics of reaction are not two interests but one.

The painter who left painting

He was born in Rome on 19 May 1898, into a Sicilian family of minor nobility, and styled himself “Baron” for the rest of his life. His first vocation was art. After the First World War — he served as an artillery officer — he passed through Futurism and settled, briefly and intensely, in Dada. He corresponded with Tristan Tzara, theorized abstraction in the essay Arte astratta (1920), painted interior landscapes with titles like Paesaggio interiore, and published a Dadaist poem in four voices, La parole obscure du paysage intérieur (1920–21). Then, around 1921–22, he stopped. The conclusion he drew was that the avant-garde had already been absorbed — that revolt against form, once it could be exhibited and sold, was no revolt at all. Painting could not carry the weight he wanted it to carry. He turned instead to philosophy, and from philosophy to the thing beneath it.

The philosophy was an idealism pushed past its German limit. In Saggi sull’idealismo magico (essays on magical idealism) and the two systematic treatises Teoria dell’individuo assoluto (1927) and Fenomenologia dell’individuo assoluto (1930), Evola argued that the self is not a thing the world produces but a power that, fully realized, conditions everything and is conditioned by nothing — the absolute made not a metaphysical postulate but a task. This is “magical” idealism because the I does not merely know the world; awakened, it commands it. The abstract painter who had wanted unconditioned expression now wanted an unconditioned subject. The crisis of art had become a program of self-deification, and the program needed a discipline.

The UR Group and the science of the inner

He found the discipline, or built it, in the initiatic work of the 1920s. In 1927 Evola gathered a circle of Italian occultists into the UR Group, named for the rune and the root sense of origin and fire. From 1927 to 1929 they issued monthly fascicles — the journals UR and, in 1929, KRUR — collecting ritual instructions, meditative exercises, translated sources, and accounts of inner experiment, published anonymously or under pseudonyms. Among the contributors was Emilio Servadio, later a founder of Italian psychoanalysis. The stated aim was the awakening of latent spiritual power and the integration of the person into a higher, transpersonal order of being — initiation understood not as a fraternal ceremony but as an operation on the self. The architecture matters more here than any technique: the UR material treats the human being as raw material for a deliberate transmutation, the same logic Evola would soon read backward out of the alchemists.

The Hermetic Tradition: alchemy as the science of the self

That reading became La Tradizione Ermetica (1931), published in Bari. Its claim is the one for which Evola’s esoteric reputation chiefly stands: European alchemy was never proto-chemistry, never a fumbling toward metallurgy that happened to wrap itself in symbol. The furnace, the sealed vessel, the nigredo and albedo and rubedo, the marriage of Sun and Moon, the materia prima and the philosophers’ stone — these are a coded notation for stages in the transformation of the operator. The “Royal Art” is a science of inner sovereignty whose true subject is the adept and whose true product is a regenerated, immortalized self. The book reads the Latin and Italian alchemical corpus — the Turba philosophorum, Philalethes, the emblem-books — as a continuous esoteric language, and it is this reading, not a chemical one, that he holds to be the literal sense. Carl Jung, working out his own theory of alchemy as a projection of the process of psychic integration, drew on Evola’s collection of sources; Evola, for his part, judged the psychological reduction a betrayal — for him the transmutation was real and ontological, not an image of something happening only in the mind. The disagreement is exact: two men reading the same texts, one finding a map of the psyche, the other a map of being.

Revolt Against the Modern World

In Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (1934) Evola gave the Traditionalist case its fullest and most uncompromising statement, and made his break with the contemplative wing of the school audible. The book opposes two worlds. The “world of Tradition” is hierarchical, sacred, and — in his recurring term — solar: a civilization ordered from above, crowned by a sacral kingship in which spiritual authority and temporal power are one, organized by caste, oriented toward transcendence, masculine and ascending. Against it stands the modern world, the terminal phase of a cyclical descent that Evola, following the Hindu scheme Guénon had adopted, names the dark age, the Kali Yuga: a slide from the rule of sacred kings through warriors, merchants, and finally the undifferentiated mass — democracy, equality, materialism, the cult of work and money read as symptoms of a single cosmic degeneration. The distinctive note, against Guénon and the broader school, is the privileging of the kshatriya over the brahmin, action over contemplation, the warrior-initiate over the priest. Tradition for Evola is not chiefly something to be transmitted in silence; it is something to be restored, and restoration is a deed.

Tantra and the way of power

The same preference for action shaped his turn to Indian sources. Lo yoga della potenza — first drafted as L’uomo come potenza (1925) and reworked into its standard form in 1949 — reads Tantra not as the dissolution of the self into the absolute but as its opposite: a discipline of mastery, in which the energies bound in the body are awakened and seized rather than extinguished. He fixes on the left-hand path, the vamachara, the current that uses what other paths renounce. His argument is cyclical and of a piece with Revolt: in the Kali Yuga the contemplative withdrawals of an earlier age are no longer open, because the human being of the dark age is wholly bound to the body and cannot transcend it by mere detachment; the only remaining road runs through the bodily and the dense, taking up its forces and riding them. The reading is, by the standards of the living Tantric and yogic traditions it draws on, highly selective — it hears a doctrine of power where those traditions hear much else — but it is internally consistent with everything around it: the absolute individual, the alchemical regeneration, the solar will. Detachment is for ages that can afford it. His age, he held, could not.

The orbit of Fascism, and the doctrine of race

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. From February to June 1930 he ran the review La Torre, attacking the regime from a position more radical than its own — too aristocratic, too uncompromising for the squad-Fascism he despised — until the authorities shut it down after ten issues. Through the 1930s he sought to give Fascism a sacral, imperial, hierarchical content it did not natively possess, and to steer it away from the biological racism of its German ally toward a doctrine of his own: Sintesi di dottrina della razza (1941) set out a tripartite theory of race as body, soul, and spirit, in which the decisive race was spiritual rather than merely genetic. Mussolini, who read it, found the formula useful; German racial theorists found it suspect, since it subordinated blood to something they could not measure. Evola was never a party functionary, never fully trusted by either regime, and at home in neither — yet he was not an opponent of fascism but a critic from its extreme right, who wanted it harder, purer, and more metaphysically grounded than it was willing to be. In 1943, as the Allied front advanced, he went north and worked in the orbit of the SS, including its Ahnenerbe research apparatus. In March 1945, during an air raid on Vienna, a blast caught him in the open street and crushed his spine; he was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. He wrote, from then on, from a wheelchair.

The esotericism and the politics are the same structure seen from two sides. The hierarchy that ordered Evola’s cosmos — the descent of orders from a solar height, caste as a metaphysical fact, the few who may ascend and the many who may not — is the hierarchy he wanted imposed on society. Inequality was not, for him, a regrettable feature of the fallen world to be eased; it was the very form of the sacred, and egalitarianism was the dark age’s signature heresy. The spiritual race and the solar empire are not the political baggage of an otherwise pure mysticism. They are what his mysticism is, carried out to its civil conclusion.

Ride the Tiger and the postwar afterlife

In 1951 Evola stood trial in Rome, charged with inspiring the violent neofascist underground and seeking to revive Fascism. He denied belonging to the historical Fascist movement at all, declaring himself something he called a “superfascist,” and was acquitted. The episode set the pattern of his last decades: a man at one remove from the activists who claimed him, supplying them with a vocabulary he held to be above their politics. Gli uomini e le rovine (Men Among the Ruins, 1953) addressed those who would still fight; Cavalcare la tigre (Ride the Tiger, 1961) addressed those for whom the fight was already lost. Its counsel is apoliteia — a calculated inner detachment, a way of moving through a dissolving world without being dissolved by it, riding the destructive forces of the age the way one rides a tiger: neither dismounting nor being thrown. He set it as the “dry way,” the intellectual and solitary path, against the “wet way” of affirmation in action he had charted in The Yoga of Power. For the young men of the postwar European and Italian radical right — the milieu around groups such as Ordine Nuovo — this posture of sovereign endurance amid ruin made Evola a reference point, and Ride the Tiger a manual of how to remain whatever one was when the world had gone the other way. He died in Rome on 11 June 1974; by his own instruction his ashes were carried to the glacier of Monte Rosa, a peak he had climbed in youth, and placed in the ice.

Reading and the scholarship

Evola is 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. The standard external history of the movement to which he belonged is Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004), which places Evola as the political-radical fork of a current whose founder, Guénon, kept his distance from him; the constructed character of “Tradition” itself is the argument of Wouter Hanegraaff’s reference work, the Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Brill, 2005). The fullest English-language intellectual biography is H. T. Hansen’s long introductory study prefaced to the Inner Traditions edition of Men Among the Ruins (2002), which reconstructs the arc from Dada to apoliteia without softening the politics; the historical literature on his racial doctrine includes scholarly treatments of his relation to the Aryan myth between 1933 and 1943, such as the open-access study at Marquette. His Dada period — the painting and the poem La parole obscure du paysage intérieur — is documented in the Literary Encyclopedia. His own works are widely in print in English through Inner Traditions, among them The Hermetic Tradition, Revolt Against the Modern World, The Yoga of Power, and Ride the Tiger. The primary alchemical and hermetic sources he read — the Turba philosophorum, the Philalethes tracts, the emblem-literature gathered by such anthologists as A. E. Waite — survive independently of his reading of them; Waite’s Hermetic Museum and his edition of the Turba philosophorum hold a good part of the corpus from which Evola drew his coded science of the self.

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.

→ In the library: The Hermetic Museum (Waite, 1893) · The Turba Philosophorum (Waite, 1896)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Theosophy · Rene Guenon · Traditionalism Perennialism · Alchemy · Initiation · Absolute · Carl Jung