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Revolt Against the Modern World
In what many consider to be his masterwork, Evola contrasts the characteristics of the modern world with those of traditional societies, from politics and institutions to views on life and death.
"No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress, which together with its corollary notion of the superiority of modern civilization, has created its own 'positive' alibis by falsifying history, by insinuating harmful myths in people's minds, and by proclaiming itself sovereign at the crossroads of the plebeian ideology from which it originated. In order to understand both the spirit of Tradition and its antithesis, modern civilization, it is necessary to begin with the fundamental doctrine of the two natures. According to this doctrine there is a physical order of things and a metaphysical one; there is a mortal nature and an immortal one; there is the superior realm of 'being' and the inferior realm of 'becoming.' Generally speaking, there is a visible and tangible dimension and, prior to and beyond it, an invisible and intangible dimension that is the support, the source, and the true life of the former." —From Chapter One.
With unflinching gaze and uncompromising intensity Julius Evola analyzes the spiritual and cultural malaise at the heart of Western civilization and all that passes for progress in the modern world. As a gadfly, Evola spares no one and nothing in his survey of what we have lost and where we are headed. At turns prophetic and provocative, Revolt against the Modern World outlines a profound metaphysics of history and demonstrates how and why we have lost contact with the transcendent dimension of being. The revolt advocated by Evola does not resemble the familiar protests of either liberals or conservatives. His criticisms are not limited to exposing the mindless nature of consumerism, the march of progress, the rise of technocracy, or the dominance of unalloyed individualism, although these and other subjects come under his scrutiny. Rather, he attempts to trace in space and time the remote causes and processes that have exercised corrosive influence on what he considers to be the higher values, ideals, beliefs, and codes of conduct—the world of Tradition—that are at the foundation of Western civilization and described in the myths and sacred literature of the Indo-Europeans. Agreeing with the Hindu philosophers that history is the movement of huge cycles and that we are now in the Kali Yuga, the age of dissolution and decadence, Evola finds revolt to be the only logical response for those who oppose the materialism and ritualized meaninglessness of life in the twentieth century. Through a sweeping study of the structures, myths, beliefs, and spiritual traditions of the major Western civilizations, the author compares the characteristics of the modern world with those of traditional societies. The domains explored include politics, law, the rise and fall of empires, the history of the Church, the doctrine of the two natures, life and death, social institutions and the caste system, the limits of racial theories, capitalism and communism, relations between the sexes, and the meaning of warriorhood. At every turn Evola challenges the reader's most cherished assumptions about fundamental aspects of modern life.
"No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress, which together with its corollary notion of the superiority of modern civilization, has created its own 'positive' alibis by falsifying history, by insinuating harmful myths in people's minds, and by proclaiming itself sovereign at the crossroads of the plebeian ideology from which it originated. In order to understand both the spirit of Tradition and its antithesis, modern civilization, it is necessary to begin with the fundamental doctrine of the two natures. According to this doctrine there is a physical order of things and a metaphysical one; there is a mortal nature and an immortal one; there is the superior realm of 'being' and the inferior realm of 'becoming.' Generally speaking, there is a visible and tangible dimension and, prior to and beyond it, an invisible and intangible dimension that is the support, the source, and the true life of the former." —From Chapter One.
With unflinching gaze and uncompromising intensity Julius Evola analyzes the spiritual and cultural malaise at the heart of Western civilization and all that passes for progress in the modern world. As a gadfly, Evola spares no one and nothing in his survey of what we have lost and where we are headed. At turns prophetic and provocative, Revolt against the Modern World outlines a profound metaphysics of history and demonstrates how and why we have lost contact with the transcendent dimension of being. The revolt advocated by Evola does not resemble the familiar protests of either liberals or conservatives. His criticisms are not limited to exposing the mindless nature of consumerism, the march of progress, the rise of technocracy, or the dominance of unalloyed individualism, although these and other subjects come under his scrutiny. Rather, he attempts to trace in space and time the remote causes and processes that have exercised corrosive influence on what he considers to be the higher values, ideals, beliefs, and codes of conduct—the world of Tradition—that are at the foundation of Western civilization and described in the myths and sacred literature of the Indo-Europeans. Agreeing with the Hindu philosophers that history is the movement of huge cycles and that we are now in the Kali Yuga, the age of dissolution and decadence, Evola finds revolt to be the only logical response for those who oppose the materialism and ritualized meaninglessness of life in the twentieth century. Through a sweeping study of the structures, myths, beliefs, and spiritual traditions of the major Western civilizations, the author compares the characteristics of the modern world with those of traditional societies. The domains explored include politics, law, the rise and fall of empires, the history of the Church, the doctrine of the two natures, life and death, social institutions and the caste system, the limits of racial theories, capitalism and communism, relations between the sexes, and the meaning of warriorhood. At every turn Evola challenges the reader's most cherished assumptions about fundamental aspects of modern life.
375 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1934
523 people are currently reading
11k people want to read
About the author
Julius Evola
188 books916 followersJulius Evola (19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974), born Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola, was an Italian philosopher and esoteric scholar. Born in Rome to a family of the Sicilian landed gentry, Evola was raised a strict Catholic. Despite this, his life was characterised by 'an anti-bourgeois approach' hostile to both 'the dominant tradition of the West—Christianity and Catholicism—and to contemporary civilization—the 'modern world' of democracy and materialism'.
By turns 'engineering student, artillery officer, Dadaist poet and painter, journalist, alpinist, scholar, linguist, Orientalist, and political commentator', he has been described as a 'rare example of universality in an age of specialization'. Yet behind it all lay a singular emphasis on, and pursuit of, a 'direct relationship to the Absolute'. For Evola, 'the center of all things was not man, but rather the Transcendent.' This metaphysical conviction can be seen to have determined both Evola's stance on socio-political issues, and his antipathetic attitude towards 'all professional, sentimental and family routines'.
The author of many books on esoteric, political and religious topics (including The Hermetic Tradition, The Doctrine of Awakening and Eros and the Mysteries of Love), his best-known work remains Revolt Against the Modern World, a trenchant critique of modern civilisation that has been described as 'the gateway to his thought'. Since his death, also in Rome, his writings have influenced right-wing, reactionary and conservative political thought not only in his native Italy, but throughout continental Europe and, increasingly, the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, he should not be considered primarily as a political thinker, but rather as an exponent of the wider Traditionalist School that encompasses the work of such individuals as René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt and Frithjof Schuon.
By turns 'engineering student, artillery officer, Dadaist poet and painter, journalist, alpinist, scholar, linguist, Orientalist, and political commentator', he has been described as a 'rare example of universality in an age of specialization'. Yet behind it all lay a singular emphasis on, and pursuit of, a 'direct relationship to the Absolute'. For Evola, 'the center of all things was not man, but rather the Transcendent.' This metaphysical conviction can be seen to have determined both Evola's stance on socio-political issues, and his antipathetic attitude towards 'all professional, sentimental and family routines'.
The author of many books on esoteric, political and religious topics (including The Hermetic Tradition, The Doctrine of Awakening and Eros and the Mysteries of Love), his best-known work remains Revolt Against the Modern World, a trenchant critique of modern civilisation that has been described as 'the gateway to his thought'. Since his death, also in Rome, his writings have influenced right-wing, reactionary and conservative political thought not only in his native Italy, but throughout continental Europe and, increasingly, the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, he should not be considered primarily as a political thinker, but rather as an exponent of the wider Traditionalist School that encompasses the work of such individuals as René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt and Frithjof Schuon.
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July 11, 2014
Revolt Against the Modern World by Julius Evola is a book so breathtaking, so fresh and magisterial that I may be incapable of reading anything for the remainder of the year. I found it rich. Every word Evola writes here speaks to something that goes beyond ordinary life, something more than a condition of life that is conditioned by superficial routine or pedestrian thoughts and actions. He writes with nostalgia for Hyperuranium, for transcendence. Evola writes of the generative principles of spiritual regality that come from a metaphysical plane where they exist in a pure state. Notions of majesty, regality and nobility have resonance here. These are the ancient rhythms that overlap the symmetry of space and override the black spans of an abyss.
Evola is a man who yearns for infinity. What he longs for is the glory of triumph. Evola is in tune with the cosmic waste of the world and wrote about civilization falling through infinity toward dissolute darkness. The book is essentially “a metaphysics of history,” specifically in relation to the downfall of civilization. Evola wrote of the effect that invisible dimensions have on our world, specifically, Evola wrote about what happens when an abyss turns itself inside out.
“Once more, we should not forget the truth that permeated the traditional world: nothing happens on this earth that is not the symbol and the parallel effect of spiritual events, since between spirit and reality (hence, power too) allegedly there was an intimate relationship.”
Evola frequently uses the word “Uranian,” specifically something he terms “the Uranian chrism” which is like a heroic solar force akin to the Paraclete or the Holy Spirit of Christianity. It is a vital force that transcends worlds, or a frequency one can embody.
“There are two elements within the traditions of those civilizations or of those castes characterized by a Uranian chrism. The first element is a materialistic and a naturalistic one; it consists of the transmission of something related to blood and race, namely, a vital force that originates in the subterranean world together with the elementary, collective, and ancestral influences. The second element is “from above,” and it is conditioned by the transmission and by the uninterrupted performance of rites that contain the secret of a certain transformation and domination realized within the abovementioned vital substratum.”
Evola champions a life of action and views cowardice and dishonor as greater personal evils than sin, which the ancient Egyptians and other early cultures had no concept of. Action includes adventure, heroism, rites of passage and vision quests but also the spiritual activity of contemplation, “which in the classical idea was often regarded as the most pure form of activity; it had its object and goal in itself and did not need “anything else” in order to be implemented.” Wasting away in the dizzying vertical nature of poetry has a basic similarity to how I view a vision quest, or Castaneda’s initiation. I loved this book.
Evola is a man who yearns for infinity. What he longs for is the glory of triumph. Evola is in tune with the cosmic waste of the world and wrote about civilization falling through infinity toward dissolute darkness. The book is essentially “a metaphysics of history,” specifically in relation to the downfall of civilization. Evola wrote of the effect that invisible dimensions have on our world, specifically, Evola wrote about what happens when an abyss turns itself inside out.
“Once more, we should not forget the truth that permeated the traditional world: nothing happens on this earth that is not the symbol and the parallel effect of spiritual events, since between spirit and reality (hence, power too) allegedly there was an intimate relationship.”
Evola frequently uses the word “Uranian,” specifically something he terms “the Uranian chrism” which is like a heroic solar force akin to the Paraclete or the Holy Spirit of Christianity. It is a vital force that transcends worlds, or a frequency one can embody.
“There are two elements within the traditions of those civilizations or of those castes characterized by a Uranian chrism. The first element is a materialistic and a naturalistic one; it consists of the transmission of something related to blood and race, namely, a vital force that originates in the subterranean world together with the elementary, collective, and ancestral influences. The second element is “from above,” and it is conditioned by the transmission and by the uninterrupted performance of rites that contain the secret of a certain transformation and domination realized within the abovementioned vital substratum.”
Evola champions a life of action and views cowardice and dishonor as greater personal evils than sin, which the ancient Egyptians and other early cultures had no concept of. Action includes adventure, heroism, rites of passage and vision quests but also the spiritual activity of contemplation, “which in the classical idea was often regarded as the most pure form of activity; it had its object and goal in itself and did not need “anything else” in order to be implemented.” Wasting away in the dizzying vertical nature of poetry has a basic similarity to how I view a vision quest, or Castaneda’s initiation. I loved this book.
June 30, 2021
Crazy, stupid. Kind of interesting, like a crazy (and overeducated) guy on the subway putting his rants on paper, but this dude might very well have been the worst guy around in Fascist Italy.
EDIT- further thoughts on Evola and the “traditionalism” revival of the early 21st century internet: https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...
EDIT- I also wrote this piece, about traditionalism, probably the last thing I have to say about it until contemporary “traditionalists” do something interesting: https://www.full-stop.net/2020/12/01/...
EDIT- further thoughts on Evola and the “traditionalism” revival of the early 21st century internet: https://toomuchberard.wordpress.com/2...
EDIT- I also wrote this piece, about traditionalism, probably the last thing I have to say about it until contemporary “traditionalists” do something interesting: https://www.full-stop.net/2020/12/01/...
February 8, 2016
When Julius Evola is right on the money, he is RIIIGHT on the money. And when he's wrong he is extremely wrong. This book oscillates between those two extremes all throughout. But even when's wrong his opinion is still interesting.
By the way, this book should be really be called "A Metaphysics of History", because that's ultimately what it is. Though "Revolt Against the Modern World" is definitely a more striking title.
The best parts of this book are when he critiques technology and modern ideologies like capitalism, communism, and nationalism. This critiques are very powerful, often right, and get at the heart of why so many people in our day and age feel like life is completely devoid of purpose.
The other best parts of this book are the spiritual longing for a higher kind of life that is more noble, heroic, and wise. A message that resonates very powerfully for some people.
Julius Evola is an incredibly interesting personality. Born near the beginning of the 20th century to a family of Italian aristocrats, he was probably one of the last intellectuals on the planet to seriously believe that Monarchism was the way to go.
Definitely worth a read, and in my case definitely worth a re-read. But if your the type of person who hates looking at other people's opinions I would stay clear of this one, because Evola doesn't seek to compromise even in the slightest with any idea that has been popular within the last 100 years.
By the way, this book should be really be called "A Metaphysics of History", because that's ultimately what it is. Though "Revolt Against the Modern World" is definitely a more striking title.
The best parts of this book are when he critiques technology and modern ideologies like capitalism, communism, and nationalism. This critiques are very powerful, often right, and get at the heart of why so many people in our day and age feel like life is completely devoid of purpose.
The other best parts of this book are the spiritual longing for a higher kind of life that is more noble, heroic, and wise. A message that resonates very powerfully for some people.
Julius Evola is an incredibly interesting personality. Born near the beginning of the 20th century to a family of Italian aristocrats, he was probably one of the last intellectuals on the planet to seriously believe that Monarchism was the way to go.
Definitely worth a read, and in my case definitely worth a re-read. But if your the type of person who hates looking at other people's opinions I would stay clear of this one, because Evola doesn't seek to compromise even in the slightest with any idea that has been popular within the last 100 years.
December 22, 2019
read this if you want to elevate your pain to a state of divinity and dissociate, like a child, into an unrecognizable reality, filled with spectacular arcane blood rites that evoke numen. Your hunger for meaning is something we're all dealing with in this corporatist society that needs to quantify being. This is the same old self-deluded ideological shit rushing to fill the void, and romantic rhetoric levels are tite. With such an incredible negation of communication, it comes as no surprise that evola fanboy steve bannon excelled both as banker and ultra-conservative politician.
If you like this book, the truth simply isn't sexy enough for you. You'd do better to go and play video games with ascetic roleplay mods. There is no special divine providence that might care for you and not 7.5 billion others. I for one, am going to deal with my pain with full use of my mental faculties. That pain is the weakness that allows cult leaders & marketplace vultures to manipulate you. Turn it into your strength. Read some Nietzsche if you have to. Just learn to think for yourself.
If you like this book, the truth simply isn't sexy enough for you. You'd do better to go and play video games with ascetic roleplay mods. There is no special divine providence that might care for you and not 7.5 billion others. I for one, am going to deal with my pain with full use of my mental faculties. That pain is the weakness that allows cult leaders & marketplace vultures to manipulate you. Turn it into your strength. Read some Nietzsche if you have to. Just learn to think for yourself.
July 31, 2014
A truly monumental work that alters the perception of history and reality. It defines the more spiritual nature of ancient societies and explains the significance of many words whose meanings have been distorted, like tradition, initiation, knowledge, and royalty.
Even if you completely reject Evola's view (in other words, if you are purely rationalist) then this book would still be a valuable insight into the mindset similar to that of the ancient peoples like the Greeks or Persians at their high points.
It's also interesting because it covers a vast range of mythology and religion, so much so that one gets somewhat of a crash course in comparative religion, and a very exciting one, at that.
Even if you completely reject Evola's view (in other words, if you are purely rationalist) then this book would still be a valuable insight into the mindset similar to that of the ancient peoples like the Greeks or Persians at their high points.
It's also interesting because it covers a vast range of mythology and religion, so much so that one gets somewhat of a crash course in comparative religion, and a very exciting one, at that.
June 17, 2020
This work shows how to be as salmon swimming counterstream the steeply descending and culturally dissolutive flow this Kali Yuga age - we are now five thousand years into - has tempestuously created (times of incarnations it has allowed in who are violent, treacherous, undisciplined, cold and greedy). At every steppe in it, all that is noble, good, innocent, harmonious, wise and growing - all flowing from the primordial and perennial center of esoteric man - has been dismantled systematically in organic, cosmic society, part by part and progressively. So it is not reactionary or bombastic but proper to counteract such decay in revolt against the modal or modern world (*not* technology though he says) through all possible holy forces in one gatherable. Such is the quick summary of this work of his.
A quick picture of it?
At each stage of loss through the ages he shows in this book, with great sorrow and love, how noble what once was, was; and what was lost in that devolutional stage in this Kali Yuga Process that we are now still cascading down from (yet he detests nostalgia by the way; for the primordial center all esoteric culture flows out from in man is already here in man amongst us and reachable right now he says).
The Sufi’s speak of the chaos surrounding higher light adam in us as the inner garden to come into and come out from as more ourselves.
”Come out of the Garden baby, you’ll catch your death in the fall, young girl, they call them the Diamond Dogs.” - Bowie
There is a center and a flow to the over all picture of this book, such is the center, returning to the flow: to summarize it, the progressional revelation of his book reminds one of the Radiohead song I Might Be Wrong; which is so ironic an ode to we Amnesiacs: “let’s go down in a waterfall. Have yourself a good time it’s nothing at all, nothing at all?...I might be wrong?” And Morrison’s song Strange Days: “Strange days have found us...The hostess is grinning, the guest’s sleep from sinning...bodies confused, memories misused, as we walk down the vale of this strange night of stone.” And also, “Can you feel it now that summer is gone? That it’s time to live in the scattered sun...Waiting for the Sun.”
But the devolutional progression, or regression, Evola shows more exactly though, let’s zoom in now on the picture of such in this book.
First the way of the Gnostic Priest-King Hermit Shaman Universal Leaders, higher than their governor kings, was replaced with mere blood-mercenary regional kings of Baal (bad Solarism in the early Kali period) from 3K to 2K BC (and before, too, he shows - he briefly goes into Lemuria and Atlantis). Then the Kings were replaced by an effete and colluding priest craft controlling their every move from 2K to 1K BC. Then the holy priests and sages - who alone would dictate when wars so sadly had to finally be - were replaced by mercenary warrior class “consultants” (Hyksos etc) all about the plunder as to saying when wars will be from 1K BC to 0 AD (ramped up canaanite baalism one might say Rome was just a counteractive measure created to ward off for a time in the West; and had Alexander the Great not warded it off - or the heruli Goths 700 years later - in the East, we would all already be slave cast by now globally).
Then this past millenia or so the holy warriors were replaced by the merchant class corporations (as we are now witnessing the tail end of today with corporations now in charge of wars) and the regicide of all the worlds’ previous kings now complete. Next we will witness the uprise of the poor enslaved 99% caste ruling in mobocracy over the merchant class in global, lawless chaos for their fame and riches for the day; and after that the servants of the servants (“serve the servants? Oh yeah...” - Pennyroyal Tea, Kurt Cobain), the iron mixed with clay, the Ai robots will take over mankind.
However, to be clear, Evola only hints at the latter two step down’s. That last step though is the “bodies confused” Morrison the Prophet speaks of. And “memories misused” if the histories now being revealed by they like me are not used to contemplate and heal mankind going forward as an old man sees all his life and prepares before his transmigratory death to another phase, as man form is soon now approaching. The shelves on my library are arranged according to this Kali Yuga digression revealing this of Evola’s (but appearant to any when purviewing history as a whole).
At each steppe there are only the one percent creating all true culture (counter-culture) who go contra to such para-ceidal effect each flavor of steppe has in it’s general trajectory inside the masses as a whole. Those contra’s works are collected by me here on this site for all true seekers as the true honey gold of the bees with magnetic center, may we miss nothing as we pack our bags.
Evola - Besides first Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Lady Hahn, Tolkien’s unhidden similitudes and possibly Maurice Nicoll or George MacDonald - is the most important writer for our age to have come these past thousand years or so. So I can’t recommend this Magnum Opus of his enough.
There was even once a higher caste than the wandering Sages who would appoint Priest-Kings before 3K BC Kali Yuga began, a station very few are incarnated into but Evola was in ours: that of the hidden role of the Exorcist so misunderstood and maligned by modernity but clearly something Jesus, now Abraham we have recently discovered from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a few others these past several millenia, carried out.
Evola was like Gandalf in WWII; he consulted Mussolini and Hitler personally telling them in warning they were about to be used by a demonic force that would chew them up and spit them out making them the reverse of what they were trying to be and on a level even one step down from the devolutive forces they were trying to counteract. Gurdjieff warned Stalin, his childhood friend, of the same. None of them listened and such history resulted.
Evola even says in an interview now on Youtube that he was already early on not thinking much of Hitler because he was being used by a certain demonism. This need not be understood in some formatory way as though some little imp with a pitchfork prodded them or such nonsense. Rather, humans create their own psychological momentums that take on a life of their own in the unconscious collective and some become fulcrums in those collective waves. Or there are innumerable gradations of higher intelligences than the human one also at work amidst our world patterns, as every culture globally once taught was so, and only recently has such been blindly assumed preposterous and “conspiracy theory.” I see no problem in seeing a higher intelligence than my own to also have the possibility like us of going quite malevolent (albeit I think the witch hunt for “possessed” was really evil in medieval times and used as a tool for sadists to manipulate humans through when one looks at the minutes of the trials, so one has to see this all in balance if one chooses to turn and see into all kinds of powers at play in the multiverse in general). What is the ultimate in naïveté in lyric for the modern is the ultimate in truth for we few contra’s developing our fine and more final astral more-all (moral) body: “The Air is filled with good and bad and mortals never know.” - Battle of Evermore (Led Zep).
However one understands the de-manning process at work on the lower outer persona cheese grater end of the “higher-ribbons-flowing angelic inner end of the stick” of each and all man form’s essence hidden from society today in each man nonetheless; there does seem to be some need for those who see the source and order of inner things in each and all and help people back into that in them (which is what ex-or-cism means, to unravel the wrong exoteric convolutions of one’s inner sinless self that are manifesting wrong down here). Evola and this book of his serves as such, a sort of astral pallette cleanser.
The new psycho-babble priests of today are trying to replace and subsume such a role but they haven’t a clue what they are doing as they are only working with a stepped-down, half baked out system from Freud’s already stepped down (2nd rate freudianism bs as Cobain used to call it) convoluted system he was open he stole from Shamanic and Esoteric Traditions he knew nothing about. Jung take them all, the whole bunch of those convoluted idea-ots creating puzzle factories (vile snake temple hubs to nab all outsiders organically developing their psychic side into their confines of) in every small city in the whole globe now. They are the new inquisition the future will look back upon wondering why we let such hell live among us on earth and have it’s sceptre’s of control among us.
As Hinduism and all Archaic cultures taught, and Evola clearly does so in this book: the super ego is no farce to be rid of, like Freud started all off on the wrong foot of, but the only thing actually that is fully real and good in a human. Whereas the lower ego of every-day, outer material personality - the well adjusting one - is chthonic, more unconscious, more derivative and unreal and ever changing and violent and samsaric and to be abnegated and subsumed under the higher ego it is but a fulcrum and a flail of. Find a psychologist teaching that today though...
Well that was long winded for there are 1,000 essential other things to say about what this work reveals besides that Evola is the exorcist of our era and offers a true esoteric and primordial source of psychology that actually works in it. But this is what Evola seems to be for humans today, a bellweather as to our next step of Evolution (inwardly). He is still becoming one of the most popular authors read regardless all the controversy surrounding him. So I would highly recommend this book for the above reasons and many others.
One last thing, one thing I love about him is he calls they who think they can make a person moral through genes, chemistry, ridiculous and horrid as though we can just breed humans like race horses to be what we want them to be. Such is the ulitimate bio-racism and much more dangerous to come than the WWII stuff if it does not fade from man (and doubtless it will only increase in coming days).
Rather he teaches, in order of importance, there are races of Spirit any human can belong to or not, then psychological or psychic races any human can belong to or not and only thirdly of least but a little importance is one’s biological race of skin color and gene’s (and we can all get over each other’s piccadillo’s about that better once we understand the order of what is more important than bio-race characteristics).
So any one who ever tells you he was a racist just because of the people he tried to redirect in his day and was around (guilt by association) are ridiculous and should not be heeded to at all. He was a high and holy man. I sometimes wonder if Tolkien knew of him and thought him a bit too close of a Sauroman for his taste. I call him much more the Gandalf of our age though, even more than Tolkien himself was (who was more Tom Bombadil), and would hope he thought that too if he did know of him in those days.
I do know Evola was familiar with the Gurdjieffians and mentions Gurdjieff positively a number of times in his writings and both Evola and Gurdjieff spoke more positively than is given credit as to the value of our eminent Lady Hahn, the female sphinx of our past few millenium. I consider him part of a good company of a few to really pay close heed to among the hundreds of thousands of writers of the past millenium. I even sometimes call all I teach just the GOETH Way (Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Evola, Tolkien and Lady Hahn - all of whom I am but the servant of trying to help their movements they created in their day come to light and take better form).
Now all of this has been said here in one of my two longest, over-winded, re-views, I hope to ever write, not just as praise and explanation of this work but equally to help any seeker like me better understand the structure, meaning and order of my libraries shelves in their categorization inspired by this Evolan and Hindu understanding of the systematic dismantling of the “organic spiritual caste tiers inside psychological man” that is to play out as this age furthers until the Golden One’s come per Hindu prophecy. I do all this to quicken the process of a seeker so they need not waste their years till they are old and feeble in their seeking but can find quickly the real gold then get on with manifesting. It is a library dedicated to finding
“the rarefied few, counteracting the general exteriorization of all - that are but a handful hard to learn of in every centuries’ literature.”
A quick picture of it?
At each stage of loss through the ages he shows in this book, with great sorrow and love, how noble what once was, was; and what was lost in that devolutional stage in this Kali Yuga Process that we are now still cascading down from (yet he detests nostalgia by the way; for the primordial center all esoteric culture flows out from in man is already here in man amongst us and reachable right now he says).
The Sufi’s speak of the chaos surrounding higher light adam in us as the inner garden to come into and come out from as more ourselves.
”Come out of the Garden baby, you’ll catch your death in the fall, young girl, they call them the Diamond Dogs.” - Bowie
There is a center and a flow to the over all picture of this book, such is the center, returning to the flow: to summarize it, the progressional revelation of his book reminds one of the Radiohead song I Might Be Wrong; which is so ironic an ode to we Amnesiacs: “let’s go down in a waterfall. Have yourself a good time it’s nothing at all, nothing at all?...I might be wrong?” And Morrison’s song Strange Days: “Strange days have found us...The hostess is grinning, the guest’s sleep from sinning...bodies confused, memories misused, as we walk down the vale of this strange night of stone.” And also, “Can you feel it now that summer is gone? That it’s time to live in the scattered sun...Waiting for the Sun.”
But the devolutional progression, or regression, Evola shows more exactly though, let’s zoom in now on the picture of such in this book.
First the way of the Gnostic Priest-King Hermit Shaman Universal Leaders, higher than their governor kings, was replaced with mere blood-mercenary regional kings of Baal (bad Solarism in the early Kali period) from 3K to 2K BC (and before, too, he shows - he briefly goes into Lemuria and Atlantis). Then the Kings were replaced by an effete and colluding priest craft controlling their every move from 2K to 1K BC. Then the holy priests and sages - who alone would dictate when wars so sadly had to finally be - were replaced by mercenary warrior class “consultants” (Hyksos etc) all about the plunder as to saying when wars will be from 1K BC to 0 AD (ramped up canaanite baalism one might say Rome was just a counteractive measure created to ward off for a time in the West; and had Alexander the Great not warded it off - or the heruli Goths 700 years later - in the East, we would all already be slave cast by now globally).
Then this past millenia or so the holy warriors were replaced by the merchant class corporations (as we are now witnessing the tail end of today with corporations now in charge of wars) and the regicide of all the worlds’ previous kings now complete. Next we will witness the uprise of the poor enslaved 99% caste ruling in mobocracy over the merchant class in global, lawless chaos for their fame and riches for the day; and after that the servants of the servants (“serve the servants? Oh yeah...” - Pennyroyal Tea, Kurt Cobain), the iron mixed with clay, the Ai robots will take over mankind.
However, to be clear, Evola only hints at the latter two step down’s. That last step though is the “bodies confused” Morrison the Prophet speaks of. And “memories misused” if the histories now being revealed by they like me are not used to contemplate and heal mankind going forward as an old man sees all his life and prepares before his transmigratory death to another phase, as man form is soon now approaching. The shelves on my library are arranged according to this Kali Yuga digression revealing this of Evola’s (but appearant to any when purviewing history as a whole).
At each steppe there are only the one percent creating all true culture (counter-culture) who go contra to such para-ceidal effect each flavor of steppe has in it’s general trajectory inside the masses as a whole. Those contra’s works are collected by me here on this site for all true seekers as the true honey gold of the bees with magnetic center, may we miss nothing as we pack our bags.
Evola - Besides first Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Lady Hahn, Tolkien’s unhidden similitudes and possibly Maurice Nicoll or George MacDonald - is the most important writer for our age to have come these past thousand years or so. So I can’t recommend this Magnum Opus of his enough.
There was even once a higher caste than the wandering Sages who would appoint Priest-Kings before 3K BC Kali Yuga began, a station very few are incarnated into but Evola was in ours: that of the hidden role of the Exorcist so misunderstood and maligned by modernity but clearly something Jesus, now Abraham we have recently discovered from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a few others these past several millenia, carried out.
Evola was like Gandalf in WWII; he consulted Mussolini and Hitler personally telling them in warning they were about to be used by a demonic force that would chew them up and spit them out making them the reverse of what they were trying to be and on a level even one step down from the devolutive forces they were trying to counteract. Gurdjieff warned Stalin, his childhood friend, of the same. None of them listened and such history resulted.
Evola even says in an interview now on Youtube that he was already early on not thinking much of Hitler because he was being used by a certain demonism. This need not be understood in some formatory way as though some little imp with a pitchfork prodded them or such nonsense. Rather, humans create their own psychological momentums that take on a life of their own in the unconscious collective and some become fulcrums in those collective waves. Or there are innumerable gradations of higher intelligences than the human one also at work amidst our world patterns, as every culture globally once taught was so, and only recently has such been blindly assumed preposterous and “conspiracy theory.” I see no problem in seeing a higher intelligence than my own to also have the possibility like us of going quite malevolent (albeit I think the witch hunt for “possessed” was really evil in medieval times and used as a tool for sadists to manipulate humans through when one looks at the minutes of the trials, so one has to see this all in balance if one chooses to turn and see into all kinds of powers at play in the multiverse in general). What is the ultimate in naïveté in lyric for the modern is the ultimate in truth for we few contra’s developing our fine and more final astral more-all (moral) body: “The Air is filled with good and bad and mortals never know.” - Battle of Evermore (Led Zep).
However one understands the de-manning process at work on the lower outer persona cheese grater end of the “higher-ribbons-flowing angelic inner end of the stick” of each and all man form’s essence hidden from society today in each man nonetheless; there does seem to be some need for those who see the source and order of inner things in each and all and help people back into that in them (which is what ex-or-cism means, to unravel the wrong exoteric convolutions of one’s inner sinless self that are manifesting wrong down here). Evola and this book of his serves as such, a sort of astral pallette cleanser.
The new psycho-babble priests of today are trying to replace and subsume such a role but they haven’t a clue what they are doing as they are only working with a stepped-down, half baked out system from Freud’s already stepped down (2nd rate freudianism bs as Cobain used to call it) convoluted system he was open he stole from Shamanic and Esoteric Traditions he knew nothing about. Jung take them all, the whole bunch of those convoluted idea-ots creating puzzle factories (vile snake temple hubs to nab all outsiders organically developing their psychic side into their confines of) in every small city in the whole globe now. They are the new inquisition the future will look back upon wondering why we let such hell live among us on earth and have it’s sceptre’s of control among us.
As Hinduism and all Archaic cultures taught, and Evola clearly does so in this book: the super ego is no farce to be rid of, like Freud started all off on the wrong foot of, but the only thing actually that is fully real and good in a human. Whereas the lower ego of every-day, outer material personality - the well adjusting one - is chthonic, more unconscious, more derivative and unreal and ever changing and violent and samsaric and to be abnegated and subsumed under the higher ego it is but a fulcrum and a flail of. Find a psychologist teaching that today though...
Well that was long winded for there are 1,000 essential other things to say about what this work reveals besides that Evola is the exorcist of our era and offers a true esoteric and primordial source of psychology that actually works in it. But this is what Evola seems to be for humans today, a bellweather as to our next step of Evolution (inwardly). He is still becoming one of the most popular authors read regardless all the controversy surrounding him. So I would highly recommend this book for the above reasons and many others.
One last thing, one thing I love about him is he calls they who think they can make a person moral through genes, chemistry, ridiculous and horrid as though we can just breed humans like race horses to be what we want them to be. Such is the ulitimate bio-racism and much more dangerous to come than the WWII stuff if it does not fade from man (and doubtless it will only increase in coming days).
Rather he teaches, in order of importance, there are races of Spirit any human can belong to or not, then psychological or psychic races any human can belong to or not and only thirdly of least but a little importance is one’s biological race of skin color and gene’s (and we can all get over each other’s piccadillo’s about that better once we understand the order of what is more important than bio-race characteristics).
So any one who ever tells you he was a racist just because of the people he tried to redirect in his day and was around (guilt by association) are ridiculous and should not be heeded to at all. He was a high and holy man. I sometimes wonder if Tolkien knew of him and thought him a bit too close of a Sauroman for his taste. I call him much more the Gandalf of our age though, even more than Tolkien himself was (who was more Tom Bombadil), and would hope he thought that too if he did know of him in those days.
I do know Evola was familiar with the Gurdjieffians and mentions Gurdjieff positively a number of times in his writings and both Evola and Gurdjieff spoke more positively than is given credit as to the value of our eminent Lady Hahn, the female sphinx of our past few millenium. I consider him part of a good company of a few to really pay close heed to among the hundreds of thousands of writers of the past millenium. I even sometimes call all I teach just the GOETH Way (Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Evola, Tolkien and Lady Hahn - all of whom I am but the servant of trying to help their movements they created in their day come to light and take better form).
Now all of this has been said here in one of my two longest, over-winded, re-views, I hope to ever write, not just as praise and explanation of this work but equally to help any seeker like me better understand the structure, meaning and order of my libraries shelves in their categorization inspired by this Evolan and Hindu understanding of the systematic dismantling of the “organic spiritual caste tiers inside psychological man” that is to play out as this age furthers until the Golden One’s come per Hindu prophecy. I do all this to quicken the process of a seeker so they need not waste their years till they are old and feeble in their seeking but can find quickly the real gold then get on with manifesting. It is a library dedicated to finding
“the rarefied few, counteracting the general exteriorization of all - that are but a handful hard to learn of in every centuries’ literature.”
October 1, 2019
What a waste of time! This is a book based in a literal interpretation of ancient myths mixed with Jungian archetypes and extreme right wing ideology that tries to argue that humans came from a ancient Arctic super-race that descended to barbarism by mixing with inferior races. The world is descending to communism and only the very phew people with a "ancient warrior spirit" can survive and maybe build a new high civilization based in "spiritual aristocracy"
The book is incredible repetitive and boring. If you don't believe in magic, supernatural and in aristocracy, the whole book seems pretty stupid and delusional. I am more surprised that actual Neo-Nazis read and believe this stuff.
The book is incredible repetitive and boring. If you don't believe in magic, supernatural and in aristocracy, the whole book seems pretty stupid and delusional. I am more surprised that actual Neo-Nazis read and believe this stuff.
January 8, 2023
***3/4
In some ways this book is deserving of 5 stars, but when Evola is wrong he is really wrong. Thus the subtracting of 1 and 1/4 stars.
Evola was a mad-man, but in a good way. Well, most of the time. At the very least he was extremely well read, and his constant references alone made the reading enjoyable and were fun to explore. In Revolt Against the Modern World he brings us down into his mystical esoteric world of traditionalism making connections between old world societies, governments, religions, structures, etc. He conjures up esoteric meaning and weaves it into every aspect of tradition and creates out of it a sort of esoteric religion that is “tradition”. Being the only way of salvation for a modern individualist, materialist, and egalitarian world that has stripped any depth or purpose out of every aspect of life. Humanity sees itself now not by tracing it's origin and roots from above in the heavens and from the gods, but from below, from apes.
The Gods have been slain by modern ideals, and Men have fallen from their places as warriors and authoritative figures and turned into slaves who work for purely economic ends as a goal. And women likewise have given up their position of primordial power and their role as lovers and caretakers in order to fall into the ranks along side men as equals driven by materialistic means toward the ever growing ideal of progress that is the only sliver of hope for humanity and acts as the only forward momentum for mankind. Yet it looms before us as a wolf in sheep’s clothing ready to destroy us when our hsitoric cycle comes to an end. And we will be the instruments of our own destruction. Evola sees both Darwin and the reformers as the primary harbingers of this modern destruction.
Here’s the deal, I don’t agree with Evola on a lot of points. Especially the kind of esoteric and gnostic religion he creates out of the transcendent idea of tradition, but I think he was extremely insightful nonetheless in pinpointing certain developments that have taken place and that have influenced mankind toward a spiritless materialism. His criticisms on progressiveness, materialism, and where the USA stands in everything especially ring true for me. Take a look at this haunting excerpt:
And in reference to the modern inward focus of man:
and on his mirroring of the historical cycles:
Where Evola gets it right is in the overarching theme of this work which is that humanity by losing it's spirituality, by losing it's belief in a natural hierarchy and focusing inward on themselves as individuals and supreme authorities has brought upon itself it's own destruction. It has stripped away the deeper meaning and purpose of all aspects of life. Everything becomes shallow and lacking meaning. Work becomes a means toward materialistic accumulation, Love loses it's spiritual framework and becomes merely a feeling, and sex becomes a purely pleasant biological stimulation. The family deteriorates, women become men and men become women and we are turned into purely psychological beings. We become sheep. Lacking in leaps and bounds the spiritual depths of the one's who came before us. And the most frightening part is that sheep are fairly easy to control, especially in a mob ruled democracy.
In some ways this book is deserving of 5 stars, but when Evola is wrong he is really wrong. Thus the subtracting of 1 and 1/4 stars.
Evola was a mad-man, but in a good way. Well, most of the time. At the very least he was extremely well read, and his constant references alone made the reading enjoyable and were fun to explore. In Revolt Against the Modern World he brings us down into his mystical esoteric world of traditionalism making connections between old world societies, governments, religions, structures, etc. He conjures up esoteric meaning and weaves it into every aspect of tradition and creates out of it a sort of esoteric religion that is “tradition”. Being the only way of salvation for a modern individualist, materialist, and egalitarian world that has stripped any depth or purpose out of every aspect of life. Humanity sees itself now not by tracing it's origin and roots from above in the heavens and from the gods, but from below, from apes.
"Today the aristocratic idea that mankind has higher origins, namely, a past of light and of spirit, has been replaced by the democratic idea of evolutionism, which derives the higher from the lower, man from animal, civilization from barbarism. This is not so much the “objective” result of a free and conscious scientific inquiry, but rather one of the many reflections that the advent of the modem world, characterized by inferior social and spiritual strata and by man without traditions, has necessarily produced on the intellectual and cultural plane."
The Gods have been slain by modern ideals, and Men have fallen from their places as warriors and authoritative figures and turned into slaves who work for purely economic ends as a goal. And women likewise have given up their position of primordial power and their role as lovers and caretakers in order to fall into the ranks along side men as equals driven by materialistic means toward the ever growing ideal of progress that is the only sliver of hope for humanity and acts as the only forward momentum for mankind. Yet it looms before us as a wolf in sheep’s clothing ready to destroy us when our hsitoric cycle comes to an end. And we will be the instruments of our own destruction. Evola sees both Darwin and the reformers as the primary harbingers of this modern destruction.
Here’s the deal, I don’t agree with Evola on a lot of points. Especially the kind of esoteric and gnostic religion he creates out of the transcendent idea of tradition, but I think he was extremely insightful nonetheless in pinpointing certain developments that have taken place and that have influenced mankind toward a spiritless materialism. His criticisms on progressiveness, materialism, and where the USA stands in everything especially ring true for me. Take a look at this haunting excerpt:
“what should be emphasized is that if there ever was a civilization of slaves on a grand scale, the one in which we are living is it. No traditional civilization ever saw such great masses of people condemned to perform shallow, impersonal, automatic jobs; in the contemporary slave system the counterparts of figures such as lords or enlightened rulers are nowhere to be found. This slavery is imposed subtly through the tyranny of the economic factor and through the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society. And since the modern view of life in its materialism has taken away from the single individual any possibility of bestowing on his destiny a transfiguring element and seeing in it a sign and a symbol, contemporary “slavery” should therefore be reckoned as one of the gloomiest and most desperate kinds of all times. It is not a surprise that in the masses of modem slaves the obscure forces of world subversion have found an easy, obtuse instrument to pursue their goals; while in the places where it has already triumphed, the vast Stalinist “work camps” testify to how the physical and moral subjection of man to the goals of collectivization and of the uprooting of every value of the personality is employed in a methodical and even satanic way.”
And in reference to the modern inward focus of man:
"In a general sense, humanism may be regarded as the main trait and password of the new civilization that claims to have emancipated itself from the “darkness of the Middle Ages.” This civilization will only be limited to the human dimension; in this type of civilization everything will begin and end with man, including the heavens, the hells, the glorifications, and the curses. The human experience will be confined to this world—which is not the real world—with its feverish and yearning creatures, its artistic vanities and its “geniuses,” its countless machines, factories, and leaders.
The earliest version of humanism was individualism. Individualism should be regarded as the constitution of an illusory center outside the real center; as the prevaricating pretense of a “self” that is merely a mortal ego endowed with a body; and as by-product of purely natural faculties that, with the aid of arts and profane sciences, create and support various appearances with no consistency outside that false and vain center. These truths and laws are marked by the contingency and caducity proper to what belongs to the world of becoming.
Hence, there is a radical unrealism and inorganic character to all modern phenomena. Nothing is endowed any longer with true life and everything will be a by-product; the extinct Being is replaced in every domain with the “will” and the “self,” as a sinister, rationalistic, and mechanical propping up of a cadaver. The countless conquests and creations of the new man appear as the crawling of worms that occurs in the process of putrefaction. Thus, the way is opened to all paroxysms, to innovating and iconoclastic manias, and to the world of a fundamental rhetoric in which, once the spirit was replaced with a pale image of itself, the incestuous fornications of man in tire form of religion, philosophy, art, science, and politics, will know no bounds...
With the revolt of individualism, all consciousness of the superworld was lost. The only thing that was still regarded as all-inclusive and certain was the material view of the world, or nature seen as exteriority and a collection of phenomena. A new way to look at the world had emerged. In the past there had been anticipations of this upheaval, but they remained sporadic apparitions that were never transformed into forces responsible for shaping civilizations . It was at this time that reality became synonymous with materiality... The advent of rationalism and scientism was unavoidably followed by the advent of technology and machines, which have become the center and the apotheosis of the new human world."
and on his mirroring of the historical cycles:
It is significant that the modem world shows a return of the themes that were proper to the ancient Southern gynaecocratic civilizations. Is it not true that socialism and communism are materialized and technological revivals of the ancient telluric, Southern principle of equality and promiscuity of all beings in Mother Earth? In the modern world the predominant ideal of virility has been reduced to merely the physical and phallic components, just like in the Aphrodistic gynaecocracy. The plebeian feeling of the Motherland that triumphed with the French Revolution and was developed by nationalistic ideologies as the mysticism of the common folk and the sacred and omnipotent Motherland is nothing less than the revival of a fonn of feminine totemism. In the democratic regimes, the fact that kings and the heads of state lack any real autonomy bears witness to the loss of the absolute principle of fatherly sovereignty and the return of those who have in the Mother (that is, in the substance of the demos) the source of their being. Hetaerism and Amazonism today are also present in new forms, such as the disintegration of the family, modern sensuality, and the incessant and turbid quest for women and immediate sexual gratification, as well as in the masculinization of the woman, her emancipation, and her standing above men who have become enslaved to their senses or turned into beasts of burden. Concerning Dionysus’ mask, I have previously identified it with ceaseless activity and with the philosophy of becoming; and so today we witness a revival, mutatis mutandis, of the same civilization of decadence that appeared in the ancient Mediterranean world—though in its lowest forms. What is lacking, in fact, is a sense of the sacred, as well as any equivalent of the chaste and calm Demetrian possibility. Rather than the survival of the positive religion that became prominent in the West, today the symptoms are rather the dark evocations proper to the various mediumistic, spiritualistic, and neotheosophical cunents that emphasize the subconscious, and are characterized by a pantheistic and materialistic mysticism; these currents proliferate and grow in a way that is almost epidemic wherever (for example, in Anglo-Saxon countries) the materialization of the virile type and ordinary existence has reached its peak and wherever Protestantism has secularized and impoverished the religious ideal. 12 Thus, the parallel is almost complete and the cycle is about to close.
Where Evola gets it right is in the overarching theme of this work which is that humanity by losing it's spirituality, by losing it's belief in a natural hierarchy and focusing inward on themselves as individuals and supreme authorities has brought upon itself it's own destruction. It has stripped away the deeper meaning and purpose of all aspects of life. Everything becomes shallow and lacking meaning. Work becomes a means toward materialistic accumulation, Love loses it's spiritual framework and becomes merely a feeling, and sex becomes a purely pleasant biological stimulation. The family deteriorates, women become men and men become women and we are turned into purely psychological beings. We become sheep. Lacking in leaps and bounds the spiritual depths of the one's who came before us. And the most frightening part is that sheep are fairly easy to control, especially in a mob ruled democracy.
June 3, 2024
You plunge your digital dick dagger into the digital cunt crocodile. It flips over with a contented sigh and becomes a blob of amorphous red flesh. The crocodile next to it looks up at you with coy eyes, wriggling its tail back and forth with a dexterity unmatched since your last visit to war-torn Nicaragua. Not today, you say, putting your digital dick dagger back into your digital dick sheath. Not today. It's been a long hunt and the sun burns your skin black as opium. You return to your Jeep and head west. You mutter into the radio, war is the true nature of man’s wilderness. There is only static and black smoke. It fills your lungs, like war-torn Nicaragua. You remember the times. You remember the heady smells like childhood. Riding your bike through the spice markets, sandal-heeled. Your father smiling beside a vase of bulging Grecian men.
Salamanders deliver coded messages through the pattering of their toes. They sip the sweat off your arms. It is a fair trade — a just trade. Pure and untainted by the decadent rot of ass. Nature! Savage yet sensuous. You sucked the Malaria out of your veins, like a weaning child. It made you stronger. It gave you a sense of purpose beyond corporate ass and sewage. The corruption that spits into your throat every time you fall asleep, dreaming the rabid dream of modernity. Eternity is the long night of man.
Sometimes you forget it all. You chase a boar through the underbrush. You scream, Walden! Walden! driven by your instincts predator. Your Jeep lies in flames behind you, metallic chassis warped into the face of John Galt. The boar is forever ahead of you and you scream, Walden! Walden! Behind you, the face of John Galt, solemn and immaculate. You reach your arms out, as if to embrace the boar, because you love the world — because you love the world as much as your AR-15, and your Remington tattoo, and your battle against the cuck dragon. The dream always ends the same. The boar runs off the edge of the cliff. The boar would rather kill itself than be touched by you.
Off in the distance, beyond the swaying palms, crocodiles moan for your digital dick dagger. You shout at your reflection in the puddle outside. The sky is the same colour as your mother’s opal necklace the night she was murdered by street thugs with antifa ass tattoos. Get a hold of yourself, get a god damn hold of yourself, you say. You are in control. You are your own Jeep. You are — Owowowowowowo! Suddenly, negro soldiers burst out of their shacks. They surround you, undulating their bodies to your panicked gasps. They fire their AR-15s into the sky, screaming, Yass queen, yass! You are overwhelmed by their mystic incantations. You collapse with a bulging erection and Mother Earth welcomes you into her sweet, savage cunt.
One of your earliest memories is the Nicaraguan spice trade beginning in 1634 when your great great great great great great grandfather declared precolonial Africa terra nullius a ripe site of extraction for the molar economy henceforth known as nitrous oxide suckling geothermal vents through the proxy of slaves. Out of barbarity your grandfather brought Sisyphian fire rolling a crest of thorns holier than Ouranos and you the shining seed of permanent destruction. During black mass self-sufficient women gather beneath the moon and steal the joy from your Belgium grandfather quipping the Congo Styx carved the arms off natives holier than the Conquistadors. The Nicaraguan Savannah taught you all you needed to know about the world. Despite these empty people despite every inch of your dick the whole world must be liberated.
Friedrich Hayek once said, if you stare into the abyss long enough the abyss will fuck your wife and steal your job. When your daughter began reading Angelina Jolie’s autobiography, you let it pass. You were a good father — a liberal father. When she began talking about the Black Panther Party, you let it pass. Because you were a good father — a god damn liberal father. Then you stumbled on her TikTok account. You watched her descent into totemic dances, into the irrational savagery of primitive socialism, and you realised you had reared a stranger. You began researching Evangelion and ahegao porn. You watched hours of VTubers eating Mochi Mochi Nippon! You dived into the heart of modern darkness and saw that hidden amidst its proclamations of queer emancipation were the chains of ass worship and crack house womanism — smoke screens to the fallout of a slow motion Hiroshima that had already detonated. You realised man had become a gay ghost.
The Owl of Minerva wakes you at twilight. Submerged in the Nubian River, you are a man off the grid, a spook. You apply a herbal balm to your dick and transform into the Spear of Longinus. You drift down the Nubian River. Along its edges, crocodiles bare their cunts to the sky like sentinels welcoming you home. In the skies, eagles tear at each other’s throats, sending great spurts of blood across the starry hemisphere. Beyond the palms, jungle cats scream. Like the prodigal son, you disowned your comfortable bourgeois trappings and fled to the wilderness of war-torn Nicaragua. You returned to your fatherland to cleanse yourself in the Sacred Fire of Vesta. Now, you take up the mantle of man alone. You return to the origin of yourself, becoming your own cunt to birth a virgin dick. You become your own dick-cunt God and propel yourself into the ass cult of multiculturalism, and out of this triumphant collision your body stretches and expands into a new continent, a continent free of libertine decadence, a continent called Far Cry 6.
Salamanders deliver coded messages through the pattering of their toes. They sip the sweat off your arms. It is a fair trade — a just trade. Pure and untainted by the decadent rot of ass. Nature! Savage yet sensuous. You sucked the Malaria out of your veins, like a weaning child. It made you stronger. It gave you a sense of purpose beyond corporate ass and sewage. The corruption that spits into your throat every time you fall asleep, dreaming the rabid dream of modernity. Eternity is the long night of man.
Sometimes you forget it all. You chase a boar through the underbrush. You scream, Walden! Walden! driven by your instincts predator. Your Jeep lies in flames behind you, metallic chassis warped into the face of John Galt. The boar is forever ahead of you and you scream, Walden! Walden! Behind you, the face of John Galt, solemn and immaculate. You reach your arms out, as if to embrace the boar, because you love the world — because you love the world as much as your AR-15, and your Remington tattoo, and your battle against the cuck dragon. The dream always ends the same. The boar runs off the edge of the cliff. The boar would rather kill itself than be touched by you.
Off in the distance, beyond the swaying palms, crocodiles moan for your digital dick dagger. You shout at your reflection in the puddle outside. The sky is the same colour as your mother’s opal necklace the night she was murdered by street thugs with antifa ass tattoos. Get a hold of yourself, get a god damn hold of yourself, you say. You are in control. You are your own Jeep. You are — Owowowowowowo! Suddenly, negro soldiers burst out of their shacks. They surround you, undulating their bodies to your panicked gasps. They fire their AR-15s into the sky, screaming, Yass queen, yass! You are overwhelmed by their mystic incantations. You collapse with a bulging erection and Mother Earth welcomes you into her sweet, savage cunt.
One of your earliest memories is the Nicaraguan spice trade beginning in 1634 when your great great great great great great grandfather declared precolonial Africa terra nullius a ripe site of extraction for the molar economy henceforth known as nitrous oxide suckling geothermal vents through the proxy of slaves. Out of barbarity your grandfather brought Sisyphian fire rolling a crest of thorns holier than Ouranos and you the shining seed of permanent destruction. During black mass self-sufficient women gather beneath the moon and steal the joy from your Belgium grandfather quipping the Congo Styx carved the arms off natives holier than the Conquistadors. The Nicaraguan Savannah taught you all you needed to know about the world. Despite these empty people despite every inch of your dick the whole world must be liberated.
Friedrich Hayek once said, if you stare into the abyss long enough the abyss will fuck your wife and steal your job. When your daughter began reading Angelina Jolie’s autobiography, you let it pass. You were a good father — a liberal father. When she began talking about the Black Panther Party, you let it pass. Because you were a good father — a god damn liberal father. Then you stumbled on her TikTok account. You watched her descent into totemic dances, into the irrational savagery of primitive socialism, and you realised you had reared a stranger. You began researching Evangelion and ahegao porn. You watched hours of VTubers eating Mochi Mochi Nippon! You dived into the heart of modern darkness and saw that hidden amidst its proclamations of queer emancipation were the chains of ass worship and crack house womanism — smoke screens to the fallout of a slow motion Hiroshima that had already detonated. You realised man had become a gay ghost.
The Owl of Minerva wakes you at twilight. Submerged in the Nubian River, you are a man off the grid, a spook. You apply a herbal balm to your dick and transform into the Spear of Longinus. You drift down the Nubian River. Along its edges, crocodiles bare their cunts to the sky like sentinels welcoming you home. In the skies, eagles tear at each other’s throats, sending great spurts of blood across the starry hemisphere. Beyond the palms, jungle cats scream. Like the prodigal son, you disowned your comfortable bourgeois trappings and fled to the wilderness of war-torn Nicaragua. You returned to your fatherland to cleanse yourself in the Sacred Fire of Vesta. Now, you take up the mantle of man alone. You return to the origin of yourself, becoming your own cunt to birth a virgin dick. You become your own dick-cunt God and propel yourself into the ass cult of multiculturalism, and out of this triumphant collision your body stretches and expands into a new continent, a continent free of libertine decadence, a continent called Far Cry 6.
April 28, 2016
The best way to describe this book is as a “Pagan Systematic Theology.” That’s not entirely accurate, though. Julius Evola, though an enemy of Christianity, isn’t so stupid to think that the pagan gods actually exist. In fact, Evola is quite clear that the “God-principle” is at best removed, if non-existent.
Rather, paganism–or better, the ancient tradition–is an instantiation of the realm of the Forms. And as long as Evola sticks with quasi-Platonic concepts, he’s okay. In fact, he is quite insightful.
Evola as Anti-Positivist
The danger of the “unconscious:” It’s easy to criticize materialism and positivism as blocking man’s path up to God; but the occult religion opens the path below man–which is equally deadly (xii). While Evola’s larger vision is incompatible with Christianity, there is some truth in this: you simply do not want to “let yourself go” with your unconscious. That is how demons enter.
For Evola “Tradition” isn’t something proved or demonstrated. It is remembered. It just “is.” It’s origin is “nonhuman” (Evola xxxiv). Presumably by this he means “transcendent,” which would be “universal” (xxxv).
Metaphysics
Key to his argument is the Doctrine of “two natures.” There is a superior realm of being and an inferior realm of becoming (3). The invisible element is always “more real” and anchors the visible.
The realm of “nature” was flux. It is an eternal state of “deprivation.” It reveals a lack of direction. Matter = becoming. There must be a transcendent order that gives meaning to this flux. This is where Evola advances the idea of “divine kingship” as a bridge between the two realms.
So far, so good. This is Plato 101.
Regality
Kings in traditional societies were viewed as “mediators” (pontifex). They possessed a transcendent quality that allowed them to participate in the Forms. “The roots of authority always had a metaphysical character” (8). Kingship is often associated with the solar symbol. The solar glory denoted a metaphysical reality (9). The king draws his authority from the “above” and not from the earth.
The Law, The Empire, the State
A transcendent realism is the presupposition of law (21).Law has to have a divine character. Doctrine of the two natures reflects the relationship that exists between state and people. Legitimacy can never derive its principle from the demos (24).
So far all of this is good and is the same as you would find in any monarchist/anti-republican treatise. But Evola takes it several steps further in a) defending the Hindu caste system and in an open attack on Christianity.
In a harsh, cruel way the caste system makes sense. It reflects an ordered hierarchy. On the other hand, it seems that the people who actually like the caste system are already at the top (remember Uncle Ruckus’s defense of slavery?). Warning: Language.
Evola dislikes Christianity because it relativised the warrior caste society, or so he thinks. His understanding of Christianity is appallingly bad (though he does have some sympathy for Eastern Orthodoxy). His problem is that Christianity borrowed disparate elements from the different polar societies. Well, maybe so but that’s not a refutation. It’s a rebuttal.
There is little reason for me to offer a detailed refutation of his system. In fact, I’m not sure why he cares. He holds to a cyclical view of history and since Kali Yuga is about to end, we’ll get a go at it next go around.
Rather, paganism–or better, the ancient tradition–is an instantiation of the realm of the Forms. And as long as Evola sticks with quasi-Platonic concepts, he’s okay. In fact, he is quite insightful.
Evola as Anti-Positivist
The danger of the “unconscious:” It’s easy to criticize materialism and positivism as blocking man’s path up to God; but the occult religion opens the path below man–which is equally deadly (xii). While Evola’s larger vision is incompatible with Christianity, there is some truth in this: you simply do not want to “let yourself go” with your unconscious. That is how demons enter.
For Evola “Tradition” isn’t something proved or demonstrated. It is remembered. It just “is.” It’s origin is “nonhuman” (Evola xxxiv). Presumably by this he means “transcendent,” which would be “universal” (xxxv).
Metaphysics
Key to his argument is the Doctrine of “two natures.” There is a superior realm of being and an inferior realm of becoming (3). The invisible element is always “more real” and anchors the visible.
The realm of “nature” was flux. It is an eternal state of “deprivation.” It reveals a lack of direction. Matter = becoming. There must be a transcendent order that gives meaning to this flux. This is where Evola advances the idea of “divine kingship” as a bridge between the two realms.
So far, so good. This is Plato 101.
Regality
Kings in traditional societies were viewed as “mediators” (pontifex). They possessed a transcendent quality that allowed them to participate in the Forms. “The roots of authority always had a metaphysical character” (8). Kingship is often associated with the solar symbol. The solar glory denoted a metaphysical reality (9). The king draws his authority from the “above” and not from the earth.
The Law, The Empire, the State
A transcendent realism is the presupposition of law (21).Law has to have a divine character. Doctrine of the two natures reflects the relationship that exists between state and people. Legitimacy can never derive its principle from the demos (24).
So far all of this is good and is the same as you would find in any monarchist/anti-republican treatise. But Evola takes it several steps further in a) defending the Hindu caste system and in an open attack on Christianity.
In a harsh, cruel way the caste system makes sense. It reflects an ordered hierarchy. On the other hand, it seems that the people who actually like the caste system are already at the top (remember Uncle Ruckus’s defense of slavery?). Warning: Language.
Evola dislikes Christianity because it relativised the warrior caste society, or so he thinks. His understanding of Christianity is appallingly bad (though he does have some sympathy for Eastern Orthodoxy). His problem is that Christianity borrowed disparate elements from the different polar societies. Well, maybe so but that’s not a refutation. It’s a rebuttal.
There is little reason for me to offer a detailed refutation of his system. In fact, I’m not sure why he cares. He holds to a cyclical view of history and since Kali Yuga is about to end, we’ll get a go at it next go around.
Read
November 10, 2021A quick sum up of Evola's critique would be ... There is a Higher unseen spiritual world that humanity must be connected to and was authentically connected to across many archaic cultures in the distant past. Over time through various means humanity has slowly become disconnected from this higher world and he has seen a corresponding slow and gradual decline of his social institutions and mores. Eventually this decline will end in catastrophe and ruin for humanity but perhaps among the ruins a new world will be created that will once again have a healthy connection to the 'higher world'.
A bit of an odd read .... I think I was expecting more of a social critique of Modernity but Evola spends most of the book constructing a pseduo-history of the deep archaic past to show how the modern world has slowly drifted away from a deep connection to a 'higher world'. I mean I knew that Evola was into 'Hyperboreans' and interested in the land of 'Thule' but I just wasn't expecting he would spend so much time weaving connections between these mythical lands and actual known historical lands. My guess is an actual historian or archaeologist would tear apart his 'interpretations' of the histories and symbols of these mythical and not so mythical lands, but Evola very obviously wouldn't care about these naturalistic 'fact gathering' critiques and would see them as just another symptom of a decadent civilization.
I thought the strongest parts of the book were where Evola actually did do some social critique of Modernity ... A Modern man who is soulless, materialistic and machinelike and who is totally enthrall to the bourgeoise values of money making... Nothing particularly original or something I hadn't heard somewhere else before but still apt.
Also he occasionally had a pithy phrase like when he called the Baccnalia ... "the avant-garde of the Alexandrian dieties."
As well I liked that he had an Appendix with some descriptions from Hindu texts that describe some of the characteristics of the Kali Yuga (the age of decline, that we are apparently in now) ....
"Property alone with confer rank"
"the prevailing caste with be the Shudras (lowest caste)"
"wealth will be the only source of devotion"
"Earth will be venerated but for its mineral treasures"
"Passion will be the sole bond of union bt the sexes"
A bit of an odd read .... I think I was expecting more of a social critique of Modernity but Evola spends most of the book constructing a pseduo-history of the deep archaic past to show how the modern world has slowly drifted away from a deep connection to a 'higher world'. I mean I knew that Evola was into 'Hyperboreans' and interested in the land of 'Thule' but I just wasn't expecting he would spend so much time weaving connections between these mythical lands and actual known historical lands. My guess is an actual historian or archaeologist would tear apart his 'interpretations' of the histories and symbols of these mythical and not so mythical lands, but Evola very obviously wouldn't care about these naturalistic 'fact gathering' critiques and would see them as just another symptom of a decadent civilization.
I thought the strongest parts of the book were where Evola actually did do some social critique of Modernity ... A Modern man who is soulless, materialistic and machinelike and who is totally enthrall to the bourgeoise values of money making... Nothing particularly original or something I hadn't heard somewhere else before but still apt.
Also he occasionally had a pithy phrase like when he called the Baccnalia ... "the avant-garde of the Alexandrian dieties."
As well I liked that he had an Appendix with some descriptions from Hindu texts that describe some of the characteristics of the Kali Yuga (the age of decline, that we are apparently in now) ....
"Property alone with confer rank"
"the prevailing caste with be the Shudras (lowest caste)"
"wealth will be the only source of devotion"
"Earth will be venerated but for its mineral treasures"
"Passion will be the sole bond of union bt the sexes"
October 5, 2009
A masterwork that I will no doubt have to go back to at various points during the rest of my life. Many people have said that if you're attempting to get into Evola, to read "Revolt Against the Modern World" first. I believe this work should be read AFTER Evola's intellectual autobiography "The Path of Cinnabar." Evola autobiography makes it much easier to understand where he is coming from with each of his works. "Revolt Against the Modern World" is obviously his greatest, but all of Evola's works have something to offer the individual in one way or another. "Revolt Against the Modern World" is the book that cemented Evola's worldview in writing.
A MUST READ!
A MUST READ!
January 17, 2019
I like to start a review with a brief statement of what the book is, but in the case of A Revolt Against the Modern World I have no idea. Having read the book cover to cover, I still have no idea what Evola was trying to say, or even what genre to place the book in. It would be a stretch to class this as philosophy. Evola explicitly rejects rational discourse and debate. In his own words, "I will have a minimal concern for debating and 'demonstrating.' The truths that may reveal the world of Tradition are not those that can be 'learned' or 'discussed'; either they are or they are not." It's not a political or an ethical manifesto -- apart from a few chapters near the end, there is very little that is normative in the book. Evola is just stating the "facts" as they are, without dwelling on their consequences. The closest thing I can think of is comparative mythology, although Evola explicitly rejects that connection in the introduction too. The "traditional method" espoused by Evola seems to consist of taking fragments of myth that fit some intuitive hypothesis, rejecting those that don't, and keeping terms sufficiently vague that any rebuttal is bound to get tangled up in an ontological morass.
With that out of the way, the book consists of two parts. In the first Evola explains certain aspects of the world of "Tradition", in the second he offers a "historical" analysis of the decline of the current civilisations from their roots in Hyperborea to the terrible state they find themselves in today.
The main problem with the first part is the lack of structure or purpose. Evola talks about individual aspects of Tradition such as priest-kings, rites and initiation, sacred games, bringing up interesting cross-cultural (cross-mythological) examples, but ultimately nothing fits together or develops into any overarching theme. On a very basic level, Evola never explains what exactly Tradition is. Is it meant to capture how historical people (which ones?) actually lived? That seems doubtful, given statements like "the eventual lack of correspondence of the historical element with a myth demonstrates the untruth of history rather than that of the myth". Is it meant to describe a joint mythos or set of cultural values that people once had? This seems closer to the case, but still not quite there since Evola is more than happy to reject elements of myth that do not fit his theses as confused, mistaken, or corruptions from aboriginal cultural strata (e.g. the Greeks, as did most people, conceived the Golden Age as a time of peace and harmony, whereas Evola is convinced it consisted of holy war). Did Tradition have a physical, or purely a metaphysical reality? Does it matter for Evola's argument? There is a lot of talk about the supernatural, about the priest-kings being sanctioned from above, and mediating magical or whatever forces for the good of all. Does this supernatural aspect have a "physical", or purely a symbolic reality? And again, does it matter? At the end of this part the only message I seem to have taken away is that men of yore were more religious than men of now. Sure, I can agree with that, but it seems like Evola was trying to say a lot more than that. Unfortunately, it turns out that rational discourse is not merely a malevolent invention designed to keep the Man of Tradition down, but an extremely useful tool for getting your arguments across. This book could use some of that.
The second part, as far as I can see, takes a different course in that it very much does profess to deal with actual historic events. Such as the origin of Indo-Aryan civilisation in Hyperborea, the founding of Atlantis, and things like that. Well, sure, why not. Let's go with that. After these lofty beginnings, Evola describes the Hyperborean civilisation coming into contact with the chtonic southern cultures, getting corrupted by them, and leading to a slow, bumpy decline that lead to the modern world. The tone of the book suggests that this was very much a bad thing, but Evola never explains why. According to him the European civilisations suffered a cultural shock in the 7th-5th centuries BC from which they've never recovered. But what is this reflected in? Certainly not in artistic output, as this is when the Golden Age of Athens is just getting started. Evola does claim that Greek art from this period was shit, but I'm not about to pretend to dislike Sophocles just because a moody Italian told me to. Certainly not in terms of knowledge and learning, as this is when we got Plato, Euclid and Thucydides, among many many others, but Evola seems to have a low opinion of philosophy. After all, "Modern man may be unaware of it, but the preeminence of 'thought' is only a marginal and recent phenomenon in history". Well said, Julius. What kind of a loser has time to think these days. A Man of Tradition knows the truth by sheer intuition alone. But perhaps most damning of all, in spite of Evola's talk of the "virility" and strength of the traditional warrior aristocracies, this is also when the era of Graeco-Roman military triumph began. I'm aware Evola tries to claim the Romans as the last vestige of Tradition to sidestep this thorny issue, but I'm sorry, I just don't see how an army that was initially composed of Plebeian yeomen and later even lower scum of the earth can possibly count as the glorious Kshatriya warrior caste. Filthy, disgusting plebs trampled on the warrior aristocracies of Hispania, Gaul, and the Near East for a thousand years. What exactly was the Man of Tradition doing in this epoch, other than losing wars to inferior races? By what metric is the civilisation of Tradition superior? I'm willing to be open minded, and leave my preconceptions on what constitutes a successful society aside, but Evola never tells me what the correct measure is. Perhaps the very concept of measurement is anti-Tradition, an artefact of the "science that degraded and democratized the very notion of knowledge by establishing the uniform criterion of truth and certainty based on the soulless world of numbers". How terrible. I guess I never can understand, being "intoxicated with the products of an art, erudition, and speculation that lacked any transcendent and metaphysical element", whatever that means.
In the conclusion Evola levels some rather sensible criticisms against modern, industrial society, but it's hard to see how they follow from the rest of the book. Sure, working eight hours a day for something you don't care about sucks, but is it really worse than slaving away in the manor of some warrior aristocrat who, paradoxically, is terrible at winning battles? Well, I don't know. Maybe there's a transcendent reality to be had in dying of malnutrition while the Baron Evola puts another boar on the spit and locks himself in his harem.
As a post scriptum, I never understood how the Hyperborean-Atlantis thing took root and achieved the currency that it did. And it's not just a vague idea, like "there was an ancient civilisation but it's gone now", but a fairly detailed description of how civilisation started on the North Pole, went down to an island in the middle of the Atlantic, and then spread to America and the Mediterranean. Based on nothing but a *very* selective reading of Greek myth. Seems like an incredible amount of mental gymnastics to go through just to deny kinship with the chimpanzee. Is that all it was? Then why not just Creationism? "God did it" is somehow more believable than this crock of shit.
With that out of the way, the book consists of two parts. In the first Evola explains certain aspects of the world of "Tradition", in the second he offers a "historical" analysis of the decline of the current civilisations from their roots in Hyperborea to the terrible state they find themselves in today.
The main problem with the first part is the lack of structure or purpose. Evola talks about individual aspects of Tradition such as priest-kings, rites and initiation, sacred games, bringing up interesting cross-cultural (cross-mythological) examples, but ultimately nothing fits together or develops into any overarching theme. On a very basic level, Evola never explains what exactly Tradition is. Is it meant to capture how historical people (which ones?) actually lived? That seems doubtful, given statements like "the eventual lack of correspondence of the historical element with a myth demonstrates the untruth of history rather than that of the myth". Is it meant to describe a joint mythos or set of cultural values that people once had? This seems closer to the case, but still not quite there since Evola is more than happy to reject elements of myth that do not fit his theses as confused, mistaken, or corruptions from aboriginal cultural strata (e.g. the Greeks, as did most people, conceived the Golden Age as a time of peace and harmony, whereas Evola is convinced it consisted of holy war). Did Tradition have a physical, or purely a metaphysical reality? Does it matter for Evola's argument? There is a lot of talk about the supernatural, about the priest-kings being sanctioned from above, and mediating magical or whatever forces for the good of all. Does this supernatural aspect have a "physical", or purely a symbolic reality? And again, does it matter? At the end of this part the only message I seem to have taken away is that men of yore were more religious than men of now. Sure, I can agree with that, but it seems like Evola was trying to say a lot more than that. Unfortunately, it turns out that rational discourse is not merely a malevolent invention designed to keep the Man of Tradition down, but an extremely useful tool for getting your arguments across. This book could use some of that.
The second part, as far as I can see, takes a different course in that it very much does profess to deal with actual historic events. Such as the origin of Indo-Aryan civilisation in Hyperborea, the founding of Atlantis, and things like that. Well, sure, why not. Let's go with that. After these lofty beginnings, Evola describes the Hyperborean civilisation coming into contact with the chtonic southern cultures, getting corrupted by them, and leading to a slow, bumpy decline that lead to the modern world. The tone of the book suggests that this was very much a bad thing, but Evola never explains why. According to him the European civilisations suffered a cultural shock in the 7th-5th centuries BC from which they've never recovered. But what is this reflected in? Certainly not in artistic output, as this is when the Golden Age of Athens is just getting started. Evola does claim that Greek art from this period was shit, but I'm not about to pretend to dislike Sophocles just because a moody Italian told me to. Certainly not in terms of knowledge and learning, as this is when we got Plato, Euclid and Thucydides, among many many others, but Evola seems to have a low opinion of philosophy. After all, "Modern man may be unaware of it, but the preeminence of 'thought' is only a marginal and recent phenomenon in history". Well said, Julius. What kind of a loser has time to think these days. A Man of Tradition knows the truth by sheer intuition alone. But perhaps most damning of all, in spite of Evola's talk of the "virility" and strength of the traditional warrior aristocracies, this is also when the era of Graeco-Roman military triumph began. I'm aware Evola tries to claim the Romans as the last vestige of Tradition to sidestep this thorny issue, but I'm sorry, I just don't see how an army that was initially composed of Plebeian yeomen and later even lower scum of the earth can possibly count as the glorious Kshatriya warrior caste. Filthy, disgusting plebs trampled on the warrior aristocracies of Hispania, Gaul, and the Near East for a thousand years. What exactly was the Man of Tradition doing in this epoch, other than losing wars to inferior races? By what metric is the civilisation of Tradition superior? I'm willing to be open minded, and leave my preconceptions on what constitutes a successful society aside, but Evola never tells me what the correct measure is. Perhaps the very concept of measurement is anti-Tradition, an artefact of the "science that degraded and democratized the very notion of knowledge by establishing the uniform criterion of truth and certainty based on the soulless world of numbers". How terrible. I guess I never can understand, being "intoxicated with the products of an art, erudition, and speculation that lacked any transcendent and metaphysical element", whatever that means.
In the conclusion Evola levels some rather sensible criticisms against modern, industrial society, but it's hard to see how they follow from the rest of the book. Sure, working eight hours a day for something you don't care about sucks, but is it really worse than slaving away in the manor of some warrior aristocrat who, paradoxically, is terrible at winning battles? Well, I don't know. Maybe there's a transcendent reality to be had in dying of malnutrition while the Baron Evola puts another boar on the spit and locks himself in his harem.
As a post scriptum, I never understood how the Hyperborean-Atlantis thing took root and achieved the currency that it did. And it's not just a vague idea, like "there was an ancient civilisation but it's gone now", but a fairly detailed description of how civilisation started on the North Pole, went down to an island in the middle of the Atlantic, and then spread to America and the Mediterranean. Based on nothing but a *very* selective reading of Greek myth. Seems like an incredible amount of mental gymnastics to go through just to deny kinship with the chimpanzee. Is that all it was? Then why not just Creationism? "God did it" is somehow more believable than this crock of shit.
March 21, 2014
Sort of like the David Icke of the new/alternative right. I think the nicest thing I can say is to quote the nationalsocialists assessment of him in their recommendation to have him expelled from Germany in August 1938 that "his learnedness tends toward the dilettante and pseudoscientific".
May 17, 2020
Julius Evola is just Joseph Campbell for racists. "The moon is female, the sun is male, and white people came from Atlantis." That's basically it. Somehow this monocled little creep managed to stretch it out over like 400 pages.
October 7, 2023
This is a book of contrasts.
While Evola is frequently depicted as a great monster (and given some of the things he said about Hitler and the SS, that’s probably reasonable), his philosophy is more nuanced that straight-up tyranny. I guess this is the horseshoe theory in action, but sometimes he sounds like an extreme leftist, making observations about capitalist society that wouldn’t be out of place in a radical Communist journal. Take the below for example, which focuses of the vacuity of modern work under capitalism.
If the modern world has disapproved of the "injustice" of the caste system, it has stigmatized much more vibrantly those ancient civilizations that practiced slavery; recent times boast of having championed the principle of "human dignity." This too is mere rhetoric. Let us set aside the fact that Europeans reintroduced and maintained slavery up to the nineteenth century in their overseas colonies in such heinous forms as to be rarely found in the ancient world; what should be emphasized is that if there ever was a civilization of slaves on a grand scale, the one in which we are living is it. No traditional civilization ever saw such great masses of people condemned to perform shallow, impersonal, automatic jobs; in the contemporary slave system the counterparts of figures such as lords or enlightened rulers are nowhere to be found. This slavery is imposed subtly through the tyranny of the economic factor and through the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society. And since the modern view of life in its materialism has taken away from the single individual any possibility of bestowing on his destiny a transfiguring element and seeing in it a sign and a symbol, contemporary "slavery" should therefore be reckoned as one of the gloomiest and most desperate kinds of all times.
This is essentially Marx’s theory of alienation. Evola is, of course, approaching the problem from a traditionalist perspective, but the problem is the same - it’s just posed differently. Marx is an atheist, looking at the problem in purely practical terms: we work in meaningless jobs to fill a gap of physical need, facing no other option. For Evola, the problem is spiritual. We experience alienation because our meaningless work ‘a transfiguring element’ - that sense of meaningfulness that we get when there is a greater purpose to our labour.
On the other hand, the society that Evola advocates for is a stratified one. The world he is advocating for his one that returns to the caste or class system, but one in which different social strata willingly and meaningfully undertake their role in a cohesive society. It requires a belief in something akin to Plato’s forms: the notion that there is a perfected model of society, that we on earth are required to strive towards. This is reminiscent of the Bhagavad Gita. On earth, the most important thing is that we perform our role to the best of our ability. Even if we are not good at it, society functions best when we stick to our prescribed role.
In fact, I think that reference to Plato is significant, because this whole book rests on the notion that our world is not the world. The crux of Evola’s worldview is predicated on the idea that our existence is of secondary concern next to the broader plan and structure of the universe. Evola proposes a world in which we are in constant imitation of certain Platonic forms: be they relating to the forms of our social roles, or forms of chivalry, nobility or honour. Evola express great admiration and sympathy for figures that are able to transcend the physical world and unite with their ultimate spiritual form.
Like Buddha, Eckhart addressed the noble man and the "noble soul" whose metaphysical dignity is witnessed by the presence of a "strength," a "light," and a "fire" within it - in other words, of something before which even the deity conceived as a "person" (i.e., theistically) becomes something exterior. The method he employed consisted essentially of detachment from all things (Abegescheidenheit), a virtue that according to Eckhart is above love, humility, or mercifulness, as he explained in his sermon On Detachment.8 The principle of "spiritual centrality" was affirmed: the true Self is God, God is our real center and we are external only to ourselves. Fear, hope, anguish, joy, and pain, or anything that may bring us out of ourselves, must be allowed to seep into us.
I think this is a reasonably good example of the way that Evola sees the true world as something above and beyond the physical. Our social structures and even (in a radical interpretation) our very personalities and sense of selves: these are all essentially fake. This links to Eliade’s notion of an eternal return. The universe beyond our physical world is the so-called real world. Down here, we are just living in illusions, imitating the greater forms.
For Evola, even foundational myths in Western society, such as those familiar from Christian tradition, are themselves just unfolding re-tellings of older myths. He places great emphasis on the myth of the Holy Grail, and stresses its significance as something that predates Christianity. It is presented as a primordial myth. The myth of the Grail, according to Evola, is of Hyperborean origin.
The "myth" and the highest ideal of medieval chivalry was to reach the Grail in its new earthly abode and to belong to such an order, which was often identified with King Arthur's knights of the Round Table. Considering that the Catholic Church has descended directly and without any interruptions from primitive Christianity, and considering the fact that the Christianized Grail disappeared until that time a knightly rather than priestly order was to be instituted - this obviously testifies to the emergence of a different tradition than the Catholic and apostolic one. There is more: in almost all the texts dealing with the Grail, the symbol of the "temple" (still a very priestly one) is abandoned in favor of the symbol of the court or of a regal castle, as the mysterious, inaccessible, and well-protected place in which the Grail is kept. The central theme of the "mystery" of the Grail, besides the test of mending a broken sword, consists in a regal restoration; there is the expectation of a knight who will restore the prestige of a decadent realm and who will avenge or heal a king who is either wounded, paralyzed, or in a catatonic state.
The Grail is symbolic of the notion of striving towards the forms. In essence, it is a symbolic retelling of the notion of nobility. By striving towards the Grail, Arthur’s knights are acting out, in symbolic form, the struggle of acting nobly. They are acting in imitation of the Platonic form, and upon obtaining the Grail, become heroes. But the last sentence of the above quote is significant. This is not a capitalistic myth, whereby the one who becomes a hero gains wealth or power. The notion of the nobility is connected to restoration. By striving, they are not reward materially but spiritually. They oversee the restoration of the proper social order.
Up to this point, I’ve largely focused on the first half of the book. The second half tries to connect the abstract notions of the first half into concrete historical examples. This mostly consists of analysis of a very broad range of myths, mostly from Ancient Greece, Rome, India and the pre-Colombian Americas. These are… interesting. The mythological analysis of the second half is weaker than the more theoretical discussion of the first half. It can be frustrating how Evola will elevate fleeting and vague mythological references as proof of his reading of history, and then off-handedly reject large swaths of evidence to the contrary.
Another mistake of evolutionism is to conceive of some forms of miscegenation that presuppose the emergence of other races that are superior either as civilizations and biological specimens or as products of "evolution." These races had their own origins; because so much time has elapsed (as in the case of the "Hyperborean" and the "Atlantic" races) and because of geophysical factors, these races have left very few traces of their existence and what remains is difficult to spot by those who are merely seeking archaeological and paleontological traces accessible to profane research.
For example, there is a lot of discussion about Hyperboreans, and the Biblical Nephilim which Evola associates with them. These discussions are strange. The discussions about Atlantis are also strange. If you have read much Jungian or mythopoetic analysis, you will probably be familiar with mythological readings of Atlantis. Evola takes these much more literally. He doesn’t accept the stories from ancient myth directly, but rather remoulds them in selective ways to fit his worldview. The symbolic nature of the myths is emphasised, but that symbolism is posited to be derived from true historical experience, rather than the more conventional reading, which would posit that past civilisations created the myths to explain their present.
I’m going to stop here, because I’ve already written quite a bit, and this is a Goodreads review. This book covers so much more which I haven’t touched on here. Evola was a remarkable thinker, but one who put forward some truly unusual ideas. He is fiercely well-read and a persuasive writer. He is also frequently monstrous, advocating for violent solutions behind a veil of mysticism.
Was Evola a fascist? In the broad modern sense of the term (sympathetic to terror and violence) - yes, he definitely was. In the sense of the historical movement in early twentieth century Europe? No, I think he was something quite different. Fascism was fundamentally forward-looking - it tried to use violence to build a more efficient and more powerful society of the future. It mass-produced terror towards defined goals of a modern state, under the arbitrary rule of a dictator. Evola looks to a quite different place for inspiration: the ancient past. He advocates for a return to a mythologised former age - one with medieval sensibilities. He is not particularly interested in the notion of a country or a state, preferring the notion of a society, in which the social order binds itself. Social stratification is presented as a natural thing, or even a goal-in-itself. The violence that maintains the order should be self-perpetuating, not driven by the capriciousness of a ruler, but by a constant striving to return to equilibrium. He sees the modern world as unnatural. By returning to ritual and symbolism, he proposes that a former sense of balance could be restored.
While Evola is frequently depicted as a great monster (and given some of the things he said about Hitler and the SS, that’s probably reasonable), his philosophy is more nuanced that straight-up tyranny. I guess this is the horseshoe theory in action, but sometimes he sounds like an extreme leftist, making observations about capitalist society that wouldn’t be out of place in a radical Communist journal. Take the below for example, which focuses of the vacuity of modern work under capitalism.
If the modern world has disapproved of the "injustice" of the caste system, it has stigmatized much more vibrantly those ancient civilizations that practiced slavery; recent times boast of having championed the principle of "human dignity." This too is mere rhetoric. Let us set aside the fact that Europeans reintroduced and maintained slavery up to the nineteenth century in their overseas colonies in such heinous forms as to be rarely found in the ancient world; what should be emphasized is that if there ever was a civilization of slaves on a grand scale, the one in which we are living is it. No traditional civilization ever saw such great masses of people condemned to perform shallow, impersonal, automatic jobs; in the contemporary slave system the counterparts of figures such as lords or enlightened rulers are nowhere to be found. This slavery is imposed subtly through the tyranny of the economic factor and through the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society. And since the modern view of life in its materialism has taken away from the single individual any possibility of bestowing on his destiny a transfiguring element and seeing in it a sign and a symbol, contemporary "slavery" should therefore be reckoned as one of the gloomiest and most desperate kinds of all times.
This is essentially Marx’s theory of alienation. Evola is, of course, approaching the problem from a traditionalist perspective, but the problem is the same - it’s just posed differently. Marx is an atheist, looking at the problem in purely practical terms: we work in meaningless jobs to fill a gap of physical need, facing no other option. For Evola, the problem is spiritual. We experience alienation because our meaningless work ‘a transfiguring element’ - that sense of meaningfulness that we get when there is a greater purpose to our labour.
On the other hand, the society that Evola advocates for is a stratified one. The world he is advocating for his one that returns to the caste or class system, but one in which different social strata willingly and meaningfully undertake their role in a cohesive society. It requires a belief in something akin to Plato’s forms: the notion that there is a perfected model of society, that we on earth are required to strive towards. This is reminiscent of the Bhagavad Gita. On earth, the most important thing is that we perform our role to the best of our ability. Even if we are not good at it, society functions best when we stick to our prescribed role.
In fact, I think that reference to Plato is significant, because this whole book rests on the notion that our world is not the world. The crux of Evola’s worldview is predicated on the idea that our existence is of secondary concern next to the broader plan and structure of the universe. Evola proposes a world in which we are in constant imitation of certain Platonic forms: be they relating to the forms of our social roles, or forms of chivalry, nobility or honour. Evola express great admiration and sympathy for figures that are able to transcend the physical world and unite with their ultimate spiritual form.
Like Buddha, Eckhart addressed the noble man and the "noble soul" whose metaphysical dignity is witnessed by the presence of a "strength," a "light," and a "fire" within it - in other words, of something before which even the deity conceived as a "person" (i.e., theistically) becomes something exterior. The method he employed consisted essentially of detachment from all things (Abegescheidenheit), a virtue that according to Eckhart is above love, humility, or mercifulness, as he explained in his sermon On Detachment.8 The principle of "spiritual centrality" was affirmed: the true Self is God, God is our real center and we are external only to ourselves. Fear, hope, anguish, joy, and pain, or anything that may bring us out of ourselves, must be allowed to seep into us.
I think this is a reasonably good example of the way that Evola sees the true world as something above and beyond the physical. Our social structures and even (in a radical interpretation) our very personalities and sense of selves: these are all essentially fake. This links to Eliade’s notion of an eternal return. The universe beyond our physical world is the so-called real world. Down here, we are just living in illusions, imitating the greater forms.
For Evola, even foundational myths in Western society, such as those familiar from Christian tradition, are themselves just unfolding re-tellings of older myths. He places great emphasis on the myth of the Holy Grail, and stresses its significance as something that predates Christianity. It is presented as a primordial myth. The myth of the Grail, according to Evola, is of Hyperborean origin.
The "myth" and the highest ideal of medieval chivalry was to reach the Grail in its new earthly abode and to belong to such an order, which was often identified with King Arthur's knights of the Round Table. Considering that the Catholic Church has descended directly and without any interruptions from primitive Christianity, and considering the fact that the Christianized Grail disappeared until that time a knightly rather than priestly order was to be instituted - this obviously testifies to the emergence of a different tradition than the Catholic and apostolic one. There is more: in almost all the texts dealing with the Grail, the symbol of the "temple" (still a very priestly one) is abandoned in favor of the symbol of the court or of a regal castle, as the mysterious, inaccessible, and well-protected place in which the Grail is kept. The central theme of the "mystery" of the Grail, besides the test of mending a broken sword, consists in a regal restoration; there is the expectation of a knight who will restore the prestige of a decadent realm and who will avenge or heal a king who is either wounded, paralyzed, or in a catatonic state.
The Grail is symbolic of the notion of striving towards the forms. In essence, it is a symbolic retelling of the notion of nobility. By striving towards the Grail, Arthur’s knights are acting out, in symbolic form, the struggle of acting nobly. They are acting in imitation of the Platonic form, and upon obtaining the Grail, become heroes. But the last sentence of the above quote is significant. This is not a capitalistic myth, whereby the one who becomes a hero gains wealth or power. The notion of the nobility is connected to restoration. By striving, they are not reward materially but spiritually. They oversee the restoration of the proper social order.
Up to this point, I’ve largely focused on the first half of the book. The second half tries to connect the abstract notions of the first half into concrete historical examples. This mostly consists of analysis of a very broad range of myths, mostly from Ancient Greece, Rome, India and the pre-Colombian Americas. These are… interesting. The mythological analysis of the second half is weaker than the more theoretical discussion of the first half. It can be frustrating how Evola will elevate fleeting and vague mythological references as proof of his reading of history, and then off-handedly reject large swaths of evidence to the contrary.
Another mistake of evolutionism is to conceive of some forms of miscegenation that presuppose the emergence of other races that are superior either as civilizations and biological specimens or as products of "evolution." These races had their own origins; because so much time has elapsed (as in the case of the "Hyperborean" and the "Atlantic" races) and because of geophysical factors, these races have left very few traces of their existence and what remains is difficult to spot by those who are merely seeking archaeological and paleontological traces accessible to profane research.
For example, there is a lot of discussion about Hyperboreans, and the Biblical Nephilim which Evola associates with them. These discussions are strange. The discussions about Atlantis are also strange. If you have read much Jungian or mythopoetic analysis, you will probably be familiar with mythological readings of Atlantis. Evola takes these much more literally. He doesn’t accept the stories from ancient myth directly, but rather remoulds them in selective ways to fit his worldview. The symbolic nature of the myths is emphasised, but that symbolism is posited to be derived from true historical experience, rather than the more conventional reading, which would posit that past civilisations created the myths to explain their present.
I’m going to stop here, because I’ve already written quite a bit, and this is a Goodreads review. This book covers so much more which I haven’t touched on here. Evola was a remarkable thinker, but one who put forward some truly unusual ideas. He is fiercely well-read and a persuasive writer. He is also frequently monstrous, advocating for violent solutions behind a veil of mysticism.
Was Evola a fascist? In the broad modern sense of the term (sympathetic to terror and violence) - yes, he definitely was. In the sense of the historical movement in early twentieth century Europe? No, I think he was something quite different. Fascism was fundamentally forward-looking - it tried to use violence to build a more efficient and more powerful society of the future. It mass-produced terror towards defined goals of a modern state, under the arbitrary rule of a dictator. Evola looks to a quite different place for inspiration: the ancient past. He advocates for a return to a mythologised former age - one with medieval sensibilities. He is not particularly interested in the notion of a country or a state, preferring the notion of a society, in which the social order binds itself. Social stratification is presented as a natural thing, or even a goal-in-itself. The violence that maintains the order should be self-perpetuating, not driven by the capriciousness of a ruler, but by a constant striving to return to equilibrium. He sees the modern world as unnatural. By returning to ritual and symbolism, he proposes that a former sense of balance could be restored.
October 22, 2020
This is more a general review of the author and his followers, rather than this work in particular.
In summary, I personally haven’t found Evola very helpful or enlightening. He takes a very long time to say things that can be put far simpler, and he makes his writing unnecessarily complicated - much like a university professor who decides to write a bunch of nonsensical jargon that others won’t understand but will at least seem intelligent, the longer, the more bizarre words and the more vague the better. Intellectual elitism at its finest.
Whenever he does have or makes a good point it’s after trudging through 5 or 10 chapters of practically nothing or just nothing new, and they’re usually things you could find far easier and simpler in other authors or even just reading the source material instead of this pedantic medium.
You’re also likely to end up running into pretty shaky grounds and claims made by him, some that he and the founder of the Traditionalist School disagree on and others that he takes great lengths and mental gymnastics to justify but to little success. Hence, I suppose, trying to lose the reader in his over complication of a topic; in true intellectual fashion.
I give Revolt here a 3 (I gave it 4 before my review but changed my mind) because despite the fact that I personally severely disliked reading it, I’d like to remain dispassionate about it and at least give it a mid-tier rating. I can appreciate the work in it and the validity of the truer statements within though buried underneath so much filler, and despite the things I and Tradition would disagree on or find just unnecessary and off-topic.
I wouldn’t recommend Evola to anybody, there’s far better out there.
Part II here refers in general to observations about his followers:
I decided to pick Evola up after a long time of neglect because I didn’t expect much from him and found his fans weren’t my kind of people, “you’ll know him by his fruits”. I finally did get around to reading a handful of his work and essays of his online just to say “I did” and to give it a fair chance, I’ve been reading books from other Traditionalist writers anyways, especially Guénon who I do enjoy; unfortunately my experience with Evola just proved my initial feelings justified, more certain and left me more averse.
I believe the reason Evola is so popular with the far-right and the like is because of his associations with Fascism even though he was never a fascist anyways and has his own criticisms of Italian Fascism and more so the NSDAP. This along with the fact he’s rather ‘edgy’, likes to talk about war, warriors, kings, sex, Left-Hand topics, etc.
Further, #RevoltAgainstTheModernWorld is a very simple and vague phrase that nearly anybody can use, I’d wager over half of the trad fads who use it haven’t actually read the namesake book, or if they have, observation and context shows they very often have no idea what it means - but it’s just easy to see how and why it’s popular. Another easy to grab statement is his call to “be radical, be absolute”, whatever his fans decide to define what that means.
Lastly I think it has to do with the pedantic nature of his writing itself, it’s easy to gloat, consciously or unconsciously, over reading Evola and feeling clever and superior for it - over “understanding” what he has said beneath clusters of mental gymnastics and unnecessary complication. Funnily enough this still counts even if what he said flies right over the readers head; Evola simply fulfils a role of pseudo-elitism. If you say you’ve read him, can quote him or just reference him, then the only explanation is you must be quite red pilled, learned and just plain based - you’re in the club.
This also just goes hand in hand with the general trend of why people even get into “traditional” values, and it’s worth noting people mix the definitions of whatever they define “traditionalism” as and the capital T philosophy of the “Traditionalist School” extremely often - again going to show that people either don’t read authors like Evola and other Traditionalists or they do and it goes over their heads.
For example, it’s noticeable in men that quite a lot of them get into these things for either bizarre desires and fetishisms or insecurities and they will call on the vague definitions and cherry picking of “tradition” and on biology to make it all work out (the “Traditions” of the contents in Evola and others are in fact separated from what they call the “profane” things of biology, time and place).
It’s easy to get into a trend that calls for masculine superiority when the man himself is an Üntermensch, spiritually and mentally speaking. It’s easy to get off at the thought of “authoritarian” and “warrior” aesthetics and the ‘no homo’ in ogling body builders, it’s easy to make the sexual metaphysical in an attempt to rationalize human lust, it’s easy to find ‘traditional’ backing and approval to justify the search for a trad wife.
And at the end of the day I think we have to admit that much of this hype over finding traditional waifus is because a lot of guys are lazy children who want to marry their mothers and have a fetish for blonde hair.
I’m picking on the men here because Evola has a “masculine” appeal in particular.
In summary, I personally haven’t found Evola very helpful or enlightening. He takes a very long time to say things that can be put far simpler, and he makes his writing unnecessarily complicated - much like a university professor who decides to write a bunch of nonsensical jargon that others won’t understand but will at least seem intelligent, the longer, the more bizarre words and the more vague the better. Intellectual elitism at its finest.
Whenever he does have or makes a good point it’s after trudging through 5 or 10 chapters of practically nothing or just nothing new, and they’re usually things you could find far easier and simpler in other authors or even just reading the source material instead of this pedantic medium.
You’re also likely to end up running into pretty shaky grounds and claims made by him, some that he and the founder of the Traditionalist School disagree on and others that he takes great lengths and mental gymnastics to justify but to little success. Hence, I suppose, trying to lose the reader in his over complication of a topic; in true intellectual fashion.
I give Revolt here a 3 (I gave it 4 before my review but changed my mind) because despite the fact that I personally severely disliked reading it, I’d like to remain dispassionate about it and at least give it a mid-tier rating. I can appreciate the work in it and the validity of the truer statements within though buried underneath so much filler, and despite the things I and Tradition would disagree on or find just unnecessary and off-topic.
I wouldn’t recommend Evola to anybody, there’s far better out there.
Part II here refers in general to observations about his followers:
I decided to pick Evola up after a long time of neglect because I didn’t expect much from him and found his fans weren’t my kind of people, “you’ll know him by his fruits”. I finally did get around to reading a handful of his work and essays of his online just to say “I did” and to give it a fair chance, I’ve been reading books from other Traditionalist writers anyways, especially Guénon who I do enjoy; unfortunately my experience with Evola just proved my initial feelings justified, more certain and left me more averse.
I believe the reason Evola is so popular with the far-right and the like is because of his associations with Fascism even though he was never a fascist anyways and has his own criticisms of Italian Fascism and more so the NSDAP. This along with the fact he’s rather ‘edgy’, likes to talk about war, warriors, kings, sex, Left-Hand topics, etc.
Further, #RevoltAgainstTheModernWorld is a very simple and vague phrase that nearly anybody can use, I’d wager over half of the trad fads who use it haven’t actually read the namesake book, or if they have, observation and context shows they very often have no idea what it means - but it’s just easy to see how and why it’s popular. Another easy to grab statement is his call to “be radical, be absolute”, whatever his fans decide to define what that means.
Lastly I think it has to do with the pedantic nature of his writing itself, it’s easy to gloat, consciously or unconsciously, over reading Evola and feeling clever and superior for it - over “understanding” what he has said beneath clusters of mental gymnastics and unnecessary complication. Funnily enough this still counts even if what he said flies right over the readers head; Evola simply fulfils a role of pseudo-elitism. If you say you’ve read him, can quote him or just reference him, then the only explanation is you must be quite red pilled, learned and just plain based - you’re in the club.
This also just goes hand in hand with the general trend of why people even get into “traditional” values, and it’s worth noting people mix the definitions of whatever they define “traditionalism” as and the capital T philosophy of the “Traditionalist School” extremely often - again going to show that people either don’t read authors like Evola and other Traditionalists or they do and it goes over their heads.
For example, it’s noticeable in men that quite a lot of them get into these things for either bizarre desires and fetishisms or insecurities and they will call on the vague definitions and cherry picking of “tradition” and on biology to make it all work out (the “Traditions” of the contents in Evola and others are in fact separated from what they call the “profane” things of biology, time and place).
It’s easy to get into a trend that calls for masculine superiority when the man himself is an Üntermensch, spiritually and mentally speaking. It’s easy to get off at the thought of “authoritarian” and “warrior” aesthetics and the ‘no homo’ in ogling body builders, it’s easy to make the sexual metaphysical in an attempt to rationalize human lust, it’s easy to find ‘traditional’ backing and approval to justify the search for a trad wife.
And at the end of the day I think we have to admit that much of this hype over finding traditional waifus is because a lot of guys are lazy children who want to marry their mothers and have a fetish for blonde hair.
I’m picking on the men here because Evola has a “masculine” appeal in particular.
June 10, 2022
"Revolt Against the Modern World" is a great book title, but that is the best part of the book. As another reviewer suggested, "A Metaphysics of History" would be a lot more accurate, though less engaging.
I anticipated that this book might have a lot with which I would disagree, but sometimes this can still be thought-provoking. I approached this book from a conservative/libertarian perspective, not a hostile one, and on open mind. I was very disappointed. It is nonsense. It has the lowest signal to noise ratio of any book that I can recall (Shoshana Zuboff and Michael Walsh are distant runners up).
There is almost nothing that is practical or relevant in 2020. It is an absurd smorgasbord of monarchism, elitism, esotericism and a dozen other isms. Evola makes his equally eclectic and seriously crazy buddy Corneliu Codreanu seem comparatively pragmatic and grounded. It is almost entirely ridiculous, dated or metaphysical noise. The few things I got out of the book, I got from looking up his more obscure references, like the Albigensians. Seriously, how much relevance do the Cathars or the Ghibellines have in the present day? Not much, I think, and Evola didn’t come close to persuading me otherwise.
As an example, Evola correctly notes that "What upsets modern sensitivity the most about the caste system is the law of heredity and preclusion". Having correctly noted the strongest objection, he devotes the rest of the chapter to an outrageous and inane defense of caste systems that assumes the conclusion and does not address the strongest objection at all.
Evola’s defense of aristocracy, monarchism and elitism is even more laughable. The modern day "elites", from the British royals to the Soviet nomenklatura to the Davos crowd, have utterly discredited themselves. This should have been sufficiently evident to Evola in 1934 from the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, the rest of the hopelessly inbred and decrepit European aristocracy, Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin.
This book has little or nothing to offer a contemporary reader, no practical solutions. Evola reportedly conceded that it was overtaken by events in his subsequent Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul, which I haven’t read (UPDATE 2021: I have now read it and it isn't much better). The author himself was largely irrelevant in his own time and largely forgotten thereafter, notwithstanding a recent flicker of revived interest from neo-Traditionalists. Even they would be well advised to look elsewhere. For instance, Chesterton’s Fence seems far more relevant. Revolt Against the Modern World is a naïve and narcissistic fantasy that was curb stomped by reality long before it was written. For better or worse, the ship sailed long ago. Evola is left alone on the dock, loudly conversing with himself about Frederick II like a crazy person, simply an anachronism.
I anticipated that this book might have a lot with which I would disagree, but sometimes this can still be thought-provoking. I approached this book from a conservative/libertarian perspective, not a hostile one, and on open mind. I was very disappointed. It is nonsense. It has the lowest signal to noise ratio of any book that I can recall (Shoshana Zuboff and Michael Walsh are distant runners up).
There is almost nothing that is practical or relevant in 2020. It is an absurd smorgasbord of monarchism, elitism, esotericism and a dozen other isms. Evola makes his equally eclectic and seriously crazy buddy Corneliu Codreanu seem comparatively pragmatic and grounded. It is almost entirely ridiculous, dated or metaphysical noise. The few things I got out of the book, I got from looking up his more obscure references, like the Albigensians. Seriously, how much relevance do the Cathars or the Ghibellines have in the present day? Not much, I think, and Evola didn’t come close to persuading me otherwise.
As an example, Evola correctly notes that "What upsets modern sensitivity the most about the caste system is the law of heredity and preclusion". Having correctly noted the strongest objection, he devotes the rest of the chapter to an outrageous and inane defense of caste systems that assumes the conclusion and does not address the strongest objection at all.
Evola’s defense of aristocracy, monarchism and elitism is even more laughable. The modern day "elites", from the British royals to the Soviet nomenklatura to the Davos crowd, have utterly discredited themselves. This should have been sufficiently evident to Evola in 1934 from the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, the rest of the hopelessly inbred and decrepit European aristocracy, Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin.
This book has little or nothing to offer a contemporary reader, no practical solutions. Evola reportedly conceded that it was overtaken by events in his subsequent Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul, which I haven’t read (UPDATE 2021: I have now read it and it isn't much better). The author himself was largely irrelevant in his own time and largely forgotten thereafter, notwithstanding a recent flicker of revived interest from neo-Traditionalists. Even they would be well advised to look elsewhere. For instance, Chesterton’s Fence seems far more relevant. Revolt Against the Modern World is a naïve and narcissistic fantasy that was curb stomped by reality long before it was written. For better or worse, the ship sailed long ago. Evola is left alone on the dock, loudly conversing with himself about Frederick II like a crazy person, simply an anachronism.
February 4, 2022
One of the worst books I have ever ever read.
Absymal Scholarship on Christianity and an incoherent view of simple reality are in here. This goes from his view of a strict dualism while still requiring that physical things influence the spiritual world, as well as depressing views of relationships and a laughable view of time.
I will be writing a full systematic refutation of his views in time.
Absymal Scholarship on Christianity and an incoherent view of simple reality are in here. This goes from his view of a strict dualism while still requiring that physical things influence the spiritual world, as well as depressing views of relationships and a laughable view of time.
I will be writing a full systematic refutation of his views in time.
February 22, 2015
Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World is the manifesto of traditionalism, and one of the most popular texts among today's "alternative right". Evola was an esotericist; his spiritual proclivities were toward a path of inner transformation and self-mastery. Everything flows from this internal spiritual endeavor, and the ultimate ideal towards which all spiritual life is to be oriented is the form of transcendence. The transcendence Evola envisions is one over the state of "becoming"; the ever-moving, ever-changing, illusory finitude of the physical world.
His interest in classical mythology should not cause one to mistake him for one of the "new-age" or "neo-pagan" aesthetes that have emerged since the 1960s. Evola is decidedly opposed to the "earth-based" religions. They are manifestations of the archetypal mother goddess who claims stewardship over the Earth, because the Earth is feminine; it is a womb that is continuously fertilized by the sun and the rain. The earthly feminine represents the illusory state of becoming, while the highest spirituality, for Evola, is a masculine, "uranian" state of transcendence; a state of "being" rather than "becoming", self-sustaining and autotelic. I suspect Evola would have nothing but scorn for Aleister Crowley's commandment, "Do what thou wilt." This sort of "freedom" is merely a posture of confusion and disharmony, in which one is merely the slave of the baser passions which lead him around by the nose in any given direction.
Evola holds that in premodern times, all great civilizations conceived of their social orders as spiritual communities that were oriented towards this ultimate transcendence. Rulers were mediators between the divine and the mundane realms, and held the social-religious order in place. The warrior aristocracy (and the aristocrats were always warriors in addition to being spiritual leaders) practiced a brand of warrior asceticism, in which the mastery of the battlefield was bound up with the internal pathway toward the transcendent. Evola interprets the hadith in which Muhammad tells his followers, upon returning from a battle, that they are returning from the "lesser jihad" to the "greater jihad" in this light. The inner transformation, in which one lets go of the things "of this world", is the ultimate one; and yet it is only made possible in the process of an external endeavor of holy war - the "lesser jihad". Interestingly enough, Evola even thinks of Buddhism as a manifestation of the warrior-aristocratic spirituality.
Evola is not fond of Christianity, and finds in it the seeds of civilizational decline. According to him, God shouldn't come to Earth; for the transcendent to move toward the temporal is merely a corruption of the transcendent ideal. That said, he has some positive things to say about the warrior spirit of the knightly orders of the crusades, like the Templars; but he sees this as evidence that the archetypal warrior-aristocratic ethos is one that transcends religious, ideological, or national fault lines. Saladin and Richard the Lionheart were really kindred spirits, it seems.
This is a somewhat significant departure from Nietzsche's conception of the oppositional Priestly and Knightly-aristocratic classes. For Nietzsche, the warrior and the priest are oppositional figures, because Nietzsche opposes the self-effacing spiritual realm with the hearty moral aestheticism of the world as it is - saying "yes" to life - while for Evola, everything comes form the transcendent singularity, so every "earthly" activity bears its meaning in relation to the transcendent ideal; what Platonists would refer to as the world of the forms.
Consequently, Evola thinks that the pre-moderns had it right when they conceived of civilization as a synergetic relationship between spiritual castes. Even the lower castes, like the guild craftsmen of the middle ages, viewed membership in their trade communities as a spiritual vocation, a position allotted to them in a divine order; and so even the crafting of tables or the laying of bricks took on a sacred dimension and was thus a source of great inner satisfaction for the craftsman. Evola suggests that nowhere has "slavery" been a more pervasive or a more pitiable status than in the modern age, where the lower strata are regulated to the role of mere automata in a great machine of production that is not grounded in any transcendent order.
With the seemingly inevitable triumph of democracy, capitalism, and the ideology of "progress", Evola doesn't see much hope for the modern world. According to him, we are currently living through what the Hindu texts refer to as the "Kali-Yuga", Hesiod referred to as the "Iron Age", and what Nordic folklore referred to as the "Age of the Wolf". Yet he closes the book with the suggestion that those "aristocrats of the spirit" who can whether the civilizational collapse of modernity will reap ever-greater spiritual rewards in the world to come.
His interest in classical mythology should not cause one to mistake him for one of the "new-age" or "neo-pagan" aesthetes that have emerged since the 1960s. Evola is decidedly opposed to the "earth-based" religions. They are manifestations of the archetypal mother goddess who claims stewardship over the Earth, because the Earth is feminine; it is a womb that is continuously fertilized by the sun and the rain. The earthly feminine represents the illusory state of becoming, while the highest spirituality, for Evola, is a masculine, "uranian" state of transcendence; a state of "being" rather than "becoming", self-sustaining and autotelic. I suspect Evola would have nothing but scorn for Aleister Crowley's commandment, "Do what thou wilt." This sort of "freedom" is merely a posture of confusion and disharmony, in which one is merely the slave of the baser passions which lead him around by the nose in any given direction.
Evola holds that in premodern times, all great civilizations conceived of their social orders as spiritual communities that were oriented towards this ultimate transcendence. Rulers were mediators between the divine and the mundane realms, and held the social-religious order in place. The warrior aristocracy (and the aristocrats were always warriors in addition to being spiritual leaders) practiced a brand of warrior asceticism, in which the mastery of the battlefield was bound up with the internal pathway toward the transcendent. Evola interprets the hadith in which Muhammad tells his followers, upon returning from a battle, that they are returning from the "lesser jihad" to the "greater jihad" in this light. The inner transformation, in which one lets go of the things "of this world", is the ultimate one; and yet it is only made possible in the process of an external endeavor of holy war - the "lesser jihad". Interestingly enough, Evola even thinks of Buddhism as a manifestation of the warrior-aristocratic spirituality.
Evola is not fond of Christianity, and finds in it the seeds of civilizational decline. According to him, God shouldn't come to Earth; for the transcendent to move toward the temporal is merely a corruption of the transcendent ideal. That said, he has some positive things to say about the warrior spirit of the knightly orders of the crusades, like the Templars; but he sees this as evidence that the archetypal warrior-aristocratic ethos is one that transcends religious, ideological, or national fault lines. Saladin and Richard the Lionheart were really kindred spirits, it seems.
This is a somewhat significant departure from Nietzsche's conception of the oppositional Priestly and Knightly-aristocratic classes. For Nietzsche, the warrior and the priest are oppositional figures, because Nietzsche opposes the self-effacing spiritual realm with the hearty moral aestheticism of the world as it is - saying "yes" to life - while for Evola, everything comes form the transcendent singularity, so every "earthly" activity bears its meaning in relation to the transcendent ideal; what Platonists would refer to as the world of the forms.
Consequently, Evola thinks that the pre-moderns had it right when they conceived of civilization as a synergetic relationship between spiritual castes. Even the lower castes, like the guild craftsmen of the middle ages, viewed membership in their trade communities as a spiritual vocation, a position allotted to them in a divine order; and so even the crafting of tables or the laying of bricks took on a sacred dimension and was thus a source of great inner satisfaction for the craftsman. Evola suggests that nowhere has "slavery" been a more pervasive or a more pitiable status than in the modern age, where the lower strata are regulated to the role of mere automata in a great machine of production that is not grounded in any transcendent order.
With the seemingly inevitable triumph of democracy, capitalism, and the ideology of "progress", Evola doesn't see much hope for the modern world. According to him, we are currently living through what the Hindu texts refer to as the "Kali-Yuga", Hesiod referred to as the "Iron Age", and what Nordic folklore referred to as the "Age of the Wolf". Yet he closes the book with the suggestion that those "aristocrats of the spirit" who can whether the civilizational collapse of modernity will reap ever-greater spiritual rewards in the world to come.
March 21, 2021
I was originally going to write a more detailed review, but the umpteenth time Evola ranted about the Uranian quality of the solar masculinity or whatever was one too many. I began skipping paragraphs and even whole chapters when I was 3/4 of the way through.
This is probably the worst book I've read in my life. Not just because of how abhorrent I find the ideas contained within, but also how boring and aimless it all is. I am amazed that someone can read through this and come out thinking he has been enlightened, particularly in our time. Revolt Against The Modern World is the 20th century equivalent of the Illuminati conspiracy theorists showing you a triangle in one of Lady Gaga's videos and going "really makes you think, don't it?".
One really only needs to read the preface to get the gist of Evola's anti-humanist, anti-rational ideas. The rest of the book consists of repetitive, biased 'analysis' of myths (which Evola convinced me he thinks are real) and historical factoids, with abortive flailings at 'modernity' interspersed between. Of course, Evola says these myths are conclusive proof of the mess he's trying to push, which should raise one's eyebrows considering he was the one to eschew rational debate in the first place (literally: 《The truths that may reveal the world of Tradition are not those
that can be "learned" or "discussed"; either they are or they are not》). In the end, he makes good on his word: there is no underlying logic to this maddening tirade of a text; either you accept the borderline psychotic ramblings or you do not.
I'll leave some quotes here so you can judge for yourself. Yes, Evola is saying that Atlantis/Thule is a real place.
《[...] this knowledge (not just a mere "theory") has always been present as an unshakable axis around which everything revolved. Let me emphasize the fact that it was knowledge and not "theory." As difficult as it may be for our contemporaries to understand this, we must start from the idea that the man of Tradition was aware of the existence of a dimension of being much wider than what our contemporaries experience and call "reality."》
《Every traditional civilization is characterized by the presence of beings who, by virtue of their innate or acquired superiority over the human condition, embody within the temporal order the living and efficacious presence of a power that comes from above.》
《Once in a while it is possible to detect in certain historical institutions (such as monarchies and empires) an esoteric and universal core that transcends the specific geographical and historical dimensions of said institutions, thus culminating in a unity of a higher kind; such are the imperial peaks of the world of Tradition》
《The ancient German peasant, for instance, experienced his cultivating the land as a title of nobility, even though he was not able to see in this work, unlike his Persian counterpart, a symbol and an episode of the struggle between the god of light and the god of darkness.》
《The periods in which women have reached autonomy and preeminence almost always have coincided with epochs marked by manifest decadence in ancient civilization》
《Not to mention all the other degenerative factors connected to a mechanized and urbanized social life and especially to a civilization that no longer respects the healthy and creative limitations constituted by the castes and by the traditions of blood lineage》
《I agree wholeheartedly with the idea expressed by Coulanges according to which the apparition of the "will," in the sense of an individualistic freedom, of those who own the land to divide their property, break it up, and separate it from the legacy of blood and the rigorous norms of the paternal right and primogeniture, truly represents one of the characteristic manifestations of the degeneration of the traditional spirit》
《[...] in the beginning there were no animal-like cavemen, but rather "more-than-human" beings, and that in ancient prehistory there was no "civilization" but an "era of the gods"; 5 this to many people—who in one way or another believe in the gospel of Darwinism—amounts to pure and simple "mythology》
《Evolutionists believe they are "positively" sticking to the facts. They ignore that the facts per se are silent, and that if interpreted in different ways they can lend support to the most incredible hypotheses. It has happened, however, that someone, though fully informed of all the data that are adduced to prove the theory of evolution, has shown these data to support the opposite thesis, which in more than one respect corresponds to the traditional teaching.》
《Historically and geographically, Atlantis does not correspond to the South, but to the West. The South corresponds to Lemuria, which I mentioned in passing, and some Negroid and Southern populations may be considered the last crepuscular remnants of this continent.》
This is probably the worst book I've read in my life. Not just because of how abhorrent I find the ideas contained within, but also how boring and aimless it all is. I am amazed that someone can read through this and come out thinking he has been enlightened, particularly in our time. Revolt Against The Modern World is the 20th century equivalent of the Illuminati conspiracy theorists showing you a triangle in one of Lady Gaga's videos and going "really makes you think, don't it?".
One really only needs to read the preface to get the gist of Evola's anti-humanist, anti-rational ideas. The rest of the book consists of repetitive, biased 'analysis' of myths (which Evola convinced me he thinks are real) and historical factoids, with abortive flailings at 'modernity' interspersed between. Of course, Evola says these myths are conclusive proof of the mess he's trying to push, which should raise one's eyebrows considering he was the one to eschew rational debate in the first place (literally: 《The truths that may reveal the world of Tradition are not those
that can be "learned" or "discussed"; either they are or they are not》). In the end, he makes good on his word: there is no underlying logic to this maddening tirade of a text; either you accept the borderline psychotic ramblings or you do not.
I'll leave some quotes here so you can judge for yourself. Yes, Evola is saying that Atlantis/Thule is a real place.
《[...] this knowledge (not just a mere "theory") has always been present as an unshakable axis around which everything revolved. Let me emphasize the fact that it was knowledge and not "theory." As difficult as it may be for our contemporaries to understand this, we must start from the idea that the man of Tradition was aware of the existence of a dimension of being much wider than what our contemporaries experience and call "reality."》
《Every traditional civilization is characterized by the presence of beings who, by virtue of their innate or acquired superiority over the human condition, embody within the temporal order the living and efficacious presence of a power that comes from above.》
《Once in a while it is possible to detect in certain historical institutions (such as monarchies and empires) an esoteric and universal core that transcends the specific geographical and historical dimensions of said institutions, thus culminating in a unity of a higher kind; such are the imperial peaks of the world of Tradition》
《The ancient German peasant, for instance, experienced his cultivating the land as a title of nobility, even though he was not able to see in this work, unlike his Persian counterpart, a symbol and an episode of the struggle between the god of light and the god of darkness.》
《The periods in which women have reached autonomy and preeminence almost always have coincided with epochs marked by manifest decadence in ancient civilization》
《Not to mention all the other degenerative factors connected to a mechanized and urbanized social life and especially to a civilization that no longer respects the healthy and creative limitations constituted by the castes and by the traditions of blood lineage》
《I agree wholeheartedly with the idea expressed by Coulanges according to which the apparition of the "will," in the sense of an individualistic freedom, of those who own the land to divide their property, break it up, and separate it from the legacy of blood and the rigorous norms of the paternal right and primogeniture, truly represents one of the characteristic manifestations of the degeneration of the traditional spirit》
《[...] in the beginning there were no animal-like cavemen, but rather "more-than-human" beings, and that in ancient prehistory there was no "civilization" but an "era of the gods"; 5 this to many people—who in one way or another believe in the gospel of Darwinism—amounts to pure and simple "mythology》
《Evolutionists believe they are "positively" sticking to the facts. They ignore that the facts per se are silent, and that if interpreted in different ways they can lend support to the most incredible hypotheses. It has happened, however, that someone, though fully informed of all the data that are adduced to prove the theory of evolution, has shown these data to support the opposite thesis, which in more than one respect corresponds to the traditional teaching.》
《Historically and geographically, Atlantis does not correspond to the South, but to the West. The South corresponds to Lemuria, which I mentioned in passing, and some Negroid and Southern populations may be considered the last crepuscular remnants of this continent.》
February 4, 2022
Finalmente dopo molto tempo mi sono riapprocciato agli scritti di Julius Evola, a ricominciare da Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, la sua opera più famosa nonché quella centrale del suo corpus (praticamente quasi tutti i libri successivi non sono sostanzialmente che appendici, spiegazioni e aggiunte alla Rivolta.
Cosa c'è quindi da dire su Evola e su quest'opera, vista e studiata in un'ottica quanto più possibile neutra? Non si può negare la grande conoscenza che Evola aveva delle mitologie e della storia antica anche per l'accesso a fonti irreperibili in Italia all'epoca. Evola però si mostra un calembour con le parole: sono molti i termini che ritornano ripetuti ad nauseam in quest'opera: Tradizione, virilità, scienza, magia, spirito, etc. Parole a cui però quasi mai viene attribuito il loro significato ma anzi un super-significato (come direbbe Evola), interpretandoli personalmente in chiave esoterica. Allo stesso tempo Evola cita moltissimi miti, spesso mettendoli impropriamente a confronto, ancor di più quando "forza" il significato di mitologie e concetti per giustificare le sue idee sulla razza e le gerarchie (considerando anche l'epoca in cui l'opera è stata scritta); anche alcune traduzioni (specie dal sanscrito) riportate sembrano errate o perlomeno strumentalizzate per questi stessi obiettivi. Lo stesso concetto di Tradizione menzionato nell'opera, Evola ci tiene a chiarirlo, non ha il significato reale di tradizione, ma si riferisce ad una dimensione storica mai esistita, ideale, e per questo superstorica, non concreta sul piano materiale. Da questo punto di vista, con l'idea di poter spiegare razionalmente e quasi scientificamente il mondo metafisico dello spirito Evola riprende coscientemente, seppur con un certo riguardo su alcune posizioni, la scuola Antroposofica di Steiner.
La struttura è pressappoco questa: in tutti i capitoli Evola riporta un'affermazione a cui lui dà valore ontolgico di realtà a priori e poi segue una lunga esposizione di mitologie e simbolismi antichi per "dimostrare" la validità di quanto affermato. Evola sostiene l'idea che ci siano due epoche cicliche, quelle che lui sintetizza chiamandole "tradizionale" e "moderna", di cui la prima è caratterizzata da eroi super-umani quasi divini, dei pontifex, ovvero individui che creano ponti tra il mondo materiale e quello superiore, originari del Polo Nord, poi trasferitosi ad Atlantide e poi diffusi nel mondo dopo il diluvio. Riprendendo da Weininger, tutto per Evola in questo contesto è duale (la tradizone è virile, e il sole, il cielo etc, la modernità è donna, rappresenta la luna, la terra, etc ed è per questo streattemente dipendente dal primo gruppo). Si esplicano poi gli elementi del cosiddetto "razzismo spirituale" il quale implica che non solo l'individuo ha valore in quanto appartenente ad una certa razza ed etnia, ma anche per la sua razza dello spirito (un ariano può così avere uno spirito ebraico, etc) che implicano le gerarchie aristocratiche di cui parla Evola. Evola auspica una società ordinata per caste in un cui ognuno deve accettare il suo ruolo. "abdicare" a tale ruolo significa creare il caos e questo è ciò che per Evola fa la modernità, l'emancipazone femminile e i diritti umani ad esempio farebbero parte di ciò e porterebbe alla distruzione della società "tradizionale". Quella moderna, comprensibilmente per Evola sarebbe l'epoca russo-americana.
In sostanza un'opera inscindibile dal suo contesto storico e soprattutto dal pensiero del suo autore, l'opera stessa è scritta in funzione del suo pensiero, Evola forza concetti, mitologie e traduzioni per giustificare le sue idee politiche di una "super-razza spirituale" che domina sulle altre, per le sue posizioni antisemite, maschiliste e fieramente anti-democratiche. Semplici elenchi di mitologie e simbolismi. Ulteriori spiegazioni di teorie vengono concluse con "non c'è bisogno di dimostrarlo" e "per natura è così". Per le sue stesse premesse, oltre che per i suoi contenuti, nonostante si ponga come "filosofia della storia" in termini puramente tecnici non può nemmeno definirsi "filosofia" in senso proprio quanto invece un libro di spiritualismo intinto di elementi New Age e esoterici come andava nei primi decenni del XX secolo. Un ultimo riferimento riguardo le note e il pessimo apparato critico, il quale è disorientante per il citare opere successive alla Rivolta e spesso consistente di osservazioni dei curatori che note/spiegazioni di passi dell'opera. Inutile anche il mettere una bibliografia di libri "consigliati" alla fine di ogni capitolo. La curatela sembra più aver tentato di "giustificare" le tesi e dar valore all'opera invece che renderla fruibile al lettore.
Cosa c'è quindi da dire su Evola e su quest'opera, vista e studiata in un'ottica quanto più possibile neutra? Non si può negare la grande conoscenza che Evola aveva delle mitologie e della storia antica anche per l'accesso a fonti irreperibili in Italia all'epoca. Evola però si mostra un calembour con le parole: sono molti i termini che ritornano ripetuti ad nauseam in quest'opera: Tradizione, virilità, scienza, magia, spirito, etc. Parole a cui però quasi mai viene attribuito il loro significato ma anzi un super-significato (come direbbe Evola), interpretandoli personalmente in chiave esoterica. Allo stesso tempo Evola cita moltissimi miti, spesso mettendoli impropriamente a confronto, ancor di più quando "forza" il significato di mitologie e concetti per giustificare le sue idee sulla razza e le gerarchie (considerando anche l'epoca in cui l'opera è stata scritta); anche alcune traduzioni (specie dal sanscrito) riportate sembrano errate o perlomeno strumentalizzate per questi stessi obiettivi. Lo stesso concetto di Tradizione menzionato nell'opera, Evola ci tiene a chiarirlo, non ha il significato reale di tradizione, ma si riferisce ad una dimensione storica mai esistita, ideale, e per questo superstorica, non concreta sul piano materiale. Da questo punto di vista, con l'idea di poter spiegare razionalmente e quasi scientificamente il mondo metafisico dello spirito Evola riprende coscientemente, seppur con un certo riguardo su alcune posizioni, la scuola Antroposofica di Steiner.
La struttura è pressappoco questa: in tutti i capitoli Evola riporta un'affermazione a cui lui dà valore ontolgico di realtà a priori e poi segue una lunga esposizione di mitologie e simbolismi antichi per "dimostrare" la validità di quanto affermato. Evola sostiene l'idea che ci siano due epoche cicliche, quelle che lui sintetizza chiamandole "tradizionale" e "moderna", di cui la prima è caratterizzata da eroi super-umani quasi divini, dei pontifex, ovvero individui che creano ponti tra il mondo materiale e quello superiore, originari del Polo Nord, poi trasferitosi ad Atlantide e poi diffusi nel mondo dopo il diluvio. Riprendendo da Weininger, tutto per Evola in questo contesto è duale (la tradizone è virile, e il sole, il cielo etc, la modernità è donna, rappresenta la luna, la terra, etc ed è per questo streattemente dipendente dal primo gruppo). Si esplicano poi gli elementi del cosiddetto "razzismo spirituale" il quale implica che non solo l'individuo ha valore in quanto appartenente ad una certa razza ed etnia, ma anche per la sua razza dello spirito (un ariano può così avere uno spirito ebraico, etc) che implicano le gerarchie aristocratiche di cui parla Evola. Evola auspica una società ordinata per caste in un cui ognuno deve accettare il suo ruolo. "abdicare" a tale ruolo significa creare il caos e questo è ciò che per Evola fa la modernità, l'emancipazone femminile e i diritti umani ad esempio farebbero parte di ciò e porterebbe alla distruzione della società "tradizionale". Quella moderna, comprensibilmente per Evola sarebbe l'epoca russo-americana.
In sostanza un'opera inscindibile dal suo contesto storico e soprattutto dal pensiero del suo autore, l'opera stessa è scritta in funzione del suo pensiero, Evola forza concetti, mitologie e traduzioni per giustificare le sue idee politiche di una "super-razza spirituale" che domina sulle altre, per le sue posizioni antisemite, maschiliste e fieramente anti-democratiche. Semplici elenchi di mitologie e simbolismi. Ulteriori spiegazioni di teorie vengono concluse con "non c'è bisogno di dimostrarlo" e "per natura è così". Per le sue stesse premesse, oltre che per i suoi contenuti, nonostante si ponga come "filosofia della storia" in termini puramente tecnici non può nemmeno definirsi "filosofia" in senso proprio quanto invece un libro di spiritualismo intinto di elementi New Age e esoterici come andava nei primi decenni del XX secolo. Un ultimo riferimento riguardo le note e il pessimo apparato critico, il quale è disorientante per il citare opere successive alla Rivolta e spesso consistente di osservazioni dei curatori che note/spiegazioni di passi dell'opera. Inutile anche il mettere una bibliografia di libri "consigliati" alla fine di ogni capitolo. La curatela sembra più aver tentato di "giustificare" le tesi e dar valore all'opera invece che renderla fruibile al lettore.
May 5, 2016
The first volume is an exciting journey throught the fantasies of a reactionary and romantic dissident. By presenting his ideal type of "traditional society" (inspired by the empires like Egypt, Babylon and Rome), Evola reveals (by exageration) the core of traditionalist conservatism (the Westboro Baptist/ Ted Cruz types). What I mean is that he articulates how bad politics like social organicism and iusnaturalism are connected with racism, slavery, mysoginy and authoritarianism. For now on I will always remember Evola's utopia when I hear the usual conservative arguments.
The second volume is just a bunch of terribly wrong and boring history by which he tries to prove that every civilization fits the "four eras" model. The interest part here is the idea that the world is degenerating instead of progressing.
The second volume is just a bunch of terribly wrong and boring history by which he tries to prove that every civilization fits the "four eras" model. The interest part here is the idea that the world is degenerating instead of progressing.
October 6, 2017
In turning to Julius Evola’s book, Revolt Against the Modern World, it is clear that he, also, believes that history has repeating cycles and, moreover, that we are in, or are approaching, an extremely critical period. But Evola assigns to these cycles ingredients significant echoes of ancient myth and magic that are wholly absent from The Fourth Turning.
As ably expounded by Professor Teofilo Ruiz, in the Great Courses presentation The Terror of History, the conviction (or hope) that “our time” is nearing, or is part of, that End Time which will utter in a new age of peace and harmony has been a consistently recurring theme in the West for at least the last 1,000 years. Now, as in the past, while those who enunciate such a vision are overwhelmingly those of the intellectual elite, their interpretation of events can quickly find ready acceptance by many of those suffering economic hardship, loss of status, or nursing grievances against “the others.”
In very interesting ways, Christian conservatives, Marxists, and fascists – to name but a few – all share a millenarian view of history and – because they do – tend to be dogmatic about the purity of their own beliefs and positions while being harshly critical of those who disagree with them. They firmly believe that they alone are on the right side of history, understand the true nature of things, and behave in morally upright ways, while those who disagree with them are not. It is little wonder, then, that such people can so easily conclude that – sometimes – desperate, even divisive, measures must be taken, including resorting to violence. As the Roman Catholic Church used to say (and may still believe behind closed doors), “Error has no rights.”
There is more than a whiff of such millenarianism in Evola’s book. An Italian philosopher (1898-1974), his ideas influenced Mussolini and the fascists and continue to percolate through right-wing elements today. In offering a questionable interpretation of religious belief and traditional authority throughout history, Evola thoroughly condemns “civilization” for abandoning the transcendent element of being and immersing itself in the things and materialistic ideals of “the world.” In this he echoes many others who, beginning in the 19th century, have deplored the emptiness of modern life that directly resulted from the great error of turning away from God and making man the measure of all things.
While at times he sounds like a cranky 19th Catholic monarchist, what is most strange is the way in which he places great confidence in what are clearly mythic “memories” of the distant past. This aspect of his thought is actually a continuation of the fascination with the “wisdom” of deep time that began with the Italian Renaissance.
While popularly thought of as a period of forward-oriented flowering – marking, as did the accompanying movements of the Reformation and the beginning of the scientific revolution, ruptures with the past and expanding boundaries of knowledge – the Renaissance actually was a profound rediscovering of, and a turning back to, the glories of ancient Greece and Rome. As ancient texts preserved by the Arabs entered Europe in the late Middle Ages, theologians, philosophers, and other intellectuals became entranced not only with many previously unknown writings of the ancient Greeks, but also with other allegedly ancients texts that explored astrology, alchemy, and magic. (It was only more than a century later that these latter, presumably authoritative, texts were found to have been authored in the first centuries after Jesus’ birth.) Unlike our own time – when we take for granted the continuing medical and technological discoveries that flow from the scientific method – these earlier Europeans thought that the essence of wisdom – indeed, of “truth” itself – lay closer to the beginning of human civilization.
The rediscovery of these rediscovered tomes contributed to the Renaissance period’s formulation of the past 1200 years as the “Middle Ages” – a truly “dark age” of long centuries in which the wisdom of the past’s golden age had been lost. This idea that the Middle Ages was a period of decline, a crumbling of proper order and knowledge, can be seen in Luther’s conviction that it was essential that the followers of Jesus return to the simplicity and non-hierarchical nature of the first century, a time before Jesus’ message was distorted by human-derived doctrines and practices.
This Renaissance fascination with the far past in turn echoes the sentiments of the first historical writer Herodotus, whose Histories is a fascinating mix of more or less factual accounts with clearly fanciful myths and legends of far more ancient peoples, strange geographies, and fantastic creatures. In his time people thought of themselves as “modern,” and were intrigued by memories and legends of a very distant past. What wisdom, now lost, was once known? If we could somehow retrieve the lost manuscripts from the great library of Alexandria that was destroyed by fire in 48 B.C. what might we learn?
Evola evidences this kind of love – even reverence – for the myths of deep time, and it is why he sees the trajectory of history as one of loss of truth rather than as one of ongoing progress. It is why he believes so deeply in hierarchical structures, in the church as well as in nation-states.
For “evidence,” he cites the most ancient cultures of which we know, arguing – rather fantastically, for my taste – that these earliest rulers were not only monarchs but, equally important, possessed links to the divine that both gave them their true authority and which helped transform them into something more than mere “men.” This is why he regards democracy as a turning of the true order of things on its head – it assigns to the vulgar “demos” (i.e., “us”) that sovereignty which was originally intended to be the sole possession of the ruler.
His same reliance upon the “truth” of the ancients leads him to reject many modern theories, including that of Darwin. For instance, he argues that Darwin’s concepts of evolution does not take into account the “testimony” of many ancient peoples – whose beliefs Evola explores in some detail – who told of peoples so ancient that they merge with the mists of the earliest time, fantastic races of giants and of beings that mixed human with divine nature, such as the Nephalim mentioned in the book of Genesis.
He affirms the soundness of ancient peoples’ beliefs that their early rulers were either really gods or enjoyed a special relationship with the gods – this, he attests, was the root of their authority. These earlier people were really wiser than their modern descendants because they recognized the reality of the spiritual, or transcendent, state of being and strove to be in touch with and follow in its course. In support of this, he cites not only biblical sources, but also those of other ancient cultures. This is also why their traditional societies were patriarchal, as this was part of the correct divine order.
Although buffeted and eroded over time, both this memory of and contact with the transcendent continued into the Middle Ages when monarchs were thought to rule by the will of God. The combined forces of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, however, finally overthrew the traditional order and, closer to modern times, society even came to embrace what Evola denounces as the “false” ideas of democracy and feminism. In today’s world (he wrote this book in the ‘60s), the ruin all of this has wrought is evident everywhere.
His evocation of a glorious ancient time when men were heroes – and properly subordinated to God and divinely appointed authority – had great appeal for people yearning for a strong leader to “put things right” and, for this reason, his writings influenced Mussolini and the fascist movements of the ‘20s and ‘30s.
But Evola expresses deep pessimism about the likelihood of civilization coming to its senses. Rather, he laments how he believes modern societies have sunk into chaos and ultimate dissolution, as others who have forgotten or repudiated the transcendent before have done. He hopes that throughout this final phase of history’s cycle that enough “good men” who remember and understand the correct relationship between our world and that of the transcendent will survive to begin to build anew from the dust of the collapsed order.
As you might imagine, there were times when reading this book that I was tempted to just slam it shut and throw it down as utter nonsense. But I resisted because I recognize that, despite all of its fantastic aspects, the lessons he draws from the “current state of affairs” resonate with many who, while knowing little if any of the bases of his theories, nonetheless also find their “today” as less than their remembered “yesterdays” (even if this “past” is a carefully filtered construct). Yes, in that “remembered” golden time, when men were men, women knew their place, and rulers governed under divine direction, not only were people like “us” successful and honored, but the country was also strong, united, and bent on achieving great things.
As ably expounded by Professor Teofilo Ruiz, in the Great Courses presentation The Terror of History, the conviction (or hope) that “our time” is nearing, or is part of, that End Time which will utter in a new age of peace and harmony has been a consistently recurring theme in the West for at least the last 1,000 years. Now, as in the past, while those who enunciate such a vision are overwhelmingly those of the intellectual elite, their interpretation of events can quickly find ready acceptance by many of those suffering economic hardship, loss of status, or nursing grievances against “the others.”
In very interesting ways, Christian conservatives, Marxists, and fascists – to name but a few – all share a millenarian view of history and – because they do – tend to be dogmatic about the purity of their own beliefs and positions while being harshly critical of those who disagree with them. They firmly believe that they alone are on the right side of history, understand the true nature of things, and behave in morally upright ways, while those who disagree with them are not. It is little wonder, then, that such people can so easily conclude that – sometimes – desperate, even divisive, measures must be taken, including resorting to violence. As the Roman Catholic Church used to say (and may still believe behind closed doors), “Error has no rights.”
There is more than a whiff of such millenarianism in Evola’s book. An Italian philosopher (1898-1974), his ideas influenced Mussolini and the fascists and continue to percolate through right-wing elements today. In offering a questionable interpretation of religious belief and traditional authority throughout history, Evola thoroughly condemns “civilization” for abandoning the transcendent element of being and immersing itself in the things and materialistic ideals of “the world.” In this he echoes many others who, beginning in the 19th century, have deplored the emptiness of modern life that directly resulted from the great error of turning away from God and making man the measure of all things.
While at times he sounds like a cranky 19th Catholic monarchist, what is most strange is the way in which he places great confidence in what are clearly mythic “memories” of the distant past. This aspect of his thought is actually a continuation of the fascination with the “wisdom” of deep time that began with the Italian Renaissance.
While popularly thought of as a period of forward-oriented flowering – marking, as did the accompanying movements of the Reformation and the beginning of the scientific revolution, ruptures with the past and expanding boundaries of knowledge – the Renaissance actually was a profound rediscovering of, and a turning back to, the glories of ancient Greece and Rome. As ancient texts preserved by the Arabs entered Europe in the late Middle Ages, theologians, philosophers, and other intellectuals became entranced not only with many previously unknown writings of the ancient Greeks, but also with other allegedly ancients texts that explored astrology, alchemy, and magic. (It was only more than a century later that these latter, presumably authoritative, texts were found to have been authored in the first centuries after Jesus’ birth.) Unlike our own time – when we take for granted the continuing medical and technological discoveries that flow from the scientific method – these earlier Europeans thought that the essence of wisdom – indeed, of “truth” itself – lay closer to the beginning of human civilization.
The rediscovery of these rediscovered tomes contributed to the Renaissance period’s formulation of the past 1200 years as the “Middle Ages” – a truly “dark age” of long centuries in which the wisdom of the past’s golden age had been lost. This idea that the Middle Ages was a period of decline, a crumbling of proper order and knowledge, can be seen in Luther’s conviction that it was essential that the followers of Jesus return to the simplicity and non-hierarchical nature of the first century, a time before Jesus’ message was distorted by human-derived doctrines and practices.
This Renaissance fascination with the far past in turn echoes the sentiments of the first historical writer Herodotus, whose Histories is a fascinating mix of more or less factual accounts with clearly fanciful myths and legends of far more ancient peoples, strange geographies, and fantastic creatures. In his time people thought of themselves as “modern,” and were intrigued by memories and legends of a very distant past. What wisdom, now lost, was once known? If we could somehow retrieve the lost manuscripts from the great library of Alexandria that was destroyed by fire in 48 B.C. what might we learn?
Evola evidences this kind of love – even reverence – for the myths of deep time, and it is why he sees the trajectory of history as one of loss of truth rather than as one of ongoing progress. It is why he believes so deeply in hierarchical structures, in the church as well as in nation-states.
For “evidence,” he cites the most ancient cultures of which we know, arguing – rather fantastically, for my taste – that these earliest rulers were not only monarchs but, equally important, possessed links to the divine that both gave them their true authority and which helped transform them into something more than mere “men.” This is why he regards democracy as a turning of the true order of things on its head – it assigns to the vulgar “demos” (i.e., “us”) that sovereignty which was originally intended to be the sole possession of the ruler.
His same reliance upon the “truth” of the ancients leads him to reject many modern theories, including that of Darwin. For instance, he argues that Darwin’s concepts of evolution does not take into account the “testimony” of many ancient peoples – whose beliefs Evola explores in some detail – who told of peoples so ancient that they merge with the mists of the earliest time, fantastic races of giants and of beings that mixed human with divine nature, such as the Nephalim mentioned in the book of Genesis.
He affirms the soundness of ancient peoples’ beliefs that their early rulers were either really gods or enjoyed a special relationship with the gods – this, he attests, was the root of their authority. These earlier people were really wiser than their modern descendants because they recognized the reality of the spiritual, or transcendent, state of being and strove to be in touch with and follow in its course. In support of this, he cites not only biblical sources, but also those of other ancient cultures. This is also why their traditional societies were patriarchal, as this was part of the correct divine order.
Although buffeted and eroded over time, both this memory of and contact with the transcendent continued into the Middle Ages when monarchs were thought to rule by the will of God. The combined forces of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, however, finally overthrew the traditional order and, closer to modern times, society even came to embrace what Evola denounces as the “false” ideas of democracy and feminism. In today’s world (he wrote this book in the ‘60s), the ruin all of this has wrought is evident everywhere.
His evocation of a glorious ancient time when men were heroes – and properly subordinated to God and divinely appointed authority – had great appeal for people yearning for a strong leader to “put things right” and, for this reason, his writings influenced Mussolini and the fascist movements of the ‘20s and ‘30s.
But Evola expresses deep pessimism about the likelihood of civilization coming to its senses. Rather, he laments how he believes modern societies have sunk into chaos and ultimate dissolution, as others who have forgotten or repudiated the transcendent before have done. He hopes that throughout this final phase of history’s cycle that enough “good men” who remember and understand the correct relationship between our world and that of the transcendent will survive to begin to build anew from the dust of the collapsed order.
As you might imagine, there were times when reading this book that I was tempted to just slam it shut and throw it down as utter nonsense. But I resisted because I recognize that, despite all of its fantastic aspects, the lessons he draws from the “current state of affairs” resonate with many who, while knowing little if any of the bases of his theories, nonetheless also find their “today” as less than their remembered “yesterdays” (even if this “past” is a carefully filtered construct). Yes, in that “remembered” golden time, when men were men, women knew their place, and rulers governed under divine direction, not only were people like “us” successful and honored, but the country was also strong, united, and bent on achieving great things.
March 27, 2023
"Revolt Against the Modern World" is a book by Italian philosopher Julius Evola, first published in 1934. The book presents Evola's critique of modernity and his vision of a traditional, spiritual, and aristocratic society.
Evola argues that modern society has lost its connection to the transcendent and the spiritual, and has instead become focused on materialism, individualism, and egalitarianism. He believes that the traditional social order, based on hierarchical relationships, is the only way to achieve true fulfillment and transcendence.
In the book, Evola draws on a wide range of sources, including ancient and medieval texts, Eastern spiritual traditions, and esoteric philosophy. He advocates for the restoration of traditional social institutions and the reestablishment of a spiritual elite, which he sees as necessary for the preservation of the traditional values and customs.
While "Revolt Against the Modern World" has been influential in some far-right circles, it has also been criticized for its promotion of anti-modern and anti-democratic views, as well as its embrace of fascist and racist ideologies. Some critics have argued that Evola's ideas promote a dangerous and regressive vision of society, while others see his work as an important critique of modernity and a call for the restoration of traditional values.
GPT
Evola argues that modern society has lost its connection to the transcendent and the spiritual, and has instead become focused on materialism, individualism, and egalitarianism. He believes that the traditional social order, based on hierarchical relationships, is the only way to achieve true fulfillment and transcendence.
In the book, Evola draws on a wide range of sources, including ancient and medieval texts, Eastern spiritual traditions, and esoteric philosophy. He advocates for the restoration of traditional social institutions and the reestablishment of a spiritual elite, which he sees as necessary for the preservation of the traditional values and customs.
While "Revolt Against the Modern World" has been influential in some far-right circles, it has also been criticized for its promotion of anti-modern and anti-democratic views, as well as its embrace of fascist and racist ideologies. Some critics have argued that Evola's ideas promote a dangerous and regressive vision of society, while others see his work as an important critique of modernity and a call for the restoration of traditional values.
GPT
November 7, 2021
Evola makes interesting philosophy out of that chapter in your high school history book where, with The Enlightenment,™ Western Civilization moved away from the idea of an invisible but all-pervasive natural order of culture, nature, and gods, and instead moved into the swelling void of individualism.
It's hard to argue with something so obviously correct.
This book presents a good introduction to the world of "collapse studies," where people look at how civilizations die and how to potentially avoid that, because it shows us how a shift in founding idea leads to a breakdown of civilization. When civilization dies, all of our efforts are lost, so even an individualist should take heed!
It also gently lets the modern reader see that we are not trying to avoid collapse, but collapse has happened, and that the root of it is the egalitarian/individualist impulse of the modern world.
Excellent stuff, but it makes more sense if you read Plato "The Republic" and Nietzsche "Beyond Good and Evil" first.
It's hard to argue with something so obviously correct.
This book presents a good introduction to the world of "collapse studies," where people look at how civilizations die and how to potentially avoid that, because it shows us how a shift in founding idea leads to a breakdown of civilization. When civilization dies, all of our efforts are lost, so even an individualist should take heed!
It also gently lets the modern reader see that we are not trying to avoid collapse, but collapse has happened, and that the root of it is the egalitarian/individualist impulse of the modern world.
Excellent stuff, but it makes more sense if you read Plato "The Republic" and Nietzsche "Beyond Good and Evil" first.
June 10, 2022
Evola rejects all empirical means of evidence and argues from his rather poor understanding of ancient religions, Greek philosophy, and history using his “analogical” method. The analogical method is when two texts contain some distinct nuggets of information which can be forced to agree with one another if one completely frees them from their context. Consequently, the book is full of possibly the weakest argumentation I’ve ever read, with pages and pages of quotations from the Veda, the Platonic dialogues, Pliny’s histories, that might merely mention a similar idea, which is then taken as proof of some wild conclusions. I’m sure the authors of all of these works would be quite surprised to learn that some hypostatized ideal of Tradition was speaking through them, especially given that the texts, to no surprise, don’t tend to agree with one another philosophically.
Evola operates from his conclusion backwards and in typical esoteric fashion ignores everything which could be leveled against his stupid system. Plus he’s an anti-Semitic Nazi.
Evola operates from his conclusion backwards and in typical esoteric fashion ignores everything which could be leveled against his stupid system. Plus he’s an anti-Semitic Nazi.
August 8, 2018
There are without questions some things here which are irrefutably prescient. Alas, subjectivity is a contagious disease. My reading of Evola suffered from the same symptom as Marx and his religious followers through the ages: the end game is terrible. What kind of psychopath works tirelessly to give up his private property and arms? The suicidal and the duped. What kind of person would set out in this brief life to condemn every last element of modernity as nothingness whence compared to the Bronze Age? The revolt lost steam for me many pages before the end of the second half. As Goethe remarked that, "I knew from a young age that no one can ever completely understand another person," I knew from a young age that that attempting to celebrate a time one never lived in is just a waste of time. If time machines did in fact exist, we could write treatises, go back to the earliest Buddhists, Pythagorean and co., and take a look around, perhaps stay a while. The crisis is that we cannot claim to envy that which we've never experienced. We cannot say things were better there where we never lived. We can say, "I think I would have liked it more," and such is fair, although of course it does not warrant penultimate fascistic manifestos. Nonetheless, I cared not re: Evola's "controversial" personal life before reading the book, and care equally little having read most of this his magnum opus. The only person who has nothing to say is the one who has something to hide, and he is often busy censoring (And thus justifying) others infinitely more courageous than himself. I give Evola credit for being original, and as mentioned there are passages of irrefutable prescience along the way. Ye almost had me there, too, epigraphing Boehme and all.
November 10, 2014
This one was fun. Quite challenging in parts, and you'll get a nice little survey of your ancient comparative mythology coming out of this (well, nothing coming out of those children of Lemuria, but anyway).
It would seem to me that Evola was one of those idealists who took what Stirner was saying about the self being a "creative nothing" entirely seriously. He denies evolution. It's an ideological necessity to go along with modern materialism, etc. Myth is ultimate reference point, Nietzsche left us without any and we need something. There would seem to be some utilitarianism in his overall argument insofar as the ultimate impetus to any sort of thoroughgoing critique of anything is a dislike towards it. Indeed, Evola was a dadaist and Nietzschean before he was, you know, a hyperborean, but anyway. You get about 350 or so pages of historical exegesis and scholarship on the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Brahmanism/Hinduism, Crhistianity.... to show 1) how the farther back you go, the better it was and 2) how the same seeds of decline can be seen across these civilization as they declined and how these same processes can be seen taking us from the European Early Middle and Middle ages into our modern civilizational shitfeast. So it's very eurocentric, that's for sure!
I take this book like I take most right wing ortiented stuff that actually has things to say. Bad for society, healthy for the individual.
It would seem to me that Evola was one of those idealists who took what Stirner was saying about the self being a "creative nothing" entirely seriously. He denies evolution. It's an ideological necessity to go along with modern materialism, etc. Myth is ultimate reference point, Nietzsche left us without any and we need something. There would seem to be some utilitarianism in his overall argument insofar as the ultimate impetus to any sort of thoroughgoing critique of anything is a dislike towards it. Indeed, Evola was a dadaist and Nietzschean before he was, you know, a hyperborean, but anyway. You get about 350 or so pages of historical exegesis and scholarship on the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Brahmanism/Hinduism, Crhistianity.... to show 1) how the farther back you go, the better it was and 2) how the same seeds of decline can be seen across these civilization as they declined and how these same processes can be seen taking us from the European Early Middle and Middle ages into our modern civilizational shitfeast. So it's very eurocentric, that's for sure!
I take this book like I take most right wing ortiented stuff that actually has things to say. Bad for society, healthy for the individual.
May 2, 2022
A very interesting read. I've read selections from this, and I've read several of Evola's other works previously. The fact that Evola denigrates Demagoguery in this book seems to be lost on today's Neo-Fascist Right who flock to Evola while simultaneously supporting Demagogues like Trump (who fits this category by Evola's definition), simultaneously supporting Capitalism, and Christianity etc. - conceptions and ideologies to which Evola was vehemently opposed. This book is insightful and valuable for its view on history and the glimpse it offers into one of the most brilliant minds on the Right. In particular the portions on initiation and tradition as a perennial world-view are intriguing and, I believe, valuable. The portions on race and caste offer a disturbing look into the mindset by which such views and orders were justified without offering any proof for their validity beyond an appeal to the ideal of "Tradition" the author sets up in contrast with the Modern World. Some great metaphysical value can be found here between the lines, with some very questionable assertions and wildly off base analysis. Overall an interesting read if for no other reason than that of offering psychological and historic insight into the ideology that still shapes much of the contemporary Zeitgeist.
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