Roman spirituality,authority and imperium - an absence of pathos and mysticism toward the divine. Its key virtues were duty, loyalty, heroism, order and dominion.

ON 2 AUGUST 1980, Italian neo-fascist terrorists took center stage as
public enemies every bit as dangerous as extreme left-wing fanatics. At 10:25
a.m. a deafening bomb explosion rocked the main concourse of Bologna railway
station. Eighty-five victims died either immediately or as a result of their
injuries, and another two hundred were wounded, many horribly. The rationale
behind the massacre was familiar yet incredible: the neo-fascist “strategy
of tension” regarded such mayhem, horror and disorder as a trigger for a
prerevolutionary situtation. Despite the difficulties of finding the actual perpetrators,
the authorities found abundant confirmation that these bomb attacks
against Italy’s civilian order were indeed part of such a strategy of tension.
As the police sought to question Paolo Signorelli, Franco Freda, Claudio
Mutti and Stefano delle Chiaie, Italy’s well-identified neo-fascist underground,
a single name kept recurring in their investigations. This was a
philosopher who had served the terrorists as an inspiration, mentor and guru
figure. His name was Julius Evola.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_2
On March 17, 1981, a list composed by Licio Gelli was found in his country house (Villa Wanda). The list should be contemplated with some caution, as it is considered to be a compilation of P2 members and the contents of Gelli's Rolodex. Many on the list were apparently never asked if they wanted to join P2, and it is not known to what extent the list includes members who were formally initiated into the lodge. Since 1981, some of those on the list have demonstrated their distance from P2 to the satisfaction of the Italian legal system.

The official effort to apprehend the terrorists after the Bologna bombing
was thorough, and several members of the violent Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari
(NAR) fled to London and other foreign capitals to escape arrest.
http://www.archivioguerrapolitica.org/?tag=nar
The Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR, "Armed Revolutionary Nuclei") was an Italian neofascist Militant organization active from 1977 to November 1981. It committed 33 murders in four years, and had planned to assassinate Francesco Cossiga, Gianfranco Fini andAdolfo Urso. An off-shoot of Terza Posizione, the group maintained close links with the Banda della Magliana, a Rome-based criminal organization, which provided such logistical support as lodging, false papers, weapons, and bombs to the NAR. In November 1981, it was discovered that the NAR hid weapons in the basements of the Health Ministry. The first trial against them sentenced 53 persons on May 2, 1985, on charges of terrorist activities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Headquarters_Allied_Powers_Europe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banda_della_Magliana


Column 88
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_88
Ganser, Daniele: NATO's Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. 
Column 88 was a neo-nazi paramilitary organization based in the United Kingdom. It was formed in the early 1970s, and disbanded in the early 1980s. The members of Column 88 undertook military training under the supervision of a former Royal Marine Commando, and also held regular gatherings attended by neo-nazis from all over Europe. The name is code: the eighth letter of the alphabet 'HH' represents the Nazi greeting 'Heil Hitler'. Many suspected that this group were behind the arson attack that destroyed the Albany Empire in Deptford, south London in July 1978 during the Rock Against Racism campaign.In January 1991, the well known UK anti-fascist Searchlight magazine as part of a series of often contradictory articles variously alleging that C88 was the paramilitary wing of the British nationalist movement or a "honeytrap operation set up by British Intelligence, claimed that Column 88 was part of an alleged European Gladio "stay-behind" network, set up and trained by special forces units (such as the British SAS) to conduct sabotage and assassinations in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. This European-wide underground network is also alleged to have recruited neo-Nazis in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy and other European countries.

The Guardian's November 1990 revelations concerning plans under Margaret Thatcher
The Guardian reported on November 5, 1990, that there had been a "secret attempt to revive elements of a parallel post-war plan relating to overseas operations" in the "early days of Mrs Thatcher's Conservative leadership". According to the British newspaper, "a group of former intelligence officers, inspired by the wartime Special Operations Executive, attempted to set up a secret unit as a kind of armed MI6 cell. Those behind the scheme included Airey Neave, Mrs Thatcher's close adviser who was killed in a terrorist attack in 1979, and George Kennedy Young, a former deputy chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6." The newspaper stated that Thatcher had been "initially enthusiastic but dropped the idea after the scandal surrounding the attack by the French secret service on the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in New Zealand in 1985."The Swiss branch, P-26, as well as Italian Gladio, had trained in the UK in the early 1970s.

Cyprus

The Turkish branch of Gladio Counter-Guerrilla formed the TMT Turkish Resistance Organisation in Cyprus in 1958 and manned it with turkish officers. The 1960 constitution of the republic of Cyprus only had provision for a very small professional army of a few hundred men from both Cypriot communities. Following the 1963–64 clashes that led to the collapse of the power sharing between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the National Guard was created as a conscription Greek cypriot army. The officers for the National Guard where almost exclusively Greek nationals, officers of the Greek Army. LOK units were created in Cyprus modelled on the Greek LOK units, though Cyprus never joined NATO and was at the time a member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Reporter Makarios Drousiotis has written about Greek officer Dimitris Papapostolou, commander of LOK in Cyprus at the time, conspiring with ex-interior minister Polykarpos Yorkatzis to kill elected president Makarios by attacking his helicopter, and after the failure of that attempt, being involved in the assassination of Yorkatzis. The 15 July 1974 coup d'etat against Makarios was executed by National Guard units, with the attack on the presidential palace perpetrated by 31 and 32 Moira Katadromon LOK units with the help of 21 Epilarhia Anagnoriseos tanks reconnaissance unit.

FOIA requests and US State Department's 2006 communiqué

Three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have been filed to the CIA, which has rejected them with the Glomar response: "The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request." One request was filed by theNational Security Archive in 1991; another by the Italian Senate commission headed by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino in 1995 concerning Gladio and Aldo Moro's murder; the last one in 1996, by Oliver Rathkolb, of Vienna university, for the Austrian government, concerning the secret stay-behind armies after a discovery of an arms-cache.^[32]

Furthermore, the US State Department published a communiqué in January 2006 which, while confirming the existence of stay-behind armies, in general, and the presence of the "Gladio" stay-behind unit in Italy, in particular, with the purpose of aiding resistance in the event of Soviet aggression directed Westward, from the Warsaw Pact, dismissed claims of any United States ordered, supported, or authorized skullduggery by stay-behind units. In fact, it claims that, on the contrary, the accusations of US-sponsored "false flag" operations are rehashed former Soviet disinformation based on documents that the Soviets themselves forged; specifically the researchers are alleged to have been influenced by the Westmoreland Field Manual, whose forged nature was confirmed by former KGB operatives, following the end of the Cold War. However since then counter sources from within gladio and the CIA have admitted its authenticity. The alleged Soviet-authored forgery, disseminated in the 1970s, explicitly formulated the need for a "strategy of tension" involving violent attacks blamed on radical left-wing groups in order to convince allied governments of the need for counter-action. It also rejected a Communist Greek journalist's allegations made in December 2005.

Politicians on Gladio

Whilst the existence of a "stay-behind" organization such as Gladio was disputed, prior to its confirmation by Giulio Andreotti,with some skeptics describing it as a conspiracy theory, several high-ranking politicians in NATO countries have made statements appearing to confirm the existence of something like it:

• Former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti ("Gladio had been necessary during the days of the Cold War but, that in view of the collapse of the East Bloc, Italy would suggest to NATO that the organisation was no longer necessary.")
• Former French minister of defense Jean-Pierre Chevènement ("a structure did exist, set up at the beginning of the 1950s, to enable communications with a government that might have fled abroad in the event of the country being occupied.").
• Former Greek defence minister, Ioannis Varvitsiotis (Greek: Ιωάννης Βαρβιτσιώτης) ("local commandos and the CIA set up a branch of the network in 1955 to organise guerrilla resistance to any communist invader")

As noted above, the US has now acknowledged the existence of Operation Gladio.

Wherever they made contact with far-right groups abroad, knowledge of
Evola spread abroad. Julius Evola now became a cult figure, with his books
and doctrines receiving increasing attention and discussion in the periodicals
and conferences of the European New Right.An elegant, smooth-shaven face,
a firm mouth and an imperious gaze with a flashing monocle: visual images
of Evola began to appear in English, French and German far-right periodicals
during the 1980s. His unqualified elitist posture and high-flown metaphysical
critique of modernity attracted those who felt themselves profoundly
alienated from the norms and values of liberal society.More importantly, his
esoteric elitism and spiritual authoritarianism offered a sophisticated ideology
to right-wing intellectuals who saw Anglo-American neo-Nazism as a
crude creed with limited appeal.

Julius Evola (1898–1974) is today a prominent icon of fascist idealism.His
ideal was the Indo-Aryan tradition,where hierarchy, caste, authority and state
ruled supreme over the material aspects of life. Invoking the heroic and sacred
values of this mythical tradition, Evola advanced a radical doctrine of
anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. He
scorned the modern world of popular rule and bourgeois values, democracy
and socialism, seeing capitalism and communism as twin aspects of the benighted
reign of materialism. During the 1930s, Evola had enjoyed the reputation
of a bold and controversial theorist in Fascist Italy and had also been
well known in Conservative Revolutionary circles in Germany during the
Third Reich.Wounded at the close of the war, he had spent the postwar years
in a wheelchair at his apartment on the Corso Vittoria Emanuelle in the center
of Rome. Secluded from practical politics, Evola held the aura of a fascist
sage untainted by the fall of Mussolini until his death in 1974. A young generation
of neo-fascists was irresistibly drawn to this oracle of violence and
revolution.

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome on 19 May 1898, the scion
of a noble Sicilian family. He soon rebelled against his strict Catholic upbringing.
Alongside his high school studies in industrial engineering, he cultivated
a keen interest in the Italian literary avant garde, dominated at the
time by Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, and in Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti’s futurist movement in art.At the age of nineteen he joined the Italian
army in the later stages of the First World War, serving as a mountain artillery
officer at the Austrian front on the Asiago plateau in northern Italy.
After the war, Evola found it hard to adjust to settled life. Beset by spiritual
restlessness, he embarked on a quest for self-transcendence, which implied a
break with the bourgeois values of the past. Dismissing futurism as loud and
showy, he became the leading representative of the Dada movement in Italy.
He gave readings of his avant-garde poetry in the Cabaret Grotte dell’Augusteo—
Rome’s answer to the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich—and exhibited his
paintings in Rome,Milan, Lausanne and Berlin.

Repelled by the commercialization of avant-garde art and its hardening
into convention, Evola gave up painting in 1922 and wrote three transrational
philosophical books, which he published during the 1920s.3 Evola’s philosophical
idealism of the absolute individual was but one expression of his
quest for self-transcendence in a postwar age of shattered values and moral
uncertainties.He also became interested in oriental studies and became a profound
student of magic, the occult, alchemy and Eastern religions. He experimented
with hallucinogenic drugs, discovered the ancient Theravadin Buddhist
text, the Majjhima-Nikaya, and wrote the introduction to an Italian
translation of the Tao-Te-Ching in 1923.

Majjhima Nikaya in English at Metta.lk
http://www.metta.lk/tipitaka/2Sutta-Pitaka/2Majjhima-Nikaya/index.html

The Majjhima Nikaya (-nikāya; "Collection of Middle-length Discourses") is a Buddhistscripture, the second of the five nikayas, or collections, in the Sutta Pitaka, which is one of the "three baskets" that compose the Pali Tipitaka of Theravada Buddhism. This nikaya consists of 152 discourses attributed to the Buddha and his chief disciples.The Majjhima Nikaya corresponds to the Madhyama Āgama found in the Sutra Pitikas of various Sanskritic early Buddhist schools, fragments of which survive in Sanskrit and in Tibetan translation. A complete Chinese translation from the Sarvāstivādin recension appears in the Chinese Buddhist canon, where it is known as the Zhōng Ahánjīng (中阿含經). The Madhyama Āgama of the Sarvāstivāda school contains 222 sūtras, in contrast to the 152 suttas in the Pāli Majjhima Nikāya.

He frequented the Italian Independent Theosophical League and was introduced by its president, Decio Calvari,to the study of Tantrism, which especially captured Evola’s imagination. He
began corresponding with Sir John Woodroffe, the learned British orientalist,
who revealed the secrets of this esoteric Hindu school in The Serpent of Power
and other books published under his pseudonym, Arthur Avalon. Evola presented
his own study of Tantrism and kundalini yoga, based on Woodroffe’s
works and original texts, as L’uomo come potenza [The Yoga of Power] (1925).
Tantrism originated in India around a.d. 400 as a radical Hindu cult focused
on women, goddesses and sexual energy. Rejecting customary Hindu
abstinence, tantric rituals celebrated intoxicating beverages, meat, fish, mudras
and ritual sexual intercourse. Tantrism revolves around the notion of
breaking all ties or bonds (pasha). Individuals with an animal nature, enslaved
by appetite, lust, custom and religious conformity are necessarily disqualified.
By means of taboo and spiritually dangerous practices (orgies, intoxication),
the superior adept (vira) can raise his consciousness to supreme
levels of unity with the divine female power of Shakti, which animates and inspires
the whole universe, thereby acquiring exceptional knowledge (vidya)
and magical powers (siddhis). Tantric doctrine lays much emphasis on the the
male god Shiva and his bride Shakti, whose sexual union is personified in ritual
intercourse.While this act symbolizes the creative impulses of the cosmos,
male ejaculation of semen is typically discouraged. In this way the energy of
orgasm is supposedly channeled away from the propagation of organic life toward
a powerful ascent experience.
Tantrism complemented Western idealism in Evola’s quest for selftranscendence.
Its secrecy and elitism essentially negated the modern
world of rationalism and democracy. Evola wrote that the knowledge and
powers pursued by the modern world are democratic, that is, available at
educational institutions to anyone with enough intelligence. Likewise,
technology is democratic: an instrument or weapon can be used by anyone
with sufficient training. By contrast, the tantric magical powers (siddhis)
are always personal and exceptional achievements accessible only to
the few.4 But Evola also thought Tantrism arose specifically in fifth-century
India at a time of spiritual decadence when men could no longer
achieve an otherworldly liberation from the world. Instead, they sought a
full-blooded embrace of life’s delights—liberty within the world. For this
reason, Tantrism was more akin to Western modes of thought and also
appropriate to the modern age characterized by density, coarseness and
moral decline. Tantric rituals essentially transformed “poison into medicine”
for the strong and liberated individual.

During the 1920s Evola immersed himself in the study of the Western esoteric
tradition. Through Theosophical and Masonic circles he met Arturo
Reghini (1878–1946), a Roman occultist immersed in alchemy, magic and
theurgy. Reghini edited two journals, Atanòr (1924) and Ignis (1925), whose
contents embraced initiate studies from Pythagoreanism to yoga, from Hebrew
Cabalism to Cagliostro’s Egyptian Freemasonry. Evola contributed numerous
reviews and articles on Tantrism, on the nature of woman, on Rudolf
Steiner, and an essay on Dionysius. A circle soon gathered around Reghini and
Evola. A strong anthroposophical influence came from Giovanni Colazza and
Duke Giovanni Colonna di Cesarò. Close to the group, which adopted the
name UR, were Guiliano Kremmerz (1861–1939), founder of the Fraternity
of Myriam that had an interest in sex magic, and an Indian alchemist, C. S.
Narayana Ariar Shiyali.Between 1927 and 1929 the group published Ur (renamed
Krur in 1929), a monthly journal of essays and rituals, which included
many of Evola’s magical studies.

Arturo Reghini sought the renewal of the classical tradition in a fiercely
anti-Christian, pagan spirit.He was a powerful influence on Evola during the
years 1924 to 1930, introducing him to the traditional texts of alchemy,whose
symbolism they regarded as a universal key to the macrocosm of the universe
and the microcosm of man. After presenting an initial study of alchemy in
Krur, Evola published his book La tradizione ermetica [The Hermetic Tradition]
(1931) on hermeticism as an ancient pagan tradition. Evola believed
that the veiled symbolism of hermetico-alchemical cosmology described the
outlines of a heroic, pre-Christian worldview when a warrior aristocracy
reigned supreme. Evola instances the “tree” as a symbol of knowledge and immortality:
in a heroic myth, one who succumbs in a bid to win the powers of
the tree simply has more courage than luck; he may try again and regain his
dignity. But in a postheroic religious era, he has sinned, and his action is a sacrilege
and is damned.7 Evola saw alchemy and hermeticism as an occult survival
of the “Royal Art,” a universal secret science of human and natural transformation
according to heroic concepts, now buried beneath pusillanimous
Christian priestcraft.

The anti-democratic and anti-modernist tenor of Evola’s political thought
may be traced to his readings of Plato,Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, whose
famous work The Decline of the West (1918–22) he later translated into Italian.
But Reghini was a more immediate force.

The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes), or The Downfall of the Occident, is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler, the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918. Spengler revised this volume in 1922 and published the second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History, in 1923.The book introduces itself as a 'Copernican overturning' and rejects the Euro-centric view of history, especially the division of history into the linear "ancient-medieval-modern" rubric.According to Spengler the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. He acknowledges eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian,Chinese, Indian, Mexican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman), Arabian, Western or "European-American". Cultures have a limited lifespan of some thousand years. The final stage of each culture is, in his word use, a 'civilization'.The book also presents the idea of Muslims, Jews and Christians, as well as their Persianand Semitic forebears, being Magian; Mediterranean cultures of the antiquity such asAncient Greece and Rome being Apollonian; and the modern Westerners being Faustian.According to the theory, the Western world is actually ending and we are witnessing the last season - "winter time" - of the Faustian civilization. In Spengler's depiction Western Man is a proud but tragic figure, for, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached.

Plato and Goethe stand for the philosophy of Becoming, Aristotle and Kant the philosophy of Being... Goethe's notes and verse.. must be regarded as the expression of a perfectly definite metaphysical doctrine. I would not have a single word changed of this: "The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast.(Letter to Eckermann)" This sentence comprises my entire philosophy.

 Spengler's civilization model

Spring: Intuition, powerful cultural creation from awakening souls, unity and abundance.

• Religion: Birth of a grand myth signifying a new conception of God. Fear and longing for the world. Earliest metaphysical organization of the world. High scholasticism.
• Art: Religious art considered as an integrated part of religious devotion. Gothic cathedrals, Doric temples. Development of Ornamental art as against the persistent, ahistorical type of Imitative art.
• Politics: Feudalism, warrior aristocracies. Division between two primary Estates: Nobility, which is the estate proper, contains within itself the highest aspirations of its race and is therefore symbolic of the particular people in question, as well as being representative of Time in the sense of Directedness and Destiny; and Priesthood, which is the anti-Estate, pursuing eternal Truth and attempting to subordinate Blood to Intellect primarily through asceticism, but also through scholasticism.

Summer: Maturing consciousness. Earliest urban-civil society and critical thought.

• Religion: Reformation: revolt of the religious moderates against the early religion. Beginnings of a purely philosophical movement. Contrasting idealistic and realistic systems. Mathematical breakthroughs leading to a new conception of the world. Rationalism. The depletion of mysticism from religion.
• Art: Development of high artistic traditions. Both artistic medium and style express the fundamental nature of the soul of the culture. Struggle between different artistic mediums, representing the culture's striving to discover its proper mode of self-representation.
• Politics: Absolutist states. Conflicts between aristocracy and monarchy. The political centre shifts from castles and estates to the cities.

Autumn: Urban rise. High point of disciplined organizational strength.

• Religion: Faith in the omnipotence of rationality. Cult of Nature. The height of mathematical thought. The last idealists. Theories of knowledge and logic.
• Art: Fulfillment of high artistic potentials of culture- sculpture in Greece, contrapuntal music in the West. At the beginning of Autumn, art possesses complete freedom to manifest the Destiny-vision of a people through its particular perfected formal technique. However, the end of Autumn witnesses the exhaustion of the possibilities of that technique, leading to craft-art in imitation of the great style as well as artistic revolt.
• Politics: Struggles between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Revolutions. Napoleonism.

Winter: Coming fissure in the world-urban civilization. Exhaustion of mental organization strength. Irreligiousness rises.

• Religion: Materialism: Cults of science, utility, and luck. Ethical-social ideals: philosophy without mathematics, skepticism. The last mathematical thinkers. Decline of abstract thinkers, and the rise of specialized academic philosophy. Spread of the last ideas.
• Art: End of symbolic art. All art becomes meaningless subjects of fashion.
• Politics: Democracy, the rule of the rich, followed by caesarism and bureaucracy.

Both he and Evola regarded the
Roman patrician world and the imperial constitution as a close approximation
to their ideal state. This strict hierarchy was but a pattern of a higher,
transcendental and absolute order. The leveling, egalitarian universalism of
Christianity negated and ultimately dissolved this political order, heralding
the disorder of the modern world.Writing in Atanòr in 1924,Reghini reflected
that he had already fifteen years earlier predicted the rise of an Italian regime
based on the ancient world and welcomed Fascism.


The fasces—the bundle of rods containing an Etruscan bronze axe as the symbol of the magistrate’s
power in ancient Rome—was presented to Mussolini in 1923 by a member of
an order dedicated to such a revival. The Group of UR also performed rituals
intended to inspire the Fascist regime with the spirit of imperial Rome.
Evola began writing political journalism in 1925. His articles reproached
Fascism for its proximity to the church, the careerism of its functionaries, and
its dependence on the bourgeoisie and the masses: Evola sought to transform
Fascism in accordance with his precepts of spiritual aristocracy and monarchy.
These attacks reached a climax in the publication of his book Imperialismo
Pagano [Pagan Imperialism] (1928), in which he celebrated the ideal of
ancient Rome, denounced all the Christian churches, and scourged the secular
universalism of both American democracy and Soviet communism.Mussolini,
for his part, was sufficiently impressed and interested in these matters
to write a journal article in reply to Reghini’s exhortation for Fascism to initiate
an era of “pagan imperialism.” In the political realities of Italy,Mussolini
could never have afforded to follow an anti-Christian line. The regime’s goal
of a concordat with the Catholic Church eventually led to the Lateran Treaty
of 1929 with the Vatican, thus dashing the Group of UR’s hopes of influencing
the new order.
Evola underpinned his anti-modernist political doctrine through his oriental
and esoteric studies. Through Reghini he discovered the work of the
French orientalist René Guénon (1886–1951), who invoked the notion of a
primordial Tradition, implicit in the metaphysical structure of the universe
and reflected in the authentic religious traditions of East and West. Brought
up in a Catholic family, Guénon studied philosophy at Paris before immersing
himself in the French occult revival at the turn of the century. Besides a
passing interest in Theosophy and Freemasonry, he was especially receptive to
Advaita Vedanta, which was becoming better known in the West through
Vivekananda, and studied Indian philosophy under Hindu teachers.

What is AdvaitaVedanta?A Short Introduciton

 Vedanta contends that human beings find themselves limited in many

ways and continually strive to rid themselves of limitation. People pursue

wealth, pleasure, and merit because they believe it will free them from all

manner of physical, temporal and psychological problems. Vedanta

presents freedom from limitation as the most desirable goal of human life.

 The Upanishads, the source of Vedanta, say that before this creation was,

the self, limitless being, was. It further says that this self continues to exist

outside of time and is therefore eternal. And it states that no action one can

perform will ‘gain’ this self, even though it is an ever-present reality...

because actions are limited while the self is unlimited. Therefore it is at

odds with Yoga on this issue. The discovery that one is the limitless self is

presented as liberation or enlightenment by Vedanta.

We cannot dismiss the Yoga view completely because untold millions

of truthful persons have ‘experienced’ the self over tens of thousands of

years so we need to look for a reasonable explanation for this phenomenon.

One possible explanation lies in the imprecise use of language. It may be

that ‘the experience of the self’ is actually a shift from the individual’s point

of view to the self’s...in which case it would be more accurate to say that the

self experiences the ego, which is how it actually is. Because the shift is so

subtle and language evolved in the experiential world, it is ill equipped to

describe this shift accurately so it is forced to formulate the new vision in

terms of an ego’s experience of an object.

There is no Advaita Vedanta

The words Advaita Vedanta, like the word Hinduism, are a misnomer

because they imply other Vedantas. The word ‘Advaita’ means non-dual and

implies the concept of duality. Indeed, those who view Vedanta as a school

of thought speak of Dwaita Vedanta, dualistic Vedanta, VishistAdvaita

Vedanta, qualified non-dualism, and even Bhakti Vedanta, devotional

Vedanta. Or they compare it with philosophies or religions that present

similar ideas.

The word ‘Advaita’ is not an adjective meant to modify a particular

type of Vedanta but a word that describes the nature of the Self. Keeping in

mind that words are always symbols, although non-dual implies dual, it is

more appropriate to refer to the Self as non-dual than as one since one is a

number that implies two, many, and even zero, nothing. Furthermore, it

would be inappropriate to label Vedanta, which is merely a means of

knowledge, as non-dual because it is in fact a dualistic device operating in a

dualistic situation, one that ironically delivers non-dual knowledge.

The ultimate source of Vedanta’s teachings are the Upanishads,

documents appended to the concluding portion of each Veda. In fact the

word Vedanta is a compound. Veda means knowledge and anta means end.

Although Vedanta is often erroneously accused of being an

intellectual discipline, it operates differently from them because it does not

leave concepts behind in the mind once it has been handled by a teacher. It

uses concepts to destroy false concepts about the nature of theSelf. And in

the process both the correct idea and the erroneous idea disappear into the

vision of oneself as the Self. Since the emphasis is on removal of doubt, any

interpretation of a mantra can be applied to remove the doubt, irrespective

of other interpretations. For a given person one interpretation may be

appropriate while the same interpretation may be inappropriate for another

because he or she entertains a different doubt or formulates the doubt in a

different way. Irrespective of the interpretation, Vedanta acts as a means of

knowledge if it removes one’s ignorance of one’s limitless nature.

Advaita is the path to liberation from limitation. Start by understanding what it is: Read the entire article , What is Advaita Vedanta,  by James Swartz by clicking here

In his books, A General Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines (1921) and Man
and His Becoming According to the Vedanta (1925), Guénon described the ultimate
reality according to Vedanta. Beyond all reason or discursive thought,
this metaphysical unity could only be grasped from the inward-directed point
of view, the suprarational intellectual intuition by which the Self (Atman)
communicates with the ego.

Guénon considered that Hindu Vedanta represented a “primordial Tradition”
whose transcendent truths were also preserved in the authentic religions
of Islam and medieval Catholicism. The modern West, by contrast, had almost
entirely lost any connection with the Tradition. In his seminal work of
pessimism, The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), Guénon showed how the
West had, since the end of the Middle Ages, succumbed to a spiritual decline.
A process of materialization embraced all life; art and culture pursued mere
externalities, while thought and science lost themselves in endless analysis,
division and multiplicity.

Western life was completely absorbed in “becoming,”
with its attendant focus on rational means, speed and technical efficiency.
The “humanistic” concern with man’s importance and consciousness,
his social and political emancipation had displaced all transcendent references
in an aberrant cult of individualism. Guénon regarded this decline as
the fulfillment of the Hindu Puranic divisions of time. The four yugas, each
of successively shorter duration, corresponded to the golden, silver, bronze
and iron ages of classical antiquity. The West had now been passing through
the fourth age, the Kali Yuga or “dark age,” for more than six thousand years.

Evola felt a deep affinity with Guénon’s esoteric pessimism. Here, in
sparse outline, he found all the reasons for the decay of a primordial heroic
world based on sacred authority and metaphysical absolutes. He applauded
Guénon’s scathing attack on the vacuous relativism and chaotic liberalism of
the modern world. Forthwith he began work on his own anti-modernist text,
Rivolta contro il mondo moderno [Revolt against the Modern World] (1934),
which remains his best-known and most important book. Here Evola described
a metaphysical Aryo-Vedic tradition that allegedly governed the religious
and political institutions of archaic Indo-European societies.He traced
the accretion of golden age myths relating to polar symbolism and the Arctic
origin of the white Aryan race through ancient Indian, Iranian, Greek and
Amerindian texts, with acknowledgments to Bâl Gangadhar Tilak, a Brahman scholar,

In 1894, Tilak transformed the household worshipping of Ganesha into a public event(Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav).

In 1895, Tilak founded the Shri Shivaji Fund Committee for celebration of "Shiv Punya Tithi" or the death anniversary of Shivaji Maharaj, the founder of 17th century Maratha Empire. The project also had the objective of funding the reconstruction of the tomb (Samadhi) of Shivaji Maharaj at Fort Raigad. For this second objective, Tilak established the Shri Shivaji Raigad Smarak Mandal along with Senapati Khanderao Dabhade II of Talegaon Dabhade, who became the Founder President of the Mandal.

Tilak started the Marathi weekly,Kesari in 1880-81 with Gopal Ganesh Agarkar as the first editor. Kesari later became a daily and continues publication to this day.

It is believed that Tilak harbored negative feelings towards the Shudras (people belonging to castes lower in Hindu social hierarchy). This belief was, for example, based on his decision not to announce news of the passing away of Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, the great social reformer, in his Kesari news paper.

Tilak said, "I regard India as my Motherland and my Goddess, the people in India are my kith and kin, and loyal and steadfast work for their political and social emancipation is my highest religion and duty"

Books

In 1903, he wrote the book The Arctic Home in the Vedas. In it, he argued that the Vedas could only have been composed in the Arctics, and the Aryan bards brought them south after the onset of the last ice age. He proposed the radically new way to determine the exact time of the Vedas.^[10] He tried to calculate the time of Vedas by using the position of different Nakshatras. Positions of Nakshtras were described in different Vedas.

Tilak authored Shrimad Bhagwad Geeta Rahasya in prison at Mandalay, Burma - the analysis of 'Karmayoga' in the Bhagavadgita, which is known to be gift of the Vedas and the Upanishads.

As noted in Shree Gajanan Vijay, he was devotee of Gajanan Maharaj of Shegaon. Many reference texts of his are available in the epic.

• Remembering Tilak Maharaj by Jyotsna Kamat
• Full & authentic report of the Tilak trial (1908) being the only authorised verbatim account of the whole proceedings with introduction and character sketch of Bal Gangadhar Tikak: Together with press opinion, 1908, Narsinha Chintaman Kelkar
• Antiquity of the Hindu Calendar, an interactive aid to understanding "The Orion" by Bal Gangadhar Thilak by Kishore S Kumar
•  Frank Herbert Brown (1922). "Tilak, Bal Gangadhar". Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.).

Herman Wirth (alternatively referred to as Herman Wirth Roeper Bosch, or Herman Felix Wirth or Hermann) (6 May 1885 Utrecht – 16 February 1981, Kusel) was a Dutch-German lay historian and scholar of ancient religions and symbols.

Wirth served as the leader of the Nazi research division Ahnenerbe until 1937 when he left the group entirely, succeeded by Walter Wüst. Since his works generally supported the historical folk religion of Germany, and not the state of Nazi Germany or the goals ofHitler's regime, he was forced into exile along with other German mystics that did not support National Socialism.

Wirth claimed that civilization is a curse that only a simpler way of life, as documented in archaeological findings and historical records, could lift. He has been criticized for romantic nationalism and Germanomania.He was also criticized by German scholars of his time, like Bolko von Richthofen, Gerhard Gloege, Arthur Hübner and Karl Hermann Jacob Friesen, for gullibly refusing to accept the scientific evidence that proved Ura Linda chronicle (a supposedly 6th-1st century BC chronicle of a Frisian family which he translated) a forgery.

Wirth's primary interest was in the legends surrounding the legendary continent of Atlantis.

Liber esse, scientiam acquirere, veritatem loqui

Ultima Thule: Julius Evola and Herman Wirth 

Ultima Thule. Julius Evola e Herman Wirth ‐ In appendice : Hyperborea di

Claudio Mutti ‐ Arthur Branwen ‐ Quaderni del Veltro

In this short monograph, Arthur Branwen shows the influence of

Herman Wirth on the thought of Julius Evola and clarifies how Evola adapted

Wirth’s ideas on the origins of Western civilisation. Herman Wirth (1885‐

1981) was born in Holland, becoming a German citizen in 1910. He headed

up the Ahnenerbe from its founding in 1935 until 1937.

Wirth’s masterpiece, titled Der Aufgang de Menshheit:

Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Religion, Symbolik und Schrift der

atlantish‐nordischen Rasse (“The Ascent of Mankind: Investigations on the

History of the Religion, Symbols, and Writings of the Atlantic‐Nordic Race”),

appeared in 1928. As far as I know, it has never been translated into English,

and copies in the used book market run around € 500. Evola devotes an

entire chapter in Il mito del sangue (MS) (“The Myth of Blood”) to Wirth’s ideas.  

The following passage, quoted in full in Branwen’s book, summarizes Evola’s opinion of Wirth.   

Wirth’s thesis must be considered as a bold surprise attack, whose profound directive impulse is

to follow extra‐scientific intuitions, which are then justified through very laborious philological,

anthropo‐geological, mythological, and symbolic methods  … But as the contingent balancing and

discontinuity of ice floes in a winter stream say nothing against the continuity of the current that

transported them, so that everything scientifically inexact, arbitrary, fantastic and unsystematic which is

found in Wirth’s work must not hide the strength of the “myth” that animates and directs the whole, its

deepest significance and its character of necessity vis‐à‐vis the problems indicated.

The Arctic region would therefore be the original homeland of the primordial Nordic race ….

Once the freeze came about, the pre‐Nordic race ‐‐ as the only way to safety ‐‐ moved away from the ices

in a Southward direction toward the Atlantic. At this point Wirth accepted the hypothesis of the existence

of Atlantis and believed that the centre of civilisation and of the Nordic race was found in Atlantis, which

then spread beyond there both to the East toward the European coast, and to the West toward the

American coast.

Wirth claimed to reconstruct not only the history of the Nordic‐Atlantic race, but moreover its

religion. It would have been a superior, monotheistic religion, distinct from the animism and demonism

of the African and Asiatic natives, without dogmas, of a great purity and potentially universal … The

primordial religion of 15,000 BCE would have been solar and compenetrated with the sense of a

universal law of “eternal return”, of death and rebirth … So Wirth speaks of a primordial Nordic

monotheism and of a “cosmic Nordic Christianity” that would therefore date back to thousands of years

before Christ.

Evola traces the origins of the Hyperborean theory not to Wirth, but to Ludwig Wilser whose

book “Origins and Prehistory of the Arians” was published in 1899. In that work, the Nordist myth

appeared for the first time in a decisive form in German science. It is not ex Oriente lux, but rather the

light from the North. There the theme of Thule comes up, the legendary polar island, originary

homeland of the white race.

Wirth’s influence on Evola is both in his conclusions – although Evola differs from Wirth in

fundamental ways – as well as in his methods. This influence is most obvious in Revolt against the

Modern World (RAMM) and in the German edition of Pagan Imperialism. Obviously, Wirth’s

methodology of the analysis of myths, symbols, sagas, and legends is familiar to any reader of RAMM.  

Wirth’s claim that the Nordic race originated in the Polar Regions (Hyperborea) and was the seat

of an advanced civilisation had the most importance to Evola. Evola then adapted some of Wirth’s

conclusions to fit into his Traditional world view. For example, Evola rejected Wirth’s thesis of a Mother

Earth – a lunar conception, and postulated instead a primordial solar tradition. Nevertheless, Evola’s

acceptance of Wirth’s Nordic‐Arctic hypothesis obligated him to reformulate the doctrinal bases of the

Roman tradition. In the original Italian edition of Paganismo Pagano, Evola spoke of a Mediterranean

tradition. However, after Wirth, the much revised German edition of Paganismo Pagano spoke instead

of a Nordic tradition and claimed that the Greek and Roman civilisations were essentially the creations

of the Nordic race.

Evola also fit the scheme into the traditional “ages”, now in the kali‐yuga. This relativised Roman

history, which then lost its uniqueness and was just one of the manifestations of Nordic civilisation.

Branwen concludes, “Evola’s new universal vision interpreted the history of Rome and even that of

Europe itself as an important episode, but one of so many of human becoming and cyclic development.”

Evola himself concludes his chapter on Wirth from MS with these words:  

… the period preceding liberalism and scientism was characterized by three fundamental

ideas:

1. The equality of the human race

2. Nordic barbarianism and the origin of every civilisation from the East

3. The Hebraic origin of monotheism

Wirth struck down or overthrew those ideas with these three: …:

1. Humanity is differentiated into distinct races

2. Civilisation did not come from the East, but from the North

3. It was the Nordics who would have known a higher monotheistic religion well before

the Hebrews

Evola began the chapter in MS with this paragraph:

Oswald Menghin, rector of the University of Vienna, wrote: “More than any other discipline the

science of prehistory has been brought, and furthermore should be brought, to the centre of the spiritual

battle of our time. I don’t believe I am mistaken in asserting that general prehistory will be the science

that will guide the next generation.” In recent years, in many circles, there has been a significant impulse

of return to the origins. The origins here appear under a special, spiritual light. It will be shown that in

primordial times, meanings and symbols still survived in a pure state, and then were lost, obfuscated, or

altered. Prehistoric research, brought from a level of disanimated scientific‐archaeological or

anthropological positivism to a level of spiritual synthesis, promises therefore to open new horizons for

the true history of civilisation.

The human race is not moved by metaphysical truth, but by the force of myth, particularly the 

myth of origins. In the three generations since Wirth’s book was published, the battle over the

prehistory of man continues, although other, allegedly more scientific, theories hold the spotlight. Yet

others, under the banner of “Radical Traditionalism” or other such movements, still respond to that

impulse of return to origins. Whoever controls the “narrative” of prehistory controls the present.

and Herman Wirth, the amateur prehistorian of an Atlantis
culture and later director of Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe.

The sacred nature of regal authority, the mystery of ritual, initiation and consecration,
the divine origins of patrician rule, chivalry and a rigid caste hierarchy defined
this traditional world in utter opposition to the secular, individualistic
and liberal concerns of the modern world. Like Guénon, Evola subscribed to
the Hindu cycle of the ages and equated the modern world with the dark age
or Kali Kuga, in which all tradition is forgotten, disorder is rife and society is
degenerate.
Evola’s view of history and political theory were grounded in a fundamental
“doctrine of two natures,” the “primordial Tradition,” which distinguishes
the metaphysical order of things from the physical, the immortal
from the mortal world, the superior realm of “being” from the inferior realm
of “becoming,” the dominant, virile principle of spirit from the lower, feminine
domain of matter.11 For Evola, the predominance of spirit in Traditional
societies was evident in their strict hierarchy of functions, which still survived
in the caste system of Aryan-Hindu society. While the lower functions are
concerned with mere matter and organic vitality, the ascending functions are
progressively ruled by spirit. In the Hindu caste hierarchy, one finds the slaves
or workers (sudras), who are subordinated to the bourgeoisie or merchants
(vaisyas). Higher up one finds the warrior nobility (kshatriyas), and all are
subject to the spiritual authority of the priests (brahmins). This order, in
which powers of the spirit corresponded to caste, prevailed in all Traditional
societies; Evola cites its presence in Plato’s Republic, in ancient Iranian society
and even in the social divisions of peasants, burghers, nobility and clergy in
the European Middle Ages.

The priestly caste stood at the apex of the caste hierarchy. However, in the
world of primordial Tradition this was no professional priesthood but royalty
itself. In Evola’s view, the roots of authority had a metaphysical character and
every temporal power proceeded from spiritual authority. Quoting the Aryo-
Vedic Laws of Manu, Evola claimed that the ruler was no“meremortal” but “a
great deity standing in the formof a man” in societies still based on Tradition.
Thus, the Egyptian pharaoh was regarded as a manifestation of Ra or Horus,
while the kings of Rome were the incarnations of Zeus; the Assyrian kings, of
Baal; the Persian shahs, of the gods of light.More especially, kings and the patriciate
performed the sacred rites that linked the human domain with the
gods, thus forming a “bridge” to the supernatural realm. The possession and
practice of these sacred rites defined the priestly caste, who were simultaneously
the leaders of the state, itself invested with the current of divine power.
“The supernatural element was the foundation of the idea of a traditional patriciateandof
legitimate royalty:whatconstitutedanancient aristocratwasnot
merely a biological legacy or a racial selection, but rather a sacred tradition.”
The doctrine of caste was closely linked in Evola’s thought to the idea of
history as a process of regression or involution. Basing his cyclical view of history
on the Puranic divisions of time, Evola asserted civilization inevitably declined
from the Satya Yuga or golden age, where the primordial Tradition was
observed and upheld, through the successively shorter and more decadent
Treta and Dvapara Yugas, until the onset of the Kali Yuga or dark age, when
the Tradition is wholly forgotten. Social disorder, spiritual alienation and violence
characterize this wretched epoch to a point of cataclysmic dissolution
when the next Satya Yuga once more begins its redemptive cycle. Evola recognized
that this prehistoric account of a golden age and subsequent decline
hardly accorded with the evolutionist ideas of Darwin. He insisted that an-
cient testimonies and writings from all great world cultures make no mention
of bestial cavemen but “more-than-human” beings in a better, brighter and
superhuman (“divine”) past. He speculates that the absence of fossil remains
of a superior primordial mankind might indicate its existence prior to materialization.
Evola ultimately dismisses evolutionism as a science typical of
dark-age myth, which derives the higher from the lower and man from animal
in total ignorance of Tradition.15
Evola offers a sweeping panorama of prehistoric cycles of civilization corresponding
to the four traditional yugas. The epoch of remote prehistory corresponding
to the golden age was a real location in the Arctic, accounting for
the many polar myths of origin. Some spiritual disaster was matched by a catastrophic
tilt in the earth’s axis, causing a forced migration of a primal Hyperborean
(extreme northern) race in a first wave toward North America and
the northern regions of Eurasia, and then in a second wave toward a now lost
continent in the mid-Atlantic. Using occult ideas from Helena Blavatsky’s
Theosophy, Evola speculated that a large Atlantean group became mixed with
aboriginal Southern races of proto-Mongols and proto-Negroes who may
have originated in the lost continent of Lemuria. In accordance with the doctrine
of two natures, Evola tended to see “spirituality” as the prior determinant
of a culture rather than its ethnic, racial population.However, since certain
races were the carriers of Southern “spirituality,” they were in turn identified
as decadent factors.

Thus, while the first wave of Hyperborean emigration remained wholly Nordic, the Western civilization of Atlantis absorbed many Southern-Lemurian traits, thus giving rise to the dichotomy of solar, male or Uranian spirituality (Northern-Atlantic races) and lunar, female or Demetrian spirituality (mixed Southern-Atlantean races).

Evola adopted Bachofen’s idea of matriarchy not as a prior linear phase
of evolution, but as an independent Southern world, inhabited by other races
that eventually clashed with Northern-Atlantic traditions.

Conspiracy theorists believe that all historical events, whether of the political, social, economic, religious or cultural order, are the result of manipulations performed according to a secret plan designed by influential individuals gathered in a secretive organisation in order to achieve world domination.

The Society of Jesus, the Illuminati, Freemasonry, the Jews, the Communists, the so-called 'Black Nobility' and the 'International Money Power', are among the main organisations of this kind which have been accused of organising, or extending the influence of, the conspiracy, different combinations of these predominating according to the different theories of the various conspiratological schools which have existed since the late 1700's.

Originally, however, it was to Freemasonry and the Illuminati that the idea of a widespread conspiracy referred, as exposed by the English author John Robison in his 'Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, collected from good authorities' (1798), which dealt with Adam Weishaupt's plan to spread the views of the Enlightenment through the society he led, the Order of the Illuminati, and through Freemasonry, which had supposedly been infiltrated by the Illuminatis' subversive rationalist anti-Catholic views.

Since then, the idea has flourished in Christian conspiratological circles that the main goal of the conspiracies is to destroy the Church in order to set up a one world government in the name of 'paganism', whose influence they claim to find in the Masonic symbols and rites. 'Paganism' was the pejorative, catch-all category to which the Christian apologists of the late Roman empire consigned the polytheistic cults - all of the polytheistic cults, without exception, from the Roman religion to the Syrio-Phoenician cults, indiscriminately. This had the effect of lumping together, retrospectively, the ancient Roman cults of the Patricians, and the cults of the various telluric goddesses of nature, from Demeter to the Venus Verticordia and Cybele, the Magna Mater, introduced into Rome under the influence of the Sybilline Books between 258 to 140 B.C., witnessed with repugnance by the Patricians, to whom all of them were completely unknown and all of which were utterly foreign to their solar Apollonian religious spirit, while the plebes, many of them descended from the pre-Roman Pelasgic civilisation, reveled in the festivities organised in the honour of these alien goddesses and gods.

Discrimination is thus required. As was shown by Bachofen, and, we may add, was intuitively understood by genuine Patricians till the end of the Empire, pre-christian cults, far from being homogenous and monolithic, displayed a wide variety of forms which, in the last analysis, can be reduced to the following dualism : "the Olympian-virile idea and the telluric-feminine idea. (...) civilisations of the heroes and civilisations of the Mothers, solar idea and chthonic-lunar idea, paternal right and matriarchy, aristocratic ethic of difference and orgiastic-communistic promiscuity, Olympian ideal of the 'supraworld' and pantheistic mysticism, positive right of the Imperium and natural right", each constantly fighting the other throughout history, and, more manifestly than in any other period, throughout the history of Rome. Each of the terms of this polarity can be referred to a different race, the former to the Aryo-Roman one and the latter to the Semitic-Pelasgic one, from within which, it must be pointed out in response to the conspiratolical accusations we have just mentioned, Christianity undoubtedly originated.

Early Christianity completed the work of corrosion and distortion of the Roman civilisation, which had been initiated by the pre-Christian semitic lunar influences from which it itself derived, and precipitated the Empire through the remaining stages of its decline and to its complete and final collapse.

Understanding this enables us to unravel the confusions within which the conspiratologists to whom we have referred are tangled : not only does Catholicism no longer need to be destroyed, since, objectively looked at, it is destroyed already, and Christianity has returned to its pre-Catholic origins, but also, it is not Catholicism as such which these influences wished to destroy, but the Nordic-Aryan elements within Catholicism, which had rectified it to a certain extent from the beginning of the 'Middle Ages' onwards. The influences which destroyed it are exactly the same as those which undermined the Roman civilisation and finally ruined that : anti-Aryan influences, deriving mainly from civilisations of Semitic stock. If those influences are 'pagan', they are so only to the extent that they represent a type of the polytheistic cultism which was antithetical to the Roman religion and its Patrician successors.

In order to comprehend this more fully it may be valuable for some people to study the work of Bachofen, who identified and highlighted, within the chaos of the cults, legends, symbols, myths, customs, juridical and political forms of the early Mediterranean world, the polarity we have just mentioned, between the Olympian-virile idea and the telluric-feminine idea.

Bachofen's work, however, because its evolutionist prejudices - which, quite ironically, led it to be adopted by various feminist currents - needed to be rectified before it could provide us with the points of reference necessary for us to make our way into the complex secret history of ancient civilisations, and, at the same time, of modern civilisations, within both of these ideas or forces are still at work, albeit in a less manifest manner. Nowadays it has become transformed, because of the demonic force of economics and other factors, especially in the West, into a pluto-gynaecocracy. The decisive clarification of Bachofen's work in this respect we owe to Evola, who, throughout his life, expounded and analysed it, with appropriate rectifications, in various articles. He translated 'Das Mutterecht' into Italian and wrote an Introduction to it, which we present here in English translation. It will not escape the attentive reader that the last few paragraphs of this Introduction recapitulate to a great extent the last few paragraphs of 'Do we live in a gynaecocratic Civilisation?'.

                                         "The stars are veiled
                                      Something stirs in the East
                                           A sleepless mass
                                  The eye of the enemy is moving"

                                                                     (J.R.T.)

MATRIARCHY IN J.J. BACHOFEN'S WORK

Johann Jakob Bachofen could be described as a 'revelation' of the most modern European culture. A contemporary of Nietzsche (he was born in Basle in 1815 and died in 1887), he belonged to the same spiritual circles which gave birth to Nietzsche's 'Birth of Tragedy' and E. Rohde's 'Psyche'. His work attained virtually no recognition in his own life-time. The general public did not come into contact with it, while the 'specialists' in ancient history and archeology hatched a sort of conspiracy of silence against it, because of its opposition to the methods and conceptions which they held dear.

Today Bachofen's work has been widely rediscovered and acclaimed as pioneering and masterly. A first re-edition of selected writings by Bachofen in three volumes was published in Leipzig in 1926 by C.A. Bernouilli under the title 'Urreligion und antike Symbole' ; a second, enriched with a wide-ranging introductory essay, was edited by A. Baumler in 1926 and bears the title of 'Der Mythos von Orient und Okzident'.

Mastering the knowledge of archeology and philology of his time, Bachofen devoted himself to a distinctive interpretation of the symbols, myths, cults and forms of right of the most ancient times, an interpretation which is particularly important because of the great number of ideas and points of reference which it offers to those who wish to penetrate an almost unsuspected dimension of the world of our origins, and to grasp a sort of spiritual secret history of the ancient civilisations hidden behind their apparent histories, all of which amounts to a supreme instance of what is called 'critical historiography'. Considering this, the fact that in Bachofen some deductions and some details are inaccurate, that some presentations are flawed by excessive simplification and that, since his time, the science of antiquity has gathered a great deal of other material, does not prejudice the essential value of his works and does not entitle any of our contemporaries to consider his main works, the fruit of profound and complex studies and of happy intuitions, as 'outmoded'. Bachofen, today, is as little 'outmoded' as Fustel de Coulanges, Max Muller or Schelling. In evaluating authors of this sort, it is the authors who has come after them who need to keep themselves in better form, since, although their spectacles, that is to say, their critical and analytical instruments, are undoubtedly more perfect, their inner sight seems to an equal degree to have become more myopic, and their researches, often losing their way in a soulless and opaque specialism, no longer reflect anything of the power of synthesis and of the certainty of intuition of some masters of the last century.

What is interesting in Bachofen, in the first place, is his method. This method is new and revolutionary compared to the usual scholastic and academic way of considering ancient civilisations, ancient cults, and myths, because it is 'traditional' in the higher sense of the word. What we mean by this is that the way in which the man of any traditional civilisation, which is anti-individualistic and anti-rationalistic, is more or less the way by which Bachofen has sought to discover the secret of the world of our origins.

The fundamental premise of Bachofen's whole work is that symbol and myth are testimonies, which any complete historical science must take into serious consideration.  They are not arbitrary creations, projections of whim and poetic imagination : they are on the contrary 'representations of the experiences of a race in the light of its religious sense', obeying a very precise logic and law. Moreover, symbol, tradition, and legend must not be considered and evaluated according to their 'historicity' in the narrowest sense of the word ; it is this misunderstanding which has prevented us from so far gaining the most precious knowledge. What must be addressed is not their problematic 'historical' meaning, but their certain meaning as 'facts of the spirit'.

Wherever the recorded event and the 'positive' document no longer speak to us, the myth, the symbol and the legend meet us, ready to introduce us to a more profound, secret and essential reality, a reality of which the outer historical and tangible face of the ancient societies, races and civilisations is only a consequence. Because of this, they themselves are often the only 'positive' documents which have remained from the past.

Bachofen rightly notices that history as such can never be grasped : an event can thus leave traces, but its inner meaning escapes us, it is taken away by the current of time, so that it is incomprehensible and unknowable to us except to the extent that it has been specified by tradition and myth. In the development, the transformation, the opposition and even in the contradiction of the traditions, symbols and myths, we can in fact identify the most profound forces, the spiritual and metaphysical 'primary elements' which were at work in the primordial cycles of civilisation and brought about their most decisive upheavals. This opens to us the way to a metaphysic of history, which is also an integral history, a history in which the most important dimension, the third dimension, is specifically highlighted. Bachofen's interpretation of the inner history of Rome on the basis of its myths and legends is one of the most convincing examples of the importance and of the fertility of such a method.

Secondly, Bachofen's work has a special importance both on the plane of the 'morphology' or 'typology of civilisation', and on that of the 'science of the races of spirit'. Starting from the various forms which the relations between the sexes formerly assumed, Bachofen's research demonstrates the existence of some typical and distinct forms of civilisation from which derive various central ideas linked in their turn to various visions of the world, of destiny, of the after-life, of right, and of society. Such ideas almost have the value of 'archetypes' in a platonic sense ; they are formative forces connected by relationships of analogy to the great forces of things. In individuals, they appear also in various modes of being, in various 'styles' of soul, feeling, acting and reacting.

This is the special science which Bachofen initiated. However, he did not completely manage to get rid of the 'evolutionist' fixation which prevailed in his day. So he was led to believe that the various forms identified by him in the sense that we have just mentioned formed a sort of succession of stages in the progress of human civilisation in general. If the higher morphological and typological meaning of his research is not to be prejudiced, this limitation, naturally, must be removed.

The world considered by Bachofen is basically that of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations. The chaotic multiplicity of cults, myths, symbols, juridical forms, and customs they exhibit boil down in Bachofen's works to the effects, in varied forms, of two fundamental antithetical ideas : the Olympian-virile idea and the telluric-feminine idea. Such polarity can also be expressed by the following oppositions : civilisations of the heroes and civilisations of the Mothers, solar idea and chthonic-lunar idea, paternal right and matriarchy, aristocratic ethic of difference and orgiastic-communist promiscuity, Olympian ideal of the 'supraworld' and pantheist mysticism, positive right of the Imperium and natural right.

Bachofen discovered the 'gynaecocratic era', i.e. the era in which the feminine principle is supreme. To this era corresponds an archaic phase of the Mediterranean civilisation, linked to Pelagic peoples as well as to a group of peoples of the South-East and Asiatic basin of the Mediterranean sea. Bachofen correctly noted that, according to the sources, all the varied but concordant elements refer, for such peoples, to the central idea that, at the origin and at the peak of any thing, there must be a feminine principle, a Goddess or divine Woman, incorporating the supreme values of spirit ; compared to her, not only the masculine principle, but also those of personality and of difference must seem secondary and contingent, subject to the law of Becoming and disappearing as opposed to the eternity and the immutability peculiar to the cosmic Great Mother, the Mother of Life.

This Mother is sometimes the earth, or sometimes the law of nature, conceived of as a force by which the Gods themselves are compelled.

Among her other aspects, accordingly, there would be various differentiations : she is both Demeter as goddess of agriculture and organised earth and Aphrodite-Astarte as principle of orgiastic ecstasies, Dionysian wantonnesses, 'hetaeric' (from the Greek word 'etera', not from 'ether') dissoluteness, whose analogic correspondence is the wild swamp or forest.

The main character of this cycle of civilisation consists specifically in its limiting to the naturalistic-material domain everything which is personality, virility, difference, in its putting under the feminine sign (feminine in the broadest sense), the spiritual domain, often so as to make it a synonym for pantheist promiscuity and an antithesis to everything which is form, positive right, heroic vocation of a virility which is no longer material. Outwardly, the most concrete expression of this type of civilisation is matriarchy, and, more generally, gynaecocracy. Gynaecocracy, that is the sovereignty of Woman, reflects the mystical value which is attributed to her in such a conception of the world. Moreover, it can also have as a counterpart, in its lowest forms, the egalitarism of the natural law, universalism and communism. At the root of communistic promiscuity lies the idea of the insignificance of everything which is difference, the equality of all individuals vis-a-vis the cosmic Matrix, the maternal and the 'telluric' (from 'tellus', earth) principle of the nature whence any thing and any being proceeds and within which it will dissolve again after an ephemeral existence. Of this nature were the orgiastic feasts in which was formerly celebrated the return to the Mother and to the state of nature, and in which all social distinctions were temporarily abolished. The masculine principle does not have an existence of its own, it is not self-sufficient. On the material plane, it only amounts to an instrument of generation, it is subjected to the bond of woman or it is obscured by the Demetrian brightness of the mother. On the spiritual plane, it is only through a Dionysian ecstasy dominated by sensual and feminine elements that it can grasp the sense of what is eternal and unchanging and gain an intimation of immortality - an immortality which, however, has nothing to do with the heavenly one of Olympians and heroes. And also on the social plane, the male, who only knows the violent law of force and struggle, feels through the woman the existence of a higher, quieter and supra-individual order, feels this 'Demetrian mystery' which, in one form or another, was in Antiquity the base and support of the matriarchal law and gynaecocracy.

In clear opposition to these views, there is, in the ancient Mediterranean world, the cycle of the Olympian-Ouranic civilisation. Here, the centre is no longer constituted by symbols of the Earth or of the Moon, but by those of the Sun and heavenly regions ('Ouranic' from the Greek word 'Uranos') ; not by the naturalist-sensual reality, but by the immaterial one ; not by the maternal womb, and not even by the phallic virility which is its counterpart, but by the Ouranic virility linked to the symbol of the Sun and the Light ; not by the symbols of Night and the Mother, but by those of Day and the Father. The supreme ideal in such a civilisation is embodied precisely by the 'Ouranic' world, by which is meant that of the bright, unchanging, detached, birthless entities, as opposed to the inferior world of the beings who are born, become, and pass away, according to a rule of life always ephemeral because always mixed with death. This is the highest point of reference, the religion of Apollo and Zeus : it is the 'Olympian' spirituality, it is the immaterial virility, it is the 'solarity' of gods free from the bondage of the woman and the mother, possessing instead attributes of fatherhood and dominion. The traces left by a tradition of this nature in Hellenic speculation are more or less known to everyone : as conceived by the Greek  philosophers, the notions of nous and of 'intelligible world' are directly derived from it. Bachofen, however, highlighted many of its other expressions. Patriarchy, especially in its patrician forms, derives from no other basis. The impulse to go beyond the 'telluric' (physical and phallic) virility towards a heroic or spiritual virility, the integration of everything which is form and difference instead of its devaluation, the contempt for the naturalistic condition, the overcoming of natural right by positive right, the ideal of a formation of oneself in which the state of nature and its law of the Mother and of the Earth is surpassed by a new order, which is under the sign of the Sun and of the symbolic exploits of Heracles, Perseus and other heroes of the Light, all derive from this type of civilisatioN. 

This is the fundamental conception of Bachofen. It provides the key to an order of researches likely to be extended to fields far wider than those considered by the thinker of Basle, since, as we have pointed out, Bachofen used this conception only in order to identify approximately the conflicts, the upheavals and the transformations peculiar to the secret history of the ancient Mediterranean world. In Hellas, and in opposition to more ancient, aboriginal forms linked with the telluric-maternal cult, the light of the heroic-Olympian spirituality first appears ; here, however, the 'civilisation of the fathers' did not last long. Altered by processes of involution, not having been sustained by a firm political organisation, it was swept away by the re-emergence of cults and forces of the previous Pelagic-Oriental period, which, at first, it appeared to have overcome. Its idea seemed to have been transmitted to Rome and to have prompted there a far wider development, the history of which continues to Augustus. At the time of Augustus, Rome seemed about to establish a new universal era by bringing to completion that mission, specifically Western according to Bachofen, for which the civilisation of the Delphic Apollo had proved to be insufficient.

Since those are the main traits of Bachofen's metaphysic of the ancient Mediterranean history, it is appropriate to indicate its other possibilities, once the 'evolutionist' framework is dispensed with. Bachofen noted that, against the substratum of a more ancient world, suffused with a 'civilisation of the Mother', the opposite civilisation, virile and paternal, developed to supplant and defeat it, even though, at a later point, at the closing of a cycle, at least in some countries, it was swept away again. All this was regarded by Bachofen as a sort of automatic development in a single family of peoples. The opposition of the two civilisations as he describes it refers therefore essentially to that existing between two evolutionary and progressive stages of a single process, without his inquiring into how the one was derived from the other.

But this problem needs to be posed, ethnologically. What has been learned from the sum total of researches in various other domains gives a certain margin of credibility to the idea that the most ancient, pre-Hellenic  Mediterranean civilisation, characterised by the cult of the Woman, of matriarchy, and of social or spiritual gynaecocracy, was linked to pre-Aryan or non-Aryan influences, while the opposite vision of the world, solar and Olympian, had specifically Aryan origins. This was intimated by Bachofen himself in his relating of the first civilisation to the Pelagic populations and in his noticing that the most characteristic cult in the Heroic-solar world, that of Delphic Apollo, had Thracian-Hyperborean origins, which amounts to saying Nordico-Aryan. His evolutionist prejudice, however, prevented him from getting to the bottom of these positive data. While carrying out a work of genius by referring the residual fragments which have reached us of the gynaecocratic civilisation to the archaic unit to which they belong, he failed to proceed in a similar manner with regard to the solar and Olympian elements which emerged and asserted themselves in the ancient Mediterranean world, which would have led him to notice the existence of an Olympian and paternal civilisation, just as archaic, of different ethnic origin.

In the Mediterranean, the purest forms of this second civilisation are, compared to the other, more recent. They are more recent, however, only in a relative sense, in that in the Mediterranean world they only appear at a given moment, not in the absolute sense, which would entail that they had not existed previously and could only ever come to birth by way of successive 'evolutionary stages' within one and the same group of peoples. Rather, the opposite could be true, that is to say that many forms derived by Bachofen from the cycle of the Mother (in its higher, 'lunar' and 'Demetrian' aspects), could be considered not so much as really intrinsic to the civilisations in which they are found, but more as forms of involution of some branches of the solar tradition, or as products of interferences between this tradition and the opposite one. This corresponds, among other things, to the teachings about the 'four ages' passed on by Hesiod.

However, we cannot focus here on this argument, given that it does itself not form part of Bachofen's researches and that, moreover, it has already been dealt with by us in other works (1). Nevertheless, Bachofen's own work constitutes an extremely useful preparation for further investigation, which, on the basis of the traces constituted by symbols, rites, institutions, customs, and juridical forms, deriving respectively from the civilisation of the Mother and from the Heroic-Solar one, would want to identify the opposing influences, of the 'race of the body' and of the 'race of the spirit', which were at work in the ancient Mediterranean world, including its Greek and Roman elements. Given the new material which has been gathered in the meantime, such research could achieve very interesting results ; and in addition, it would also be possible to undertake it, on the basis of the same root ideas, with respect to other civilisations, European and non-European.

In regard to Bachofen's views on the specifically morphological and typological plane, we must notice that this thinker did not stop at the consideration of two terms of an antithesis, 'solar' and 'telluric', a virile Ouranic-paternal principle and a telluric-maternal principle, but also considered intermediary forms which he related to the terms 'Demetrian' (or 'Lunar'), 'Amazonian', "heroic', and 'Dionysian'.  We thus have, all in all, seven points of reference, according to which not only types of civilisation but also typical modes of being could be defined, so as to enable us to speak of a 'solar' or 'lunar' or 'telluric' or 'Amazonian' or 'Dionysian' or 'heroic' man. We ourselves, in the aforementioned works, have sought to develop, on these bases, a special typology. This is, once again, a new field of the science of the spirit, to the explorers of which Bachofen's views can provide precious points of reference.

Finally, it has to be pointed out that researches of this kind are not only of retrospective interest in the context of the reconstruction of a secret history of the ancient world, but could also prove to be very useful to all those who strain to discover the true face of the present times and to formulate a diagnosis and a prognosis of the whole of Western civilisation. Bachofen, at some points in his works, sensed the existence of cyclical laws, by force of which, at the end of a given development, some involutive and degenerative forms almost represent a return of primitive stages left behind by the whole development. Now, the worrying degree to which contemporary Western civilisation shows and reproduces the main traits of an 'epoch of the Mother', of a telluric and 'aphrodisian' epoch with all its consequences, has been noticed, not without reference to Bachofen, by more than one writer. Baumler wrote this, in the introduction to the already mentioned selected writings of Bachofen : "In the streets of Berlin, Paris or London, all you have to do is to observe for a moment a man or a woman to realise that the cult of Aphrodite is the one before which Zeus and Apollo had to beat a retreat...The present age bears, in fact, all the features of a gynaecocratic age. In a late and decadent civilisation, new temples of Isis and Astarte, of these Asian mother goddesses that were celebrated in orgies and licentiousness, in desperate sinking into sensual pleasure, arise. The fascinating female is the idol of our times, and, with painted lips, she walks through the European cities as she once did through Babylon. And as if she wanted to confirm Bachofen's profound intuition, the lightly dressed modern ruler of man keeps in leash a dog, the ancient symbol of unlimited sexual promiscuity and infernal forces" (2). But these analogies can be much further developed.

Modern times are 'telluric', not only in their mechanistic and materialistic aspects, but also, and essentially, in several of their 'vitalist' aspects, in their various religions of Life, of the Irrational and of Becoming, precise antitheses of any classic or 'Olympian' conception of the world. Keyserling, confirming this analysis, has thought he could speak of a telluric character - that is to say irrational, mainly related to forms of courage, self-sacrifice, fervour and dedication without transcendent reference - shown by this modern mass movement which has been called, generically, 'world revolution'. With democracy, Marxism and communism, the west has thus re-assumed, in secularised and materialised forms, the ancient concept of natural right, the leveling and anti-aristocratic law of the chthonic Mother, which stigmatises as unjust any difference ; and the power often granted on this basis to the collectivist element seems to bring back into force the ancient irrelevance of the individual peculiar to the 'telluric' conception.

Dionysus reappears with modern romanticism : we have here the same love for the formless, the confused, the unlimited, the same promiscuity between sensation and spirit, the same antagonism towards the virile and Apollonian ideal of clarity, form and limit. Even Nietzsche, who extolled Dionysus, is a living and tragic proof of the modern lack of understanding for that ideal, as witnessed by the telluric nature of so many of his conceptions. Moreover, after having read Bachofen, it is not difficult to observe the 'lunar' character peculiar to the most widespread type of modern culture : the culture based on a pale and empty intellectualism, the sterile culture separated from life, only capable of criticism, abstract speculation and vain aesthetising creativity : a culture which, here again, is closely connected with a civilisation which has taken material refinement to extreme forms (in the special terminology of Bachofen, we would say : aphrodisian) and in which woman and sensuality often become predominant motifs almost to a pathological and obsessive degree.

And wherever the woman does not become the new idol of the masses under the modern form, not of goddess, but of movie 'star' or some similar fascinating Aphrodisian apparition, she often asserts her primacy in new 'Amazonian' forms. Thus we see the new masculinised sportswoman, the garconne, the woman who devotes herself to the unilateral development of her own body, betrays the mission which would be normal to her in a civilisation of virile type, becomes emancipated and independent and even bursts into the political field. And this is not all.

In Anglo-Saxon civilisation, and particularly in America, the man who exhausts his life and time in business and the search for wealth, a wealth that, to a large extent, only serves to pay for feminine luxury, caprices, vices and refinements, has conceded to the woman the privilege and even the monopoly of dealing with 'spiritual' things. And it is precisely in this civilisation that we see a proliferation of 'spiritualist', spiritistic, mystic sects, in which the predominance of the feminine element is already significant in itself (two women, Blavatsky and Besant, for example, set up and managed the so-called theosophical Society). But it is for a much more important reason that the new spiritualism appears to us as a sort of reincarnation of the ancient feminine mysteries : it is the formless escapism in confused suprasensual experiences, the promiscuity of mediumism and spiritualism, the unconscious evocation of truly 'infernal' influences and the stress laid on doctrines such as reincarnation, that confirm, in such pseudo-spiritualistic currents, the correspondence that we have already mentioned and prove that, in these misguided desires to go beyond 'materialism', the modern world has not managed to find anything that would connect it with the higher traditions of Olympian and 'solar' character (3).

Psychoanalysis, with the preeminence it grants to the unconscious over the conscious, to the 'nocturnal', subterranean, atavistic, instinctive, sexual side of the human being over all that is waking life, will and true personality, seems precisely to refer to the ancient doctrine of the primacy of Night over Day, of the Darkness of the Mothers over forms, supposedly evanescent and irrelevant, that rise from it to light.

It must be acknowledged that these analogies, far from being extravagant or amateurish, are based on grounds that are broad and substantial and therefore gravely disturbing, since the reappearance of the 'gynaecocratic era' can only mean, to us, the end of a cycle and the collapse of the civilisations founded by a superior race. But many of Bachofen's views, just as they enable us to identify these symptoms of decadence, show us also the points of reference for a possible reaction and reconstruction. Such points of reference can only be constituted by 'Olympian' values of a new anti-gynaecocratic and virile civilisation. And this is what Bachofen has recovered for us, in the 'Western Myth' : the formative idea, the ideal, which would define what is the most specifically western in the story of civilisation. As we have explained, for Bachofen it was Rome which, after the attempt of the Apollonian Hellades, would have assumed this ideal, and asserted a 'civilisation of the father' on universal bases ; but only by way of a tragic struggle against forces which, little by little, were to flow back and reassert themselves again and again in first one then another domain of Roman life and civilisation. Whoever can sense the deep truth of this view of Bachofen's can see a new and extremely interesting field of research opening : that of the identification and discovery of a Olympian-paternal (in the superior sense) Romanity. But after the havoc which a silly and inflated rhetoric has worked upon the name of Rome, after that which an academically dull and soulless erudition and historiography have done to make us forget everything bright and perennial which appeared in the original Romanity and formed its true mission, how is it possible to restore to serious view the importance which such research, and, therefore the work of Bachofen itself and in its entirety, could have for us?

However, all this notwithstanding, what may not be possible today because of a complex of factors, some merely contingent, may be possible tomorrow, in a quieter period. one of the greatest merits of Bachofen is that he has restored the dignity of the virile and Olympian civilisation, thereby contributing to a means of correction for the many ideological distortions and misplaced evocations of modern times.

Julius EVOLA

(1) Essentially in 'Rivolto contro il Mondo Moderno', second part.

(2) Introduction to 'Der Mythos von Orient und Okzident', München, 1926, pp.CCXCI-CCXCIII

(3) See 'Maschera e Volto dello Spiritualismo contemporaneo', Laterza, Bari, 1932, 1949 ; Mediterranee, Roma, 1971, 1990 ('Mask and Face of the Contemporary Spiritualism').

This Southern “mother-culture” was later typifed by the Asiatic-Mediterranean goddesses of
life, such as Isis, Ishtar, Cybele and Demeter, who subordinate the male, solar
principle, and by images such as the child on the lap of the Great Mother. By
contrast with the virile spirituality implicit in intelligible essences and dramatized
in gods of war, sky and the sun, the “mothers” preside over a telluric
and cthonic world of earth, darkness and moon. In accordance with the maternal
principle, in which we are all children of the earth, this culture encouraged
social structures of a collectivist nature with ideals of sharing,
brotherhood and equality. Evola saw these “lunar” themes of peace and community
as typical of Demetrism, representing the second silver age or Treta
Yuga, in which a priestly caste ruled without virile, regal authority. He saw
further evidence of this feminized spirituality in ancient cults of emasculation
and even in priests wearing robes redolent of female attire.18
Evola’s dualism of male-female spirituality owed an even greater debt to
the young Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903), whose famous
book Geschlecht und Charakter [Sex and Character] (1903) expounded a
metaphysical view of the principles of male and female sexuality.


Weininger glorified higher reason, Platonic truth and Kantian imperatives while negating
the fallen,mundane sphere of matter and nature.

Only man aspires to the eternal life of the spirit,while woman embraces the lower life of the earth and
the senses.Man may choose between that life which ends with physical death,or that life for which death means a restoration of complete purity.

Woman,on the other hand, is part of the material world.Void of any higher spirit, she knows nothing of logic and morality. She has no ego, no individuality but leads a purely sexual, impersonal existence.

Man is a subject and woman is an object whose only desire is to be formed and given meaning by male attention and sexual coitus. Ontologically, she is a nullity, and her existence simply guarantees the continued reproduction of the material, sensate world.

 Evola’s celebration of virile spirituality was rooted in Weininger’s
work, which was widely translated by the end of the First World War.
Evola traced the progress of Northern-Atlantic heroic spirituality among
the ancient Aryans of India and Iran, commenting that in India the term arya
was a synonym for dvija, meaning “twice-born” or “regenerated.”However, he
noted that India eventually followed a contemplative path and abandoned the
regal and solar path of a spiritual patriciate. Evola attributed the rise of a professional
brahmin caste to the decay of the original dynasties responsible for
the Aryan conquest of India. The disintegration of the Aryan worldview in
India followed the identification of Brahman (God) with all nature in a pantheistic
sense that reflected the spiritual influence of Southern races.

In Iran the heroic spirituality led to the warrior cult of Ahura Mazda, the Aryan ethic of truth and loyalty, and the view of the cosmos as an order maintained through sacred rites. Some decline caused by lunar naturalism and decadent priestcraft led to a solar reaction in the doctrine of Zarathustra, which Evola
compared to Buddha’s reforming role in decadent Hindu India. Mithraism
again inaugurated a new heroic cycle of Aryan, solar spirituality opposed to
all telluric cults of earth and darkness.23 Once Mithraism declined in Iran,
Evola saw its later revival in the Roman Empire as a spiritual path that the
West might have followed instead of Christianity, a speculation incidentally
shared with Carl Gustav Jung.

Turning to Western history during the present Kali Yuga, Evola celebrated
the Roman Empire as a major attempt to reverse the forces ofMediterranean-
Southern decadence and forge a new unitary state based on heroic Aryan-
Western spirituality. He speculated that Rome’s new rigor and ascent were
due to the influence of prehistoric immigrant “reindeer” and “battle-axe”
peoples of Hyperborean origin, who formed regenerative nuclei among the
aboriginal races of Etruscans, Sabines, Sabellians, Siculians and others in the
pre-Roman Italian peninsula. Those aboriginal peoples who adhered to the
worship of lunar, female deities typically formed the lower stratum of plebeians
beneath a patriciate devoted to notions of authority and imperium.

Roman spirituality was henceforth characterized by an absence of pathos and
mysticism toward the divine. Its key virtues were duty, loyalty, heroism, order
and dominion. The revolt of the Roman patriciate against the foreign Tarquin
dynasty (509 b.c.), the fall of Capua, and the destruction of Carthage (146
b.c.) were representative events in Rome’s methodical liquidation of the centers
of earlier Southern influence.25
As Rome rose to imperial power, the virile idea of the divinely ordered state
supplanted all earlier hieratic, Demetrian forms of society. The patriciate performed
the sacred rites under a precise law, and all society was subject to strict
paternal rights. Continuing his dualistic theme of Northern and Southern
spirituality, Evola saw Rome maintain its heroic Aryan-Western culture of hierarchy
and state through constant rejection of Dionysian and Aphrodistic
influences, such as the banning of the Bacchanalia. Roman suspicion of mystery-
religions of Asian origin and Pythagorean philosophers was likewise
rooted in a spiritual antipathy toward Demetrian throwbacks, while its famous
civil wars involving such figures as Pompeius, Cassius and Anthony
were contests with Southern revisionism. Through its single-minded dedication
to heroic civilization, “Rome shifted the centre of the historical West
from the telluric to the Uranian mystery, from the lunar world of the Mothers
to the solar world of the Fathers.”26 By the time of Augustus, the imperial
cult had effectively restored the spiritual “genius” of the emperor as a bridge
with the supernatural realm, while Roman universalism seemed to stretch to
the limits of the known world.

Evola regarded the advent of Christianity as a process of unprecedented decline. The Christian ideal of a religion open to everyone irrespective of race, tradition and caste was a solvent of Roman order and hierarchy. By positing mere faith over heroic and initiatory spiritual growth, Christianity appealed to the plebeian mentality with promises of salvation from subjection,
the world and even death. Christian egalitarianism, based on principles of brotherhood, love and collectivism, militated against all Roman ideas of duty, honor and command. The Christian God was not the god of the patricians,invoked while standing erect and carried in front of the legions, but a crucified god-man, to whom one prayed in the sense of sin and atonement.

The spread of Christianity marked a shift from the masculine to the feminine,from the solar to the tellurian, from martial aristocratic values to mystical plebeian sentiment. 

Evola detected the revival of female, lunar spirituality in its myths of a sacrificed and regenerated (agricultural) god and the Virgin birth,and its iconography of Mother and Child.

Nevertheless, Christianity was only a symptom of decline, as Evola believed the Roman heroic cycle was already exhausted in “ethnic chaos and cosmopolitan disintegration.”

Evola’s “Northern” bias led him to regard the German peoples as a powerful
countervailing force to Christianity’s female culture. As descendants of
Northern-Aryan racial stocks, the Germans had preserved their prehistoric
purity outside the cosmopolitan late Roman Empire. Their Norse myths and
tribal ethos preserved traces of the primordial Tradition.

The god Wotan-Odin granted victory, possessed esoteric wisdom and had secrets not granted
to any woman; he was the leader of the dead heroes.

The oldest Nordic stocks
regarded Asgard in the far north as the home of the gods, an ancestral memory
that linked them with the Indo-Aryans in the East. Initially a barbarian
force of destruction at the close of the Roman cycle, the German tribes
brought warrior leadership, fealty and freedom into the medieval European
political order.While laying the basis of feudal caste society, these values represented
solar spirituality against the feminizing Church.Chivalry upheld the
hero over the saint, the conqueror over the martyr. Loyalty and honor were
the highest virtues, while cowardice was a greater evil than sin. 

Evola regarded the quest for the Grail and the Crusades as symbols of a solar tradition within
Christian civilization. In the medieval struggle of popes and emperors for
precedence, Evola identified the Ghibelline dynasty of Hohenstauffen emperors
(1152–1272) as the Germanic champion of “sacred regality” in a revived
Holy Roman Empire.

Evola saw the Italian communes of the Renaissance as pioneers of the profane
and anti-traditional idea of society based on economic and mercantile
factors, leading to the Jewish trade in gold and the rise of banking and capitalism.

The Hohenstaufen (or the Staufer(s)) were a dynasty of Kings of Germany, many of whom were also crowned Holy Roman Emperor and Duke of Swabia. The dynasty can be dated from 1138 until 1266. In 1194, the Hohenstaufen also became Kings of Sicily. The proper name, taken from their castle in Swabia, is Staufen. Therefore, the dynasty is sometimes also called theSwabian dynasty after the family's origin. The Hohenstaufen's gave stability to a substantial region of Europe through a significant period of medieval history. Cities grew in importance and began to replace monasteries as centers of learning, leading to the democratization of knowledge. Despite the weakening of centralized power that followed the death of Frederick II (1250), Germany continued to expand territorially, laying the foundations for its emergence in the nineteenth century as the major continental European power. During World War II, the Waffen-SS named an SS Panzer division Hohenstaufen in honor of this family. Several of the Hohenstaufens were embroiled in rivalry with the Papacy over whether the Pope or the Emperor was superior. As Holy Roman Emperors, the Hohenstaufens were succeeded by the Habsburgs who, over the next six centuries would become, by marriage rather than conquest, rulers of more than half of Europe.


Evola applauded Dante’s condemnation of the revolt of the Lombard
cities and the principle of self-government. The Hohenstauffen emperors
fought over Italy, not for German aggrandizement, but “against the rebellious
race of merchants and burghers in the name of honor and spirit.” Evola
thought it highly significant that the Renaissance should have started in Italy,
not on account of its Roman heritage, but as the perennial crucible of the antagonism
between North and South, between solar and lunar spirituality. In
his view, the Renaissance did not represent a revival of classical civilization
but only a borrowing of its decadent forms for a wholly new spirit of atom-
ization and independence. Where emperors had once ruled by nobility and
supernatural authority, the new political ideal was demonstrated by Machiavelli’s
Prince, where the individual can only rule in his own name by employing
cunning, violence and diplomacy.

Evola regarded Renaissance humanism as the harbinger of modern thought, limited to the exploration of the human dimension in the arts, philosophy and science. Humanism embraced individualism in this negation of the transcendent world by glorifying the “self ” as an illusory center. The
Reformation opposed Rome precisely because of its hierarchy and dogma,
remnants of Tradition, and set up individual conscience as the sole authority
in religion. The private interpretation of the Bible emphasized critical
judgment and human reason, which would ultimately challenge all authority
and metaphysical reality. Rationalism joined forces with empiricism and
expermentalism to create modern science, whose sole object was the material
world. Science is exclusively concerned with the physical dimension, the
discovery of mathematical relations, laws of consistency and the calculation
of outcomes.With its uniform criterion of truth based on “soulless numbers”
and indifference to quality and symbol, science also paved the way for
the rise of lower social orders by degrading and democratizing the idea of
knowledge. Denying all transcendence, science vainly attempts to compensate
the human spirit with power over material objects, titanic technology
and huge industries.

Evola traced the continued descent of the Kali Yuga in European politics.
Emperors now foresook imperial consecration, and Frederick III was the last
emperor to be crowned in Rome (1452).Kings and princes began to claim an
absolute power, thus subverting the universal ecumene with the idea of the
national state. Free cities and republics began to assert their independence,
not only against imperial authority but also against the nobility. The principle
of a common body of law declined, and chivalry decayed into a defense of
temporal and territorial ambition. Raison d’état destroyed the foundation of
Christendom and European unity with wars of kings against emperors, alliances
with the sultan, and the rise of territorial princes in virtual independence
from the empire. Royalty became increasingly secular, divorced from its
former spiritual authority.With the Reformation, states themselves began to
act as schisms from superordained authority. The assertion of the “divine
right” of kings in Catholic states in the age of the Counter-Reformation after
the Council of Trent was no more than an empty formula concealing the spiritual
vacuity of kingship divorced from authentic universalism.31
Evola saw the rise of national monarchies as an intermediate stage in the
cycle of decline. Just as national monarchies once asserted their own absolute
power, they in turn would be confronted by individuals demanding emancipation
in the name of their own free, sovereign autonomy. Spiritual secession
from the sacred center ultimately weakened the very principle of hierarchy.
The collapse of supernatural authority encouraged the emergence, revolt and
liberation of lower strata in society. The atomization of the European imperial
order presaged the rise of mercantile classes, ideas of popular sovereignty
and the French Revolution, when all authority and law are only legimate as
the will of the citizens. This principle of authority “from below” formed the
basis of democracy and liberalism in modern bourgeois states.32 A further
stage in this process of egalitarianism led to the collectivism of mass consumer
society or communism, typified by America and Soviet Russia. As this
decadent downsweep in the Kali Yuga progresses, matter rules over form, leveling
occurs on every plane, and anti-traditional values of secular humanism,
hedonism and utilitarianism dominate.
Evola’s involution or regression through the cycle of the ages was mirrored
in the law of the regression of castes. Once the sacred regality of the mythical
golden age is lost, power devolves upon the second warrior caste, represented
in Europe by national monarchs and absolute sovereigns. Then in time, the
aristocracy decays, and power shifts to the third caste (the mercantile class).

The Italian communes, merchants and Jewish bankers of the Renaissance eventually led to the capitalist oligarchs and middle classes, who consolidated their power by exploiting liberal and democratic ideologies to drive bourgeois revolutions in the nineteenth century. 

By the beginning of the twentieth century,organized labor and communist revolution sought to transfer power to the fourth caste of slaves, reducing all values to matter, machines and the
reign of quantity. This cycle of castes extended to the international arena.

Evola regarded the First World War as a global struggle between the third caste (the Entente democracies) and the residual forces of the second caste (the feudal and aristocratic Central Powers). 

The Second World War began with the anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes of Germany and Italy challenging the plutocracies in the name of fascist collectivism, but eventually this war became a crusade of democracy, allied with the fourth caste of the Soviet Union, against “regression” to warrior castes. The outcome was the division of Europe, with America and Russia as the dominant mass societies,united in their crass materialist and utilitarian civilization.

Evola’s notion of race was spiritual, subject to spirit and tradition. He
spoke of “a man of race,” meaning “a man of breeding” with its aristocratic
implications. Evola elaborated a tripartite racial thory of body, mind (religion
and adherence to Tradition), and soul (character and emotions), in which the
inner determined the outer forms.Discussing Arthur de Gobineau’s racial
thought, Evola asserted that races only declined once their spirit failed.

Evola actually rejected Alfred Rosenberg and other biological racists of the
Third Reich, implying that their physical anthropology was based on reductionist
and materialist science.

Evola’s interpretation of the word “Aryan”
was similarly idealistic. In his book on Buddhism, he had translated arya to
mean aristocratic or high caste and illuminated in a spiritual sense as well as
related to the Nordic, light-skinned Aryan conquerors of India. It will be recalled
that Evola’s ideal of the “Aryan-Roman” race was essentially defined by
its sacral and aristocratic quality. Mussolini actually adopted Evola’s ideas as
the official Fascist racial theory in 1938, when Italy enacted its own racial laws
distinct from those of Nazi Germany.

Evola’s anti-Semitism was also metaphysical, whereby he regarded Jewry as
a symbol for the rule of money, individualism and economic materialism in
the modern world. Here again one sees the influence of Otto Weininger, who
defined Jewishness (Judentum) as an “intellectual tendency” or “psychic constitution”
manifest in all individuals and races, but finding its fullest expression
in historical Jewry. Weininger maintained that the Jews resembled
women in their metaphysical essence. Like women, the Jews had neither a soul
nor a need for immortality.Weininger highlighted the Jewish contribution to
science as an urge to deny all transcendence through a mechanistic-materialist
worldview. The Jewish devaluation of all higher meaning, he argued, was
evident in their support of Darwinism and man’s descent from the apes,
Marxism and the economic interpretation of history.The Jews lack all conviction,
they are ambiguous and endlessly flexible.Significantly, they have
no desire for property but prefer coin and mobile capital so that they can
quickly change direction for gain.Weininger regarded the modern age with
its increasing emphasis on business and journalism as a social universe in the
image of the Jews.

Otto Weininger’s critique of the “psychic constitution” of Jewishness was
central to Evola’s anti-modernist idealism. Evola detected the fatal Jewish influence
in early modern Europe through rational calculation and banking.
From its origin in the ghettos, the trade with gold and interest ultimately conquered
and refashioned the world. But the Jews were not the sole pioneers,
for Evola follows Karl Marx and Werner Sombart in seeing a revival of the
“Hebraic spirit” in Protestant puritanism, rationalism and capitalism.The
Jews had only taken advantage of humanism and the Reformation to create
the secularized scientistic and mechanistic world of modernity. However, it
was the “Jewish spirit [which] destroys everything through rationalism and
calculation, leading to a world consisting of machines, things and money instead
of persons, traditions and fatherlands.”41 Much later, in 1970, Evola
would describe Hitler’s fanatical anti-Semitism as a paranoid idée fixe with
tragic consequences and a stain upon the reputation of the Third Reich that
would be hard to remove.

However, Evola’s anti-Semitism also took the form of an attack on real
Jews. Quoting the notorious text of Jewish conspiracy theory, Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion, Evola sees the Jewish press and finance as systematic
means of spreading the liberal virus, which would destroy the monarchical
and aristocratic residues ofWestern culture. Evola published his own preface
and an essay, “The Authenticity of Protocols as Proven by Jewish Tradition,”
in the Italian edition of the Protocols, which recycled contemporary anti-Semitic
slurs and falsehoods. He found abundant evidence of the erosive influence
of individual Jews in American banking and industry as well as in the
Russian Revolution. Likewise, Jews were always at the forefront of modernistic
ideas, such as Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, Albert Einstein and
the theory of relativity, Emile Durkheim and the “sociology” of religion.
Under stress, Evola could indulge in vicious anti-Semitism in his journalism.

Israelite tyranny

After the murder of his friend Corneliu Codreanu (1899–1938), the leader of
the fascist Romanian Iron Guard, Evola railed against “the Judaic horde,” describing
a potential communist takeover in Romania as “the filthiest tyranny,
the talmudic, Israelite tyranny.”

Finding Italian Fascism too compromising, Evola began to seek recognition
in the Third Reich, where he frequently lectured from 1934 onward. Although
National Socialism opposed liberalism and “Jewish culture,” Evola
was repelled by Nazi populism, plebeian culture and nationalism as manifestations
of modernity. Nazi racism was rooted in biological materialism, and
the Führer principle, whereby Hitler drew his legitimacy from the Volk, and
likewise ignored all transcendent reality. Evola praised the SS as a vehicle of
the state, of hierarchy, racial heritage and a new warrior elite, but the SS authorities
rejected Evola’s ideas as supranational, aristocratic and thus reactionary.

Evola found his closest allies among the Conservative Revolutionaries
in Germany and Austria such as Edgar Julius Jung, Wilhelm Stapel and
Othmar Spann. Several of his books were translated into German, and many
of his articles appeared in German conservative and right-wing periodicals
between 1928 and 1943.43 In August 1943 Evola conferred with the deposed
Mussolini at Hitler’s field headquarters in East Prussia and was involved in the
short-lived Republic of Salò. Following his flight from Rome before the Allies
in late 1943, Evola spent the remainder of the war in Vienna.Working with
fascist leaders across Central Europe, he performed liaison services for the SS
in recruiting a pan-European army for the defense of the Continent against
the Soviet and American invaders. Severely injured in an air raid on 12 March
1945, he was permanently paralyzed in both legs. After his return to Italy he
lived in Rome, the guru of the neo-fascist right, until his death in 1974.44
How did Evola’s lofty mythological discourse and profound pessimism inspire
neo-fascist activism and violence? 

In the early 1950s, Evola directed his writings more toward practical politics. His journalism and his pamphlet Orientamenti [Orientations] (1950) stressed the “legionary spirit” and “warrior
ethic” while outlining how ideals, elites and order could be maintained with the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) neo-fascist party, police and army taking over the state.

In his book Gli Uomini e le Rovine [Men Among the Ruins] (1953), he restated his doctrine in terms of counter-revolution, the transcendent character of state against the economy, and the need for an antibourgeois,warrior’s view of life.

By the time Evola penned his work Cavalcare la Tigre [Riding the Tiger] (1961), he despaired of such remedies. The postwar economic miracle and consumerism were now sweeping away all that remained
of tradition, hierarchy and order. Evola’s critique was scathing: nothing in this final stage of the Kali Yuga was worthy of survival. Evola sets up the ideal of the “active nihilist”who is prepared to act with violence against modern decadence.

What did this mean in practice? While Evola held himself above all political
parties, he exerted a strong influence on young right-wing Italians who despaired
of Italy’s return into the mainstream of liberal development. Many
compared their fate to that of Dante, who had lamented the passing of the
Ghibelline order.45 Young postwar neo-fascists sat at Evola’s feet to hear this
oracle of aristocratic values and war with modernity. Guiliano Salierni, a
young MSI activist in the early 1950s, recalled Evola’s call for violence.46

Ordine Nuovo (Italian for "New Order"), full name Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo, "New Order Scholarship Center") was an Italian far right cultural and extra-parliamentary political and terrorist organization founded by Pino Rauti in 1956. It had been the most important extra-parliamentary far-right organization of the post-war Italian republic.The name is shared by Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo, a splinter group of Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo.The organization, considered as an attempt at reforming the Fascist Party (banned by the Constitution), was forcibly dissolved by the Italian government in 1973.

Previously, L'Ordine Nuovo ("The New Order") had been the name of a radical left-wing paper edited by Antonio Gramsci in the early 1920s, with Gramsci's followers being nicknamed "ordinovisti". However, later on the term - in Italian and various other languages - was appropriated by Fascists and Nazis, its original left-wing predecessors forgotten.

The extreme right-wing organization here referred to, whose members were also nicknamed ordinovisti, though being the political opposite of the earlier ones, was born from an internal current and then a schism in the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). In 1954 Arturo Michelini, a moderate seeking an alliance with the Italian Monarchic Party, and possibly with the Christian Democracy, became general secretary of the MSI. This led to the schism of the most intransigent and spiritualist, Evolian current (Nazism was also a reference), led by Pino Rauti, Lello Graziani and Sergio Baldassini. They refused any compromise that brought the party apart from aristocratic principles. The intransigent and spiritualist Ordine Nuovo was then founded in Rome, but still a part of the MSI.

The real break with MSI happened at the MSI congress in Milan in 1956. Pino Rauti declared that, being disappointed with the moderate drift of the MSI, his movement would abandon the political scene, creating the "Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo", an association dedicated to "political studies and analysis". This wanted to be a literal application of the theses of Julius Evola, that is, an aristocratic refusal of contemporary, materialist society. Ordine Nuovo, nonetheless, had a capillary and hierarchical organization on the Italian territory, and often behaved more like an extra-parliamentary political organization than a simple "scholarship center".

The neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo (ON) was founded in 1956 by Pino Rauti, one of
Evola’s closest disciples. ON ideology was replete with Evolan terminology,
including aristocracy, hierarchy, elite rule, political soldiers and warrior asceticism.
Its strategy corresponded to Evola’s initial postwar ideas, namely the
reinforcement of the state, including the seizure of power by police, armed
forces, veteran groups and youth organizations.47 Giorgio Almirante, the MSI
leader, hailed Evola as “our Marcuse—only better,” alluding to the Frankfurt
School veteran Herbert Marcuse’s status as the doyen of the 1968 student revolutions.

The use of violence in Italian neo-fascism escalated with numerous bomb
attacks and massacres, beginning with the Piazza Fontana explosion in Milan
in April 1969. Adriano Romauldi, a leading young neo-fascist, identified
Evola in 1971 as the intellectual hero of militant right-wing youth in Italy “because
the teaching of Evola is also a philosophy of total war.”49 By 1975, the
far-right underground adopted a leftist strategy in mounting attacks against
the state itself (murders of officials, robberies in ministries). The trend toward
violence continued, so that by the late 1970s a cult of action replaced ideology
itself, elevating the idea of combat to an existential duty.

Neo-fascist terrorists such as Franco Freda and Mario Tuti frequently reprinted and cited Evola’s two most militant tracts, Metafisica della guerra (1935) and Dottrina ariana (1940), in praise of “heroic,” “exemplary” action without an instrumental purpose. 

Inspired by these ideas of metaphysical stuggle, the underground bulletin Quex (1978–81) (from Hitlerjugend Quex, a Nazi youth hero) glorified Corneliu Codreanu’s “legionaries” and “fulfillment in heroic death” in the
same breath as Evola’s “luminous forces against all tellurism and chaos.”

Hitler Youth Quex (German: Hitlerjunge Quex) is a 1932 Nazi propaganda novel based on the life of Herbert “Quex” Norkus.The 1933 movie Hitlerjunge Quex: Ein Film vom Opfergeist der deutschen Jugend was based on it and was described by Joseph Goebbels as the "first large-scale" transmission of Nazi ideology using the medium of cinema.Both the book and the movie, like S.A.-Mann Brand andHans Westmar, both released the same year, fictionalized and glorified death in the service of the Nazi party and Hitler.Both novel and movie are based on the real story of Herbert Norkus' life. Norkus, aHitler Youth member, died from injuries suffered when chased and confronted byCommunist youths in the night of 23 / 24 January 1932 in the Beusselkietz neighborhood of Moabit, Berlin.^[4] Already the next morning, Joseph Goebbels started to use Norkus' death for propaganda purposes, during a rally in Berlin's Sportpalast.^[5]The funeral on 29 January at Plötzensee, Berlin, was turned into a major ceremony of several Nazi party organizations, under the aegis of Goebbels.^[5] While the murder was condemned also by non-Nazi press, the Communists started a counter-propaganda offensive, describing the incident as an accidental result of Communist self-defense during a Nazi attack.^[6] In the subsequent trial, several persons were sentenced by theLandgericht I court in Moabit, yet the most prominent accomplices Willi Simon, Bernhard Klingbeil and Harry Tack had been able to escape to the Soviet Union.

After the Nazis assumed power, the grave of Norkus was turned into a Nazi shrine, visited annually on New Year's Day by Nazi youth leader Baldur von Schirach for a speech that was broadcast nationwide.^[7] To the site of Norkus' death at Zwinglistraße 4,a plaque was attached reading "He Gave His Life For Germany's Freedom", the first of several such memorial plaques subsequently placed throughout Germany.24 January was made remembrance day for all killed Hitler Youths, and the flag of Norkus' unit became the Hitler Youth's "blood flag".Two weeks after the Enabling Act of 1933, a provocative Hitler Youth march to Norkus' grave took the route through Berlin's communist districts of Wedding and Moabit.Throughout Germany, the Nazis organized demonstrations and speeches commemorating their newly created martyr.Novels, plays, poems and songs were written about him.

Groups such as Movimento Revoluzionario Popolare, Terza Positione and
Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari subsequently unleashed a surge of black terrorism
in Italy until the majority of militants had been captured or killed and a
handful fled abroad.

In late 1980, a cell of Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionarice (NAR) fugitives arrived
in London, where they made contact with Britain’s far-right National
Front (NF). Roberto Fiore, a close associate of the imprisoned Mario Tuti;
Massimo Morsello and his wife Marinella Rita; and Amadeo de Francisci and
Stefano Tiraboschi were all subsequently convicted in absentia by a Rome
court for NAR terrorist offenses involving armed conspiracy. Inspired by
Evola and Codreanu, Roberto Fiore would have a catalytic influence on the
new ideological direction of the NF. After its dramatic increases in membership
and success at the polls in the strife-torn 1970s, the NF had seen its support
draining to the new Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher,
which vigorously addressed industrial unrest, rising crime and weak immigration
control. This weakening and isolation of the NF had a radicalizing effect
on its leaders and their ideology. A younger generation of university-educated
NF activists, represented by Nick Griffin, Derek Holland and Patrick
Harrington, felt that the NF’s soggy mixture of reaction, concern over law and
order and the immigrant threat to jobs and homes lacked any theoretical sophistication.
While the older NF leaders John Tyndall and Martin Webster
were tainted by British neo-Nazism, the young men embraced the ideals of
Italian neo-fascism.

Roberto Fiore and his colleagues helped the NF forge a new militant elitist
philosophy that foreswore electoral strategies in favor of educating and training
a fanatical, quasi-religious “New Man” in select cadres for a national revolution.
By 1983, this group—led by Griffin, Holland and Harrington—had
broken away to form the NF “Political Soldier” faction. Cadres similar to Iron
Guard legionary “nests” became the organizational unit, and training seminars
were held at the Hampshire country house of Rosine de Bounevialle, the
publisher of the Catholic anti-Semitic magazine Candour, originally founded
by A. K. Chesterton. Backed by Fiore, the “Political Soldiers” published a new
journal, Rising (1982–85), which emphasized the spiritual and cultural basis
of a new social order. A revival of the countryside and a return to feudal values
reflected Codreanu’s prewar attack on the decadence and materialism of
urban life; nationalist communes were planned in upland areas of Britain.Archaic
woodcut art juxtaposed knights and rural idylls with consumerism and
modernity. Evola’s most militant tract was discussed, especially his call for a
“Great Holy War” fought for personal spiritual renewal paralleling the physical
“Little Holy War” on a material plane against national or ideological enemies.
Like the hero of the Bhagavad Gita, Christian Crusaders, ancient Norse
warriors and Roman legionaries were all united in the Aryan struggle for selftransformation
and a nobler reality. Some indication of this struggle was
given in a paean to Franco Freda, Italy’s most notorious neo-fascist terrorist.52
Derek Holland published The Political Soldier (1984) as a manifesto of the
new NF elite of racial nationalism to counter “the forces of Evil swamping the
entire globe in an ocean of Filth, Corruption and Treason.” Both the global
dark age and the past failures of the NF could only be remedied by the Political
Soldier, a “New Type of Man.” Holland evoked Codreanu’s Legionary
Movement of the Romanian Iron Guard, with its cult of death, as the outstanding
example of political soldiery in the twentieth century: “[Men] willing
to sacrifice anything and everything for the victory of their Ideal.”53


The Islamic Revolutionary Guards of Iran were also cited as fanatical, spiritual
warriors with a similar contempt for death. Evola’s anti-modernity and warrior
ethics of the “Holy War” led the NF “Political Soldiers,” like their Italian
models, to embrace pro-Islamic positions, with public support for the anti-
Western, national revolutionary regimes of Muammar Qaddafi and Rûhollâh
Khomeini in Libya and Iran. By the end of 1989,Nick Griffin, Derek Holland
and the Italians had finally left the NF to establish the International Third Position
(ITP).54
Evola’s ideas had a much wider impact beyond this Anglo-Italian revolutionary
nationalist sect. From the late 1970s, neo-fascist intellectuals sought
to engage mainstream society in the discourse of the New Right. Following
the founding of GRECE (Groupement de recherche et d’études sur la civilisation
européenne) in Paris in 1969, new glossy magazines such as Elements,
Totalité, Vouloir, Diorama Letterario and Elementi sprang up in France, Belgium
and Italy to challenge liberal, egalitarian ideology. The market and utilitarianism
were rejected in the name of a superior spiritual view of life. Organic
community was compared favorably with capitalist society and its
quantitative, abstract relationships. Racial origins, differences, and identity
were mobilized to counter egalitarian and multiracial ideas. Again, Roberto
Fiore and the Italians in London acted as catalysts in promoting this intellectual
discourse in Britain. Fiore was a close friend of Michael Walker, a former
NF organizer in central London who began publishing the journal National
Democrat in late 1981 (renamed The Scorpion in spring 1983). As a linguist
and translator, Walker was well placed to edit a New Right magazine in
Britain, which offered readers articles on nationalism, anti-egalitarianism and
the Conservative Revolution by Robert Steukers, the Belgian editor of Vouloir,
and Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye of GRECE.
This new radical discourse had ample scope for Evola’s ideas of tradition
against progress, hierarchy against equality, rule from above against democracy
and the primacy of aristocratic over plebeian values. Evola’s contempt for
America as the most advanced center of Western alienation from Tradition
also interacted with a widespread mood of anti-Americanism during the
1980s. Both the left and right condemned the cultural colonization of Europe
by U.S. multinationals, Hollywood film and American television soaps, and
the rapid rise of American-style consumerism.McDonald’s hamburgers and
Coca-Cola became key symbols of a banalAmerican mass culture and its massive
penetration of the postwar vassal states of Europe.Widespread opposition
to the United States’ stationing of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Europe
and attendant fears of the likely sacrifice of the Continent in any nuclear exchange
between the superpowers also stoked these anti-American sentiments.
Michael Walker introduced Evola’s life and work to a wider English readership
in The Scorpion between 1984 and 1986. His spiritual theory of race,
anti-modernity and views on Jewish influence were located within his “superior,
heroic and aristocratic conception of existence.”55 The entire summer
1984 issue of the magazine was devoted to an attack on the secular, liberal notion
of American statehood, divorced from any ethnic roots or culture.
Among its articles was a translation of Evola’s 1945 essay “American ‘Civilization,’”
which saw America as the final stage of European decline into the “interior
formlessness” of vacuous individualism, conformity and vulgarity
under the universal aegis of money-making. Its mechanistic and rational philosophy
of progress combined with a mundane horizon of prosperity to
transform the world into an enormous suburban shopping mall.56 This anti-
American theme was extended by Evola’s ideas on a unified Europe’s need for
a spiritual and supranational basis. Only by opposing the current Westernization
of the world could Europe challenge both superpowers for global
hegemony.57 Through these articles,Walker presented Evola as the champion
of a European spiritual and national revival against the liberal, multiracial
quagmire of the United States.
70 JULIUS EVOLA AND THE KALI YUGA
The international export of Julius Evola has added a vital strand to the contemporary
radical right in the Anglo-American world and elsewhere. Once
Evola had embraced the mythic ideology of cultural decadence and rebirth, he
identified self-transcendence with the higher, timeless spirituality of a lost
world, which could only be reborn through catastrophic change. Evola’s studies
in Tantrism, oriental religions and the Western esoteric tradition also offer new
intellectual horizons and widening access to fascist idealism. His works on Zen
and Taoism were matched by translations of Pascal Beverley Randolph’s Magia
sexualis and several of Gustav Meyrink’s occult novels.58 His dualist metaphysics
of sex, derived from Otto Weininger, provided a key to world religions
and occult doctrine highlighting the abyss of emancipatory, collectivist politics
based on lunar spirituality. His notion of the “Jewish spirit,” also from
Weininger, has influenced Miguel Serrano’s “Esoteric Hitlerism.”
Evola’s aristocratic world of Tradition, painted in the exotic colors of Hyperborean
and Eastern mythology, juxtaposed with the “Jewish spirit,” offers
an esoteric mystique to reactionary discourse and is attracting new audiences.
His rigorous New Age spirituality speaks directly to those who reject absolutely
the leveling world of democracy, capitalism,multiracialism and technology
at the outset of the twenty-first century. Their acute sense of cultural
chaos can find powerful relief in his ideal of total renewal. The year 1998 witnessed
a plethora of publications and conferences marking the anniversary of
Evola’s birth.59 A major U.S. New Age publisher, Inner Traditions, has so far
published English-language editions of eight of Evola’s major monographs,
while the right-wing Arun-Verlag has published several titles in German.
Kshatriya, a Viennese intellectual right-wing journal devoted to Evola and
Codreanu, provides a forum for Russian, German and Hungarian Evolans.
Even Black Metal music has taken up Evola, and Michael Moynihan, a rightwing
U.S. industrial musician, has translated Men among the Ruins.60