Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (; 19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974), better known as Julius Evola, was an Italian far-right philosopher and writer. Evola regarded his values as traditionalist, aristocratic, martial and imperialist. An esoteric thinker in Fascist Italy, he also had ties to Nazi Germany. In the post-war era, he was an ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist and militant right.
Evola was born in Rome and served as an artillery officer in the First World War. He became an artist within the Dada movement, but gave up painting in his twenties; he said he considered suicide until he had a revelation while reading a Buddhist text. In the 1920s he delved into the occult; he wrote on Western esotericism and Eastern mysticism, developing his doctrine of "magical idealism". His writings blend various ideas of German idealism, Eastern doctrines, traditionalism and the Conservative Revolution of the interwar period. Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites. To counter this, Evola invoked a rebirth of the "world of Tradition". Tradition for Evola was not Christian—he did not believe in God—but rather an eternal supernatural knowledge with values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience.
Evola advocated for the Italian racial laws, and became the leading Italian "racial philosopher". He mentioned having worked for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence agency of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS).H. T. Hansen, 'Preface to the American Edition', in Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, Simon and Schuster, 2018 pp-1-104, p.5. This is deduced by remarks by Evola suggesting he was an active agent for the Sicherheitsdienst, remarks that Philippe Baillet, his French translator, believes refer to the fact that the Sicherheitsdienst had been set up within the SS and had a remit to cover cultural matters, before it actually assumed a later role in Nazi counterespionage. He fled to Nazi Germany in 1943 when the Italian Fascist regime fell, but returned to Rome under the Italian Social Republic, a German puppet state, to organise a radical-right group. In 1945 in Vienna, a Soviet shell fragment permanently paralysed him from the waist down. On trial for glorifying fascism in 1951, Evola denied being a fascist, instead declaring himself "" (superfascist). The historian Elisabetta Cassina Wolff wrote that "It is unclear whether this meant that Evola was placing himself above or beyond Fascism". Evola was acquitted in his first trial, but convicted a few years later in the second.
Evola has been called the "chief ideologue" of the post-war Italian radical right, and his philosophy has been characterised as one of the most "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century". His writings contain misogyny, racism, antisemitism and attacks on Christianity and the Catholic Church. He continues to influence contemporary traditionalist and neo-fascist movements.
Early life Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome to Sicilian parents on 19 May 1898. His family were members of the Sicilian aristocracy and devout Roman Catholics; he is sometimes described as a baron. Evola considered details about his early life irrelevant, and is noted for hiding some details of his personal life. He adopted the name Julius in homage to Ancient Rome in his mid twenties.
Evola rebelled against his Catholic upbringing. He studied engineering at the Istituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci in Rome, but did not complete his course, later claiming this was because he did not want to be associated with "bourgeois academic recognition" and titles such as "doctor and engineer". In his teenage years he immersed himself in painting—which he considered one of his natural talents—and literature, including Oscar Wilde and Gabriele d'Annunzio. He was introduced to philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Otto Weininger. Other early philosophical influences included the Italian man of letters Carlo Michelstaedter and the German post-Hegelian thinker Max Stirner.
He was attracted to the avant-garde, and briefly associated with the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist movement during his time at university. He broke with Marinetti in 1916 as Evola disagreed with his extreme nationalism and advocacy of industry. In the First World War, Evola served as an artillery officer in the Italian Army on the Asiago plateau. Despite reservations that Italy was fighting against Germany, which Evola admired for its discipline and hierarchy, Evola volunteered in 1917 and briefly saw frontline service the following year. Evola returned to civilian life after the war and became a painter in the Italian Dadaist movement; he described his paintings as "inner landscapes". He wrote his poetry in French and recited it in cabarets accompanied by classical music. Through his painting and poetry, and his work on the short-lived journal Revue Bleue, he became a prominent representative of Dadaism in Italy. (In his autobiography he described his Dadaism as an attack on rationalist cultural values.) In 1922, lamenting that avant-garde art was becoming commercialised and stiffened by academic conventions, he gave up painting and renounced poetry. Evola was a keen mountaineer, describing it as a source of revelatory spiritual experience.
Evola reportedly went through a "spiritual crisis" through the banality of civilian life and his need to "transcend the emptiness" of normal human activity. He experimented with hallucinogenics and magic, which, he wrote, almost brought him to madness. In 1922, at 23 years old, he considered suicide, he wrote in The Cinnabar Path, but was saved by a revelation while reading an early Buddhist text on shedding all specific identity and embracing absolute transcendence.
Evola would later publish The Doctrine of Awakening as a repayment of his debt to Buddhism. His interests gradually led him further into spiritual, transcendental, and "supra-rational" studies: esoteric texts, the occult, alchemy, magic, and Oriental studies, particularly Tibetan Tantric yoga. The historian Richard H. Drake wrote that Evola's alienation from contemporary values resembled that of other young Lost Generation intellectuals after the First World War, but his took an uncompromising, eccentric and reactionary form.
Philosophy
Evola's writings blended ideas from German idealism, Eastern doctrines, traditionalist conservatism, and especially the interwar Conservative Revolution, "with which Evola had a deep personal involvement". He viewed himself as part of an aristocratic caste that had been dominant in an almost-forgotten archaic Golden Age, which had been destroyed by the contemporary Dark Age (Kali Yuga), meaning the whole of historical times. In his writing, Evola addressed others in that caste whom he called l'uomo differenziato (the man who has become different), those who through heredity and initiation were able to transcend the ages.
Evola considered human history to be, in general, decadent; he viewed modernity as the temporary success of the forces of disorder over tradition. Tradition, in Evola's definition, was an eternal supernatural knowledge, with absolute values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience. Matthew Rose wrote that "Evola claimed to show how basic human activities—from eating and sex, commerce and games, to war and social intercourse—were elevated by Tradition into something ritualistic, becoming activities whose very repetitiveness offered a glimpse of an unchanging eternal realm". Only the re-establishment of aristocratic authority could ensure the triumph of Tradition over the present chaos. Rose wrote that Evola "aspired to be the most right-wing thinker possible in the modern world".
Evola's philosophical work started in 1924 with Teoria dell'individuo assoluto (Theory of the Absolute Individual) and Fenomenologia dell'individuo assoluto (Phenomenology of the Absolute Individual), originally a single work, which for editorial reasons was divided into separate volumes published in 1927 and 1930 in Turin by Bocca publishers. These attacked the Hegelianism dominant in Italy, especially in the works of Benedetto Croce. Croce may have helped Evola to find a publisher for his Absolute Individual opus.
Evola wrote prodigiously on mysticism, Tantra, Hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism. German Egyptologist and scholar of esotericism Florian Ebeling noted that Evola's The Hermetic Tradition is viewed as an "extremely important work" among esotericists. Evola gave particular focus to Cesare della Riviera's Il Mondo Magico degli Heroi, which he translated into modern Italian. He held that Riviera's text was consonant with the goals of "high magic"the reshaping of the earthly human into a transcendental 'god man'. According to Evola, the timeless Traditional science attained lucid expression through this text, though lightly veiled to prevent accusations from the church. Though Evola rejected Carl Jung's interpretation of alchemy, Jung described Evola's The Hermetic Tradition as a "magisterial account of Hermetic philosophy". In Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, the philosopher Glenn Alexander Magee favoured Evola's interpretation over that of Jung's. In 1988 a journal of Hermetic thought published a section of Evola's book, describing it as "Luciferian."
Evola later clarified that he was not a Buddhist, and that his text on Buddhism was meant to balance out his earlier work on the Hindu tantras. Evola's interest in tantra was spurred on by correspondence with John Woodroffe. Evola was attracted to the active aspect of tantra as a practical means to spiritual experience, over the more passive approaches in other forms of Eastern spirituality. In Tantric Buddhism in East Asia, the scholar Richard K. Payne argued that Evola manipulated Tantra in the service of right-wing violence, and that the emphasis on "power" in The Yoga of Power gave insight into his mentality.Richard K. Payne. Tantric Buddhism in East Asia. Simon and Schuster, 2006. p. 229 Evola often relied on European sources about Asian creeds while evoking them for racist ends, Peter Staudenmaier wrote. Rose described Evola as an "unreliable scholar of Eastern religions."
Evola advocated for "differentiated individuals" following the left-hand path to use dark, violent sexual powers to disrupt the modern world. For Evola, these "virile heroes" are both generous and cruel, and their commanding "Dionysian" acts may transgress timid conventional morality.
According to A. James Gregor, Evola's definition of spirituality can be found in Meditations on the Peaks: "what has been successfully actualized and translated into a sense of superiority which is experienced inside by the soul, and a noble demeanor, which is expressed in the body." Evola attempted to construct, Ferraresi wrote, "a model of man striving to reach the 'absolute' within his inner self". For Evola, Furlong wrote, transcendence "rested on the freeing of one's spiritual self through the purity of physical and mental discipline." Evola wrote that the tension between a detached "impulse toward transcendence" and an engaged "warrior spirit" defined his life and work.