One of the more curious features of the search for neofascism after the termination of the Second World War is the insistence, on the part of some of the most widely known researchers, that Julius Cesare Andrae Evola, born in Rome on the 19 May 1898, scion of an ancient aristocratic family, provided the neofascism of post–World War II Europe its ideology. Evola has been seen as the source of neofascism’s ideological rationale. It was his ideas that lent neofascism its substance. Umberto Eco, who identifies “traditionalism” as essential to the “Ur Fascism” that he argues serves as the core of generic neofascism, cites no one other than Evola as its critical exponent.1
Others have identified Evola’s thought as quintessentially fascist, as “creative” and “original.”2For still others, he is spoken of as a “post-war
fascist,” insisting that, after the passing of historic Fascism, his thought pro- vided the inspiration for a resuscitated European neofascism.3Together with
that, we are confidently told that Evola became a source of neofascist ide- ological thought because Mussolini’s “Fascism had few true believers who could. . . write articles and books.”4 Because so few Fascists of the time of
the Ventennio were capable of writing articles or books, Evola, as one of the few, provided the texts that became one of “the most important” sources for the neofascism that arose out of the ruins of the Second World War.5
Even one of the theoreticians of Italian neofascism chose to identify Evola as 1Umberto Eco, “Pointing a Finger at the Fascists,” Guardian, 19 August 1995, p. 27. See Eco’s
comments in Five Moral Pieces (New York: Harcourt, 1997), pp. 77–9.
2Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 254. Capitalized “Fascism,”
throughout, will refer to Mussolini’s Fascism; a lower-case “fascism” will refer to generic fascism.
3Roger Griffin, in Griffin (ed.), Fascism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 111. 4Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996),
p. 97.
5Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 169.
“the most authoritative theorist of the most vital currents of neofascism.”6
What all that is supposed to mean remains more than obscure to this very day.
The fact is that Evola’s relationship to Fascism over almost a quarter- century of its history – and his relationship to the neofascism that followed – was always, and throughout, highly problematic. All things considered, it is difficult to see Julius Evola as any kind of fascist at all. Nothing in his youth and young manhood marked him as one of those few who could and would write the articles and books of Fascist apologetics.
Evola, as a nineteen-year-old, served in the Italian armed forces in the First World War. But unlike those who advocated Italian intervention in that war and would enter Fascist ranks in the years that were to follow immediately, he objected to his nation’s alliance with the industrial democracies. Rather, he favored alliance with the more “traditional” Wilhelminian Germany and monarchial Austria-Hungary. As a scant seventeen-year-old, Evola already sought to foster the “traditionalism” he identified in the beliefs and politics of the Central Powers.
In the course of the First World War, while Fascism was little more than an aspiration, Evola reported enjoying “supersensible” experiences in the mountains of northern Italy. He spoke of undertaking occult practices while not being fully occupied as an artillery officer. It was in those mountains, and at that time, that Evola succeeded in “separating himself from his body,” to come into contact with “invisible presences.” He enjoyed experiences he identified as “transfigurations” – as “ecstasy, a joyful expansion of con- sciousness.” Before he was twenty, Evola had already embarked on his mys- tic journey as an initiate, seeking transcendent “liberation” and personal “power” through “magic.”7
Unlike those who would enter Fascist ranks after 1919, Evola, with the termination of the war, gave himself over to abstract art, mysticism, and occult studies. He became an advocate and a protagonist of Tristan Tzara’s avant-garde Dadaism, in which he discovered some sort of affinities with Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical “science of the invisible.”8In making the
connection, Evola explicitly rejected the alternative art movement prominent in his immediate environment – Futurism – the singular creation of F. T. Marinetti.
Evola found Futurism objectionable because Marinetti used the move- ment to advocate the rapid industrial and technological development of Italy. 6Marco Tarchi, “Introduction,” in Julius Evola, Diorama filosofico (Rome: Edizioni Europa,
1974), p. lxxviii.
7Iagla (Evola), “Experiences: The Law of Beings,” in Micheal Moynihan (ed.), Introduction
to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions,
2001), pp. 167–72.
8See A. P. Shepherd, Rudolf Steiner: Scientist of the Invisible (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions,
The advocacy was infused with an intense nationalism – all of which Evola found objectionable.9Furthermore, nationalistic Futurism, which early iden-
tified itself with Mussolini’s Fasci di combattimento, advertised itself as a modernizing movement. Like Fascism, in general, the Futurists were advo- cates of industrial and technological growth and development for Italy, with all its attendant factories, machine production, motoring, and mechanical flight.10
Evola denounced all of that. He held that industrial and technological development was manifest evidence of the fundamental failure of the modern world to live beyond the confines of gross materialism. It was a materialism that “killed the spirit.” There was nothing spiritual to be found in technol- ogy and machine production. All the vaunted power of what Evola called “profane science” – that constituted the knowledge base of such material accomplishments – could only provide mechanical substitutes for what tra- ditionally had been the power of “a few superior beings” who had the ability to effect results, not through the employment of machines and technology, but by invoking the cosmic forces of the spiritual world behind the world of ordinary things.
For Evola, “true power” was that power that infilled only those unique individuals who had made the tortuous ascent to the “heights” of other- wordly “Being” through the agencies of initiatic ritual and ascetic discipline. What Evola sought was not the material power that he was convinced “desacralized” existence – the power that everyone, and anyone, might “democratically” acquire by learning to conform to “natural, physical laws.” Rather, Evola sought a “higher power,” the product of both noetic and
metaphysical knowledge, accessed through “special faculties” that could
only be the result of long and demanding occult training.11
That Evola rejected Futurism signaled, in fact, his essentially anti-Fascist disposition. Evola’s esotericism was predicated on a radical individualism that found expression in epistemological solipsism,12 in political antino-
mianism, coupled with a set of abiding reactionary social and economic convictions.
9 Years later, Evola reiterated his objections. See Julius Evola, Il cammino del cinabro (Milan:
All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1963), pp. 18–19. Evola reported that Marinetti had confided to him at the time that “your [Evola’s] ideas are as remote from mine as those of an eskimo.” Ibid., p. 19.
10 See Evola, Saggi sull’Idealismo Magico (Rome: Alkaest, n.d., but originally published in
1925), p. 191, n. 2.
11 Evola, The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way (Rochester, VT: Inner Tradi-
tions, 1992), chap. 2, originally published in Italian as L’uomo come Potenza (Rome: Atanor, Todi, 1925), then revised and republished in the early 1940s as The Yoga of Power.
12Years later, Evola admitted to his epistemological solipsism, although he took exception
to the word (which he found “inadequate”). “The world,” for Evola, “could only be ‘my’ world.” See Evola, Il cammino del cinabro, pp. 41–2.
As a consequence, Evola’s first political writings were explicitly anti- Fascist. In 1925, three years after the March on Rome brought Mussolini to power, and upon the invitation of one of his occultist colleagues, Evola wrote his first political article for the journal Lo stato democratico: an attack on Fascism.13
Evola spoke of Fascism as a “caricature” and “parody” of a real revolu- tion. For Evola, Fascism was simply based on material strength; it possessed neither cultural nor spiritual roots. In his article, Evola rejected any form of nationalism as simple foolishness, predicated on empty sentiment. Manipu- lating “chauvinistic” sentiments, Fascist “pseudorevolutionaries” had stage- managed a “laughable revolution” – all this at the time when it was perfectly clear to everyone that nationalism was the central, mobilizing “myth” of Fascism.14Three years after Mussolini assumed power in Italy, Evola insisted
that to be “truly human,” one would have to “overcome brotherly contam- ination”; one must “purge oneself” of the feeling that one is united with others “because of blood, affections, country or human destiny.”15 Such
ingroup sentiment, the core of Fascist nationalism,16had no place in Evola’s
inventory of “Traditional” virtues. Evola was, and remained, an emphatic antinationalist throughout his life.17
Beyond that, Evola objected to any revolution that took on “plebeian” properties – any revolution originating among the “lowly” rather than those informed from “on high.” Much to Evola’s discomfort, the squadristi who collected around the guidons of Mussolini’s Fascism – to fight its battles – were largely undistinguished veterans of the war, the ordinary unem- ployed, and impoverished students, all joined together with less-than-lettered delinquents.18
Evola found it exceedingly unfortunate that Mussolini had been a social- ist prior to the war, and had involved himself with equally questionable elements: the revolutionary syndicalists as well as the Futurists of F. T. Marinetti. All were known to concern themselves with rapid industrial development and radical social and economic reform. They spoke of the 13Evola, “Stato, Potenza e Libert `a,” Lo Stato Democratico, 1, no. 7 (May 1925); pp. 98–112;
see Evola, Il cammino del cinabro, pp. 82–3.
14 On 24 October 1922, Mussolini said, “We have created our myth. The myth is a faith,
a passion.. . . Our myth is the nation.” Mussolini, “Il discorso di Napoli,” Opera omnia
(Florence: La Fenice, 1955–63 [hereafter cited as Oo]), 18, p. 457.
15See Evola’s comments in Ea (Evola), “On the Magical View of Life,” in Moynihan (ed.),
Introduction to Magic, p. 158, written at almost the same time.
16 See the discussion in A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitari-
anism (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp. 72–92, 252–60, and Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999), pp. 74–81.
17 See Julius Evola, Il fascismo: Saggio di una analisi critica dal punto di vista della Destra
(Rome: Volpe, 1964), pp. 20–1, and passim.
18 See Guido Fracastoro di Fornello, Noi squadristi (Verona: Casa editrice S. A. Albarelli-
“corporative” restructuring of industry. And there was talk of demographic policies to increase the birthrate and reduce infant mortality – to provide the citizens to sustain it all. Evola found all such policies deplorable.19
Worse still, Mussolini had shown himself to be tendentially secular, and antimonarchial as well. Unhappily, Mussolini’s secularism was not the kind that would render him unreservedly anti-Catholic,20and his attitude toward
the monarchy was entirely pragmatic, having nothing whatever to do with the mystic feelings that Evola attached to the institution. In effect, Evola found nothing attractive in the first Fascism. Nor did that change with the passage of time.21
The fact is that Evola never was any kind of Fascist. He was neither a “cryptofascist,” a “parafascist,” a “superfascist,” nor a “neofascist.” He was and always remained an occultist, a pagan “magus,” a devotee of “initi- atic science” – the lifetime advocate of a “science” predicated on “different criteria of truth and knowledge from those predominant in modern culture and thought.”22
As a consequence, he identified the fundamental problem of philosophy as epistemological – the articulation and defense of the criteria employed to establish the truth status of empirical, normative, or philosophical claims.23
Epistemologically, Evola was a solipsist, a radical individualist. The world in which he lived could only be his world.24 His most elaborate treat-
ment of epistemological issues, written during the mid-1920s, was contained in his Theory of the Absolute Individual and his Phenomenology of the
Absolute Individual, both of which were essentially solipistic – governed
by the premise that epistemological, ontological, and deontological truth claims must be measured by, and against, the “power and freedom of the real individual.”25
By the time of the appearance of his two major philosophic works, Evola was an aggressive anti-Gentilean at a time when Giovanni Gentile was rig- orously defending Fascism against its foreign and domestic critics.26Evola
dismissed Gentile’s “Actualism” as a sterile enterprise, holding forth the 19 Evola never abandoned those objections. Toward the end of his life, he repeated precisely
the same objections to Fascism. See Evola, Il fascismo, pp. 36, 68–9, 71–80.
20 See Marco Rossi, “‘Lo stato democratico’ (1925) e l’antifascismo antidemocratico di Julius
Evola,” Storia contemporanea 20, no. 1 (February 1989).
21 See Evola, Il cammino del cinabro, pp. 107–16.
22 Ea (Evola), “The Nature of Initiatic Knowledge,” in Moynitian (ed.), Introduction to Magic,
p. 29.
23 Evola, Saggi sull’Idealismo Magico (Rome: Alkaest, n.d., originally published in 1925),
pp. 5–6, and Ea (Evola), “The Nature of Initiatic Knowledge,” in Moynitian (ed.), Intro-
duction to Magic, p. 27.
24 See Evola, Il cammino del cinabro, p. 42.
25Evola, Fenomenologia dell’Individuo assoluto (Turin: Bocca, 1930), pp. xii, 1.
26 See A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick, NJ:
promise of the individual occupying the center of life’s experience, and then surrendering to intellectual abstraction, fearful of facing the prospect of the individual actually shaping the world. Evola insisted that academic philoso- phers such as Gentile were typically afraid to acknowledge the real power of thought – a power that the gnostic wisdom of Tradition had always assigned it. Evola chose to conceive the notion of a “transcendental ego” quite lit- erally. He argued that only in “mysticism” would the basic epistemological and ontological problems of philosophy be successfully resolved. Academic philosophers feared the occult and consequently had little, if anything, to offer the world in crisis. Only mysticism offered contemporary humans true freedom and real power.27 Thereafter, Evola had only distain for Gentile’s
Actualism, the philosophical perspective Mussolini had made the foundation of the official doctrine of Fascism.28
Evola consistently maintained that the true power and freedom of the individual could be truly understood only in the occult tradition of East and South Asia and the ancient cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean, Greece, and Rome. Given that peculiar orientation, Evola was not only an essentially apolitical individualist, but an antinomian whose behaviors were governed exclusively by “principles” only he could divine. Evola was essentially a mysteriosophist – a fact that hardly recommended him for membership in the Partito nazionale fascista. In fact, Evola never ever became a member of the Fascist Party.29
Evola was never a member of the Fascist Party because he never met the minimum criteria for membership. Evola was a mystic in search of his own peculiar, rather than Fascist, “truths.” In that pursuit, he advocated a “suprarational” or “sacred,” as distinct from a “profane,” science. Unlike standard science, Evola’s sacred science was “universal” and “infallible.”30
It was a science that rejected the notion of an “ordinary world,” a world in which phenomena were the transient sensory effects of the impact on the individual of a finite, contingent, and “accidental” atomic and subatomic reality. For sacred science, the world was an interplay of etheric beings, of supersensible forces pursuing mystic purpose in accordance with unalterable, transcendent “principle.” For Evola, we ordinary humans only occasionally 27 Evola, Phenomenologia dell’individuo assoluto, pp. 2, 187–97.
28 Mussolini had assigned to Gentile the responsibility of writing the philosophical portion of
the official Dottrina del fascismo. See Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, pp. 63–5.
29 See Evola’s Autodifesa, his “self-defense” against the postwar criminal charge of having
“glorified Fascism,” as an appendix to Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections
of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002), p. 292. Evola was never
a member of the Fascist Party – during the first period because he chose not to petition for membership, and during the last period of Fascist rule, because his application was rejected for political reasons. See H. T. Hansen, “Introduction: Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” in ibid., p. 46.
glimpse the sacred world behind the world – through paranormal experience, psychokinesis, precognition, time travel, and astral projection.31
In the journals UR32and Krur, which he edited during this period, Evola
articulated all this with the absolute assurance of a sleepwalker. Like Rudolf Steiner, the Anthroposophist – who exercised major influence on his develop- ment – Evola could “perceive” realities denied ordinary mortals.33Because
of his special gifts, possessed of his infallible truths, Evola objected both to the Catholic Church as well as Mussolini’s “pedagogical” and “ethical” state. He raised his objections in the mid-1920s and persisted in them until his death.34
Toward the end of the 1920s, Evola prepared himself to pursue his ideas more fully in the political arena. He had learned that he could not simply reject the Fascism he deplored. Rather, he would seek to influence the political system from within. His first tactic in pursuit of that strategy was to appeal to Giuseppe Bottai, a major figure of the regime, with whom he had served in the military.
Bottai gave Evola access to Critica Fascista, one of the more important journals of the period, in which Evola immediately proceeded to publish two articles, largely a restatement and an elaboration of the intellectual and political postures already assumed.35 This was followed in 1928 by
the publication of Evola’s first major, specifically political manuscript, Pagan
Imperialism.36
Imperialismo pagano was a frank statement of Evola’s views. The exer-
cise commenced with Evola’s judgment concerning Fascism’s therapeutic 31 Ibid., pp. 67–73, and Ea (Evola), “Freedom, Precognition, and the Relativity of Time,” in
Moynitian (ed.), Introduction to Magic, pp. 304–14.
32 Some of the articles from UR are available in English, in the collection edited by Michael
Moynihan, Introduction to Magic.
33 See the account in Shepherd, Rudolf Steiner, pp. 20–6. Evola made no secret of his qualified
connection with Theosophists, Anthroposophists, and occultists of all sorts. His relationship with Steiner was complex. He frequently qualified his approval of Steiner (as he did with all “spiritualists”), but it is clear that Evola associated positive features of his own occult views with him. See, for example, the appendix to Evola, Saggi sull’Idealismo Magico, p. 191, n. 2. Evola even used pictures of Steiner to illustrate the racial types that showed the peculiar “power of spiritual penetration.” Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza (Milan: Hoepli, 1941), pp. 275–6, photographs nos. 2 and 3. During the last years of the 1920s, Evola was deeply involved with Theosophists and Anthroposophists.
34 In this context, see Evola, Il fascismo, pp. 35–6; Evola, Imperialismo pagano: Il fascismo
dinnanzi al pericolo Euro-Cristiano (Roma: Atanor, 1928), passim. See also the discussions
in Evola, Men Among the Ruins, passim.
35See Evola, “Idee su uno stato come potenza,” Critica Fascista 3, no. 21 (1 September 1926),
and “Il Fascismo quale volont `a di impero e il Cristianesimo,” ibid. 3, no. 12 (15 June 1927). Another article by Evola, “Fascismo antifilosofico e tradizione mediterraneo,” ibid. 5, no. 12 (15 June 1929), also appeared as well. In all, Evola was to publish seven articles in the pages of Critica Fascista over the next two decades.
potential, given what he perceived to be the advanced state of Europe’s sys- temic illness. After six years of Fascist rule, and a full two or three years of dictatorship, Evola decided that if Fascism were to have any salutary effect at all, it would have to develop a “soul.” Evola proceeded to advise the fol- lowers of Mussolini that only if Fascism became something it was not – by becoming the agent of the hermetic “Wisdom” of antiquity, abandoning all the “empty” social, economic, and military programs it had made its own –