RadixJournal - December 12, 2014


Evola

Topics
Revolt Against the Modern World tradition tradition Evola perennialist race and spirit
Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
John Morgan William Neville Evelyn Mussolini René Guénon Arctos Plato Ernst Jünger Spengler Jonathan Bowden Judaic Abel Giovanni Gentile Otto Weininger Carl Schmitt Bronze Age Heidegger Protocols Richard Bakofen and 11 more
Faustian Identity The Importance of Being Earnest

Episode Stats


Length

47 minutes

Words per minute

159.61

Word count

7,563

Sentence count

369

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the life and career of Julius Evola, the Italian Dadaist painter, philosopher, writer, and philosopher-in-chief of the occultist movement known as The Path of Cinnabar.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, William Neville, John Morgan, welcome to the podcast.
00:00:04.100 William, I'll begin with you. How are you?
00:00:07.600 I'm great, Richard. It's great to be here.
00:00:09.440 Very good. And John, how are things in Budapest?
00:00:13.040 They're going quite well.
00:00:14.400 Good. What is the weather like in Budapest in December?
00:00:20.160 Oh, it's been horrible recently. It's been raining almost continuously the last couple of days.
00:00:25.860 I didn't really appreciate how even Central Europe like this, how far north it is compared to the U.S.,
00:00:32.880 because it gets dark here around four in the afternoon, which is a little depressing.
00:00:38.240 I think Rome is at the same latitude as Washington, D.C.
00:00:44.140 So Europe is a lot more closer to the Hyperborean realm. 0.60
00:00:51.900 Yes.
00:00:52.780 So to speak.
00:00:53.780 But anyway, let's talk a little bit about Evola.
00:00:59.000 We've had a number of requests from listeners that we do an Evola podcast,
00:01:04.420 and I think I mentioned this on Twitter.
00:01:07.320 I did some really great and really fun as well podcasts with Jonathan Bowden a couple of years ago,
00:01:14.700 and he was actually preparing to do a podcast on Evola just before his death.
00:01:21.360 And so I'm glad that we're kind of doing it now.
00:01:27.340 Perhaps some of Jonathan's spirit can take a hold of us while we're speaking.
00:01:33.280 But why don't we start out, and John, I'll just throw it over to you first.
00:01:38.500 Why don't we just talk about who Julius Evola was and his time, his background.
00:01:46.620 Just if a listener knows nothing about Julius Evola, where should he begin?
00:01:53.540 I'll just mention first that I think this will sound like a plug for Arctos, and I guess it is,
00:02:01.180 but I genuinely do think it's the best introduction is Evola's autobiography, which is the Path of Cinnabar that Arctos publishes.
00:02:11.680 And he doesn't talk about the biographical facts of his life very much in the book,
00:02:17.520 but it's a very good overview of his ideas and the things that preoccupied him.
00:02:23.460 But he was born in 1898 in Rome, which is where he lived basically his entire life.
00:02:30.540 His early interest was actually in idealist philosophy, and he actually, before he started to write books on traditionalism,
00:02:44.440 he wrote several very lengthy works on what he called the idea of the absolute individual,
00:02:52.120 which was sort of a heroic, almost Nietzschean vision of the individual, but in keeping with idealist philosophy.
00:03:02.400 There's very little of that that's been translated into English, so I'm going on just what I've read secondhand, mainly.
00:03:10.560 But that was his early interest.
00:03:13.600 You know, like everyone else from his generation, he did fight in World War I.
00:03:21.020 He was actually an artillery officer, although in Cinnabar, he actually denies that, you know,
00:03:28.200 I don't think he actually saw much action, although, you know, he did serve in the Italian army.
00:03:34.680 After the war, he actually became Italy's foremost Dadaist painter.
00:03:43.900 He was Italy's foremost representative of the Dada movement, which he later said, you know,
00:03:50.100 that might seem somewhat contradictory for someone who later became a traditionalist,
00:03:54.640 but that, you know, he saw it as a kind of way of leveling the ground,
00:03:59.300 that it kind of destroyed everything he had believed up to that time and kind of like opened the way for tradition to come in.
00:04:08.120 And then it was it was in the 1920s when he started to get interested in the occult and the various religious traditions.
00:04:19.780 And this eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, you know, and Guénon himself was sort of in his prime at that time.
00:04:29.900 And this introduced him to the idea of tradition.
00:04:33.700 And once he encountered that, you know, that that became sort of the basis for all of his work for the rest of his life after that.
00:04:42.760 Although he had a very different understanding of tradition than Guénon did in some ways.
00:04:52.240 Interesting. Well, let's I do want to talk about what tradition and traditionalism.
00:04:58.160 But before that, William, would you have anything to add in terms of some of these basic facts of his life and some of the basic things that motivated Evola?
00:05:08.840 Sure. Yeah. I mean, John outlined it pretty well.
00:05:11.520 Yeah, it's interesting. Evola proceeds from, you know, one phase to the other of his career, in a sense, leaving the previous phase behind, like Dadaism or philosophy, saying that he's pretty much exhausted it.
00:05:25.540 That's what he said with philosophy and occultism as well, to a certain extent.
00:05:32.360 He pretty much knew it. He was in it's how he always has interesting kind of seeming contradictions.
00:05:39.280 He talks with all these Freemasons and, you know, anthroposophists and stuff like this.
00:05:48.220 But then ultimately, he'll, like, disavow their entire worldview and say that they're kind of grasping at a piece of the truth, but they don't really have it.
00:05:56.360 And their whole system is, you know, petty and kind of diluted.
00:05:59.440 And that's, you know, his system of the absolute individual and magical idealism is the real one.
00:06:04.480 But, yeah, his, when he discovers Guinnon, yeah, there are a couple of influences.
00:06:09.780 Guinnon is a big one.
00:06:12.800 His morphology of history.
00:06:14.400 So Guinnon's basic historical worldview is that, you know, there are, you know, four ages, the Golden Age, the Silver Age, is Bronze Age, the Iron Age, similar to Hesiod or the Norse tradition and the Hindu tradition have this as well.
00:06:30.840 But this sort of dialectic, not even dialectic, this sort of contrast between traditional civilization and modern civilization really informs his whole worldview.
00:06:40.580 But there are some other influences besides Guinnon.
00:06:45.140 Bakofen, if you're familiar with him, is a kind of morphologist of history who talks about sort of two different types of civilization, solar, which is patriarchal, and a lunar type of civilization, which is matriarchal.
00:07:01.720 It also has a huge effect on the sort of morphology of civilization that he gives in Revolt Against the Modern World.
00:07:08.060 So Revolt Against the Modern World is almost like a fusion of Guinnon's view with Bakofen's view.
00:07:15.800 But, yeah, I think John covered it pretty well.
00:07:19.220 So why don't we talk a little bit about this?
00:07:21.380 What is traditionalism?
00:07:23.440 And, John, I'll throw it over to you again.
00:07:26.940 How would you describe this kind of tradition?
00:07:29.880 I think, obviously, the word tradition is used in all sorts of manner, whether we're talking about a Christmas tree or traditional Christianity in America or things like that.
00:07:40.040 But what specifically is the tradition that Evola and Guinnon are a part of?
00:07:48.220 Yeah, that's a good point.
00:07:49.580 And I actually think the fact that the word has so many meanings generates a lot of confusion.
00:07:55.600 When people say they're a traditionalist on the right today, some of them think that they're using it in the sense that Guinnon and Evola did, but they're not really.
00:08:05.740 We support gay marriage as a traditionalist, not polymorphous homosexuality.
00:08:12.580 Gay marriage.
00:08:13.400 You know, I'm kind of joking.
00:08:14.960 I expect Republican traditionalists to actually say that in the near future.
00:08:19.640 But, sorry, go on.
00:08:21.220 Well, that's the other tradition is subject to modification, depending on the polls.
00:08:26.680 But, well, the idea that Guinnon and Evola have of tradition is that, you know, behind reality, there's this, you know, metaphysical source that lies, you know, at the heart of everything.
00:08:39.740 It's very platonic in conception.
00:08:41.660 You know, Plato had this idea of, you know, the realm of ideas, pure ideas that lies behind reality.
00:08:48.400 And that's essentially what Evel and Guinnon believed.
00:08:51.760 But they thought that this metaphysical essence manifests itself in the material world through the various spiritual traditions.
00:09:01.780 Not just any spiritual traditions, but ones that came from legitimately revealed sources, you know, like the Vedic texts in India or, you know, the texts that came, that formed the Bible and so forth.
00:09:18.420 And that this tradition, even though it itself is one, manifests differently depending on the cultural contexts in which it manifests.
00:09:31.220 So, you know, the Nordic tradition, when it was still living, you know, the manifestation of this metaphysical essence within Nordic culture, just as the Christian and Islamic one is in the Semitic culture and Vedic in Indian culture and so on and so forth.
00:09:52.440 And this might sound suspiciously new age, but where the traditionalists really part is that they don't believe that traditions should be mixed.
00:10:03.000 I mean, Evel and Guinnon were certainly interested in all of the world's major traditions, but they thought that syncretism, which is, you know, the mixing of several traditions, was very harmful and was actually counter-traditional.
00:10:20.220 And it was something peculiarly modern, you know, where people want to, and we see this a lot in America today, where people want to, you know, they take a little bit of Buddhism and they mix it with a little bit of Christianity.
00:10:30.300 And, you know, you know, sort of, you know, designer religions, they rejected that notion because Ganon taught that tradition is manifested as a metaphysical whole.
00:10:45.940 So, and he also drew a distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric.
00:10:52.360 You know, the esoteric is what we would call, you know, the more mystical elements of a religion that, like, you know, monks and other mystics are more involved with, whereas there's the exoteric part that's sort of like for the masses, which is like, you know, the external rituals, the hierarchy and so forth.
00:11:12.900 The two are linked, and one important way in which Ganon and Abel had differed from New Agers is that they thought you can't have one without the other.
00:11:23.000 You know, you can't take esotericism and neglect its outer forms entirely, you know, that both have to be linked.
00:11:30.780 So this kind of abrogates the idea that, you know, like people would say, well, I'm spiritual but not religious.
00:11:35.780 Like, that distinction Ganon and Abel would have denied that there is one.
00:11:40.660 Right. We Episcopalians are religious but not spiritual.
00:11:46.060 Exactly.
00:11:48.020 But, no, I would also mention that, you know, I think there's a lot about New Age stuff that we've, over the past 20 years or so, that I think is not very admirable.
00:12:04.420 But that being said, I think even those people who might be pursuing these things in maybe the wrong way or maybe in a kind of goofy way, nevertheless, I think those people who are attracted to that or are attracted to the truth, and they're attracted to something beyond material consumerism and Americanism.
00:12:24.180 And I think that's interesting.
00:12:26.420 I think the people who are attracted to New Age philosophy, I think it says something about them, that they might be kind of on the wrong path, but maybe they're headed in the right direction.
00:12:34.560 Well, they're on the wrong path for the right reasons.
00:12:37.120 Yeah, that's a better way of articulating it, yeah.
00:12:39.700 But, yeah, William, why don't you talk a little bit about tradition and Evola's, specifically Evola's relationship with tradition.
00:12:47.500 Sure. So, yeah, like John said, John kind of outlined the overall kind of perennialist view of tradition and of history.
00:12:59.320 Where Evola kind of gets his uniqueness from is that he does start out in philosophy and this idea of magical idealism, which has the whole absolute individual concept at the center of it.
00:13:12.480 And the absolute individual is similar to what would be described in Hinduism as Atma or what we describe in other circles as the real I, a kind of transcendent identity beyond your material body or even your material personality, which, of course, changes and is in constant chaos and dies with the body.
00:13:33.600 But this sort of transcendent I, which, and the whole goal of magical idealism is to discover this I and identify with it.
00:13:43.580 And that's sort of what leads him away from his philosophical phase.
00:13:50.600 Because for Evola and as well for Grenon, the only purpose of knowledge is basically only good if it leads to a change in existential condition.
00:14:01.820 And, again, it's, again, it's similar to Plato.
00:14:05.300 Plato, you know, true knowledge for Plato is, you know, the universe, the outer universe and your inner world are kind of analogs of one another.
00:14:16.000 And when you truly know something, you almost, might be too strong to say that you become it, but it's sort of internalized within you.
00:14:23.580 So when you grasp these higher things, the real true knowledge of it changes your whole existential condition and state of being.
00:14:31.360 So for Evola, the most important thing with knowledge is this sort of real supernatural knowledge, which is why he finds really all profane philosophy, which is, you know, basically all philosophy for the last few hundred years.
00:14:48.140 And even science, he says, you know, science can achieve these great things in the external world. 0.68
00:14:53.760 But, you know, if you can go to the moon and do all these things, but you're still kind of a pathetic, cowardly, fearful individual, you know, what good was it all?
00:15:03.440 If you haven't changed your existential condition for him, it's all useless unless you yourself become better, become more of a master of yourself and more of a master of the universe even.
00:15:16.760 So that's sort of his perspective that really, and Evola, another difference between Evola and Ganon is that, and most people who follow Ganon, is that Evola sort of thinks of himself as a spiritual member of the warrior caste.
00:15:30.820 So, and he thinks the whole West is sort of oriented more in this direction of being warriors rather than contemplatives and ascetics.
00:15:38.240 So we're kind of more driven to action and, you know, trying to change the world and impose our will on things.
00:15:45.460 And this has, this is really what kind of differentiates him from Ganon, because Ganon is content to expound metaphysical doctrine.
00:15:54.720 That's pretty much all he does.
00:15:56.040 He studies various tradition and expounds the metaphysical doctrine and sort of explores the higher unity behind different traditions.
00:16:03.000 But Evola is much more concerned with the goings-on of the world, what can be done to manifest tradition in the world, at least until he reaches the last phase of his career, when he kind of, you know, after World War II, he gets a little bit hopeless about this.
00:16:17.440 But, you know, Evola is engaged with existentialist thought, so he engages a lot with Heidegger and Nietzsche, Ride the Tiger, discusses these philosophers at length.
00:16:28.460 He's engaged heavily in politics.
00:16:31.100 He was very much, I mean, he's engaged with all these idealist philosophers who were, you know, at the top levels of the fascist regime, like Giovanni Gentili and others.
00:16:40.480 So he engages with the mainstream philosophy of the day.
00:16:45.440 He, you know, he had a, he was on personal basis with Mussolini.
00:16:50.920 Mussolini, for example, really liked his doctrine about race.
00:16:54.980 So he was very much involved in the world and in the politics of the world until maybe the last phase of his career, which is, which is mainly the, probably the biggest thing that would differentiate him from Ganon and Chuan and other perennialists.
00:17:10.480 Well, John, before, before we talk more about fascism and, and also Evola's concept of race, which William also touched on, I'm interested in, in, in thinking a little bit more about religion, particularly Christianity.
00:17:26.700 I mean, it's, it's, with Ganon, he, he, he, he ended up converting to Islam and, and, and, and in this traditionalist conception of religion, Christianity is, I would say, deeply a Semitic religion or at least derived from a Semitic religion.
00:17:42.160 Um, so what was, what was, what were Evola's thoughts on Christianity in, in Europe?
00:17:49.940 I mean, he is, he is a Roman after all, that's a, it's a, it's a, obviously a deeply Christian city and a deeply Catholic country.
00:17:56.660 Uh, what, what were his thoughts on this paradox of Christianity and Europe?
00:18:02.400 Well, Evola had deep respect for Ganon.
00:18:06.800 Uh, I mean, they corresponded, I think, for about a quarter of a century until Ganon's death.
00:18:13.560 Um, but he, he did have some differences of views.
00:18:17.360 I, I mean, you know, Ganon was raised a Catholic, uh, and he always considered it to be a, a valid tradition, but he thought in the modern world, it had lost its way.
00:18:29.340 He thought it, it had become too corrupted by modernity.
00:18:33.300 Uh, so it, it's, it's a bit of a mistake to say that he converted to Islam.
00:18:38.700 There, there's actually a letter that survives where somebody asked Ganon about this.
00:18:44.140 And he said, well, the important conversion isn't, you know, from Christianity to Islam or to any other religion.
00:18:52.020 He said, the important conversion is from modernism to the point of view of tradition.
00:18:58.400 Uh, so he didn't really, I, if you look at even Ganon's work, there's very little about Islam in it.
00:19:05.300 Uh, and I, I think it's a mistake to kind of read his decision with the kind of political valence that we would tend to look at it with today.
00:19:14.140 Uh, but when it comes to Evola, uh, you know, Evola was, was very much a Nietzschean in his younger days.
00:19:23.600 And even though he kind of became critical of Nietzsche after his turn to tradition, because of, uh, what he saw as Nietzsche's, uh, materialism, uh, and lack of a transcendent perspective.
00:19:35.140 Uh, he's, he, I think Nietzsche always exerted kind of an influence over him and his understanding of Christianity was that, uh, you know, it was something that, uh, had sort of imposed itself on Europe and that Europe was still inherently pagan.
00:19:54.300 I mean, Evola loved, uh, uh, the pagan religions of Rome.
00:20:00.420 Uh, he was very interested in the other pagan religions of Europe, although he agreed with Ganon that, uh, uh, one of the important things about a tradition for it to remain living is that there has to be an unbroken chain of initiations in the priesthood.
00:20:15.900 Uh, so even though Evola had a great amount of respect for all of these European pagan traditions, he didn't think they could be revived in the modern world because, you know, this chain of initiations had been broken and, you know, there's not really any way of getting it back.
00:20:32.160 Um, he did write a book, uh, in the late twenties when, uh, around the time that Mussolini signed an agreement with the Vatican, uh, because there were, there were a lot of fears in, uh, in the Vatican in the twenties that, uh, you know, this crazy fascist movement was going to turn against them somehow.
00:20:51.960 Uh, and Evola was actually, uh, in his, his younger days, he was very much hopeful that, that Mussolini would do this, uh, would sort of reestablish Rome as a pagan society.
00:21:03.120 And he wrote this book, uh, which is called, uh, it's been translated as either pagan imperialism or heathen imperialism.
00:21:10.940 Uh, a lot of people like it because it's, it's an extremely anti-Christian work.
00:21:17.360 Uh, but he actually in later life kind of retracted it and said, well, I was,
00:21:21.960 I was young and kind of naive and I, you know, I was a little bit too harsh.
00:21:26.580 Uh, I, he, he always had respect for Christianity and you can see this in Cinnabar where he writes about it, at least, uh, not so much for Protestant, Protestantism, but, you know, at least for Catholicism.
00:21:38.820 Uh, even though he agreed with Ganon that, uh, it had become very corrupted by modernity.
00:21:44.460 Uh, but where he disagrees with, uh, Ganon is that, you know, he, he didn't think that this was really an appropriate religion.
00:21:51.960 For European peoples.
00:21:54.520 And, uh, you know, he really thought that, uh, you know, for European man to really rediscover his true identity, he was eventually going to have to sort of overcome Christianity.
00:22:06.200 But, you know, he still acknowledged that, uh, you know, there was a great deal that was good in, you know, at least traditional Christianity.
00:22:12.600 Uh, I mean, his political ideal was always the Holy Roman empire because he thought it had the perfect balance between the political authorities and the, uh, the sacred authorities in the church.
00:22:25.800 Uh, but, uh, there's, there's, there's also a great quote in Cinnabar where he says, uh, I would rather spend an afternoon chatting with, uh, the lowliest country pastor than with the, uh, loftiest literary celebrity of our time.
00:22:43.020 Uh, so he, he, he did have a respect for, for Christianity, but, uh, you know, he, he did think that there was something inherently un-European about it.
00:22:53.620 And, uh, uh, you know, he definitely thought that, uh, for Europe to rediscover itself, it was going to have to overcome it.
00:23:00.800 And how, how could it do that?
00:23:03.660 I mean, I, one thing that, uh, a number of people have talked about is, in a way, discovering the, the pagan aspects of European Christianity.
00:23:13.500 Um, and, and, and, and that doesn't really include the, uh, so much of the Christianity that we see in America, which, when you look back to, or, you know, early, uh, early pilgrims and so on and so forth, there, there was a very, uh, very strong kind of Judaic element to,
00:23:30.800 uh, American Christianity, a, a desire to get rid of the traditions, like, celebrating Christmas, most obviously, but, but all sorts of things.
00:23:39.840 Going back to a kind of Hebraic model, uh, pure, it's a kind of a hyper-Protestantism, um, that, that would have been a bit much for someone like Luther.
00:23:49.900 But, but how, how could, and how, how could Europeans rediscover the pagan?
00:23:56.060 Uh, William, maybe, maybe you should pick that up so we can.
00:23:58.980 Sure.
00:23:59.320 So, yeah, I mean, Evola's view about the Middle Ages in particular, um, and specifically, like John said, the Holy Roman Empire, is that it was this ideal synthesis, um, between Europe's old pagan heritage and, um, Christianity, which, in other works, he says, actually, you know, despite his kind of negative assessment of Christianity's general effect on Europe and the character of the religion and all of this, um, he does say that, you know, the Nordic tradition,
00:24:27.400 and all these pagan currents had kind of lost their, their awareness of the transcendent dimension of life and that these things had kind of just become, like, nature worship at that point.
00:24:40.320 And that the contact with Christianity actually had sort of, uh, uh, conditionally positive effect for both sides, resulting in this kind of ideal synthesis of the Holy Roman Empire and the tradition of, um, chivalry and the myth of the Holy Grail and all this kind of virile warrior spirituality that he approved of.
00:24:58.920 Um, yeah, Evola's view on these traditions is not so much, um, like, the Semitic versus not-Semitic, um, dichotomy, but more of this kind of idea that goes back to Bakoven, which is, you know, the idea of solar versus lunar civilizations.
00:25:14.920 Civilizations, civilizations that are fundamentally feminine and matriarchal and civilizations that are fundamentally masculine and solar.
00:25:22.300 And he takes this to very extreme levels, but, um, and so that's really the, his issue with Christianity is mostly in that, uh, it requires, it, most of its manifestations, aside from what I'm talking about in the Ghibli Middle Ages and certain mystics, um, have, you know, a devotional, passive, um, relationship with the divine.
00:25:42.920 Divine. Whereas Evola, you know, highly admires pagan Rome, which kind of had a more active, um, masculine relationship with spirituality. 0.79
00:25:53.840 And, um, and it's part of his idea about, uh, we can get into it later about spiritual race is, uh, defined by what kind of relationship you're inclined to have with the supernatural.
00:26:05.360 Um, yeah, but yeah, like, uh, John was saying, he does have a very complicated relationship with Christianity.
00:26:11.340 You know, he thinks the lowliest priest is of more interest to him than the most haughty philosopher, but, um.
00:26:19.000 How would he describe a kind of theology of modernity in the sense of, uh, you know, I, I, uh, thinking about the, a solar situation, civilization, which we might associate with say the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire, um, versus the more matriarchal lunar civilization.
00:26:36.520 In a way, modernity might have a little bit of both.
00:26:40.620 I mean, there's a, there's one aspect of the modern age that, that includes things like futurism, certainly includes things like fascism, um, of, uh, you know, let's, let's harness technology for the, for our, for our will and, you know, kind of, this kind of aspect of it.
00:26:56.500 But, but it's almost like the world we live in, I think it's, it's remarkable the degree, the degree to which it's becoming very matriarchal. 0.77
00:27:04.280 Uh, it's becoming a, a world based on comfort and protection and security.
00:27:09.980 And it really isn't a, that kind of masculine Faustian world of going off to the stars.
00:27:16.500 It's, uh, so how would, how would, uh, and either of you could pick this up, uh, but how, how would Evola, how did Evola think about modernity and those, using those terminology?
00:27:25.900 Sure, I'll pick this up briefly and then I'll hand it over to John.
00:27:28.500 Mm-hmm.
00:27:28.680 Um, so Evola's idea about this sort of Faustianism, this modern drive to, you know, conquer the material world, says essentially, um, Titanic.
00:27:38.320 And what he means by Titanic is, um, this myth of the Titans that were these huge beings that revolted against the Olympian gods and failed.
00:27:47.420 Um, it's this idea that, um, yes, they have this sort of masculine drive, but it has no reference to the transcendent.
00:27:54.840 And so it's kind of futile and, um, destructive.
00:27:58.640 He, um, so he diverges, he specifically calls out Spengler and diverges with him on this point along with some others.
00:28:06.200 But, um, he also, his views are similar to Ernst Jünger's in this respect.
00:28:11.960 Ernst Jünger writes a lot about, um, Titans versus Olympians, which is a subject Evola is very focused on.
00:28:18.640 Um, so yeah, John, whatever you had to add to that.
00:28:21.980 Well, uh, you know, this, this doctrine of the cycle of ages, uh, was very important to Evola.
00:28:28.680 And, uh, you know, the traditionalists typically use the Vedic understanding of the cycle of ages.
00:28:35.100 So, uh, they believe like Hindus themselves, uh, you know, that we're currently in the Kali Yuga, which is the last and, and most degenerate of the ages. 0.98
00:28:45.700 No.
00:28:46.080 Traditionalism really.
00:28:47.980 No, we're heading towards greater and greater progress.
00:28:51.440 But that, that, that was, that was one of the things that really blew my mind when I first started to read Evola and Ganon was like, you know, I'd always grown up with this idea that, you know, progress was infinite.
00:29:02.340 And things were getting better and better and, you know, we were advancing.
00:29:05.400 And to really understand the traditionalists, you have to completely reverse that and say, you know, the, the, the golden age was in the past.
00:29:14.080 And at least as far as the outer world is concerned, you know, things are, are only going to get worse.
00:29:19.400 And even, even when it seems that we're making progress, uh, because it lacks this transcendent aspect, uh, you know, it's, it's really not achieving anything that's genuinely transcendent.
00:29:31.420 Uh, and because of, you know, this idea that we're in the Kali Yuga, uh, everything, you know, even the universe itself is sort of beginning to fall apart over the course of many centuries.
00:29:43.380 Uh, so for Evola and also Ganon, I mean, modernity, uh, is sort of the quintessence of this spirit of degeneration.
00:29:52.080 Hmm. Uh, and there, you know, I, there's a lot of things we, we could say about this.
00:29:58.800 I mean, Evola thought the best thing for an individual who is interested in tradition to do at this time was to just withdraw from the world as much as possible, uh, to try to, uh, you know, escape the degenerative effects as much as possible and, and stick to the, the worldview of tradition.
00:30:18.020 And, you know, he said, you know, if, if you're forced to engage with things in the outer world, and I think he understood his relationship with fascism this way too.
00:30:26.460 Uh, he said, you can do it if it has some benefit for you spiritually, but you should remain detached from any result.
00:30:34.260 So, you know, there, there are ways in which you can engage with the modern world, like including politically.
00:30:40.400 But, uh, you know, since everything is degenerating, you shouldn't actually expect that you can actually make anything better.
00:30:46.760 You should only engage with it in terms of how it helps you, uh, as an individual spiritually.
00:30:53.680 Interesting. I, I think this is a, also a good transition to Evola and fascism.
00:30:59.340 Uh, so what did they, what did Evola and, and people like him see in fascism?
00:31:04.240 Did, did, did they actually see it as, as maybe something that, that, that, that wasn't just Titanic and wasn't just modernist or authoritarian, but actually could reawaken the, the spiritual realm within us?
00:31:18.460 I mean, is, is that, is, and, and, and maybe that led them to disappointment.
00:31:22.720 Why don't you, John, why don't you just pick that up first?
00:31:25.900 It's just what, what, what is Evola's relationship to fascism and, and what, and what it could accomplish in the modern world?
00:31:33.380 Well, Evola was never a member of the fascist party, actually.
00:31:38.160 Uh, I mean, he, he was on, uh, personal terms with Mussolini and some of the other fascist leadership, but his involvement was sort of restricted to these essays that he wrote.
00:31:48.980 Uh, some of which were actually, uh, published in the, uh, you know, official fascist newspapers.
00:31:56.220 Uh, we published a collection of them in English in Arctos called Metaphysics of War.
00:32:01.000 Yeah.
00:32:01.680 Uh, although there's many more that, that haven't been translated yet.
00:32:06.160 Uh, but he, he basically, he saw that, he thought that fascism had potential.
00:32:12.560 Uh, I mean, he, he, uh, in fascism viewed from the right, which he wrote after the war, uh,
00:32:18.640 and which we've done in English.
00:32:19.900 He, uh, uh, he basically says that it had the potential to transcend its sort of, you know, bourgeois, you know, mass movement origins.
00:32:30.140 And he thought it, you know, it could become something more like the Holy Roman Empire.
00:32:35.060 Uh, I mean, he thought it, it ultimately failed in that, but I mean, he did see the seeds of many good things in it.
00:32:42.080 He actually does say in fascism viewed from the right that, uh, you know, the fact that fascism was defeated in war,
00:32:48.640 war, you know, that had bad fortunes in war shouldn't lead us to just dismiss it out of turn because he actually thought there were many positive aspects to Italian fascism.
00:32:58.560 He didn't actually think very highly of German national socialism.
00:33:02.640 Uh, but Italian fascism in many ways was actually more interesting from a, from a traditional standpoint because they still had a monarch.
00:33:09.700 Uh, it wasn't quite as totalitarian, uh, you know, it, it wasn't, uh, as obsessed with this biological view of race that the Nazis were.
00:33:19.920 Uh, so yeah, I, he, he saw that it had potential and there were actually some people who listened to him.
00:33:25.860 I, I don't think ever had any significant impact, uh, on Italian fascist policy other than maybe a little bit in their, their racial policies.
00:33:35.940 Uh, but apart from that, I mean, he was really, you know, kind of on the fringe, uh, and after the war, you know, of course he, he kind of, uh, uh, stopped being involved with politics altogether.
00:33:49.140 Hmm.
00:33:50.360 William, do you want to, uh, chime in on this subject?
00:33:53.880 Sure.
00:33:54.500 John covered it pretty well.
00:33:55.900 Um, yeah, Evolo was always sort of disappointed in the Italians for, uh, I think he said, you know, they're not quite worthy of fascism.
00:34:03.780 They're too bourgeois degraded.
00:34:07.080 He said that, uh, uh, it wasn't that fascism had failed the Italian people, but that the Italians had failed fascism.
00:34:14.220 Exactly.
00:34:15.060 Yeah.
00:34:15.520 He, uh, his work never really got too much traction in Italy.
00:34:19.320 Actually, uh, despite his disapproval of, um, national socialism, it did get a lot of traction in, um, Germany.
00:34:27.220 And the official, um, yeah, national socialist, uh, government was always a little bit, um, suspicious of him because his school of thought is basically, um, most congenial to the, um, conservative revolution in Germany, which includes Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and plenty of others.
00:34:44.400 But it was in these circles where he really became, um, fairly widely read.
00:34:50.380 And, of course, they tried to do the assassination attempt on Hitler. 0.78
00:34:53.260 But then after, after the war, all of this conservatism in Germany kind of, um, dries up and you don't really hear very much more about it.
00:35:01.660 But, um, yeah, he was actually more popular, um, in Germany and Austria at a certain point, um, than he was in Italy.
00:35:09.160 But, um, yeah, he did have hope for fascism that was ultimately, um, disappointed.
00:35:18.100 He said that basically the, the point of the state is in its transcendental function, basically enabling men to act in the name of something supernatural.
00:35:28.040 Yeah.
00:35:28.240 Um, and interestingly enough, it's basically something that transcends their own individual, individuality.
00:35:33.160 And Avila was always careful to, um, distinguish between two different types of, quote-unquote, transcending individuality.
00:35:40.760 He, um, on the one hand, he noted the, you know, the kind of state he advocates that enables, um, man to once again be in contact in the name, with the divine and act in the name of divine things.
00:35:53.940 But on the other hand, he noted, and so an example of that would be, you know, the kamikaze or something like this, the Japanese warrior spirituality that he admired during the time of the war.
00:36:04.600 But then his, um, kind of polar opposite of that, which is also sort of, quote, transcending individuality, but in kind of a subhuman direction, was the collectivism of, you know, communism in the Soviet Union, where, um, instead of being in touch with transcendent forces, you're in touch with, you know, kind of demonic collective, you know, subconscious.
00:36:23.940 Yeah.
00:36:24.940 That, um, so, but yeah, yeah, so you had hope for fascism that didn't quite, um, play out, especially in Italy, so.
00:36:33.940 Yeah.
00:36:34.540 Yeah.
00:36:34.660 Yeah.
00:36:34.940 No, I mean, in some ways, what we've seen in the post-war world has been this, uh, you know, until 89, 91, has been this battle between two big ideological empires that had very similar presumptions, in a way, um, that was, uh, you know, we can provide comfort, basically, better and more efficiently than you can.
00:36:59.560 Uh, it was, it was, it was kind of a, a battle of the last man, uh, at some level.
00:37:04.200 Uh, let me go, let, let's move to, um, the, this concept of, of race and the spirit, because I found this very fascinating.
00:37:12.200 I think one, while I was doing just some, um, some light research before we began talking, uh, one quote from Evola that stuck out is he said that the idea is our fatherland.
00:37:23.660 Um, and, and that is, in a way, a, uh, uh, something directed at, um, the, the racialism and nationalism of, say, the Nazis, um, who thought that, you know, obviously that your ethnos, your people, your race is, is the fatherland.
00:37:42.480 Um, and, uh, that he was, he was looking towards this platonic ideal, something higher than a mere human being or, or a race or something like that.
00:37:50.940 Um, and, and, and also his, he, he did have a very strong concept of race, but it was one that wasn't biological or genetic.
00:37:59.100 It was one that was really primarily spiritual.
00:38:02.520 Um, so why don't you, why don't, uh, John, I guess you can start with this one.
00:38:06.000 Um, maybe talk a little bit about Evola's concept of race.
00:38:10.120 Uh, what, what was it and how does it actually differ from both, uh, say the National Socialist conception and, and also from the conception of race that, um,
00:38:20.940 many people in our movement have, which is a kind of HBD genetic conception of race?
00:38:26.900 Well, I actually think, uh, I'll say a few words, but I actually think, uh, from what he said before we started recording, uh, William seems to know more about Evola's racial beliefs than myself.
00:38:38.320 But, uh, I, uh, he did, he didn't discount the, the biological.
00:38:45.760 I mean, it would be a mistake to say that he thought that race is purely a spiritual thing.
00:38:50.660 Right.
00:38:50.920 It was related to the biological, biological, but, uh, I mean, he actually was famously said that, uh, uh, somebody who is Aryan or European can possess a Judaic soul.
00:39:03.440 Yeah.
00:39:04.000 Just as, uh, you know, somebody of Jewish background, he thought could have an Aryan soul.
00:39:08.800 Like, uh, if you look at the thinkers who influenced Avola, uh, there were several Jews who, who had, uh, uh, big influence on him.
00:39:17.060 Like, uh, Otto Weininger would be, uh, a prominent one.
00:39:20.700 Uh, and he, and he sort of, uh, you know, explained this by saying, well, yeah, they, they have very much an, an Aryan, uh, soul.
00:39:27.100 Uh, so his, he, uh, I think as, as William was saying before we started recording, he thought that when one's, uh, spiritual nature, one's character was in line with one's biological nature, that that was the ideal, but that, you know, that's not always the case.
00:39:47.240 And in this, he was kind of similar to Spengler, uh, Spengler didn't really have much time for people who were purely biological racists.
00:39:56.660 In fact, I think it's in the hour of decision.
00:39:59.200 He says, uh, those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.
00:40:03.840 Yeah.
00:40:04.300 Uh, and his point was that, you know, we shouldn't just talk about, you know, racial purity, but, you know, characters should play into that as well.
00:40:11.680 And, you know, his, his argument was sort of, you know, and I think Avola would have agreed with this.
00:40:16.140 If somebody, even if they're of pure European descent, but they act like a complete degenerate in the way they live their lives, can we still really call that person Aryan? 1.00
00:40:26.880 Yeah.
00:40:27.520 Uh, because certainly, you know, in, in India and the Vedic tradition, where the word Aryan comes from, uh, it's actually, you know, has much more to do with character than with, uh, uh, you know, racial, uh, or ethnic concerns.
00:40:41.900 So, you know, I, I think that's an important thing for the right to inculcate because I, you know, I don't think we don't want just a society where everybody is European.
00:40:51.600 I mean, we want people, a society of people who act like, uh, you know, in accordance with the greatest ideals of Europe.
00:40:59.220 Oh, yeah. And we don't want to define, you know, being, being white or being Aryan or being European, whatever, what have you, as being, oh, see, we're more economically efficient units and we commit lower crime than other races. 0.83
00:41:13.480 Like that, that might very well be true. Uh, but that's really not a basis for anything, uh, of spiritual or noble.
00:41:23.200 Um, but William, what do you have to say about all this?
00:41:27.460 Sure. So, yeah, I mean, Evelyn's main problem with biological racism, as he puts it, is that it's this idea that the superior is determined by the inferior. 0.99
00:41:36.320 Like the, it's the character and the intellect and the spirit are all determined by biological heritage in a completely mechanistic way,
00:41:46.820 which is the reverse of the way Evelyn and probably Guénon see it, which is that your spiritual race, if anything, um, if at least if it's active,
00:41:57.080 is going to have a formative effect on these other two races and not the way, other way around.
00:42:02.860 Um, the idea that the, um, when Evelyn says, you know, the idea should be our fatherland,
00:42:08.100 it's important to, um, differentiate that from, you know, the American concept of what a nation is,
00:42:14.060 because on the surface it might sound quite similar, right? You know, America's an idea and exists everywhere where people eat Big Macs,
00:42:21.140 you know, it's not quite, uh, which is true.
00:42:23.820 Quite evidently, of course, it is true.
00:42:27.580 But, uh, it's really like John says, it's more based on the, um, platonic ideal of a transcendent idea.
00:42:34.880 Um, this is kind of related to how every single ancient city, um, thought of itself as being founded by a god
00:42:42.140 or by an archangel or something like this.
00:42:45.420 It's, there's kind of a divine basis that serves as the, um, the fount of authority for everything in the civilization.
00:42:54.340 Um, and yeah, so Evelyn thought there were three races, and basically these three races were of the body,
00:43:00.480 the character, or the soul, and the spirit.
00:43:03.700 And this pretty much corresponds exactly to Plato's idea of the three souls.
00:43:07.420 So, there's this idea that every person has kind of three races, which are ideally in harmony,
00:43:13.380 but in the modern world are almost always in some sort of level of disharmony.
00:43:17.400 And that real, quote, racial purification consists not in just purifying the biological race,
00:43:23.340 but in, once again, achieving a kind of harmony between the body, the soul, and the spirit.
00:43:30.480 Um, so, like he said, like John said, you know, you have these, quote-unquote, Aryans who act more like, um,
00:43:38.600 Jewish bankers or something like this.
00:43:40.780 Uh, I think he amusingly uses, like, the Scandinavians as an example of that.
00:43:45.260 Yes.
00:43:45.620 An example of, like, decorated, you know, pure-blooded people.
00:43:49.880 But, um, yeah, so, so basically, Evelyn's idea is that spiritual race has primacy over biological, 0.61
00:43:56.620 and he basically even says that, like I mentioned before, that these higher races have formative power over the lower races.
00:44:04.260 So, you know, the spiritual race has a formative power over your psyche and over your body,
00:44:09.740 over even the way you look, which seems like a pretty, um, phenomenal claim to make.
00:44:15.420 But he uses the example of, um, the Jews, for instance, who were completely ethnically diverse at the beginning of Judaism,
00:44:23.380 and then through this one spiritual tradition, kind of molded them into having, nowadays, you know,
00:44:29.580 very distinct ethnic traits, very distinct, um, psychological traits, even.
00:44:36.000 That's fascinating.
00:44:37.160 What does Evelyn think about Jewishness as a spiritual and racial concept in modernity?
00:44:42.960 So, yeah, he acknowledges the problem, um, the, quote, Jewish question, um, but he has a very different take on it
00:44:51.120 than, you know, say, like, most people of his time did.
00:44:54.720 He didn't have exactly a problem with the Jewish religious or mystical tradition, which he respected.
00:45:00.560 He uses the Kabbalah, for instance, in a number of his works as a positive reference.
00:45:05.320 Um, but his, like, his basic concept is that secularized Judaism, um, has more or less this kind of psyche
00:45:13.440 that Jewishness created when secularized, um, enables the emergence of a particularly regressive type of human being 0.98
00:45:21.760 who previously, in previous areas, had been kept in check.
00:45:25.140 So, he does acknowledge the problem, but he doesn't really have a problem with their religious tradition.
00:45:33.360 Um, so, he warns against the dangers of being distracted by kind of a limited worldview of the Jews being the source
00:45:41.200 of all the world's problems.
00:45:42.920 Um, he thinks that, basically, the currents of subversion in the world go far deeper than Jews 0.71
00:45:47.920 or just Freemasons or anything else, but these things are all kind of manifestations
00:45:52.720 of this deeper current of subversion.
00:45:55.360 Evola wrote an essay on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, uh, I don't think it's been translated yet,
00:46:02.260 but, but basically, what he said was that, well, it may actually be true that it's a forgery,
00:46:07.240 but he said, uh, that's irrelevant because it still accurately describes what's happening in the world today.
00:46:13.080 Hmm.
00:46:13.980 So, he sort of thought it had a deeper kind of, uh, you know, uh, esoteric metaphysical truth
00:46:20.080 about the state of the world, even if, even if it wasn't an actual document, actually, historical document, I should say.
00:46:27.340 No, that's, that's, um, that's fascinating.
00:46:29.740 That, that would be a pretty provocative text for Arctos to publish, but, uh, maybe,
00:46:33.880 maybe you should be a, a kind of a kamikaze and, and, uh, and go for it.
00:46:41.860 That's, it's possible.
00:46:42.900 Um, well, gentlemen, I have, uh, really enjoyed this conversation.
00:46:49.040 I've certainly learned something myself.
00:46:50.980 Why don't we just put a bookmark in it and, uh, and, and definitely return to Evola?
00:46:57.860 Because, uh, you know, as with all things, I think we just scratched the surface.
00:47:01.380 But, um, let, let's just do that.
00:47:04.120 Let, let's come back to this in a couple of months and maybe take on, uh, some other elements
00:47:09.040 of his, of his thought.
00:47:11.040 Uh, but first, uh, William, your first time on the podcast.
00:47:13.960 Thank you for being on.
00:47:16.180 Yeah, it's a pleasure being here.
00:47:17.300 Great.
00:47:17.620 And John, you're an old hand at this, uh, but thank you for joining me again.
00:47:22.060 Oh, you're welcome.
00:47:22.660 My pleasure.