The Golden One - Starting With Julius Evola

00:00:00.000 Greetings my esteemed subscribers! In this video I thought to talk a bit about the books of Julius

00:00:07.760 Evola. Now I have posted a longer podcast episode, one hour, where I discuss the teachings of Julius

00:00:15.360 Evola. So if you're interested in hearing my take on those teachings, first link in the description

00:00:22.080 box below. Then, as I am fond of reminding you all that you must read all my book reviews,

00:00:28.800 I suppose some of you have read all of my book reviews. If so, I salute you. That warms my heart

00:00:36.080 to know. So if you haven't and if you're interested in Evola, then I suggest that you head over to the

00:00:42.960 second link in the description box below to thegoldenone.si where I have a section called

00:00:49.280 book reviews and there I have reviewed quite a few of Evola's works. Now on to the question at hand,

00:00:57.440 where to begin with Julius Evola. And I can actually respond in the following way, where not to begin.

00:01:05.920 You should not begin where I began a few years back with this book, Ride the Tiger. Now of course it has

00:01:14.880 an epic title and a nice cover and you've probably heard of it because the teaching itself is

00:01:21.760 very profound and valuable. So I don't regret reading it, even though I didn't understand much

00:01:28.640 about it during my first read-through. But I did understand the teaching, the central teaching, which

00:01:34.720 is to ride the tiger. So to give a concrete example that I have mentioned before, of course I talk about

00:01:41.360 this book or the teaching in Dauntless as well. So an example could be that you ride on the tiger,

00:01:48.960 which is modernity. If you fall off the tiger it will eat you and corrupt you. So to take an example,

00:01:57.040 you find it extremely nice to instead of going to MMA or instead of going to the gym on an afternoon

00:02:04.720 after school or work, instead of doing that you go into, you sit down on your sofa with some sweets

00:02:11.440 and you watch Netflix. That is to fall off the tiger or to watch porn or something like that.

00:02:17.680 So stay on top of your routines. We could say stay on top of your habits, stay on top of the tiger,

00:02:24.400 lest it mauls you and you will find yourself being depressed and without a purpose. Which,

00:02:30.640 you know, happens to many individuals in the modern world and they ask, why am I

00:02:35.360 depressed? And they live, you know, not particularly active lives. They are spending a lot of time on

00:02:41.520 the sofa watching Netflix and eating bad food. So anyway, this is a longer topic, but I just thought

00:02:49.440 to mention that it contains that valuable teaching, so I don't regret reading it. But when I read it when

00:02:57.120 I was 26, now I am almost 33 000 years old. I reread this a few months back and I still didn't really

00:03:08.480 find it all too interesting. Of course, I did understand it in a different way than I did first

00:03:14.480 upon reading it, but this is not Evola at its best. This is not Evola that, you know, is really,

00:03:20.640 really interesting. Here he discusses the philosophy of others, which isn't really all too interesting.

00:03:26.240 So I wouldn't recommend reading the book at all, unless you are a true Evola connoisseur,

00:03:33.760 an enthusiast of Evola's works. So that being said, you can, of course, read it if you

00:03:39.760 are interested in that sort of stuff. I wouldn't recommend starting with it at all. And if you don't

00:03:45.680 find it particularly interesting and you say to yourself, oh, what's the hype about? This isn't

00:03:50.400 particularly interesting. Yeah, it's because the book isn't his finest work, so to speak. I would

00:03:57.680 actually say that I haven't read all of his books, but I've read enough of them to say that this is his

00:04:04.000 least interesting book. So with that being said, I would like to say that you can approach Evola in two

00:04:10.080 different ways. So you can approach him as the magical Evola, which in my humble opinion is the

00:04:16.320 more interesting Evola. Secondly, the political Evola, which, you know, he has some interesting

00:04:23.200 takes in regards to those matters as well. But most of us, I'd say, I do believe that you're also,

00:04:30.640 you know, aware of the political situation we find ourselves in. So it's not really something that is

00:04:36.960 so interesting for us at this stage. It would have been different if you read it during the,

00:04:42.000 say, 80s or something like that. But for most of us, it's not really new. But the magical teachings

00:04:48.960 are more exciting in that way. So you can approach Evola in two different ways. And for me personally,

00:04:56.160 the books I have found to be more, to be more high thumos, yeah, it would be the more esoteric,

00:05:02.160 the more spiritual of his books. Now, on to the question at hand. I have rambled on for long

00:05:09.840 enough without actually responding to where to start. I would say that you should start with

00:05:14.880 the following fine masterwork. So that is his Magnum Opus. That is his masterwork. And

00:05:23.600 if you read it, you will also gain a good introduction to other topics he talks about

00:05:28.480 at length in different books. So if you read this, you will encounter many of the teachings

00:05:33.520 in other books. Now, also to keep in mind here, a while back, I made a video titled

00:05:39.040 Bombard your mind. If you haven't watched that video, I recommend that you do so.

00:05:44.240 Basically, what I say there is that if you want to understand something, if you want to understand

00:05:49.520 the teachings of Evola, which at a first read, they are quite hard to understand. Hard for me too.

00:05:55.360 But the more you read, the easier it becomes to understand. So this I actually read quite recently,

00:06:01.440 after I had already read quite a few of his books. So it was quite smooth for me to read,

00:06:07.520 because I had encountered many of the teachings before, and I had contemplated, I had digested

00:06:14.240 said teachings. So if you start, if you haven't read any of his books, and you start with this,

00:06:18.880 and you find it to be very hard, complicated, completely fine. Completely fine. Not something

00:06:25.360 to stress about at all. Just keep reading his books, and it will dawn. Many teachings will become

00:06:32.720 clear the more you read, because he writes from different perspectives in the books. This also leads

00:06:38.160 me into the second book I recommend if I were to give a top three, and that's Men Among the Ruins.

00:06:46.240 So it's quite similar in its style to Revolt Against the Modern World. You could also use this as a first

00:06:52.640 book to get acquainted with his teachings. So both of these books, they contain both a bit of

00:06:58.880 social commentary and some more esoteric commentary. Now, if you don't want to invest so much time,

00:07:07.200 because I would say that Revolt Against the Modern World, it will take quite a bit of time to read,

00:07:12.000 to digest, and to reread, which you probably should do. I have reread some of his books just to,

00:07:19.440 you know, properly digest all of the teachings, because they can be quite dense. The Hermetic

00:07:25.200 tradition, I wrote it in my book review, that I reread it directly upon finishing it, because

00:07:30.400 many of the teachings, they were so, yeah, they needed to be properly digested. Now, anyway,

00:07:36.880 if you want something lighter, not lighter in the in the sense that the teachings are light,

00:07:42.320 they're quite profound, but Metaphysics of War, you see, that's quite thin. I haven't written a book

00:07:48.640 review on it, but I do reference to it in Dauntless, so it might be familiar if you have read Dauntless,

00:07:56.960 which I suppose all of you, most of you, have done. Now, speaking of the magical Evola, you have

00:08:03.760 the three volumes of Introduction to Magic. It's primarily Evola's work, but some other essays by

00:08:11.760 his companions in the Ur group. So yeah, some insights from his companions there as well. That

00:08:18.320 can be a good starting point. The first one you can read by itself, it's more practical in its nature.

00:08:24.080 The second and third ones are a bit more theory. And now to respond to the question, which is my

00:08:30.640 favorite Evola book? It's a tough question, but I would say that it's probably the mystery of the

00:08:37.120 Grail. Because it's a bit more esoteric and also he analyzes the spiritual aspect of the medieval

00:08:45.840 conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope. I have written about this many times in my book

00:08:52.000 reviews and Evola writes about it all the time, including in Revolt Against the Modern World and

00:08:57.520 Men Among the Ruins. This is more specifically about that teaching and of course the Grail legend. I

00:09:04.240 suppose we're all great fans of it. If you're a fan of my work, I can only suppose that you're also

00:09:10.800 interested in the Grail legend. I sure am, so it was nice reading it. And again, in my humble opinion,

00:09:18.320 the best Evola is the magical esoteric Evola. Because ultimately, as I said, the political stuff,

00:09:26.000 the social stuff, there are so many others who can write well about it. And I suppose many of us were

00:09:33.120 quite, we've had our fill of political theory and everything like that. So it's more interesting to

00:09:40.080 develop this magical path. And Evola, he writes from a right-wing perspective. So when he writes about

00:09:48.400 yoga and Buddhism, as I wrote in my review of the yoga of power, he does it from a high thumos

00:09:56.240 perspective. So you can access these teachings from a high thumos perspective and not a

00:10:04.480 hippie nonsense perspective. Which, you know, Buddhism, I would say that most people, they think

00:10:10.720 it's, you know, hippie nonsense. But Evola, he can present it to us in a different way, which is

00:10:17.120 very appealing, I would say. But anyway, those are just my own thoughts. I am more interested in the

00:10:23.920 magical stuff. Then you have some good historical and social commentary as well. You have Metaphysics of

00:10:30.960 Power. I wrote a shorter review of it. So it's a collection of essays in which he, one of the essays,

00:10:37.840 he discusses the very interesting concept of race of body, race of soul, race of the spirit,

00:10:43.840 which I elaborate on at length in the latest podcast episode, by the way. So if you're interested in

00:10:50.240 that, then yeah, listen to the podcast. And you can, of course, also read this fine book. In the book,

00:10:56.560 he also elaborates on his critique of Francis Philip the Fair, who centralized power. And of course,

00:11:04.640 Evola wasn't a fan of that at all, because he was on the side of the aristocrats. A very long topic.

00:11:12.640 I elaborate on it in the podcast as well. And I do elaborate on it in many of the book reviews.

00:11:19.040 Now, of course, I do have some critique of Evola's teachings. If you want to read about

00:11:25.040 said critique, you can read my book review of Men Among the Ruins. I made that review a bit longer

00:11:31.600 to give an overall take on the teachings of Evola. And to give a more fun, light-hearted example,

00:11:39.200 he denotes boxing as American barbarism, basically. And for me personally, of course,

00:11:45.680 I encourage you all to box and to train MMA and stuff like that. But had he lived today,

00:11:52.080 he would probably, hopefully, agree with my assessment. Because, yeah, the world looks a bit

00:11:57.520 different, even though he predicted it to a large extent, the decline of the West. But anyway,

00:12:04.480 I could ramble on more about the books, but I've written so much on my page, thegoldenone.se. So

00:12:10.240 read through my reviews there, listen to the podcast if you like. But to respond to the question at hand,

00:12:17.200 where to begin? I would say his greatest work, Revolt Against the Modern World. Then you can decide

00:12:24.960 which skill tree you would like to level. So you can level the magical skill tree. Again,

00:12:30.800 which I find a bit more interesting. And then you have this volume's introduction to magic, which

00:12:37.280 I found quite interesting indeed. So anyway, thank you for watching and have a Hithumos day ahead. 0.71

00:12:46.800 XFXO, BOOM!

The Golden One - July 25, 2022

Starting With Julius Evola

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