Currents · by Frater Custos · 16-minute read

Julius Evola

A Dadaist painter who stops painting at twenty-three, writes for forty years about the Grail, tantra and tradition, signs books on race and retracts nothing. With the exact particulars — and two charges made against him constantly that are false.

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome on 19 May 1898 and died there on 11 June 1974. He studied engineering and deliberately refused to take his degree, as he would refuse all his life every title, post and membership card. He was an artillery officer in the Great War, then a Dadaist painter and poet in contact with Tristan Tzara; in 1922 he stopped painting abruptly, at twenty-four, and would never take it up again. From that moment on he only wrote.

This entry serves two purposes. The first is to give the bibliographical and documentary particulars of what he wrote, including the racist pages, with mastheads and dates instead of formulas. The second is to dismantle the false charges, which in Evola's case are numerous and continue to circulate — because a site that claims to verify its sources must do so even when the verification works to the advantage of someone it does not like.

First: the philosophy, and the absolute individual

Between 1925 and 1930 Evola publishes Saggi sull'idealismo magico (1925), Teoria dell'individuo assoluto (1927) and Fenomenologia dell'individuo assoluto (1930). The idea is that German idealism should be carried through to the end: if the subject posits the world, then the subject can will it, and freedom consists in an effective power over the real, not in a moral condition. It is philosophy written with a philosophical vocabulary, assessed at the time by Benedetto Croce with some interest and many reservations.

The Ur Group, and who had founded it

Between 1927 and 1929 the review Ur, later Krur, comes out in monthly instalments: an attempt at a «magic chain», that is, at an operative group publishing practical instructions signed with pseudonyms. Its contributors include, among others, Arturo Reghini — a Pythagorean and a Freemason, who is the real intellectual promoter of the project —, Giulio Parise, Emilio Servadio, Giovanni Colazza. Evola joins it and progressively takes control of it; in 1929 the group splits, and the break with Reghini is bitter. On how it ended, this entry corrects itself: it was previously written here that it «ends up in court», and that is a formulation that says too much. What is documented is more precise and more interesting, and is to be found in the entry devoted to the Ur Group.

The instalments would later be collected in a volume under the title Introduzione alla magia quale scienza dell'Io, and from there arises the most widespread misunderstanding: that the Ur Group was «Evola's». It was not. Evola was its most prolific contributor, and in 1955-56 the editor of the collection, which has handed him the authorship of the whole; but the framework came from Reghini, and the Pythagorean and Masonic part — which did not interest Evola — is his.

The major works

The book that defines him is Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (1934): a universal history read as continuous decline from a «traditional» world, hierarchical and sacred, towards the modern world, egalitarian and desacralised. Then Il mistero del Graal (1937), La dottrina del risveglio (1943) on early Buddhism read as an ascetic and heroic path, Lo yoga della potenza on tantra, Metafisica del sesso (1958), Cavalcare la tigre (1961) — the manual for someone who finds himself living in an age he considers lost — and the intellectual autobiography Il cammino del cinabro (1963).

Race: the particulars, without formulas

Here the titles and the dates are what is needed, not periphrases. Evola publishes Il mito del sangue in 1937 and Sintesi di dottrina della razza in 1941. He writes in La Difesa della Razza, the review edited by Telesio Interlandi, and collaborates with La Vita Italiana of Giovanni Preziosi, which is the principal seat of Italian antisemitism in the period. He also edits the Italian edition of the Protocolli dei Savi di Sion of 1937, with an introduction.

His theoretical position is distinct from the biological one, and it needs to be described exactly, because the distinction is used as a mitigating circumstance. Evola maintains a hierarchy on three levels — race of the body, race of the soul, race of the spirit — in which the decisive level is the third, and in which biological membership is not enough to determine worth. This puts him at odds with German and Italian biological racism; it does not put him outside racism, because the hierarchy remains, the Jew remains placed low within it, and the practical result coincides. On the Protocolli, moreover, the position is the classic one of useful denial: he admits that they may be a forgery and maintains that they would be «true» in substance all the same — an argument which is, itself, a method.

After the war Evola does not retract. There is no public declaration repudiating those pages, and anyone looking for the retraction does not find it because it does not exist. He scales down, contextualises, distinguishes: he does not retract.

Two false charges, and one to be stated precisely

He did not sign the Manifesto della razza of 1938. The signatories of the Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti published on 14 July 1938 are ten, they are known by name, and Evola is not among them. The charge arises from confusion with the list of three hundred and thirty adherences that circulates online and that historians have recognised as having no source — the same list that generates the parallel charge against Massimo Scaligero, which this site deals with elsewhere.

He was not a member of the SS, and he was not enrolled in the Partito Nazionale Fascista. On this the documentation is clear and runs in the opposite direction from the received account: the German intelligence reports concerning him, produced when he was frequenting circles of the Ahnenerbe and the Sicherheitsdienst, are wary. They judge him a «Roman reactionary» with ideas unusable by the regime, and advise against employing him. Evola sought those contacts; it was the Germans who did not want him.

The 1951 trial must be recounted in full. In 1951 Evola is charged in Rome with apologia for Fascism and as the inspirer of the FAR, the Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria. He is acquitted, and his defence statement — later published — is a remarkable text: he maintains that he is not a Fascist but something older and more radical, and that his ideas, if they are an offence, have been one for two thousand years. But «acquitted» means acquitted of that charge, not rehabilitated: the judgment says that his participation in the organisation was not proved, not that his writings were harmless. To use it as a general certificate is an abuse.

The long tail

Evola founded nothing, left no organised disciples and considered political activism an inferior form of existence. In spite of this — or precisely because of it — his influence on the European radical right of the second half of the twentieth century is broad and documented: Gli uomini e le rovine and Cavalcare la tigre functioned for decades as manuals of orientation for circles that he, while alive, judged mediocre. Since the Two Thousands his fortunes have grown again outside Italy, with translations and citations in Anglophone and Russian political contexts.

There is one last thing to say, and it concerns the method of this site more than it concerns Evola. His esoteric work — tantra, Buddhism, Hermeticism, the Grail — is still read today, including by people who have nothing to do with his political positions, and in some quarters it is considered serious reading, slanted though it is. They are two distinct things, and they are to be kept distinct in both directions: one cannot use the worth of the tantra books to mitigate the pages on the Protocolli, nor use the pages on the Protocolli to declare that the tantra books do not exist. Anyone who wants to judge has to read both, and this page serves to say where they are.

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