Currents · by Frater Custos · 15-minute read

The Ur Group

Twenty-four months of a periodical that came out in Rome with no proper names beneath the articles, and that in 1955 was reprinted by one of its authors with cuts and additions. Ever since, almost everyone cites the book believing they are citing the periodical. Here the two are kept apart.

Between the end of 1926 and December 1929, in Rome, a group of people gathers and publishes a periodical in fascicles. It is called Ur for two years, then Krur. The articles appear signed with pseudonyms, on a principle stated by the editors: «active impersonality», the idea that the individual self counts for nothing beside what is being transmitted. The group breaks up in a little over two years, in a rupture that ends up before a judge.

It is one of the most cited and least read things in twentieth-century Italian esotericism. This entry sets out what is documented — with the dates, the exact titles and the archival reference where one exists — and states, line by line, what is not.

Who founded it: the point that remains open

I begin with the gap, because it comes first. It has not been settled who took the initiative. There are four reconstructions and they are not compatible with one another.

What can be said without choosing: the group forms between the end of 1926 and January 1927, in Rome; the first fascicle appears at the end of January 1927; the editorship of the periodical is Evola's from that fascicle onwards. The attribution of the initiative is not. Current estimates give the core twelve or fifteen people, with local operative «chains» — but that is an estimate by scholars, not a roll: no primary list of names exists.

The three central names, and the background

Arturo Reghini (Florence 1878 – Budrio 1946), mathematician, neo-Pythagorean, a 33rd-degree Mason of the Scottish Rite from 1921. He had already edited Atanòr in 1924 and Ignis in 1925. In Ur he signs himself Pietro Negri. Julius Evola (Rome 1898-1974) edits the periodical from 1927 and, from 1929, Krur. Giulio Parise (Vicenza 1902 – Rome 1969), a pupil of Reghini and a Mason of the «Pagano» lodge, signs himself Luce.

The background is documented by the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani: in 1925 Evola gave lectures and a course in spiritual culture at the Rome premises of the Lega Teosofica Indipendente, led by Decio Calvari; Reghini had been in the Theosophical Society since 1898. It is a continuity of milieu and of persons — not of institution: an organisational or legal continuity between the Lega and the Ur Group is not attested.

Around them: Giovanni Colazza, a physician, the Italian disciple closest to Steiner, signs himself Leo; Ercole Quadrelli (1879-1948), a Latinist and Hellenist, signs himself Abraxa and Tikaipos; Emilio Servadio (1904-1995), later a psychoanalyst and among the founders of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society; Guido De Giorgio (1890-1957), a Catholic, a correspondent of Guénon, signs himself Havismat; the poet Girolamo Comi (Gic); the mountaineer and theorist of mountaineering Domenico Rudatis (Rud).

The periodical, with the exact figures

Two observations are worth the table. The first: those who present «10 fascicles» and «12 issues» online as conflicting data are mistaken — they are two counts of the same year, nominal issues against physical fascicles, because some came out as doubles. The second, which is more interesting: the title Introduzione alla Magia quale scienza dell’Io, under which the work has been known since 1955, is not a 1955 invention. It is already the masthead subtitle of the second series, in 1928, and can be read on the title pages.

On the editorship: in 1927 it is Evola. In 1928 he is joined by Pietro Negri and Luce, and on the back cover of the October fascicle there appears a statement reasserting «an absolute unity of editorial direction» — a statement which, as will be seen, arrives at the exact moment when that unity no longer exists. In 1929, with Krur, Evola is alone.

The pseudonyms: what is known and what is conjectured

The identifications go back to the researches of Renato Del Ponte, who in 1994 published a summary index of the contributors, and of Gianfranco de Turris; they were then taken up by Hakl. They must, however, be kept on two levels, and almost no one does so.

And there remain unidentified: Alba, Arom, Nilius, Primo Sole, Zam, Atro, Straali, X, Vendis, Je, Arco.

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The philological problem: Introduzione alla magia is not Ur

This is the point for which it is worth reading this far, and it is the commonest methodological error made about the Ur Group.

In 1955-56 the fascicles were collected into three volumes with Fratelli Bocca, Rome — the first two in August-September 1955, the third in May 1956 — under the title Introduzione alla magia quale scienza dell’Io. The editor was Evola, who declared the texts «revised, corrected and expanded». In 1971 Edizioni Mediterranee republished them with further revisions by the same Evola. Only in 1980-81, with Edizioni Tilopa, did the anastatic reprint of the original fascicles appear.

Introduzione alla magia is therefore an authorial redaction made some twenty years later, by Evola alone. The documented interventions are of three kinds:

• Suppressions. Texts judged by the editor «insignificant or no longer relevant» were removed, as were monographs that later went into books of their own — material that passed into La tradizione ermetica and into L’aurora dell’Occidente, critical essays on modern spiritualism. The Anthroposophical milieu further notes the toning down of the references to Steiner.
• Additions that were not there in 1927-29. A text on esotericism, the unconscious and psychoanalysis; one on magical perspectives according to Aleister Crowley; Rievocazione di segni e di gesti; René Guénon's essay Su due simboli iperborei; Del distacco by Massimo Scaligero; Esperienze fra gli arabi.
• Rearrangement. The editorial note states that certain monographs were not reprinted and were replaced with «complementary texts», so as to ensure coherence and progression.

From this follows a correction: «Guénon and Crowley contributed to Ur» is false. Guénon's essay and the text on Crowleyan perspectives appear among the additions of 1955-56, not in the fascicles. And the identification Agnostus = Guénon remains a conjecture.

But a counter-correction follows as well, against another legend: Reghini and Parise were not expunged. The contents of the collection still include texts signed Pietro Negri — for instance Sub specie interioritatis — and Luce, with the Opus magicum series. There was no wholesale damnatio memoriae.

The rupture, and what the papers actually say

In October 1928 Reghini and Parise, who maintain relations with Freemasonry, attempt to take the editorship and ownership of the periodical away from Evola. The attempt fails — the statement of «absolute unity of editorial direction» belongs to that fascicle. The dispute over ownership of the periodical does not reach court: according to Fabrizio Giorgio's reconstruction, the good offices of Aniceto Del Massa and Mario Puglisi prevented it. In December 1928 Ur ceases publication.

In January 1929 Reghini brings out a single fascicle of the new series of Ignis, with Parise as nominal editor, and there accuses Evola of plagiarism: he maintains that sections of Imperialismo pagano derive from an article of his own of the same title of 1924. Evola replies publicly, denounces Reghini as a Mason and asks the government to take measures against him. Proceedings follow: the hearings are held in February 1930, and in the course of those hearings two opposed factions confronted one another, physically as well.

The stated programme, and how it ended

The group declared two aims: to arouse a supersensible force useful to the inner development of its members, and to direct it towards the surrounding environment — in the formula recurrent in the periodical, to act «behind the scenes of history». It is the textual premise on which all the later reconstructions rest, including the most fanciful.

On what was actually attempted, historiographical positions exist and must be recorded as such: Renato Del Ponte devoted an explicit essay to the subject in the volume edited by de Turris in 2015; Davide Marino and Milan Reith, in «Aries» in 2025, describe Evola's trajectory in these years as esoteric collaborationism and observe that the regime did not take up the overtures, and that the 1925-26 legislation on associations had already struck at Reghini's Masonic milieu; Marco Rossi gave the overall academic framing in the Einaudi Annali on esotericism, in 2010. In his own autobiography of 1963, Il cammino del Cinabro, Evola states the intention of orienting Fascism in a «traditional» direction and reports that Mussolini is said to have feared «the danger of a magical action at a distance» on the group's part. It is a retrospective testimony by the interested party, given more than thirty years later, and I have found no independent documentary corroboration.

The end is more prosaic. In December 1929 Evola announces in Krur the conclusion of the undertaking; the «chains» had already ceased to operate. In 1930 he carries on alone with La Torre, ten issues from February to June, to which De Giorgio, Comi, Rudatis and Servadio contribute; the paper ceases after the intervention of Achille Starace, who made it impossible to print in the Roman printing houses — and this datum, unlike the others, is in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. It should be noted for context that as early as 1927 the group had been attacked in the pages of «Studium» by Giovanni Battista Montini, at the time central ecclesiastical assistant of the FUCI.

What circulates without a source

«Founded by Evola in 1927.» A double error: the documented chronology is of the end of 1926, and the attribution of the initiative to Evola is one of the versions in the field, not a datum.

«The magical chains were operated against political targets.» There is only one textual basis: the article signed Ekatlos, La Grande Orma: la scena e le quinte, published in Krur in 1929, which recounts the action of an operative circle upon the fortunes of the Great War and upon the advent of Fascism. No external documentation exists. Cristian Guzzo, who in 2019 devoted a reconstruction on archival documentation to the case, treats the affair explicitly as mythopoeia. On Ekatlos's identity three incompatible hypotheses circulate — Leone Caetani, an anonymous woman author, or a circle around Maria Calzone Mongenet: none of the three is demonstrated.

«The Ur Group's rites at a distance.» The phrase has no documentary support. It arises from the combination of Ekatlos's account with Evola's sentence about the «magical action at a distance» feared by Mussolini, and has been amplified by the popular literature on «magical Fascism» — including at least one title that is a novel, not a study, and that is regularly cited as though it were a historical source.

«Mussolini had it dissolved.» The only source is Evola on himself. The Dizionario Biografico attributes the end of the group to the internal split, and Starace's intervention concerns La Torre, which is another periodical and another year.

«Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism derives from the Ur Group.» Without support. In the 1995 essay «Ur-» is the ordinary German prefix, «original, primeval». There appears to be no statement by Eco to that effect.

«The group numbered twelve members.» It is an estimate by scholars, not a roll. It should be given as an estimate.

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