Revolts Against the Modern World

Editors' Note: Though coming from an academic and materialist perspective, and highly critical of Evola and what the author terms the 'sacred Right,' we felt this piece to be of interest to readers of SYNTHESIS because of the amount and detail of well-substantiated information, for its erudition, and for certain interesting conclusions and parallel correspondences to be found within. It is being reprinted here with the kind permission of the author on condition that it is understood that he dissociates himself from the ideological thrust of any of the other material available on this website. This is a corrected but unrevised version of the article first published in Literature and History, vol. 11, no. 1, (Spring 1985), pp. 101-124. The Editors would like to give their sincere thanks to Professor Griffin for permission to reprint this work.

Never had I more excited, passionate, fantastical imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible.

-- W. B. Yates, The Tower (1926)

On 10 September 1983 there appeared in the cultural supplement of La Stampa among a group of articles marking the publication of Tolkien's biography a piece written by the president of the Tolkien Society in Italy entitled 'Why He Became a Cult for Us'. A hidden dimension of significance to this innocuous title begins to open up when it turns out to have been penned by Gianfranco de Turris, not only one of Italy's major publishers and cognoscenti of literature of the fantastic, but also a prominent propagandist of the neo-fascist Right. Another propagandist of ultra-Right ideas is Marco Tarchi, who in his programmatic Beyond Right and Left (meaning conventional definitions of these two positions) writes 'we had an example of what it means to belong spontaneously to a cohesive group-mind without any leadership in the years in which many of us discovered Tolkien, the fantastic, the saga'.[1] Perhaps the most striking symptoms of the Italian neo-Right's adoption of Tolkien as one of its official sources, however, lies in the fact that the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano chose to call the summer camp organized for its youth section, Il Fronte della Gioventù, in the Abruzzi 'Camp Hobbit'. No less significantly, the volume commemorating the foundation of the Italian New Right in 1977 was called Hobbit/Hobbit and the title of its publishing cooperative is 'The Rock of Erec'.

Such facts underline how erroneous it would be to approach Euro-fascism simply in terms of a mimetic revival of the fascist creeds of the thirties. Academic attempts to characterise 'classical' fascist ideology have always had to contend with the problems of classifying and assessing the significance for theory and practice of a bewildering array of different component ideas and positions coexisting even within ostensibly the same national movement. As a result it is even a matter of considerable debate whether fascism can be used as a generic term at all, let alone whether it has any ideology in the stricter senses of this intrinsically loose term, beyond a nebulous 'irrationalism' or 'negativity'.[2] The same dilemma is posed in an even more acute form in the context of contemporary New Right /fascist (even here distinctions are subtle) 'culture', for here so many factions proliferate with their own formulations or rationalisations of radical anti-communism and anti-liberalism that commentators have recourse to distinctions that to the uninitiated can sound scholastic. For example Furio Jesi in his Cultura di Destra,[3] which concentrates on the contemporary Italian scene, extends the distinction conventionally made by Italian historians between 'respectable' and 'violent' fascism with the categories 'profane/ exoteric', (involving secular, pseudo-scientific arguments and goals) and 'sacred/esoteric', (drawing on a legacy of occultist or quasi-mystical notions).[4] Sheehan, in an article for the New York Review,[5] refers to an 'ideological tension' between de Benoist's 'Nietzschean nominalism' which underlies some of the French ultra-Right groupings and the 'bizarre metaphysics' that are invoked by such Italian factions as Third Position.[6] Giorgio Galli is also aware of the complex elements which constitute 'Right-wing Culture', but picks out as the most 'interesting' strand of the New Right the one which draws on the counterculture of the nineteen-sixties.[7] It is precisely within this 'sacred', 'metaphysical' Right that de Turris and Tarchi are to be situated.

But the three have something else in common which puts the taste for Tolkien in another perspective again, namely a profound debt to a figure who, though conspicuous by his absence from the annals of Europe's 'official' post-war culture, is arguably the most important single influence on neo-fascist thought in Italy: Julius Evola. Jesi concentrates extensively on him in his Cultura di Destra and claims 'Neo-fascism needs Evola, especially to feed the minds of the youngest recruits',[8] while for Galli he is 'one of the most qualified representatives of Right Wing culture'.[9] In similar vein Sheehan argues that Evola is the major source of the 'metaphysics' on which neo-fascist violence is based.[10] More to the point, all three Tolkien aficionados already considered testify to the impact Evola has had on them. Tarchi has not only written on him and been interviewed as an 'expert' on him in the Right Wing press, but also directs the Rome-based Evola Foundation which reissues choice samples of his master's voice. (His right to do so is hotly disputed by Renato del Ponte who from his Genoan base has poured his energies into the magazine Arthos and the Evolian Study Centre to keep followers informed.)[11] Even more prolific has been de Turris, who, apart from writing numerous articles, produced his Homage to Julius Evola,[12] and edited the voluminous Testimonies[13] in which some thirty representatives of the 'sacred' New Right in Europe bore witness to the seminal importance of their guru. If imitation is the best form of flattery, then the most eloquent testimony to Evola's influence is perhaps the MSI deputy and 'intransigent' Fascist Pino Rauti, who heavily plagiarised him to set forth his own political vision in The Ideas that Moved the World and is able to apply Evolian principles to the policies he advocates in the Italian parliament.[14]

But what are these principles? For over fifty years, till he died in 1974 at the age of seventy-six, Evola was a highly prolific writer producing a stream of articles, essays, translations and substantial tomes expounding his analysis of philosophical, cultural and political issues. Accordingly his work is far from simple to summarise, especially in view of the highly 'unorthodox' ideas it expresses, but the best introduction to the principles at the heart of all his writings is probably The Revolt Against the Modern World,[15] published in 1933, and reissued with significant revisions to reach the second reprint of the fifth edition by 1980. In it, with seemingly compendious scholarship, Evola establishes the typology of two fundamentally opposed forms of society: the 'modern', essentially secular and based on the 'inferior realm of becoming', represents an onslaught on the original type based on the 'superior invisible realm of being', the only one with any substantial reality. This latter is called 'Traditional', a key term for the understanding of contemporary neo-fascist thought. (Evola only hypostatises the nominal form 'Tradition' but to avoid confusion I will do so also when using the adjectival form). A Traditional society is one in which the individual is an organic part of a hierarchical state governed by a caste of warrior-priests, custodians of supra-temporal, metaphysical truths, and headed in their turn by a monarch. Such a state, echoes of which Evola sees in the hierarchical social systems, myths and legends past of various civilisations, cultivates life as an essentially initiatic experience from which the degenerative forces of secularism, egalitarianism and individualism are kept at bay by ritual and the iron rule of law and caste.

However in accordance with the pattern of decay and rebirth operating gradually through the life-cycle of entire civilisations, such Traditional societies as have existed in history have been subject to an insidious decadence. As a result twentieth-century Western society now finds itself at the nadir of the cycle, nearing the end of what is known to the Hindus as the 'kali yuga', the black age. All the social institutions and spiritual forces that constitute the 'modem' age are symptoms of an irreversible decline from the world of Tradition which set in perceptibly with Greek rationalism of the sixth-century B.C. and was only temporarily retarded by the Roman empire and the Ghibelline phase of the Middle Ages in Europe: the principles of the Holy Roman Empire, through a fusion of military and priestly virtues, were already a pale reflection of the true hierarchic state.

It is at this point of Evola's epic 'history' that a significant difference emerges between the 1934 and 1951 editions of the Revolt, for whereas the pre-war version looks to international fascism as holding out the prospect of a cultural rebirth, marking a re-entry into a new golden age of Traditional values, the post-war edition can only advocate a stoic inner resistance to a world in which 'Bolshevism and Americanism' will eclipse the true 'immortal principles' (so different from their Enlightenment travesty of 1789) for the foreseeable future. Both Evola's charges against the modern world as well as the predicament of those spiritually rooted in the 'world of Tradition' are given more extended treatment in his most influential post-war work, Riding the Tiger. First published in 1961 and revised in 1971 this is an indictment of the philosophical, sociological, and political manifestations of the 'kali yuga', the terminal phase of the decadence of contemporary culture: existentialism, relativism, rock music, drugs, the decay of the family ethic, the general levelling tendencies of a materialistic society, the proliferation of political parties in 'democratic' Italy all point to a terminal phase of dissolution. Since no party or movement can now reverse this degenerative process till the disease has run its course, the exile from the 'Tradition' has no option but to 'ride the tiger' of modernity, confident in the knowledge that sooner or later it must collapse exhausted (the phrase is taken from a 'saying in the Far East'). Meanwhile the only suitable political response, there being 'nothing any more that really deserves a full dedication and profound commitment', is one of 'apolitiá',[17] i.e. a refusal to dedicate oneself to any existing political 'cause'. However this does not exclude political acts as long as they are carried out disinterestedly, gratuitously.

This, in its essentials, is the Traditionalist world-view, and Evola applies it to the condemnation of features of post-war society that the uninitiated might take to be allies of his crusade, such as attempts to revive the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini or the growing interest in Eastern metaphysical systems of thought. According to Evola, Nazism and Fascism were doomed from the start because, instead of seeking to re-establish an 'organic' state on the Traditional model, they create its travesty, the totalitarian state, flawed in its very conception, both by the levelling forces exerted by the masses it had to enlist in its support, and in its exaltation of 'modern' technology and bureaucratic apparatus, not to mention the blinkered nationalism so far removed from a genuine 'imperialism'.[18] In a similar way he argues that the process of dissolution is only accelerated by those who look to some mythical "East" to supply the inspiration of cultural regeneration, for without the key to Traditional principles fragments of archetypal wisdom cannot be integrated into a healthy world-view. The New Right is to be something generically different from the old.[19]

But no matter how 'new' the Italian New Right's message may be, it is an essential component of guru-like Evola's aura for his followers that he had been preaching the ideas on which it is based as a voice crying in the wilderness long before he was 'discovered' in the late sixties. He was already over seventy when, as de Turris writes in his biographical appendix to the Testimonies, 'a sense of urgency seized many young people, an almost physical necessity' to have more books by Evola to read, to show, to give as presents, to lend'.[20] The Evola boom had started. The image of a solitary prophet, Nietzschean in both his genius and the uncompromising radicalness of his message to an age too corrupt to appreciate it, but moreover endowed with the initiatic paranormal powers of a seer, recurs frequently in tributes to Evola. In them we encounter such phrases as 'the perennial watch', 'the flight of the dragon', 'the icy way', 'the guardian of the threshold', 'the guide to the primordial realm of being', 'the crystal of the absolute', 'the Master of the spirit', 'the son of Hermes', 'the revealer of the forces of light'. Giovanni Volpe, who, with his distinguished Fascist pedigree,[21] is one of the most prominent publishers of ultra-right authors, talks of Evola as 'a man of another age', 'of another mettle', making 'no concessions to the human need to adjust to the moment'.[22]

This particular aspect of Evola does suggest some real if superficial parallels with Tolkien. Born six years before Evola (he died a year before him in 1973), Tolkien in the late nineteen-twenties started work on the narrative cycle that was to eventually embrace The Hobbit, (1936), The Lord of the Rings, (1954) and The Similarion (uncompleted). At first he had a small cult following. It was only in the mid-sixties that his works became internationally famous, firmly establishing themselves in the counter-culture 'top ten' of prescribed texts. De Turris himself stresses the fact that Tolkien's vision long predates his fame: 'The Lord of the Rings is a rare phenomenon because it is not a product of the "cultural industry" which makes and destroys fashions and best-sellers on a day to day basis, manipulating the taste of the readers, it is not an "instant book"'.[23] What Tolkien and Evola thus share in the eyes of their Neo-Right adulators is an importance in inverse proportion to their recognition by the prevailing aesthetic or ideological norms of society: thus de Tunis speaks of the growing Tolkien cult in Italy existing 'despite the indifference and hostility of "official culture"'.[24] Similarly Romualdi declares that his intention in writing Evola: The Man and the Work (published by Volpe) is to demonstrate that 'the name ignored by "official culture" means something to a growing number of readers'.[25]

However the paths which led to both Evola and Tolkien acquiring a similar status as heroes of the New Right in Italy could hardly have been more contrasting. Tolkien's career is now legendary: the Magdalen professor of English literature with a life-long passion for Celtic mythology who in a moment of boredom while marking Schools exam papers wrote the line 'In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit' and in terms of literary success, at least, never looked back. Evola, who never completed his engineering degree apparently out of 'disdain for academic titles'[26] first surfaced in Italian cultural life as a teenage member of the circle round Papini, who had published A Nationalist Programme in 1908 and was now bringing out the 'Nietzschean' periodical Lacerba. He quickly ran through the gamut of avant-garde art movements of the day, in his own words graduating 'from decadentism, symbolism and analogism right through to "abstract" and dadaist composition',[27] (futurism he came to reject characteristically as a symptom of degenerate modernism).[28] In practice this meant several slim collections of highly cryptic alogical poems (some in French) and some sixty non-figurative (almost constructivist!) paintings, such as 'Inner Landscape 10.30 A.M.',[29] which still hangs in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. The contradiction of this ultra-modernism with the ultra-conservatism of Evola's later years turns out on closer inspection, however, to be only apparent. The central theme of the theoretical essay on modem art published in the Collection Dada in 1920 is that only Abstract Art 'is capable of expressing the existence of a Self beyond categories [...] for which everyday life appears alien and unreal excrescence, an unintelligible swelling and corruption of my nocturnal spheres (sic!) Je est un autre'. The Self, we learn, is completely ignored in the 'non-life' of the 'man of the market-place' based on 'indolence, cowardice and corruption'.[30]

Here we already are presented with the kernel of all Evola's subsequent thought, for it was a short but logical step from this highly intellectual form of aestheticism which he adopted as 'Italy's foremost exponent of Dada'[31] to unabashed occultism. Dedicating himself to four years of voracious reading into the world's mysticism, religion and mythology, and with none of the inhibitions, scruples (or irony) of a professional philologist, Evola reconstituted to his own satisfaction the archetypal Truths buried in the cultural debris left over from centuries of decline. He was able to convince himself that at the core of all the heroic cultures of the past lay the experience of an immortal Self rooted in a timeless, invisible realm of true power on which the whole edifice of religion, government and social life was based. This enormously extended the historical scope and empirical arsenal of his contempt for the conventional values and life-styles characteristic of the modern world. He now had a total cosmology with which to castigate his contemporaries. The result was a series of works on occultism: Essays on Magic Idealism[32], Man as Power[33], The Individual and Becoming[34], The Theory of Absolute Idealism[35], Pagan Imperialism[36]. By the end of 1926 he had formed an occultist group, Ur (later called Krur) which for three years published a review, the articles from which were later published in a limited edition as Introduction to the Magic and Science of the Self[37].

Meanwhile Mussolini's regime had firmly established itself and was embarked on its attempt at the total transformation of Italian culture. In 1930 Evola entered the political arena, not in an overtly propagandistic way, but using a strategy which has been crucial to all 'Evolian' politics ever since, namely the critique of various features of the contemporary age from the Olympian heights of the 'supra-temporal', essentially metapolitical world-view now to be called 'the Tradition'. Modelling himself on Papini's Lacerba of twenty years before, Evola and some of his followers brought out The Tower[38], a monthly magazine of articles on topics ranging from the decline of the west to a criticism of psychoanalysis, from Robespierre to the metaphysics of fairy-tales. The Tower, once its abstruse style has been decoded, is a scathing indictment not only of democracy in any form, but also of the Fascist travesty of a 'true' hierarchical state, and was suspended after ten issues in June 1933. In 1977 all the issues were republished in one volume by none other than Marco Tarchi, who writes at the end of his preface that Evola intended to relaunch The Tower in the early sixties, and that 'By renouncing this idea he has deprived us of an interesting document of the revolt of an "integral" and "radical" Right in the face of an anti-fascist regime.'[39]

But the suspension of his magazine could not dampen the ardour of Evola for his cultural mission. 'Traditional' metaphysics and attacks on its various travesties were the theme of the three books which appeared over the next four years: The Hermetic Tradition,[40] The Mask and True Face of Contemporary Spiritualism,[41] and then the work for which he became most famous, The Revolt Against the Modem World.[42] The culmination of his occultist phase is reached with The Mystery of the Grail (1937) [43] in which the Ghibelline Empire of the Middle Ages presented in 'Traditional' light. By now, however, Evola was channeling most of his prodigious intellectual energy into a particular application of his personal cosmology, namely to the question of race. He had already written on the subject in The Tower a piece entitled 'The Races Are Dying' as part of his general theme of a culture in decay, but from 1934 till 1942 numerous articles presenting his Traditional view of race appeared in seven Fascist newspapers and over twenty periodicals, notably La Difesa della Razza and Il Regime Fascista.[44] More significant were the extensive treatments of racial theory in four books: The Aspects of the Jewish Problem,[45] The Myth of Blood,[46] Outline of a Racist Education,[47] and finally The Synthesis of Racial Doctrine.[48] It was this self-appointed role as Italian racial theorist that secured Evola a small but notable role in the official history of Fascism, for against the background of the 'rapprochement' between Mussolini and Hitler, and especially after the Fascist regime's adoption of the Nazi-style race laws in November 1938, Evola suddenly found himself in demand. He was sent by Bottai, now minister of culture, to give lecture tours to Italian universities,[49] he addressed SS study groups in Berlin, where his ideas were subjected to scrutiny for their compatibility with official German Weltanschauung by Himmler's Ahnenerbe,[50] and he was finally invited in 1941 to Palazzo Venezia when Mussolini apparently told him that The Synthesis, by now translated into Germany as An Outline of Fascist Racial Doctrine, was 'the book we needed'.[51] Certainly the Duce's annotated copy of The Synthesis convinced Renzo De Felice that he had genuinely adopted Evola's theory of race.[52]

The key to the distinctiveness of Evola's racism, as he repeatedly stresses, is the overarching philosophy of history and total cosmology expounded in The Revolt Against the Modern World. Rejecting any biological or Darwinistic approach (intrinsically decadent in its materialism), Evola maintains that there are three dimensions to human existence: the body, the soul and the spirit, the latter being a metaphysical element systematically eroded by centuries of secularisation. Contrary to the claims of German 'experts' the Aryans left 'not one but two main branches in Europe, the Ario-Germans and the Ario-Romans. In terms of the residue of racial soul and spirit the Italians are superior to the Germans as raw material for a cultural rebirth. Though he agrees with his German counterparts that the Jews represent the anti-race par excellence, being deficient in all three departments of racial superiority, he repudiates the need for any eugenic or 'surgical' intervention to rectify the situation. It is sufficient to create an organic state with the right climate of heroism and ethical austerity for the dormant Aryan forces in the Italians to be reawakened. The work ends with an appendix containing photographs which illustrate acceptable and unacceptable racial types found in Italy, backed up by the evidence bequeathed by classical Roman sculpture for the potential of the Italians as a super-race.

It would be erroneous to attribute too much practical significance to Evola's Traditional or 'spiritual' racism. Its official sponsoring by the regime was prompted by pragmatic considerations of Realpolitik rather than any deep commitment to a racial ideology and was in any case short-lived. Evola's continued attacks on Catholicism and Nazi theory in the fascist press, not to mention the un-Traditional features of Mussolini's totalitarian state, soon made him more of a liability than an asset and an article by Interlandi in Difesa della Razza in 1942 attacking his 'nebulous spiritualism'[53] marked his fall from grace. In Germany the reaction was predictably even more hostile. The verdict was telling: 'Evola's doctrine is neither National Socialist nor Fascist. What separates him in particular from the National Socialist world-view is his radical neglect of the concrete, historical facts of our national past in favour of an abstract spiritual Utopia based on fantasy.'[54] The reaction of the German Racial Policy Office to The Synthesis in September 1942 is even more damning: it is dismissed as an illustration of 'the low spiritual level of modern Italy' due to centuries of 'racial decline'.[55]

Subsequent events spelled not only the end of any chance Evola might have had of making his Traditionalism the official ideology of Fascism, but of all the hopes he had nurtured that the advent of the totalitarian Right in Europe marked the close of the kali yuga and the dawn of a new golden age. He spent the rest of the war in isolation working once more on occultist doctrines to produce The Doctrine of Awakening,[56] a copy of which graces the shelves of the Indian Institute in Oxford, despite such phrases as 'We have to remember that behind the caprices of modem historical theories there lies as a more profound and primordial reality; the unity of the blood and spirit of the white races who created the greatest civilisations both of the East and West'.[57] Orientations,[58] which appeared in 1950, shows that Evola's Traditional world-view had if anything been strengthened rather than weakened by the triumph of the decadent forces of democracy in its American and Bolshevik forms, only that the tone of apocalyptic expectancy has given way to the profound pessimism, resignation and call for a stoic 'apolitiá' that characterised his post-war message.

For the next two decades he was to maintain his self-appointed role as a beacon of Traditional values illuminating the dark plain of modernity, little known except to small groups of neo-fascist youths such as the Fasces of Revolutionary Action and the Black Legions whose acknowledgment of Evola as their 'master' and 'inspiration' caused him to appear before a Rome court in 1951 accused of attempting with his 'nebulous theories' to 'reconstitute the disbanded Fascist party' (a crime under post-war Italian law).[59] He was acquitted after an eloquent self-defence that has become part of Evolian legend. It was only when the joint impact of the Hippy movement and student power turned 1968 in Italy, as in so many other countries, into a year of 'contestation' that Evola emerged from obscurity. Almirante, leader of the MSI described him in a celebrated phrase 'Our Marcuse, only better'.[60] Ultra-Right bookshops, such as the Basilisk Bookshop of the Tradition in Genoa now sell Evola's works, all of which have been reprinted except the overtly racist ones,[61] alongside shelves of writings on mythology, occultism, Fascism and the fantastic. Jesi goes so far as to declare his conviction that the 'ravings' of Evola 'have played a considerable role in the terrorist actions of the last years'. 'Within sixteen months of the publication of these words the neo-Right bombing in Bologna took place, killing eighty-four and injuring a further two hundred and fifty. Romualdi, one of Evola's adulators, tells us not to be surprised 'if the extreme Right youth has looked to Evola as its master, with veneration, at times with a sectarian spirit', and that Evola's teachings 'critically rethought could constitute the ideal buttresses of a political Right'.[64]

Despite Romualdi's assertions, from a 'liberal academic' stand-point (itself doubly illegitimate to a Traditional way of thinking) it is not self-evident why what seems on casual perusal no more than metaphysical and anthropological 'ravings' could help inspire ultra-Right activism some half-century after their author was being cold-shouldered by an official Right-wing regime, particularly when the political circles that now take him seriously invoke in practically the same breath the name of an Oxford don who lived a life of apolitical scholarship and seclusion within his Magdalen sanctuary. Even though cultural history is an even less exact science than 'intellectual history', especially when it is dealing with phenomena which are popular, 'irrational', contemporary and taking place in another society, an attempt will now be made to suggest an interpretation both of Evola's success and of how his name can become associated with Tolkien. The tentative, 'heuristic' nature of this explanatory framework should be obvious.

An initial problem arises which concerns only Evola, namely how his message of stoic resignation and 'apolitiá' can be translated into a licence to carry out terroristic actions against liberal democracy and communism. One clue is given in Romualdi's phrase 'critically rethought', in other words with the 'apolitiá' edited out. In fact Romualdi in his assessment of Evola makes no reference to apolitiá and elsewhere calls for true 'conservative revolutionaries' to fight for the restoration of the European Nation. The French Evolian Baillet makes a similar call to go 'beyond Evola'.[65] Secondly Evola, as we have seen, does not object to acts of violence as long as they are disinterested gestures, thus leaving the door open for a type of political 'actes gratuits' whose very nihilism gives it the stamp of sovereign disdain for pragmatic considerations. Finally a more esoteric possibility is added by Jesi's contention that the Evolian elite consciously instruct fascists at a lower grade of initiation to carry out acts of violence as part of their training, the true nature of the strategy being revealed only once they have proved themselves worthy heirs of the Tradition.[66] This concept presumably relates to the left-handed path of Tantric Hinduism which produced the Thugees and which Evola frequently alludes to.[67] If such speculation is justified then it would cause fascist acts of violence associated with the 'Strategy of Tension' in recent years to be seen in a somewhat new light, but by definition hard proof is difficult to come by.

With the more central question of the sudden success of figures such as Tolkien and Evola, we are dealing with waters which at least have been already partly charted. For at the heart of it lies the youth movement of the sixties. Galli seems to be on safe ground when he underlines the debt of Tarchi's invocation of 'a collective rediscovery of the East, [...] of deeper roots of being and feeling' to the widespread quest for 'non-intellectual consciousness'[68] of which Roszak presented such an idealistic panorama in The Making of a Counter Culture.[69] Another contributor to Beyond Left and Right, Cardini, writes 'Restoring the feast means rediscovering the non-primacy of economics and productivity in history, rediscovering the whole man',[70] and has himself written on witchcraft, magic and medieval chivalry. In this contest the exploration of myths and legends from the East, not in an academic but a purportedly 'experiential' spirit is equated with the attempt to by-pass the reductionist intellectualism which is associated with secular, 'technocratic' reason and get in touch with a saner, more integrated, 'primordial' vision of reality. In Evola's words, intellectuality 'develops in a sphere detached from the living totality of the individual'.[71] Clearly this quest for 'anoetic' insight, for 'gnosis' rather than mere knowledge, forms the background to the sixties cult of such visionary writers and theorists as Blake, Jung, Ginsberg, Hesse, Watts and Castaneda. It was this climate of grass-root revolt against modern rationalism and secular humanism that saw a boom in literature on occultism, mysticism, alternative cosmologies, para-normal and super-natural phenomena as well as 'journeys to the East' both metaphorical and literal. It is no wonder that Tolkien's work also came to the fore in this modern Sturm und Drang of the imagination to the point where Hobbit graffiti such as 'Frodo Lives' started invading the New York subway.

It is in this context that Almirante's famous phrase 'Our Marcuse, only better' acquires a deeper significance. Marcuse, born the same year as Evola, was contributing to the Frankfurt School's revision of Marxism in the same years as Evola was formulating his Traditionalism. The now famous result was a blend of Freudian theory of repression with a Marxist concept of alienation to provide the basis for a radical critique of the insidious forms taken by dehumanisation in an advanced consumer stage of capitalism. With little prospect of successful revolution there is little more that the disaffected can do than reintegrate the principles of pleasure and play in his own life to break out of the 'one-dimensionality' that threatens to reduce all life to an efficient, soulless function. When the counter-culture Left looked for an ideologue, Marcuse's name soon became a shibboleth for an up-to-date, switched on Marxism rejection of the 'technocracy', often 'critically rethought' so as to ignore his pessimistic diagnosis of the possibility of imminent revolution now that the world was dominated by 'one-dimensional' men.

In Italy, where a small but dedicated ultra-Right had survived the fall of Mussolini to become a permanent strand of youth culture, 1968 created a climate in which if Evola had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. Moreover Evola's credentials seemed to the Italian New Right as impeccable as Marcuse's were to the New Left. Marcuse had an impressive 'academic baggage', having graduated from Freiburg in philosophy, worked alongside distinguished confreres in Frankfurt, and then held prestigious posts in Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis. Even the uncompromising intellectuality of his prose only underlined his authority for his adepts. Paradoxically for the Right it was Evola's very lack of and claimed disdain for established academic qualifications that enhanced his credibility, meaning he was able to devote himself totally to his quest for truth, his intuitive vision uncorrupted by the pernicious influence of secular intellectuality so symptomatic of the decline of the west. This emerges from Romualdi's opening paragraphs of Evola: the Man and the Work, which explain his neglect in the following terms: 'Who would remember an author as awkward and isolated, so difficult to label or classify, aloof from all the cliques, Mafias and universities which in Italy, by ancient tradition, form 'culture'? Not academics, those technicians of an increasingly myopic specialism, a caste proud and jealous of its techniques like the caste of mummy embalmers in ancient Egypt.'[72]

This explains a feature of Evola's work that can act as an effective barrier to assessment of its significance by scholars whose minds are trained in the Enlightenment conventions of intellectual scepticism and empiricism: his application of an 'alternative' methodology. In the introduction to The Revolt Against the Modern World Evola gives his own account of the principles on which the work is based.[73] Having dismissed any concessions to the 'corpse wisdom' of the positivist tradition, he anticipates the anathemas which will be used by hostile critics: 'arbitrary, subjective, fantastic'. But 'what is objective and scientific is not as the moderns conceive it. All that is outside the Tradition. The truths that can make the world of the Tradition intelligible are not ones that can be 'learned' or 'discussed'. They are or they are not'. He will reconstruct the Tradition referring to various cultures and their literatures, 'each time choosing the ones that represent most neatly and exemplify most completely the same spiritual principle or phenomenon'. This he distinguishes from eclecticism because it is based on the Traditional principles of 'correspondence' and 'intuition'. This circular argument which makes any dissent a sign of not being rooted in the Tradition acquires sinister connotations in his Synthesis of Racial Doctrine when he states 'the law of elective affinity: to react against racism, to feel an inner revolt when faced with its arguments, means to reveal to oneself that all is not right racially.'[74]

What results from the license to roam through the store-houses of the world's anthropology, mythology and esoteric doctrines unencumbered by conventional standards of evidence or 'objectivity' is the characteristic trait of all Evola's writings: a tone of unassailable authority in the revelation of eternal truths corroborated by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of quotations and references. The Revolt alone contains over twelve hundred allusions to over three hundred authors in a style that seems a cross between Spengler, Sir James Fraser and Gobineau. The frontiers between speculation and science, propaganda and research, ravings and erudition blur in a way that has anyone 'contaminated' by positivism leaping for his or her Occam's razor. But it is precisely this cosmological 'faction' defying sceptical dissection which made Evola so ideally qualified to become a guru of the counter-cultural Right and explains the ecstatic eulogies we read in the Testimonies,, for as one of the contributors points out 'obviously all this is not material for the high and mighty professors of philosophy, for the unassailable adorers of the self-evident process of historical change or the collectors of facts proved and documented by the sacred light of modern science'. Evola, 'intransigent in his task of memory and custodian of values to be passed on for a future rebirth of the Traditional world',[75] is not just the equivalent of Marcuse, whose own career and sources underline how blinded he is by 'modern' concepts, but genuinely 'better'.[76] Evola is not a mere academic but a 'sage', or as Jesi calls him in a phrase taken from Castaneda 'a man of knowledge'.[77]

The deeper correspondences between Tolkien and Evola for the counter cultural Right should now be emerging. The sixties' thirst for visionary knowledge, for alternative cosmologies and arcane realities ignored or suppressed by the modern age was slaked by an orgy of eclectic, experimental, and experiential reading. The autodidactic 'anti-positivist' nature of 'gnostic' reading meant that categories sacrosanct for specialists became blurred, and traditional compartments of knowledge mixed, under the millenaristic banner of the May 1968 bearing the slogan 'L'imagination au pouvior'. To make distinctions between myth and history, fiction and fact, literature and cultural analysis, theory and practice, play and work was a sign that dimensions of being had been lost, whether the loss-assessor invoked was Blake or Marcuse. Evola offered a total world-view expressed in tomes of visionary erudition. Tolkien created a mythical cosmology. To someone seeking the key to the ailments of the modem world in metaphysical rather than material terms the two writers could appear almost as incarnations of the Jungian archetype of the 'old man' (another 60s guru with a fascist past) endowed with superior insight not of this world, irrespective of the vast differences between them that might strike the academic mind. In any case were the differences so vast? For both authors reality was presented as essentially metaphysical, a battle ground for a Manichean struggle between good and evil clothed in pagan myth and fought out by warriors of the spirit. The Star Wars cycle could be construed by the Italian New Right as a pathetic Hollywood travesty of this arcane struggle marketed by one of the twin citadels of modern decadence, America. Certainly Boorman's more orthodox treatment of the Arthurian legends in his film Excalibur was widely received in Italy as 'a Right-wing film'!

But a serious point is raised here which, even if alien to the liberal spirit of academic criticism spirit, is surely to be taken seriously if contemporary historians are to come to terms with some of the more obscure mythic forces at work in the shaping of modern society. Central to the cult of figures such as Tolkien and Evola is the nostalgia for a total world view, a holistic understanding of existence, warm and 'alive', immune to the icy winds of scepticism and relativism that waft from the official institutions of culture and learning. In his Death of the Past[78] J. H. Plumb expresses the paradox that 'history, which is so deeply concerned with the past, has, in a sense, helped to destroy it as a social force, as a synthesising and comprehensive statement of human destiny. Because of this, most historians in this century avoided any attempt to explain the history of man. This has been left to the journalists, the prophets or the philosophers, but some of those who have attempted it acquire great success. H.G. Wells, Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, who sought to mould history into a meaningful past, secured millions of readers but the almost universal condemnation of historians'.[79] Significantly, though, Plumb, writing in 1969, makes no reference to the counter culture which was then at its height, as if unaware of the storm of mythic energies that was raging around him for the younger generation as he reflected on the nature of history. Thus he is able to end with the blithe assertion: 'The old past is dying, its force weakening, and so it should. Indeed the historian should speed it on its way'.[80]

The implication that the erosion of a meaningful past by science should not give academics pause is surely highly complacent and takes no account of the extent of the vacuum created over the last hundred years in the course of which official science has largely withdrawn from the field of holistic explanations. This vacuum has been filled in the ebb and flow of events and fashion with the influx of the most bewildering array of 'alternative' cosmologies, often combined indiscriminately, or so it appears to the sceptical outsider, in the quest for substitute values. One historian who recognises this problem as a major feature of the modern age is the Californian historian William Irwin Thompson, who, writing at the same time as Plumb (they could be taken for incarnations of Professors Swallow and Zapp in David Lodge's Changing Places!) set out in At the Edge of History[81] to 're-imagine' the relationship between visionary and scientific understanding of the past. Deeply impressed by the Hippy counterculture he found all around him in Los Angeles, his book is partly a compendium of the new idols of the Aquarian Age from Blake to Edgar Cayce, from the I Ching to Velikovsky, from the Mayas to Arthur C. Clarke. In one passage he reports a conversation with a hitch-hiker who recommends him to read The Lord of the Rings, telling him 'It's a real history of this planet. [...] Tolkien gets by the grown ups as a fantasy, and even some of the kids take it in that way, but once it's inside, the unconscious takes off the fantasy wrapper and knows it's the real story'.[82] So swayed is he by the psychedelic prospects opened up by such Extra-Mural studies that he seriously poses the question 'What if the history of the world is a "myth", but myth is the remains of the real history of earth?'[83] To show how much he is in earnest he proceeds to formulate his own theory of cultural dynamics along Jungian lines, with results strangely reminiscent at times of Evola himself. Such capitulation of citadels of learning to what Roszak in his study of the counter culture calls the 'invasion of centaurs',[84] paralleled by his own hip brand of cultural sociology, is arguably more of a symptom of cultural malaise than a diagnosis of it. While orthodox philosophers of history such as Mandelbaum and Hempel draw up abstruse escape plans to break out of the prison of relativism[85] and others such as Karl Popper and B. T. Wilkins debate whether history has any 'meaning',[86] those with a strong enough need for personal 'past masters' have found them. To ignore the cults and New Religions growing up outside academia, to put one's faith in them as the dawning of a new post-industrial society, or to indulge in breast-beating about the threat they pose to high culture may throw considerable light on the psychological make-up of the academic but little on history itself. What the historian is surely called upon to do is identify causal, structural factors shaping events, and what is being argued in this article is that the Italian 'sacred Right' demonstrates how important the nostalgia for a holistic cosmology can be as a component of the ideological forces at work in contemporary history. If Thompson had used his conversations with West coast hippies as an empirical basis for research into such a thesis, instead of succumbing to the temptation of writing his own Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy he would have rendered a greater service to his profession. It is not the job of historians even to explain the world but to explain history. If there are 'two cultures', then the divide is between those who learn to live with partial knowledge and the intrinsic limitations of their incomplete understanding of life and those who feel at home in a total explanatory system, who need a 'vision of the world' at all costs.

It is this that the protagonists of a counter cultural Right seek in their masters. De Turris writes in his articles on Tolkien that 'the cult presupposes a vision of the world which the reader makes his own, making it immediate, giving it his total commitment.[87] In similar vein Romualdi writes 'The minorities who are in the vanguard of the forces making up the nations have felt for years that the hour has come for the Right to finally emerge from the ambit of sentimentalism and qualunquismo (indifference to orthodox politics) to give itself a Weltanschauung, a vision of the world. The hour of Evola, in fact'.[8] It is thus to their success in seeming to offer a comprehensive 'alternative' explanation of the state of the modern world and of the feeling of not 'belonging' to it, of 'anomie', that Tolkien and Evola owe their cult following in Italy's neo-Right.

If the approach suggested in this article is on the right lines, it is no coincidence that an Italian publishing house, the Editions of Ar (the root of 'Aryan') lists in its catalogue works by Hitler, Goebbels and Gobineau alongside novels by the Prague occultist Meyrink, essays by Evola and a book devoted to The Metaphysical Roots of Hungarian Fairy-Tales.[89] If it is no coincidence it is also important, for what emerges is the existence of a mode of autodidactic speculation in the suburbs of academia in which the frontiers between history and literature blur, where anthropological fantasy, esoteric literature and alternative cosmology can fuse into a potent 'faction' capable of supplying the ideological fuel to violent political 'factions' but largely ignored by official historians because marginal to main-stream culture. Paul Wilkinson's otherwise excellent The New Fascists,[90] for example, makes no reference to the 'sacred' Right so prominent not only in Italy but also in France where the esotericist René Guénon plays a parallel role to Evola as resident esotericist and Jeremiah of the modern age of decay. Furio Jesi is an exception, not only documenting the existence of Traditionalist politics but stressing that 'history' is its greatest enemy'.[91] This confirms Plumb's general analysis with the difference that Jesi is writing to alert the public to the way political subcultures, contemptuous of the apparent prohibition against grand narratives and totalising 'visions of the world' enforced by the bastions of 'official culture' are brewing their own in backroom stills and consuming them in activist speak-easies, sometimes with lethal results. The tendency to consign all such phenomena to the waste-paper basket of 'irrationalism', to underestimate the importance of the 'charismatic' sphere of cultural life coexisting with the 'legal-rational',[92] increases the likelihood that intellectual mavericks will move in where licensed academics do not even put in a tender. Thus when Pauwels and Bergier researched the occult dimension to Nazism in their highly suspect The Dawn of the Magicians[93] they were generally ignored by specialists in Nazism but were soon added to the counter-culture reading list. 'Metahistory' will not simply wither away any more than its political blood-brother 'terrorism', and deserves to be treated seriously by all disciplines concerned with history if only so that the conditions of Enlightenment humanism and liberalism are as firmly rooted and thriving as exotic fledgling Traditions that strive to supplant it. The past is not dead but alive and kicking.

A final point must be considered which if valid would undermine a central premise of the argument so far, namely that Tolkien's name does not legitimately belong in the company of an ultra-Right conservative mystagogue like Evola. Yet there are some grounds for thinking that the sacred Right has not needed to stray so far from the spirit of Tolkien's work in their adoption of him as might at first be imagined. William Dowie in J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Story-teller[94] makes a convincing case for the 'far reaching applicability'[95] of the anthropological theories of Mircea Eliade to the Ring cycle. Quoting extensively from The Sacred and the Profane, Dowie analyses how the mythological narrative 'evokes participation in a secular religion - that is a religion in which all is sacred because all things, even the most natural, are related to one another and to a founding transcendence'.[96] Referring to the theme of initiation in the novels, Dowie cites Eliade's observation that 'death signifies passing beyond the profane, unsanctified condition, the condition of the natural man, who is without religious experience, who is blind to spirit [...], human life is preceded by a pre-existence and continued in a post-existence'.[97]

What puts such an 'Eliadic' interpretation of Tolkien in a new light (or a new Right) is that the central themes of Eliade's pronouncements on sacred Time, cosmological myths and shamanism made from his Chair at Chicago University had already been close to his heart on an experiential level when he was a leading light in the occultist right wing circles in his native Bucharest in the late 1930s and became extremely impressed by the esoteric 'religion of death' of the Rumanian Iron Guard. By 1937 he was expressing in the popular press such sentiments as 'May the Rumanian race put an end to a life exhausted by poverty and syphilis, invaded by Jews and debilitated by foreigners. The revolution of the Legionaries must achieve its supreme goal: the redemption of the race'.[98] Moreover there is evidence that Evola was in direct contact with Eliade and the Rumanian fascists before the war and that his belief in the 'kali yuga' and the Tradition was formulated partly under Eliade's influence.[99] Certainly he is quoted as an authority several times in The Revolt. If there are, as Dowie claims, correspondences at a structural level between Eliade's anthropological and Tolkien's literary cosmologies, there may therefore be a sense in which Tolkien's sagas, irrespective of his conscious intention, genuinely harmonise with 'esoteric' neo-fascism's 'revolt against the modern world'. Certainly this impression is confirmed when Dowie stresses 'the profound religious significance' of festivity in Tolkien's cycle because 'by it one makes a commitment both to a historical world and to a moment of ideal parousia that anticipates the hopeful future'.[100] He goes on to quote approvingly Harvey Cox's The Feast of Fools: 'The Religious man is one who grasps his own life within a larger historical and cosmic setting [...] Festivity periodically restores us to our proper relationship to history and history-making. It reminds us that we are fully within history but that history also is within something else'.[101] This is uncannily parallel to the idea expressed in the reflections on festal time of a member of the Italian 'sacred' New Right intelligentsia, Cardini. The passage from Beyond the Left and Right already cited continues 'restoring the feast means rediscovering an "extraordinariness" which acts as a limit to everyday reality and so reshapes that reality'.[102] When Dowie concludes that 'Tolkien's whole creation of the perilous realm of Middle-earth is an effort to transport us from a positivist, mechanist, urbanised and rationalist culture into one in which man is in contact with his own desires and the significance of the cosmos around him',[103] the spectre of the sacred Right looms large.

There thus seems to be an area of genuine common ground on which a Califomian hippy, a university don[104] and a member of the Italian 'sacred' Right can agree in their reading of Tolkien. Dowie assures us that the Ring cycle is 'based on Christian experience'[105], and certainly Tolkien dissociated himself from any sympathy for the racist policies of his native South Africa when he declared in his valedictory Address at Oxford that he had 'the hatred of apartheid in (his) bones'.[106] What is rather to be inferred from the ease with which Tolkien's work lends itself to being taken as runic prophecy by a 'sacred Right' is that a deep-rooted sense of disaffection with the world in which one is condemned to live may be a fertile stimulus to the literary imagination, but can equally well nourish historical myth which, as Sorel understood so well, can be translated, if believed intensely enough, into political ideology and thence into action.[107] This much historians have already understood from extensive research into the links between German Romanticism, idealism, neo-paganism and the rise of Nazism.[108]

But some lessons, it seems, are easily forgotten when it comes to understanding contemporary phenomena, as if the Second World War had laid the ghost of the 'revolt against positivism' for good. Dowie's approval of Tolkien's castigation of the 'rawness and ugliness of modern European Life' (to which he adds 'American'),[109] points to considerable naivety (if not to something more sinister still) about the historical implications of radical anti-modernism and the concomitant need for heroic teleological myth. It is an unfortunate consequence of excessive specialisation and compartmentalisation that 'literature' and 'history' tend to look in different directions and ignore those areas where they complement each other to throw light on powerful cultural forces actively shaping society past and present.[110]

Perhaps Tolkien's intuition was sound when in The Two Towers he portrayed the modern, secular intellect as the evil Saruman, divorced from his physical self and guardian of the tower Orthanc (cunning mind). His 'intellectual perversion' has shaped his tower to his 'shifting purposes' and he now 'gazes myopically in a vain attempt to boost his own knowledge and power'.[111] But some of the 'hobbits' who are planning the revolt against the Sarumans of the modern world are not mythical, but specially educated to become political hobbits in educational summer camps held in the Abruzzi, confident in the knowledge that they are remaining true to the spirit of Julius Evola, 'closed in his tower which is certainly not of ivory, romantic and decadent, but the tower of a castle, a fortress, classical and aristocratic'.[112]

Biographical Postscript (2002)

This article was submitted before the publication of Franco Ferraresi (ed.), La Destra Radicale, (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984), a comprehensive and impressively documented analysis of the various currents of the Italian radical and 'New' Right, repeatedly underlining the crucial importance of Evola to its whole ethos and strategy, both cultural and terroristic. It also stresses that the central concern of the European radical right is to formulate a holistic 'vision of the world' or Weltanschauung to combat the relativism and materialism of the 'modern world', and expands on the significance of literature of the fantastic, in particular of Tolkien in this enterprise (especially pp. 119-135. 192-193). For those who with a reading knowledge of Italian, this book is an important supplement to this article. Other texts which subsequently appeared in English and corroborate or substantiate the argument developed here are:

• Franco Ferraresi, 'Julius Evola: Tradition, Reaction, and the Radical Right', European Journal of Sociology, no. 28, 1987, pp. 107-51.
• P. Bologna and E. Mana (eds). Nuova destra e cultura reazionaria negli anni ottanta, (Notiziario dell?Istituto storico della Resistenza in Cuneo, no. 23, 1983), especially the chapter by Alessandro.Porrelli, 'Tradizione e meta-tradizione: appunti su Il Signore degli anelli, pp. 287-310; Giorgio Galli, 'La componente magica della cultura di destra', pp. 279-286. Both Evola and Tolkien figure prominently in the 'Bibliografia essentiale per la conoscenza della nuova destra italiana', pp. 419-436 compiled by Patrizia Guerra and Marco Revelli.
• The importance of Evola to neo-fascist activism in the years of the 'Strategy of Tension' is borne out Richard Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989). It is also stressed in Franco Ferraresi, Minacce alla democrazia, (Feltrinelli, Milan, 1995).

Notes:

1. Quoted by G. Gialli, La Destra (Milan: Gaminalibri, 1983). p. 24. [Back]
2. Cf. W. Laqueur (ed.) Fascism: A Reader's Guide, (London: Penguin, 1976). especially the chapters by J. J. Linz, A. Lyttleton and Z. Sternhell. [Back]
3. F. Jesi, Cultura di destra, (Milan: Garzanti, 1979). [Back]
4. Ibid., pp. 67 ff. The Italian terms that Jesi uses are 'neofascismo dalla faccia feroce e in doppio petto'. [Back]
5. 'Italy: Terror on the Right', New York Review, 22 January 1981. [Back]
6. Ibid., p. 26. Thomas Sheehan has also written on the subject in the article 'Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist', Social Research, Vol.48, No.1, Winter 1980-1. [Back]
7. Galli, La Destra, p. 26, [Back]
8. Jesi, Cultura di Destra, p. 101. [Back]
9. Galli, La Destra, p 25. [Back]
10. Sheehan, 'Italy: Terror on the Right', p. 38. [Back]
11. Cf. Bolletino del Centra Studi Evoliani, no. 16 (April 1975), p. 15 [Back]
12. Gianfraco de Turris, Omaggio a Julius Evola, per il suo LXXV compleanno (Rome: Volpe, 1973). [Back]
13. G. de Turris (ed.) Testimonianze su Evola, (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1973). [Back]
14. cf. Sheehan, 'Italy: Terror on the Right', p. 26. Rauti's book is called Le idee che mossero il mondo (Rome: Europa, 1976). [Back]
15. J. Evola, Rivolta contra il mondo moderno (Milan: Hoepli, 1934; 2nd revised ed. Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1969; 5th ed. 1976). For the basic scheme of this work, i.e. the theme of the decadent modem world as the nadir of a cyclic process of decay and rebirth, the concept of the kali yuga and the special connotations of the term 'traditiona1 (un-hypostatsed), Evola is deeply indebted to the works of René Guénon, particularly La crise du monde moderne (1927) which Evola translated, [Milan: Hoepli, 1927) and clearly influenced the title of his own hook. However Evola's elaboration of the Traditional world is much more extensive and draws on his own readings in comparative religion and occultism carried out in the twenties. Elsewhere he criticises the limitations of Guénon's Traditionalism (cf. L'arco e la clava, 2nd ed. Milan: Scheiwiller, 1971, pp. 175-176). Bulletin no. 18 of The Centro Studi Evoliani reprints Evola's article 'René Guénon e la "scolastica" guenoniana"' and in a postscript explaining the reprinting of this piece Del Ponte explains it is a riposte to an attack on Evola in Rivista di Studi Tradizionali (no.16) as a counterfeiter of Guénon. The R.S.T. is accused of being run by socialists and Freemasons, 'pseudo-Traditionalists of the Left', and Del Ponte warns that bona fide Guénonians have now been alerted to their 'dirty game'. This is a sample of the seriousness with which different groupings of the 'sacred' Right (and Left?) take ideological niceties. [Back]
16. J. Evola, Cavalcare la tigre (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1961; 2nd revised ed. 1971), also published by Il Falco (Milan) in 1981). For a full bibliography of Evola's major writings see the bibliography appended to de Turris, Testimonianze. [Back]
17. Evola, Cavalcare la tigre, op.cit, pp. 171-176. [Back]
18. Cf. particularly J. Evola, Il Fascismo visto dalla Destra (Rome: Volpe, 1979; 1st ed. 1964). [Back]
19. J. Evola, 'Il mito d'oriente e "l'incontro delle religioni"', L'arco e la clava, pp. 174-208. [Back]
20. De Turris, Testimonianze, p. 226 [Back]
21. Cf. Jesi, Cultura di destra, p. 68 [Back]
22. De Turris, Testimonianze, pp. 208-209. [Back]
23. La Stampa, 10 September 1983, supplement, p. 6 [Back]
24. Ibid. [Back]
25. A. Romualdi, Julius Evola: L'uomo e l'opera (Rome, Volpe, 1979), p. 4 [Back]
26. Cf. de Turris, Testimonianze, p. 220. A brief outline of Evola's career has recently appeared nearer home in The Scorpion, no. 6 (Spring 1984), which published the article 'Julius Evola: An Introduction to his Life and Work' by Mario Aprile. The periodical is dedicated to helping create the nucleus in Britian of a radical right 'culture' emulating France's Nouvelle Droite and Italy's Nuova Destra, to which frequent references are made. Aprile sees Evola's importance in the fact that he 'awakens in us the values and possibilities of a different world and order'. The same issue contains articles on Celtic and Wagnerian mythology. [Back]
27. J. Evola, 'Simboli delle degenerazione moderna: il futurismo', Raag Bland, (Rome: Edizioni del Sole Nero, nd.), p. 7. [Back]
28. Cf. J. Evola, La Torre (Milan: Il Falco, 1977), originally published in issue 6, 15 April, 1930 [Back]
29. The cover of de Turris, Testimonianze reproduces Evola's 'La parola oscura del paesaggio interiore', and four other of his paintings in black and while are to be found between pp. 96 and 97. [Back]
30. J. Evola, 'Arte astratta' (reprinted by Fondazione Julius Evola, Quaderni di Testi Evoliani, no. 3 (undated), p. 5. This essay is also available with his poem in its French version 'La parole obscure du paysage intérieur' (Rome: II Falco, 1981) but was originally written in 1920 [Back]
31. de Turris, Testimonianze, p. 219. [Back]
32. J. Evola, Saggi sull'idealismo magico (Rome: Atanor, 1925) [Back]
33. J. Evola, L'uomo come potenza (Rome: Atanor, 1925) [Back]
34. J. Evola, L'individuo e il divenire del mondo (Rome:, Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, 1926) [Back]
35. J. Evola, Teoria dell'indiviudo assoluto (Turin: Bocca, 1927 [Back]
36. J. Evola, Imperialismo pagano (Rome: Atanor, 1928) [Back]
37. J. Evola, Introduzione alla magia quale scienza dell'Io (private edition, 3 vols, 1926-7-8). Reprinted as Introduzione alla magia, (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1971). [Back]
38. J. Evola, La Torre [Back]
39. Ibid., p. 16 [Back]
40. J. Evola, La Tradizione ermetica (Bari: Laterza, 1931; 3rd ed. Rome, Edizioni Mediterranee, 1971) [Back]
41. J. Evola, Maschera e volto dello spiritualismo contemporaneo (Turon: Bocca, 1931; 3rd revised ed. Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1971) [Back]
42. Op. cit. [Back]
43. J. Evola, Il mistero del Graal e la tradizione ghibellina dell'impero(Bari: Laterza, 1937; 3rd revised ed. Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1971) [Back]
44. For a more complete list see de Turris, Testimonianze, pp, 223-224. [Back]
45. J. Evola, Tre aspetti del problema ebraico, Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1936) [Back]
46. J. Evola, Il mito del sangue(Milan, Hoepli, 1937) [Back]
47. J. Evola, Indirizzo per una educazione razziale (Milan, Hoepli, 1941) [Back]
48. J. Evola, Sintesi della dottrina della razza (Milan, Hoepli, 1941) [Back]
49. Cf. de Turris, Testimonianze, p. 224. Also see M, Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). For Evola's own account of this phase see his Cammino del conabro (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1963, revised 2nd ed. 1972), pp. 136-160 [Back]
50. The Bundesarchiv material relating to Evola is the Himmler file, orange folder, drawer II, folder 126. I am grateful to Nicholas Goodrick-Clark for making this material available to me. [Back]
51. J. Evola, 'Mussolini e il razzismo', Il Merdiano d'Italia, no. 49, Dec. 16, 1951, p. 3. [Back]
52. R. de Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascimso(Turin: Einaudi, 1961), pp. 251-152. [Back]
53. La Difesa della Razza, 20 April, 1942 [Back]
54. Report on Evola's series of lectures given to the German-Italian Society on 13, 20 and 27 June 1938, Bundesarchiv, op.cit. [Back]
55. Quoted by Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, p. 330. [Back]
56. J. Evola. La dottrina del risveglio (Bari: Laterza, 1943; 3rd revised ed. Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1972. The English edition was published by Luzac & Co. (London) in 1951, who also published Guénon's Crisis of the Modern World (1975). In their preface the translators M. Pallis and R. Nicholson claim, writing in 1961, that 'certainly the tendencies that Guénon appraised (in 1927) with such acuteness have gone on manifesting themselves in the world with undiminished force'. It was on sale in a bookshop that is generally associated with literature of the radical and 'alternative' Left. [Back]
57. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening, p. 17. [Back]
58. J. Evola, Orientamenti (Rome: Imperium, 1950). [Back]
59. Julius Evola, Autodifesa (Fondazione Julius Evola, Quaderni di Testi Evoliani, no. 2, undated). Cf. Il cammino del cinabro, p. 165. [Back]
60. Cf. G. Galli, La Destra; Sheehan, 'Italy: Terror on the Right', p. 25; Jesi, Cultura di destra, p. 93. [Back]
61. The Centro Studi Evoliani was advertising copies of La sintesi di dottrino della razza on application only in bulletin no. I8. [Back]
62. Jesi, Cultura di destra, p. 85. [Back]
63. Romual, Julius Evola,. p. 91. [Back]
64. ibid. p. 95. [Back]
65. Cf. Jesi, Cultura di destra, pp. 99-99 for a more detailed discussion of this point [Back]
66. Ibid. 93-94. [Back]
67. J. Evola, Il cammino del cinabro, p. 190 for importance he attaches to Tantrism. [Back]
68. G. Galli, La Destra, p. 25. [Back]
69. Theodor Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1970). It underlines the leftist connotations of the counter-cultural assault on rationality in the Anglophone world that The Economist should have recommended this book to those 'who do not be surprised by the stamina and extent of the New Left in Europe', a phrase cited on the inside cover. [Back]
70. cf. G. Galli, La Destra,. p. 25. [Back]
71. Quoted by J. V. Borghese in his introduction to Evola's Gli uomini e le rovine, p. 11. [Back]
72. Romaldi, Evola, p. 5 [Back]
73. Evola, La rivolta, (5th ed.) pp. 7-16 [Back]
74. J. Evola, Sintesi, p. 99. [Back]
75. De Turris, Testimonianze, pp. 34-5. The contributor is S. Bartolini, art lecturer in Pistoia. [Back]
76. Cf. J. Evola, 'Il mito Marcuse', Gli uomini e le rovine, pp. 263-269. [Back]
77. Jesi, Cultura di Destra, p. 99. [Back]
78. J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London: Macmillan, 1969) [Back]
79. Ibid. p. 136. [Back]
80. Ibid. p. 145. On p. 137 Plumb concedes that 'it would seem that man in the West still seeks a meaningful past', but goes on to argue that history 'can still teach wisdom, and it can teach it in a far deeper sense than was possible when wisdom had to be taught through the example of heroes' (p. 142), as if the spread of Enlightenment is enough to compensate for the loss of teleological world-views. [Back]
81. W. I. Thompson. At the Edge of History (New York: Harper Colophon, 1972). [Back]
82. Ibid. p. 29. [Back]
83. Ibid. p. 175. [Back]
84. Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture, especially chapter two. [Back]
85. Cf. P. Gardiner (ed.), The Philosophy of History (Oxford: OUP, 1977); see too M. Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism (New York, Harper & Low, 1967, 1st ed.1938). [Back]
86. See B. T. Wilkin Has History any Meaning (New York: Cornell, 1978). [Back]
87. La Stampa, op. cit. [Back]
88. Romualdi, Julius Evola, p. 7. Later in the book, (p. 81) Romualdi expresses concisely the issue at stake here, namely the gap between the understanding that 20th century science can offer of the world and the total meaning craved by those who are temperamentally or intellectually frustrated by partial, relative truths. He writes, 'Science, which a century ago the positivists saw as heir of philosophy, has passed through a radical phase of reorientation (non-Euclidean geometry, quantum theory etc.), with a result that it now presents itself as a construction site for working hypotheses, effective in practical terms but incapable of giving us any general truths. There is at the heart of science an absolute nihilism because even if it puts at the disposal of man increasingly huge material forces, it is not able to make man stronger or more sure of himself, while the latest hypothesis precludes the possibility that science can ever tell us something about the ultimate truths of life and death. Even if some people have deluded themselves that the contrary is true, the fact remains that science is fundamentally impotent to give us a vision of the world'. Cf. Evola, Cavalcare la tigre, pp. 127-134, 'Dissoluzione della conoscenza: Il relativismo. I procedimenti della scienza moderna'. Cf. also the article 'Reductionism and Nihilism' by V. Frankl in A. Koestler and Smythies (ed.), Beyond Reductionism (London: Hutchinson, 1969) which fully recognises this problem from a non-right wing perspective. [Back]
89. Jesi, Cultura di Destra, pp. 98-99. [Back]
90. P. Wilkinson, The New Fascists (London: Pan, 1983). For a good example of the literature of the 'sacred' Right generated by Génonians cf. D. Cologne, Julius Evola, René Guénon et le Christianisme, (Paris: Vatré, 1978). Cologne presents the Tradition and the kali yuga as the key to understanding the modern age and to the creation of a genuine Right: 'only men of the Tradition are authentic men of the Right. The great error of the present pseudo-Right is to leave the monopoly of Utopia to the Left', (p. 89). Though he asserts that the pre-Christian Traditionalism of Guénon is to be preferred to the paganism of Evola he concludes the book with the stricture 'any man who claims to be and calls himself "right wing" must at least read the books of Julius Evola and René Guénon'. It also appears from p. 45 that there is a 'Centre d'Etudes Doctrinales Evola' in Paris publishing cahiers such as Introduction à lOeuvre de Julius Evola. [Back]
91. P. Wilkinson, The New Fascists, p. 102. [Back]
92. The allusion here is, of course, to Weber's terminology usually applied to types of political authority, cf. A Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, (Cambridge: CUP, 1971), esp. pp. 157-163. The distinction between extreme Right (and Left) political ideology based on 'holistic' schemes and the liberal-democratic programmes based on humanism and pluralism is illuminated by Weber's distinction between 'Gesinnungsethik' and 'Verantwortungsethik' (ethics based on conviction, ethics of ultimate ends, as opposed to ethics based on answerability, responsibility). It is relevant to the thesis of: this article that Weber stresses that not only does the essentially 'religious' character of the former make proponents of Gesinnungsethik' impervious to empirical argument, but that 'science' can do nothing to resolve the conflict between the two types of political behaviour: 'scientifically the "middle course" is not truer even by a hair's breadth than the most extreme party ideals of the right or left'. See Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, pp. 134-138. Perhaps the finest statement of the unbridgeable gulf that separates scientific investigation of the world from the sense of its meaning also comes from Weber: "The fate of an epoch which has eaten from the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning for itself. It must recognise that general views of life and the universe can never be the product of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us', (quoted Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, p. 136). [Back]
93. L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, Le Matin des Magiciens (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). [Back]
94. In M. Sadu and R. T. Farrell (ed.), J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Story-teller, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1979). [Back]
95. ibid, p 268 [Back]
96. ibid. p. 267 [Back]
97. ibid. p. 273 [Back]
98. Quoted Jesi, Cultura di Destra, p. 38. For an extended treatment of Eliade's involvement with Romanian 'sacred' fascism see pp. 30-50. [Back]
99. Cf. J. Evola, Il cammino del conabro, pp. 139-40, in which he claims not only to have been in personal contact with Codreanu 'one of the most illustrious and spiritually oriented figures that I ever met among the national movements of the day', but also Mircea Eliade, 'who after the war was to become famous for numerous works on the history of religion, and with whom I have remained in contact to this day'. Cf. also Galli, La destra, p. 64 where he refers to R. Scagno's fortcoming Cultura e politica nella Romania tra le due guerre: Eliade e Codreanu, to be published by Fondazione Agnelli. Cologne also invokes Eliade (op. cit., p 88) as an 'authority', and his name occurs frequently in the writings of the French Nouvelle Droite on the 'sacred'. [Back]
100. Dowie, Tolkien, p. 281. [Back]
101. Ibid. p. 282. [Back]
102. Galli, La destra footnotes 68 and 70. [Back]
103. Dowie, Tolkien, p. 283. [Back]
104. William Dowie lectures at Southeast Louisiana University. It is interesting in this connection that in C. Evan's Cults of Unreason, (London: Harrap, 1973), which perceptively analyses some of the contemporary cults 'arising to fill gaps in cosmology caused by the onslaught of science', looks on the Tolkien cult as benign. Typical of the standard Anglophone view of the politics of anti-rational cosmological speculation, Dowie treats the hippy magazine Gandalf's Garden as an example of 'the good-natured outlook of the new wave of occultists', and commenting on the fact that in the 1968 American presidential elections the wizard Gandalf won a 'substantial number of write-in votes', states 'perhaps what the world really does need is a bit of a mystical shake-up'. The magazine presented itself as 'the cry of the Now Generation seeking an Alternative to the destructive forces of today's world', (p. 257). [Back]
105. Dowie, Tolkien,. p. 284 [Back]
106. Ibid., p. 31. [Back]
107. Evola specifically invokes Sorel's concept of myth as 'idée-force' to justify his cosmology as a source of meaning and basis of action, cf. La sintesi di dottrina della razza, p. 4, as well as bulletin no. 16 of the Centro Studi Evoliani: 'Monarchia come principio e come Idea-forza'. [Back]
108. Cf. Z. Sternhell, 'The Ideology of Fascism', pp. 385-387, in which he reviews recent publications in this area. [Back]
109. Dowie, Tolkein, p. 285 [Back]
110. There are of course some honorable exceptions to this generalisation such as Fritz Stern's The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: ?, 1961). [Back]
111. J. C. Nitzsche, Tolkien's Art. A Mythology for England (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. I11-113. [Back]
112. De Turris, Testimonianze. This is how Aniceto del Massa opens his piece entitled 'The Tower as a Symbol', pp. 97-101. [Back]