JULIUS EVOLA - On Homosexuality

JULIUS EVOLA

On Homosexuality, Plato's Inappropriateness 

& Sex at the Level of "Mutual Masturbation"

(from "Eros and the Mysteries of Love") 

[…]

Homosexuality is so widespread a practice that it cannot be overlooked in a doctrine of sex. Goethe wrote that "it is as old as mankind and therefore can be said to be a part of nature although it is contrary to nature." If it is "an enigma which appears more mysterious the more we attempt to analyze it scientifically" (Ivan Bloch), it also forms a complex problem from the point of view of the metaphysics of sex as formulated in the foregoing pages.

 

We have already mentioned that in his theory of eros Plato often referred not only to heterosexual love but also to love for epheboi and male paramours. Now let us consider "eros" in those of its exalted forms that are linked to the aesthetic factor, according to the Platonic sequence already mentioned. We should pass gradually from beauty as seen by a given being to rapture that can be aroused by incorporeal beauty not linked to any particular person: divine beauty in an abstract sense. There is no real problem if the accidental starting point is a being of the same sex. The word "uranism," which some use to mean homosexuality, springs from Plato's distinction between Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemia; Aphrodite Urania is the goddess of a noble love which is not carnal and unconcerned with procreation, as is the love which has woman as its object. It may be that pederasty (paidon eros, or love of boys) had in the beginning and to a certain degree a noble character when it was honored by ancient writers and poets and practiced by important personages. But it is now enough to read the last pages of theSymposium and the speech of Alcibiades in order to realize how little this eros remained "Platonic" in Hellas and how it also led increasingly to carnal developments as the ancient customs in Greece and Rome declined.

 

If, therefore, we assume homosexuality to conform to these carnal conditions or to correspond to ordinary sexual relations between man and woman, then we may well describe it as a deviation, not from a conventional or ethical point of view, but precisely from the standpoint of the metaphysics of sex.

 

It is inappropriate to apply, as Plato does, the metaphysical meaning made evident by the myth of the hermaphrodite to homosexual love or to love as practiced between pederasts or lesbians. In fact, in the case of such love, it is no longer allowable to speak of the impulse of the male or female principle, as present in the primordial being, to be reunited. The mythical being of our origin would, in such a case,have to be not hermaphroditic but homogeneous and of one sex only,either all man (in the case of pederasts) or all woman (in the case of lesbians), and the two lovers would seek to unite themselves as simple parts of one and the same substance. Thus the essential,which gives each myth its whole value, loses its meaning, namely, the idea of the polarity and the complementary nature of the two sexes asthe basis of the magnetism of love and of a "transcendency" in eros,and of the blinding and destructive revelation of the One.

 

To find an explanation it is necessary to descend to a lower level and examine various empirical possibilities. Normally two forms of homosexuality are distinguished in sexology: One has an inborn,natural character, whereas the other has an acquired character and is conditioned by psychological and sociological factors influenced by a person's environment. But in the second of these forms it is necessary to give a proper value to the distinction between forms having a vicious nature and forms that presuppose a latent predisposition which is aroused under given circumstances. It is necessary to set forth this condition because, given the same situation, different types behave in different ways and may not become homosexual. It is important, however, not to consider the inborn form of homosexuality in a rigid way but to allow a certain possibility of variation.

 

In natural homosexuality or in the predisposition to it, the most straightforward explanation is provided by what we said earlier about the differing levels of sexual development and about the fact that the process of sexual development in its physical and, even more so, in its psychic aspects can be incomplete. In that way, the original bisexual nature is surpassed to a lesser extent than in a "normal" human being, the characteristics of one sex not being predominant over those of the other sex to the same extent (see chapter 1). Next we must deal with what M. Hirschfeld called the "intermediate sexual forms." In cases of this kind (for instance, when a person who is nominally a man is only 60 percent male), it is impossible that the erotic attraction based on the polarity of the sexes in heterosexuality -which is much stronger the more the man is male and the woman is female- can also be born between individuals who,according to the birth registry and as regards only the so-called primary sexual characteristics, belong to the same sex, because in actual fact they are "intermediate forms." In the case of pederasts, Ulrichs said rightly that it is possible to find "the soul of a woman born in the body of a man."

 

But it is necessary to take into account the possibility of constitutional mutations, a possibility that has been given little consideration by sexologists; that is, we must also bear in mind cases of regression. It may be that the governing power on which the sexual nature of a given individual depends (a nature that is truly male or truly female)may grow weak through neutralization, atrophy, or reduction of the latent state of the characteristics of the other sex, and this may lead to the activation and emergence of these recessive characteristics. And here the surroundings and the general atmosphere of society can play a not unimportant part. In a civilization where equality is the standard, where differences are not linked, where promiscuity is in favor, where the ancient idea of "being true to oneself" means nothing anymore -in such a splintered and materialistic society, it is clear that this phenomenon of regression and homosexuality should be particularly welcome, and therefore it is in no way a surprise to seethe alarming increase in homosexuality and the "third sex" in the latest "democratic" period, or an increase in sex changes to an extent unparalleled in other eras.

 

But the reference to "intermediate sexual forms," to an incomplete process of the development of sex or to a regression, does not explain all the varieties of homosexuality. In fact, there have been male homosexuals who have not been effeminate or "intermediate forms"but even men of war, individuals decidedly manly in their appearance and behavior, powerful men who have had or could have had the most beautiful women at their disposal. Such homosexuality is hard to explain, and we have the right here to speak of deviation and perversion, or "vice" linked, perhaps, to a fashion. Indeed, it is hard to understand what can drive a man who is truly a man sexually toward an individual of the same sex. If appropriate material for the realization of the zenith of the orgasm of heterosexual love is almost nonexistent, this is even more the case in the embraces of homosexual love. However, there is reason to suppose that it is merely a matter of "mutual masturbation" and that the conditioned reflexes are exploited for "pleasure" since not only the metaphysical but also the physical premises for a whole and destructive union are lacking.

 

On the other hand, classical antiquity bears witness not so much to a homosexuality having sole rights and being the foe of women and wedlock, but rather to a bisexual attitude in which both women and young men were used (as a counterpart, there are generally many cases of very highly sexed and also very feminine women who are at the same time lesbians, with bisexual practices). Here it seems that the governing motivation was simply the desire to try everything. However, not even this point is very clear because, apart from the fact that there was femininity in the epheboi and youths who were the favorite object of those pederasts, we may also refer to the crude saying, taken by Goethe from a Greek writer, that if one has had enough from a girl as a girl, she can always play the part of a boy ("Habe ich als Mädchen sie satt, dient es als Knabe noch").

 

As to the claim for an ideal nature of hermaphroditic wholeness in the pederast who acts both as man and as woman sexually, that is obvious fallacious beyond the level of straightforward sensations;hermaphroditic wholeness can only be "sufficiency," for it has no need of another being and is to be sought at the level of a spiritual realization that excludes the nuances that the "magic of the two" can offer in heterosexual unions.

 

Even the rationale sometimes found in countries such as Turkey and Japan, that homosexual possession gives a feeling of power, is not convincing. The pleasure of domination can also be felt with women and with other beings in situations free of sexual intercourse. Besides, such a pleasure could be involved only in a completely pathological context where it would develop into a true orgasm.

 

Thus overall, when homosexuality is not "natural" or else cannot be explained in terms of incomplete inborn forms of sexual development, it must have the character of a deviation, a vice, or a perversion. And if some instances of extreme erotic intensity in relations between homosexuals should be adduced, the explanation is to besought in the possibility of the displacement of eros. Indeed, it is enough to go through any treatise on sexual psychopathology to see in how many unthinkable situations the erotic potential of a human being can be aroused, sometimes to the level of orgiastic frenzy (from fetishism even to animal sodomy and necrophilia). The same anomalous background could include the case of homosexuality,although the latter is much more frequent: a displaced eros for which a being of the same sex can serve as a simple, occasional cause or support, as in so many cases of psychopathy, although it must wholly lack every profound dimension and every meaning higher than experience because of the absence of the necessary ontological and metaphysical premises. As we shall see in certain aspects of sadism and masochism, it is possible to find elements that can be included in the deepest structures of heterosexual erotics and that become perversions only when freed from limitations. No similar recognition can be given in respect to homosexuality.

[…]

JULIUS EVOLA - The Secret Causes of History & The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

JULIUS EVOLA  (from "Men Among the Ruins")

The Secret Causes of History 

and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

[...]

The deeper causes of history—here we can refer to both those that act in a negative sense and those that may act in an equilibrating and positive sense— operate prevalently through what can be called "imponderable factors," to use an image borrowed from natural science. These causes are responsible for almost undetectable ideological, social, and political changes, which eventually produce remarkable effects: they are like the first cracks in a layer of snow that eventually produce an avalanche. These causes almost never act in a direct manner, but instead bestow to some existing processes an adequate direction that leads to the designated goal. Thus, men and groups who believe they are pursuing something willed by themselves become the means through which something different is realized and made possible: it is precisely in this that a super-ordained influence and meaning are revealed. This was noticed by Wundt, who talked about the "heterogeneity of the effects," and by Hegel as well, who introduced the notion of the List der Vernunft [Cunning of Reason] in his philosophy of history; however, neither of these thinkers was able to fruitfully develop his intuitions. Unlike what happens in the domain of physical phenomena, an insightful historian encounters several instances where the "causal" explanation (in the deterministic, physical sense) is unsatisfactory, because things do not add up and the total does not equal the sum of the apparent historical factors—almost as if someone adding five, three, and two ended up not with ten, but with fifteen or seven. This differential, especially when it appears as a differential between what is willed and what has really happened, or between ideas, principles, and programs on the one hand and their effective consequences in history on the other, offers the most valuable material for the investigation of the secret causes of history.

Methodologically speaking, we must be careful to prevent valid insights from degenerating into fantasies and superstition, and not develop the tendency to see an occult background everywhere and at all costs. In this regard, every assumption we make must have the character of what are called "working hypotheses" in scientific research—as when something is admitted provisionally, thus allowing the gathering and arranging of a group of apparently isolated facts, only to confer on them a character not of hypothesis but of truth when, at the end of a serious inductive effort, the data converge in validating the original assumption. Every time an effect outlasts and transcends its tangible causes, a suspicion should arise, and a positive or negative influence behind the stages should be perceived. A problem is posited, but in analyzing it and seeking its solution, prudence must be exercised. The fact that those who have ventured in this direction have not restrained their wild imaginations has discredited what could have been a science, the results of which could hardly be overestimated. This too meets the expectations of the hidden enemy.

This is all I have to say concerning the general premises proper to a new three-dimensional study of history. Now let us return to what I said earlier on. After considering the state of society and modern civilization, one should ask if this is not a specific case that requires the application of this method; in other words, one should ask whether some situations of real crisis and radical subversion in the modern world can be satisfactorily explained through "natural" and spontaneous processes, or whether we need to refer to something that has been concerted, a still unfolding plan devised by forces hiding in the shadows.

In this particular domain, many red flags have gone up: too many elements have concurred to alarm the less superficial observers. In the middle of the past century, Disraeli wrote these significant and often quoted words: "The world is governed by people entirely different from the ones imagined by those who are unable to see behind the scenes." Malinsky and De Poncins, when considering the phenomenon of revolution, have remarked that in our age, where it is commonly acknowledged that every disease of the individual organism is caused by bacteria, people pretended that the diseases of the social body—revolutions and disorder—are spontaneous, self-generated phenomena rather than the effect of invisible agents, acting in society the way bacteria and pathogenic germs act in the organism of the individual. Disraeli, in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote:

The public does not realize that in all the conflicts within nations and in the conflicts between nations there are, besides the people apparently responsible for them, hidden agitators who with their selfish plans make these conflicts unavoidable. . . . Everything that happens in the confused evolution of peoples is secretly prepared in order to ensure the dominion of certain people: it is these people, known and unknown, that we must find behind every public event.

In this order of ideas, there is an interesting document known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. I have discussed the nature and scope of this document in the introduction to its last Italian edition (Rome, 1937). Here I will only mention some fundamental points.

This document was purported to be a protocol stolen from a secret Judeo-Masonic organization and allegedly reveals a plan that was devised and implemented with the subversion and the destruction of traditional Europe in mind. Regarding the authenticity of the Protocols a rabid and complex debate has erupted, which can be dismissed, however, by Guénon's correct observation that a truly occult organization, no matter what its nature, never leaves behind written documents or "protocols." Thus, in the most favorable hypothesis, the Protocols could have been the work of someone who had contacts with some representatives of this alleged organization. However, we cannot agree either with those who wish to dismiss this document as a vulgar mystification, forgery, and work of plagiarism. The main argument adduced by the latter is that theProtocols reproduce and paraphrase in many parts the ideas found in a short book written by a certain Maurice Joly during the period of Napoleon's Second Empire. Allegedly, mysterious provocateurs of the Czar's secret police were responsible for writing the Protocols. This argument is truly irrelevant: those who decry plagiarism should keep in mind that this is not a matter of a literary work or of copyright. For example, when a general writes a plan, he could employ previous materials and writings as long as they contain ideas fit for his purpose. This would be a case of plagiarism, but it would not affect at all the question of whether or not this plan has really been conceived and carried out. Cutting short all this—that is, leaving aside the issue of the "authenticity" of the document in terms of real protocols stolen from an international secret organization—the only important and essential point is the following: this writing is part of a group of texts that in various ways (more or less fantastic and at times even fictional) have expressed the feeling that the disorder of recent times is not accidental, since it corresponds to a plan, the phases and fundamental instruments of which are accurately described in the Protocols. Hugo Wast wrote: "The Protocols may well be a fake, but their predictions have been fulfilled in an amazing way." Henry Ford added: "The only comment that I can make about the Protocols is that they perfectly correspond to what is happening today. They were published sixteen years ago, and ever since then they have corresponded to the world situation and today they still dictate its rhythm." In a sense, we can speak of a prophetic premonition. In any event, the value of the document as a working hypothesis is undeniable: it presents the various aspects of global subversion (among them, some aspects that were destined to be outlined and accomplished only many years after the publication of the Protocols) in terms of a whole, in which they find their sufficient reason and logical combination.

As I have said, this is not the place to engage in a detailed analysis of the text; it will suffice to recall the main points. First of all, the primary ideologies that are responsible for the modern disorder did not arise spontaneously, but have been evoked and supported by forces that knew they were false and had in mind only the latter's destructive and demoralizing effects. This would apply to democratic and liberal ideas; the Third Estate had purposely been mobilized to destroy the previous feudal and aristocratic society, while in a second phase the workers were mobilized to undermine the bourgeois. Another basic idea of the Protocols is that, despite all, the capitalist and the proletarian Internationals are in agreement, being almost two columns with distinct ideas but which act in unison at a tactical level in order to achieve the same strategy. Likewise, the economization of life, especially in the context of an industry that develops at the expense of agriculture, and a wealth that is concentrated on liquid capital and finance, proceeds from a secret design. The phalanx of the modern "economists" followed this design, just as those who spread a demoralizing literature attack spiritual and ethical values and scorn every principle of authority. Among other things, mention is made of the success that the secret front achieved not only for Marxism, but for Darwinism and Nietzsche's nihilism as well. The Protocols at times even encourage the spread of anti-Semitism, while in other cases mention is made of the secret monopoly of the press and of the media in democratic countries as well as the power to paralyze or destroy the most prestigious banks. This power concentrates the rootless, financial wealth in a few hands, and through it controls peoples, parties, and governments. One of the most important objectives is to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values from the human personality, knowing that when this is accomplished it is not difficult to turn man into a passive instrument of the secret front's direct forces and influences. The counterpart of the action of cultural demoralization, materialization, and disorganization causes unavoidable social crises to grow increasingly worse and collective situations to grow increasingly desperate and unbearable; in this way, a final conflict will eventually be considered as the means to finally sweep away the last residual resistance.

It is difficult to deny that such a "fiction" exposed at the beginning of this century has indeed reflected and anticipated much of what has taken place in the modern world, not to mention the predictions of what is in store for us. It is therefore no surprise that theProtocols received so much attention from those movements of the past that intended to react against and stem the currents of national, social, and moral dissolution in their own day and age. However, these movements often upheld dangerously unilateral positions, due to the lack of adequate discernment; this was a weakness that, again, has played into the enemy's hands.

In relation to this, we must deal with the issue raised by this document concerning the leaders of the occult war. According to the Protocols, the leaders of the global plot are Jews who planned and undertook the destruction of the traditional and Christian European civilization in order to achieve the universal rule of Israel, or God's "chosen people." This is obviously an exaggeration. At this point we may even wonder whether a fanatical anti-Semitism, which always sees the Jew as a deus ex machina, is not unwittingly playing into the hands of the enemy. One of the means employed by the occult forces to protect themselves consists of directing their opponents' attention toward those who are only partially responsible for certain upheavals, thus concealing the rest of the story, namely a wider sequence of causes. It could be shown that even if theProtocols were a forgery perpetrated by provocateurs, nonetheless they reflect ideas very congenial to the Law and spirit of Israel. Second, it is true that many Jews have been and still are among the promoters of modern disorder in its more radical cultural expressions, whether political or social. This, however, should not prevent a deeper analysis, capable of exposing forces that may have employed modern Judaism merely as an instrument. After all, despite the fact that many Jews are among the apostles of the main ideologies regarded by the Protocols as instruments of global subversion (i.e., liberalism, socialism, scientism, and rationalism), it is also evident that these ideas would have never arisen and triumphed without historical antecedents, such as the Reformation, Humanism, the naturalism and individualism of the Renaissance, and the philosophy of Descartes. Such phenomena cannot be attributed to Judaism, but rather point to a wider web of influences.

In the Protocols the concepts of Judaism and Masonry are interwoven; therefore, in the literature that this text spawned, mention is often made in careless terms of a Jewish-Masonic plot. Here caution must be exercised. While recognizing the Jewish predominance in many sectors of modern Masonry, as well as the Jewish origin of several elements in the Masonic symbolism and rituals, the anti-Semitic thesis, according to which Masonry has been the creation and tool of Israel, must be rejected. Modern Masonry (with this designation I allude essentially to the Freemasonry that developed since the creation of London's Grand Lodge in 1717) has undoubtedly been one of the societies that promoted the modern political subversions, and especially their ideological background. However, here too the danger is to be distracted by explaining everything with the action of ordinary Masonry.

Among those who regard the Protocols as a forgery, there are some who have noticed that various ideas in this text are similar to those that have been implemented by centralizing and dictatorial regimes, so much so that the Protocols can be an excellent manual for those who wish to install a new Bonapartism or totalitarianism. This view is partially correct. This amounts to saying that the "occult war" should be conceived, from a positive point of view, within a wide and elastic context, and we should expose the part played in it by phenomena that are apparently contradictory and hardly reducible to the simplistic formula of a Jewish-Masonic global plot.

Regardless of the role played by Jews and Masonry in the modern subversion, it is necessary to recognize clearly the real historical context of their influence, as well as the limit beyond which the occult war is destined to develop by employing forces that not only are no longer those of Judaism and of Masonry, but that could even totally turn against them. To realize this, consider the law of the regression of the castes, which I have employed as a hermeneutic tool in my Revolt Against the Modern World in order to assess the effective meaning of history. From a civilization led by spiritual leaders and by a sacred regality, a shift occurred to civilizations led by mere warrior aristocracies; the latter were eventually replaced by the civilization of the Third Estate. The last stage is the collectivist civilization of the Fourth Estate. When we reflect carefully on things, modern Judaism as a power (quite apart from the concomitant, widespread, and instinctive action of individual Jewish thinkers and writers) is inseparable from capitalism and finance, which fall within the civilization of the Third Estate. The same applies to modern Masonry, which prepared ideologically for and supported the advent of the Third Estate. Masonry still presents itself today as the custodian of the principles of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, its doctrines acting as a kind of secular religion of modern democracy; its militant action has revealed and continues to reveal itself along this line, openly or in semisecret ways. All this falls within the penultimate phase; this phase, the overall cycle of democratic and capitalist civilization of the Third Estate, will eventually usher in the last collectivist phase, to which it has inadvertently opened the way. It is therefore logical that the role of a central guiding force of global subversion in this last period will no longer be played by Judaism or Masonry and that the main current may turn against both of these groups, as if they were residues to be liquidated once and for all; after all, this can be seen in countries in which regimes controlled by the Fourth Estate (i.e., Marxist regimes) are beginning to be consolidated, even though Jews and Masons contributed to their advent.

But then again, as far as the general radical Jewish-Masonic conspiracy thesis upheld in some milieus is concerned, the actual situation shows its inconsistency. It would be a real abandonment to fantasy to suppose that the leaders of the great conflicting powers — the United States, the USSR, and Red China — receive orders from an international center of Jews and Masons (almost nonexistent in China), and act accordingly in view of the same goal. Again, it is necessary to refer to a wider horizon of influences and to look elsewhere.

[...]

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Evola's anti-semitism

By Michael O'Meara

Julius Evola

When Julius Evola, one of the leading twentieth-century critics of Judeo-liberal civilization, worked out his racial theory during the 1930s, the principal inspiration for anti-Semitic thought was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Purportedly stolen from an occult Lodge, theProtocols were a report of twenty-four secret meetings held by the leaders of international Jewry, as they attempted to devise a plan for world domination.

Jewish organizations quite naturally went to considerable lengths to discredit the Protocols. Their most famous effort resulted in a judicial action taken by a Berne court in 1933 against a Swiss nationalist who had distributed the document.

The court’s decision that the Protocols were a libelous forgery, Evola thought, was besides the point. For in his eyes the issue of the Protocols’ authenticity was “secondary to the far more serious and essential problem of their veracity”—for even if not actually written by the “Elders” or based on an existing plan, the document in his view was of unparalleled significance in drawing attention, first, to the Jewish Question, and, more importantly, to the subversive forces at work in recent history.

In this spirit, he claimed the Protocols shed new light on the Jews’ campaign against Europe’s traditions, aristocracies, symbols, and transcendent values, especially as this campaign promoted ideologies subverting the white man’s sense of order—ideologies such as capitalism, cosmopolitanism, egalitarianism, materialism, feminism, etc.

Inspired by the subversive import of these ideologies, the Jews allegedly “stress the negative aspects, abuses, and injustices” of traditional Europe. To this end, they “spread the germs of a critical and rationalistic mentality meant to corrupt the innermost ethical cement” of organically established hierarchies; they endeavor to dominate the principal centers of official teaching, to control public opinion through their monopoly of the media, to undermine family life, to provoke both social and moral defeatism by “stirring up mistrust and discreditable rumors regarding the clergy” and other representatives of white society. And, not least, they reduce all interests to economic-financial ones, replacing former authorities with mathematical calculations and materialist imperatives.

The course of modern European history, Evola claimed, seemed “to meet the objectives set out in the Protocols.” For once the “Elders’” campaign succeeded in reducing whites to “a mush of beings without tradition and inner strength,” “the ancient promise of theregnum of the Chosen People” became realizable.

But if Jews for Evola were one of the principal forces for subversion in the modern world, he parted company with those “vulgar anti-Semites” who saw the Jews everywhere, a sort of deus ex machina, responsible for all the world’s ills. This type of reductionism, he thought, was self-discrediting. One can acknowledge “the pernicious role the Jew has played in the history of civilization,” he writes, but this “must not prejudice a deeper investigation which can make us become aware of forces for which Judaism may have been . . . only the instrument.”

Thus, while the European encounter with Judah goes back more than two millennia, it was, he stressed, only in recent times, with the advent of liberal-capitalist societies and particularly with the rise of America to world power, that Jews actually began to dominate the white homelands.

Though Evola affirmed both the legitimacy and necessity of anti-Semitism, at the same time he rejected its “parochialism,” its often arbitrary principles, and its lack of “a truly general standpoint.”

The vulgar anti-Semitism that makes the Jews responsible for every form of subversion was, from his perspective, a humiliating admission of inferiority. The Jews were stronger and more capable, he argued, only when the white man degenerated. That is, only he was no longer himself and thus weakened did he become vulnerable to them, for their power came from their exploitation of the degenerate forces already assaulting white life.

For this reason, Evola thought the subversive forces empowered by liberal capitalism and exploited by the Jews were “only the last links in a chain of causes which are unthinkable without antecedents such as, for instance, [Renaissance] humanism, the [Protestant] Reformation, and the French Revolution, all of which are phenomena that no one would seriously think of ascribing to a Jewish conspiracy.”

Jewish power, in a word, followed a larger historical process of “decomposition and involution,” which had de-Aryanized the white man and prepared the way for the Jews’regnum.

Anti-Semitism, as a consequence, not only tends to make the Jews a scapegoat for the failings of modern civilization, it also conceals a more general struggle against its de-Aryanizing forces—against its “mechanizing rationalism, secular illuminism, and world-outlook based on numbers and quantity.”

Though emphasizing that the Jews were not the sole cause for modernity’s anti-white impetus, Evola nevertheless accepted that it was easier to fight personal forces (Jews) than abstractions (modernity) and that the figure of the omnipotent Jew was an effective symbol in mobilizing resistance to the anti-Aryanizing forces.

Because Evola believed it was the destruction of “our former imperial, aristocratic, and spiritual Europe” that made Jewish domination possible, it was only in returning to the principles of this Europe that he saw any prospect of effectively resisting the demonic order born of their domination.

The struggle against the de-Aryanizing forces entails, then, not merely a racial struggle against alien domination, but also a spiritual struggle to reclaim the white man’s original identity—a spiritual struggle having nothing to do with woolly abstractions or mystic escapes, but one engaged as a heroic action faithful to the white man’s Aryan essence.

What is this essence?

Virtually every historical stage in the white man’s encounter with Judah has unleashed the forces of anti-Semitism. For the Jew this is sign of the inherently pathological character of gentile society; for Evola it suggested that everything “connected with Semitism, and, above all, with Jews, appears as peculiarly repulsive to the peoples of the white race.” This is the case not simply because Jewish interests clash with white ones, but because they, as a people defined by Talmudic Law, offend the animating spirit of that “common primordial civilization” from which all the various historical and more recent white civilizations arose.

It was this primal spiritual opposition between Jew and Aryan, Evola argued, that was at the root of anti-Semitism.

Borrowing terms taken from J. J. Bachofen, Evola characterized the Aryan spirit as solar and virile, the Jewish spirit as lunar and feminine.

“Arya,” the root of “Aryan,” Evola noted, comes from a Sanskrit word designating “noblemen,” for “out of the mass of common and mediocre beings rise men ‘of race’ in the sense of higher, ‘noble’ beings.”

The highest expression of the Aryan’s aristocratic racial spirit took the form of the warrior’s “affirmative attitude to the divine”—spirit being that “which in better times was called ‘race’ by well-born persons: that is, straightforwardness, inner unity, character, dignity, manliness, immediate sensitivity for all values that are at the core of all human greatness and which, since they are situated far above fortuitous reality, govern this same reality.”

Behind the numerous mythological and symbolic references to the bright sky found in the various Indo-European cultures, all of which upheld value systems oriented to the transcendent heavens, there prevailed a sense of the “incorporeal virility of light.”

The solar is indeed light itself, unlike the lunar which brightens only when it reflects and absorbs light outside it.

Relatedly, the Europeans’ ancient pagan cults all believed in a race of divine heroes. In this spirit, they saw themselves as the “eminent bearers” of the universal forces associated with these heroes’ “solar glory”—as expressed in principles of freedom and personality, loyalty and honor.

Similarly, the Aryan spirit was realized not in the works of monks and rabbis—but in action, preeminently in the struggles the warrior waged against the enemies he had to fight, in himself and in his world.

From this, Evola claimed the Aryan’s “characteristic ideal was more royal than sacerdotal, more the ideal of a transfiguring affirmation than the priestly idea of religious abandon.”

Unlike the “devout and imploring servility” characteristic of the Abrahamic religions, the Aryan relation to the divine was active and affirmative.

“It was the heroes, more than the saints” that the Aryan saw as reaching “the highest and the most privileged places of immortality.” His quest for knowledge and understanding, it followed, was engaged as a virile, heroic conquest—not something “sinful” like the biblical Adam’s attempt to eat from the divine tree.

In contrast to Aryan solarity, Evola claimed the Jews’ lunar spirit negates the synthesis of spirituality and virility, emphasizing both that which is coarsely materialist and sensualist on the one side, and escapist and contemplative on the other. Mammonism and rationalism accordingly dominate their relationship to the world, just as the body for them is not an instrument of the spirit, but simply flesh and matter, something to be stimulated and pleased.

The dualistic conception of body and soul born of the Jewish spirit, whose abstract and fatalistic contemplativeness is “devoid of any interest in the heroic and supranatural affirmation of the personality,” cannot, as a result, but level the higher values associated with the Aryan’s Olympian spirituality.

In the cultural realm this leads the Jews “to falsify, make ridiculous, render illusory and unjust” that which is distinct to peoples of Aryan origin and which resists the “animal, low, or dirty aspects of things.” “To degrade, to soil, and to debase all that [which the white man considers] great and noble, and to unleash at the same time obscure, instinctive, sexual, pre-personal tendencies” that undermine his values are all, in fact, second nature to them.

The Jews’ critical assault on white values is also the key to their dominion, for through the opportunistic infiltrations that enable them to control the governing institutions, they seek (usually in the name of democracy, humanity, and science) to tear down all the historically established principles and orders obstructing their designs.

Wherever, then, “the virile, heroic, triumphant assumption of the Divine vanishes, to give way to the exaltation of the pathos of a slavish, depersonalizing, turbidly and Messianic attitude toward spirit,” there Jewry inevitably triumphs over Aryanity.

To fight the forces denaturing the white man, it is not enough, therefore, to take half-measures infused with the alien Semitic spirit of the modern world.

A great many anti-Semites, though, do just this, seeing Aryanity as an inverse Semitism and not a true anti-Semitism. To be fully anti-Semitic, Evola argued, cannot be compromised by the ideas and principles against which whites struggle. They need to fight as Aryans.

[They] need to be radical. Values must be evoked once again which can be seriously called Aryan, and not merely on the basis of vague and one-sided concepts suffused with biological materialism. Values of a solar Olympian spirituality, of a classicism of clarity and controlled force, of a new love for difference and free personality, and, at the same time, for hierarchy and universality that a stock newly possessed of a virile ability to rise from “life” to “more-than-life” can create as against a world torn to shreds, without true principles and peace.

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Evola’s anti-Semitism was largely an offshoot of his “Traditionalist” opposition to liberal modernity and its assault on the Aryan spirit, just as his support for racial nationalism in the Thirties and Forties was based less on his belief in its various ideological manifestations than in its resistance to the materialist and Judaifying impulses of the Third Estate.

Yet not long after 1945, once the forces of the Third Estate had crushed the last remnants of Traditional Europe, the Jews ceased to be a target of Evola’s traditionalist critique. At the very point, then, when the lunar forces became triumphant, Evola seemed to abandon his anti-Semitism.

Why?

Part of the reason had to do with the impossibility of mounting an effective political resistance to the Judeo-liberal order of the postwar period. For once Europe fell under the yoke of the extra-European powers and every vestige of its historic past fell into ruin, all that could be done in this new dark age was to make certain that those few men left standing were able to keep the dimming embers of the Aryan spirit from being entirely extinguished.

As he wrote in 1948, “I see nothing but a world of ruins, where a kind of front line is possible only in the catacombs.” To sustain this underground resistance, it was henceforth necessary to adopt a stoic—an indifferent—attitude to the frenzied antics of what had become a totally Hebraicized world.

But there was another reason for his waning interest in the Jewish Question.

In his “spiritual autobiography,” The Road of Cinnabar (1972), Evola writes that following the Second World War he thought it “absurd” to continue stressing the white man’s superiority over the Jew “because the negative behavior [traditionally] attributed to Jews had now become that of the majority of ‘Aryans.’” That is, in an age where the Jewish spirit of liberal modernity prevailed and most whites had succumbed to it, it was futile to exalt Aryan values, for whites, the Aryans’ alleged heirs, now behaved no differently than Jews.

For this reason, I think his postwar stance was less an abandonment of his earlier anti-Semitic critique than a recognition that the subversive forces (of which the Jews were the most conspicuous embodiment) had become hegemonic and that those few white men who had not succumbed had no choice but to “ride the tiger” until it dropped of exhaustion—the tiger being the perverted powers that had come to rule the world.

Insofar as the twenty-first century announces a new order of battle, Evola’s apolitical stoicism can no longer be our position today.

But it is nevertheless one that points to what is at stake in the wars we’ll have to fight if whites are to have a future—for the white man’s blood will not survive if he defiles the spirit that makes him who he is.

Bibliographical Note: Ten of Evola’s twenty-five books have now been translated into English, though not his racialist and fascist ones (with the exception of the pamphlet “Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem”). The interested reader should probably begin not with his magnum opus, Revolt against the Modern World, which demands a good deal of familiarity with his thought, but rather with Men among the Ruins, beautifully edited by Michael Moynihan and introduced with a long biographical essay by the Austrian scholar H. T. Hanson. There are also several English-language websites devoted to him. The one with the best collection of his articles is Evola As He Is (http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com). For those who read Italian, an excellent introduction is Adriano Romualdi, Julius Evola: L’uoma e l’opera (Rome: Volpe, 1968). For those who read French, see Christophe Boutin, Politique et tradition: Julius Evola dans le siècle (Paris: Kimé, 1992). On Evola’s “problematic” metaphysics, see my “The Primordial and the Perennial: Tradition in the Thought of Martin Heidegger and Julius Evola,” Tyr: Myth—Culture—Tradition 3 (2007).

Michael O’Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, Ind.: 1stBooks, 2004).

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