JULIUS EVOLA

Giulio Cesare Andrea "Julius" Evola 19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974) was an Italian philosopher, poet, painter, and esotericist. Evola regarded his perspectives and spiritual values as aristocratic, masculine, traditionalist, heroic and defiantly reactionary.

Evola was born in Rome, but little is known about his early upbringing. He served as an artillery officer on the Asiago plateau during the First World War. As a painter, Evola was attracted to the avant-garde, and briefly with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist movement. Evola considered suicide at the age of 23 but avoided it due to a revelation he had while reading an early Buddhist text concerning shedding all forms of identity other than absolute transcendence. Evola's interests in the early 1920s led him deeper into the occult; he wrote fastidiously on Western esotericism and of Eastern mysticism, ultimately developing the doctrine of "magical idealism".

The central postulation of Evola's theories and writings is centred on his own idiosyncratic spiritualism and mysticism; the inner life. The philosophy covers themes such as Hermeticism, the metaphysics of war and of sex, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism, mountaineering, the Holy Grail, the essence and history of civilisations, decadence and various philosophic and religious traditions dealing with both the Classics and the Orient. Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites, spiritual oblivion and organised deviancy. To counter this and call in a primordial rebirth, Evola presented his world of tradition. According to scholar Franco Ferraresi, Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most consistently "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century".[2]

Evola was ostracised during Fascist Italy. He publicly criticised fascism and was never affiliated with the Italian National Fascist Party nor the Italian Social Republic.[3] He regarded his position as that of a sympathetic right-wing intellectual, seeing potential in the movement and wishing to reform its errors to allign with his own views. One of his successes was in regards to the racial laws; his advocacy of a spiritual consideration of race won out in the debate in Italy, rather than a solely materialist reductionism concept popular in Germany. Since the Second World War some Perennialist groups have taken inspiration from him, as well as several apolitical occultists, such as Thomas Karlsson and Massimo Scaligero.