Revolt Against the Modern World By Julius Evola Original Italian Edition 1934 Revised 1951, 1970 Inner Traditions International 1995 (Translation by Guido Stucco) 375 Pages, $29.95 ISBN 0-89281-506-X

Summary & Notes on the Author Traditional Spirituality State, Kingship, Empire Castes and Traditional Economics Traditional Time and Space Historical Decay A Mythological World History Degenerate Religions The Decline of Antiquity Church versus Empire The Post-Medieval Collapse The End of this World A Critique and Anathema

A Critique and Anathema The notion of “tradition” is not easily dismissed, nor is it inherently sinister. More than one commentator has noted that the world of tradition is simply the world of fairy stories. Tolkien's “Middle Earth” is a nearly perfect picture of the traditional world. The Italian Right even uses Tolkien's work for recruiting, to the continuing consternation of the British-based Tolkien Society. Middle Earth becomes a sinister place only if one uses it against history, and not as an illustration of continuing historical themes. For Tolkien, history was a theodicy. There was decay from age to age, but in some ways the world also grew wiser through experience and revelation. Tolkien was a conservative, but he was he the kind of conservative who was interested in conserving things. This was not a project that Evola endorsed until he was practically on his deathbed. Tradition appears in more uncompromising light in other fiction; the model of history in Doris Lessing's “space novels,” particularly “Shikasta” and “The Sirian Experiments,” tracks Evola's scenario very closely, down through the end of the current world. What particularly struck me, once I encountered Evola, was the relationship between his ideas and those of some New Agers from the 1970s, particularly William Irwin Thompson. He and the Lindisfarne group seemed for a time to have been planning to constitute groups of “seed people” against the darkness to come. Evola's model of history is oddly parochial. It even smacks of Frazier's “Golden Bough.” Comparative mythographers of about 1900 assumed that magic came first, and then religion, and finally philosophy and science. Evola says much the same: first came the pre-religious “Polar” era, when supernatural forces were commanded, not worshipped. Evola differs from the early mythographers only in his insistence that magic works. Most later anthropologists seem to think otherwise. While this may be putting the matter too simply, the rule of thumb is that magic is misused religion, particularly religion used for a private purpose, such as to hex a neighbor. We see this even in sophisticated societies. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages, as C. Lewis noted. The European interest in the subject became pronounced only during the Renaissance, when religious prohibitions weakened. My point here is not to debate whether Evola's “Polar Age” ever happened; he makes clear that he is willing to use the idea simply as an archetype. The problem is that he seems to have defined his archetype by using bad anthropology. Evola is proud that his model is anti-historical. There is indeed an attraction to a model that purports to encompass a world beyond history. The problem is that Evola's “magical idealism,” as it is sometimes called, seems to have more than the usual amount of trouble dealing with mere historical facts. This is what happens when you exclude progress from history and dialogue as a method of enlightenment. There is no way that historical events can modify the system. Traditionalists must reject “devotional religion” and capitalism, democracy and science, indeed all the features of the modern world, no matter what occurs within those structures. Despite his insistence on the superiority of traditional societies, he never quite comes to terms with the immense historical success of the “bourgeois” West. His argument that this success is merely material rings more and more hollow as he laments its victories in every field, and not least over the semi-traditional powers in the 20th century world wars. Even granted Evola's different standards of evidence, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the superiority of tradition is not just occult, but undetectable. Actually, Evola's understanding of tradition is more sinister than the systematic misreading of history it promotes. The system also leaves no way in which events can modify the autonomous will of those who embrace Evola's ideas. What we have here is a kind of occult pietism. Those who embrace it are forever after on automatic pilot. Indeed, even if the Dark Age ended, and the world began the process of reintegration, still the “seed people” would continue on their perfectly autonomous path of criticism and destruction. No natural event could change their wills; only the divine intervention to which Evola refers at the end of his book could do so. One wonders whether even that would suffice, however. The sort of fixity of the will for which Evola evangelized has sometimes served as a definition of damnation. Beginning

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Copyright © 2002 by John J. Reilly