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

Degenerate Religions Demetrianism, Aphroditism, Amazonianism, Titanism, Dionysianism, and Heroism: all these are higher or lower forms of “traditional” society. In mixed form, they are all met with in the Dark Age, which is the Iron age and our age. Societies outside the West were, until very recently, better at preserving traditional forms than the West has been. For instance, the end of Imperial Japan marked the end of solar regality for this age of the world. However, we can also trace the decay of tradition in every historical civilization. We see decay beginning in ancient Egypt, when immortality became democratic at the end of the Sixth Dynasty. Pharaoh becomes a mere representative of deity; he is no longer transcendence himself. The cult of Isis appeared, and Osiris became a lunar god. Ra, with whom the state cult once chiefly identified, is impassive and solar. Osiris is a mere vegetation god: “The solar-magical stage declined, followed by a new 'religious' stage: prayer replaced command; desire and sentimentalism replaced identification and magical techniques.” The Hebrew cycle has some peculiar features. Adam failed in his quest, as did his prototype, Gilgamesh: “[I]t is possible…to establish a traditional convergence of meanings between the traditional view of the 'vanquished' and the Jewish view of 'sin…Adam's fault is associated with a defeat he suffered in a symbolical event (the attempt to come into possession of the fruit of the 'Tree'), which may yet have had a victorious outcome. We know of myths in which the winning of [symbolically equivalent things, such as the Golden Fleece] is achieved by other heroes…and does not lead them to damnation…but rather to immortality or a transcendental knowledge.” In Judaism, the heroic attempt became a sin, through woman's fault. Still, there are heroic Hebrews; Jacob even outwrestled an angel. There is an oscillation in the Jewish soul between guilt and Luciferic rebelliousness. The general picture is bleak. There is no Blessed Island to which heroes, at least, might repair. David himself must descend to dismal Sheol. At the high end, the traditional component in Judaism became critical and abstract. We see this right through Jewish history; we can trace its effect on modern science. A human type arose whose ideas can never be realized, and who is therefore eternally dissatisfied. He is frustrated with any positive order of society, thus becoming a constant source of revolution. There are further tensions. No king can enjoy divine regality, lest God's place be taken, but the Jews are themselves “God's people,” who have been promised dominion over all others. There is the disturbing borrowing of the Saoshyant, of the hope for a Messiah. The Jews are not a race. The priests made the Jewish people through the Law. However, a rebellious substratum remains. The prophets turned defeat into expiation, with the hope of future restoration. Prophetism is rebellious, anti-hieratic by nature. When restoration did not arrive, prophecy degenerated into apocalyptic, which smacks of popular shamanism. “The Chosen People” became “the Eternal Servants.” Ancient tradition says the Jewish God was one of the creatures of Typhon, which was the spirit of restlessness. When divorced from the law, the latent rebellion in the Jewish substratum acts dramatically and decisively. Islam managed to overcome the negative motifs of its region. Again, we have a case where a divine law created a people, but the law worked on warrior stock. There was no direct dependence on Judaism or Christianity. Thus, there was no original sin. There is an outer law for public order, but this is complemented by a recognized esoteric tradition, complete with a system of initiation. Islam thus represents a tradition higher than that of Judaism or western Christianity. In India, the role of the priests was a late and unhappy development. Contemplation gained ascendancy over action. The Aryan worldview began to dissipate in India when the identity of Atman and Brahman was interpreted pantheistically. This was the spirit of the South. Brahman had been an impersonal force, which the Aryan directed. Later, when Brahman was considered the All, the Source, and the Goal, the way was open to belief in the equality of all creatures. Buddhism reacted against this, holding that even to identify oneself with nature or God was nonetheless an evasion of the transcendent. In early Buddhism, the self was not believed to reincarnate, but only a craving conceived in an earlier life. Mithraism was a heroic, anti-telluric cult. This was no mysticism of love, but of warriors committed to the same enterprise, something we also see among the later Germans. It declined only after Mithras became a savior, not the archetype with which initiates identified. Despite traditional elements, particularly in Catholicism, Christianity is subversive. God becomes a human being, not an impassive essence. Christianity's immediate antecedent is not even traditional Judaism, but prophetism. Christian spirituality is desperate; Jesus simply crystallized something in the atmosphere of late antiquity. Christianity exchanges the warrior messiah for a sacrificial victim. The victim is the object of an ecstatic cult that opposes all caste, all race and tradition. The cult is not heroic, sapiential, or initiatory; its confused link to the supernatural is nothing more than faith. The natural candidates for this cult are perturbed, broken people. Spiritual equality strikes at the heart of the traditional idea of personality. The Church substitutes mere collectivity for universality. Christianity was defective for lack of an element of initiation. However, the Protestants made things worse by removing even the fragments of transcendence and hierarchy that Catholicism had preserved. Luther was right about the Church being “Babylonian,” but the Babylonian elements were the valuable ones. Anglo-Saxon Protestantism divorced religion from the transcendent completely. Sacrality was transferred to the worldly success of individuals, and to the “progress” of societies. Next

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Copyright © 2002 by John J. Reilly