Background
Julius Evola was born on May 19, 1898 in Rome, Italy. He was the son of Vincenzo Evola and Concetta Mangiapane.
painter philosopher Political activist author
Julius Evola was born on May 19, 1898 in Rome, Italy. He was the son of Vincenzo Evola and Concetta Mangiapane.
Evola studied engineering in Rome, but did not complete his studies.
During World War I Julius served as an artillery officer on the Asiago plateau. He was attracted to the avant-garde and after the war, Evola briefly associated with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist movement. In 1922, after concluding that avant-garde art was becoming commercialized and stiffened by academic conventions, he reduced his focus on artistic expression such as painting and poetry.
Approximately at the beginning of the 1920s, Evola focused on spiritual, transcendental and "supra-rational" studies. He began reading various esoteric texts and gradually delved deeper into the occult, alchemy, magic and Oriental studies, particularly Tibetan Tantric yoga. After his return from the war, Evola experimented with hallucinogens and magic.
In 1927, Evola together with Arturo Reghini, the man, who introduced him to esotericism, founded the Gruppo di Ur ("Ur Group"). The purpose of this group was to attempt to bring the members' individual identities into such a superhuman state of power and awareness that they would be able to exert a magical influence on the world. The group employed techniques from Buddhist, Tantric and rare Hermetic texts. They aimed to provide a "soul" to the burgeoning Fascist movement of the time through the revival of ancient Roman religion, and to influence the fascist regime through esotericism.
In 1928, Evola wrote an attack on Christianity titled Pagan Imperialism, which proposed transforming fascism into a system consistent with ancient Roman values and the ancient mystery traditions.
Evola spent a considerable amount of time in Germany in 1937 and 1938, and gave a series of lectures to the German–Italian Society.
Julius spent World War II, working for the Sicherheitsdienst. The Sicherheitsdienst bureau Amt VII, a Reich Main Security Office research library, helped Evola acquire arcane occult and Masonic texts.
After World War II, Evola continued his work in esotericism. He wrote a number of books and articles on sex magic and various other esoteric studies, including The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex and others.
In May, 1951, Evola was arrested and charged with promoting the revival of the Fascist Party, and of glorifying Fascism. Defending himself at trial, Evola stated that his work belonged to a long tradition of anti-democratic writers who certainly could be linked to fascism — at least fascism interpreted according to certain Evolian criteria — but who certainly could not be identified with the Fascist regime under Mussolini. Evola then declared that he was not a Fascist but a "superfascist". He was acquitted.
Untitled
Xilografia
Composizione Dada
Astrazione
Five o'clock tea
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The tendency of aesthetic idealism
Small table (upper surface)
Fucina, studio di rumori
Composizione futurista
Paesaggio interiore, apertura del diaframma
Composizione (Paesaggio) Dada n. 3 (o n. 2)
Mazzo di fiori
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La libra s'infiamma e le piramidi
Julius applauded Mussolini's anti-bourgeois orientation and his goal of making Italian citizens into hardened warriors, but criticized Fascist populism, party politics, and elements of leftism that he saw in the fascist regime. Evola saw Mussolini's Fascist Party as possessing no cultural or spiritual foundation. He also opposed the futurism that Italian fascism was aligned with, along with the "plebeian" nature of the movement.
In Evola's view "power and civilization have progressed from one to another of the four castes — sacred leaders, warrior nobility, bourgeoisie (economy, "merchants") and slaves." For Evola, the core of racial superiority lay in the spiritual qualities of the higher castes, which expressed themselves in physical as well as in cultural features, but were not determined by them. The law of the regression of castes places racism at the core of Evola's philosophy, since he sees an increasing predominance of lower races as directly expressed through modern mass democracies.
Evola believed that physical race and spiritual race could diverge as a consequence of miscegenation. Evola's racism included racism of the body, soul and spirit, giving primacy to the latter factor, writing that "races only declined when their spirit failed."
As for Jews, Evola saw them as corrosive and anti-traditional. In Evola's view the Jews were "the carriers of a world view...a spirit, that corresponded to the "worst" and "most decadent" features of modernity: democracy, egalitarianism and materialism."
Quotations:
"Neither pleasure nor pain should enter as motives when one must do what must be done."
"The entrance of the woman with equal rights into practical modern life, her new freedom, her finding herself side by side with men in the streets, offices, professions, factories, sports, and now even in political and military life, is one of those dissolutive phenomena in which, in most cases, it is difficult to perceive anything positive. In essence, all this is simply the renunciation of the woman's right to be a woman."
"My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal."
"The blood of heroes is closer to the Lord than the ink of scholars and the prayers of the pious."
"I see nothing but a world of ruins, where a kind of front line is possible only in the catacombs."