Keywords

1 The Rise of Traditionalism

After the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, byzantine-Greek intellectuals who had fled from Constantinople and settled in Western Europe kindled interest for the Greek treatises. The translation of these treatises to Latin by intellectuals such as Marsilio Ficino (d.1499) generated the idea that a single true theology or prisca theologia stood at the origin of both Greek and Christian thoughts that connected them. The existence of this theology was secured by the Neoplatonist principle of “the One”. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d.1494) furthered the idea and sustained the existence of the ancient truth also in many other sources such as the Quran and the Kabbalah (Schmitt, 1968). In 1540, the Vatican librarian and theologian Agostino Steuco (d.1548), in his De perenni philosophia, presented a more ambitious project confirming that various pagan and non-Christian traditions were compatible with Christianity. They all contained a common perennial nucleus of truth. A century and a half later, convictions about the existence of the perennial wisdom became widely popular. This assumption constructed one of the bases of the European Traditionalism and formed its method of looking into religions, namely comparative studies (Sedgwick, 2004).

In the following centuries, Europe witnessed the rise of interest for the East. The Thirty Years’ War challenged the European self-awareness and encouraged scholars such as Voltaire (d.1778) to seek models of tolerance outside of Europe. In this period, French travelers went to India and Persia seeking eastern ancient religions that could offer alternative paradigms to the Judeo-Christian world views. Travelers like Thevenot (d.1667), Tavernier (d.1689) and Chardin (d.1713) left various reports of the tolerance of the governors and peaceful coexistence of people in Tauris and Ispahan (Mirshahvalad, 2016). Also India was seen with admiration. Sir William Jones (d.1794) saw similar roots in the Vedanta, Plato’s, and Pythagoras’ teachings (Dickson, 2021). In the nineteenth century, the newly discovered Vedas became the textual evidence of the existence of the unique perennial wisdom, while Hinduism started to be considered the original root of all religions (Sedgwick, 2004).

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution questioned old cultural values and authorities generating existential crisis. This crisis formed the second basis of the European Traditionalism: a romantic reaction to the loss of old values and nostalgic views toward the non-modern world. In this period, Germany and France witnessed the rise of anti-positivist philosophical trends (Ferraresi, 1995). In Western Europe, traditionalists sought remedies for the evils of modernity both within and without the Catholic Church. Philosophers such as Joseph De Maistre (d.1821) and Louis De Bonald (d.1840), besides polemists such as François-René de Chateaubriand (d.1848) and Félicité de La Mennais (d.1854), defended the Church against the modern world (Scaliati, 2007; Nisbet, 1966). In 1861, when Vatican lost the Papal States, Pope Pius IX (d.1878) developed deep hostility toward modernity and in 1864, published Pius’ Syllabus of Errors. He claimed that the Pope should not and cannot come to terms with progress, liberalism, and the modern world. This trend dominated the Church until the Vatican II (1962–1965) (Legenhausen, 2002).

Dissimilar to Catholic traditionalists, some devotees of the old secure and stable world sought salvation outside the Church. They were fascinated by an inner wisdom that the established religions could not offer. At the end of the nineteenth century, the interest for the primordial and perennial reality was reinforced by the “re-discovery” of Steuco’s De perenni philosophia (Schmitt, 1968). A synergy between the idea of crisis of the West and the perennial philosophy formed what later became known as the Western Traditionalism or simply Traditionalism. Although in the early twentieth century the alarm of crisis of the West had been raised by several philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche (d.1900), Oswald Spengler (d.1936), Johan Huizinga (d.1945) and Ortega y Gasset (d.1955), the synthesis between perennialism and pessimism is commonly understood as the merit of the French intellectual René Guénon (d.1951).Footnote 1

Despite being influenced by Renaissance Hermeticism and theosophy, Guénon never recognized these roots of his ideas. He rebranded the perennial philosophy as the Integral Tradition, which he always wrote with a capital T to emphasize its absolute and non-human nature. The Tradition in this sense was different from customs and habitual ways of being transmitted as a family heritage. The Tradition is Divine, unchangeable, and impenetrable. A method for grasping its features is comparative study of its “authentic” exterior forms or epiphanies. This study enables the Traditionalist to see the identical symbols in different forms, remote in time or space whose origin is the mysterious primordial Tradition. The inner wisdom that the Traditionalist cultivates over time is not accessible to the commonality, not only because it is intrinsically secret, but because the profane cannot understand it. The belief in the nobility of the occult is a corollary to Guénon’s adversity to democracy and public knowledge. Guénon disdained democracy and what he called the “vulgarization” or lowering of knowledge in order to reach out to all. The democratic education is based on the “illusion” that people can be educated equally. Improving the education level of people will lead to the decline of the elite. The public education is adequate for the “profane” knowledge; it is public, not because of the value of opening science to everyone, but because its content does not have any value to be reserved for the elite. The French author fiercely criticized the mass life, which assimilated men to bees and ants that live in community (Guénon, 2001a).

Guénon once hoped that the Tradition could be accessed also through Catholicism, but then concluded that the Church was too contaminated by the modern world to be considered an authentic reference point. The genuine expressions of the Tradition had to be sought in the East. Guénon essentialized the East and the West and made them two contrasting categories. The West was in decline and the Church was incapable of reversing the catastrophic process. The West possessed only aberrant and deformed types of knowledge such as sociology, history, psychology, archaeology, and anthropology, whereas the East was the abode of the wisdom. The West had nothing to teach to the East. Before its total destruction, the West was supposed to realign itself with the Traditional civilizations of the East. Guénon divided the East, on the basis of its distance from Europe, into “near”, “middle”, and “far” represented by Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese civilizations respectively. All three civilizations were milieu of the perennial Tradition (Guénon, 2001b).

Hindu civilization possessed a significant testament to the unity of Being, namely Vedanta. Guénon came to this conclusion under the influence of the English mathematician and Indologist Reuben Burrow (d.1792) and the French physician Gérard Encausse (d.1916) who had presented a “Vedanta-Oriented perennialism”: a non-dual reading of Vedanta introduced by the eighth-century Indian scholar Shankara (Dickson, 2021, p. 592). Although Guénon was interested in Hinduism, he was aware of the practical difficulties in embracing traditional Hinduism for those who were not Hindu by birth. Eventually the appeal of Gnosticism led him toward Islam. In Cairo, he encountered the Swedish-born convert to Islam and the representative of the Shadhiliyya order, Ivan Aguéli (d.1917). Thanks to Aguéli, in 1910 Guénon was initiated to Islam and chose ʿAbd al-Wahid as his name. Under Aguéli’s influence, Guénon perceived Ibn ʿArabi’s (d.1240) teachings as the Islamic version of the Vedanta, while waḥdat al-wujudFootnote 2 became a confirmation of the inherent oneness of existence (Fotros, 2021; Sedgwick, 2021). As he described in the Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindoues (Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines), among Eastern religions, Islam is the nearest to the West. This religion plays the role of intermediation between East and West.

Although Guénon did not convert to Hinduism, many Hindu concepts found their way in his works. Cyclical time, the idea that we are currently in Kali Yuga or Dark Age and his admiration for the caste system are some of these convictions. Inspired by Ibn ʿArabi’s concept of time, Kabbalah, and Hinduist notions such as Manvantara, Manu, Kalpa, and Yuga, Guénon presented seven world regions or Dvipas. Each of the seven lands is governed by a Qutb or Pole. The Manvantara is divided in four yugas. Each Yuga corresponds to a cycle of the universe: gold, silver, bronze, and iron. Guénon added his apocalyptic visions regarding the end of the world to the cyclical time. This concept of time is in complete opposition to the idea of progress because each cycle is accompanied by a descent, implying that the universe is gradually moving away from its original principle. Now we are in the Dark Age or Kali Yuga that started long time ago and currently we are in its advanced phase. The descending movement of the history provokes terror, which Guénon calls the “terror of history”. The linear time, backed by mathematicians, is based on the idea that time is unfolded uniformly. Whereas the real representation of time is cyclical and non-quantitative. The cyclical time corresponds to the cycles of seasons, which, according to Guénon, represent the Traditional world (Guénon, 2001a).

Guénon’s teachings attracted numerous students all around the world who translated, paraphrased, modified or promoted them. Since Enlightenment, Italy has been exposed to France’s different intellectual currents. Traditionalism was one of them. Guénon was in contact with several Italian intellectuals and realized various editorial collaborations with them. One of Guénon’s followers who inspired many Italian circles of conservative intellectuals, especially after WWII, was Julius EvolaFootnote 3 (d.1974). Evola was the main gate through which Guénon was introduced into Italy; however, he was anything but a loyal epigone of the French author.

2 The Italian Traditionalism

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Italy, similar to France, witnessed an emerging fascination with the Eastern cultures, cultivated especially among occultist societies. Several well-known scholars of Eastern cultures were also members of such societies. The historian of the Middle East and author of Annali dell’Islam (Annals of Islam) Leone CaetaniFootnote 4 (d.1935) had close ties with pagan movements in Rome. He was active in the Grand Council of the Sanhedrin of the Traditional Egyptian Rite, which was a masonic ritual (Massaglia, 2019). The Indologist Giuseppe TucciFootnote 5 (d.1984) founded a theosophical organization dedicated to esoteric studies (Garzilli, 2012). These vigorously male organizations,Footnote 6 especially in the interwar period, were interested in Guénon’s school and promoted his teachings in Italy. Arturo ReghiniFootnote 7 (d.1946), Guido De GiorgioFootnote 8 (d.1957), and Julius Evola were among Guénon’s most important Italian propagators. All three authors developed their own Traditionalist views, which were independent from the French author, and even clashed with him on some crucial points.

The oldest one, Reghini, was also the severest critic to Guénon. Reghini had a long correspondence with Guénon and was influenced by the French author. However, he did not believe in the twilight of the Western system of initiation. He regarded the scholars’ fascination with the East, influenced by Guénon’s teachings, as a barbaric assault on the Caput Mundi. While Guénon praised the East as the locus of the uncorrupted Tradition, Reghini remained convinced in his ideas about the superiority of the Tradition in his homeland. Reghini disapproved Guénon because the French author believed that only in the East one could find inspiring examples and had depicted the West void of initiations and masters (Giudice, 2016).

All three Abrahamic religions, in Reghini’s view, were threatening to the Tradition. Reghini considered Christianity as a Semitic disease. In an article published in the Introduzione alla Magia (Introduction to Magic), under the pseudonym Pietro Negri, Reghini rejected any claim about the Western nature of Christianity. The latter was an Asiatic sect, established by a Palestinian Jew, who was never Hellenized. According to Reghini, affirming the Western nature of Christianity was tantamount to denying or forgetting the contribution of Romans to its extension from Asia to Europe. Nonetheless, the Christianization of the West has not removed the traces of paganism. The Roman wisdom derives from the primordial Tradition that continues to exist in Lazio (Reghini, 2009). Reghini did not describe Islam better than Christianity. Islam was the religion of the Asian barbers who had converted people with violence. To protect people from the Islamic barbarism and the domain of the Church, the Roman empire had to be re-established in the West. The Catholic Church was responsible of having introduced an exotic religion that was threatening to the Roman Olympic spirit. According to Reghini, what could awake Westerners from their slumber was the Roman-Pythagorean unbroken chain of initiation (Giudice, 2016).

Guido De Giorgio had completely different ideas about Christianity and Islam. In his youth, he traveled to Tunis where he would teach Italian. In Tunis he came into contact with a Sufi brotherhood and was inspired by Shaykh Sufi Muhammad Khayreddin (d.1922). It seems that De Giorgio, at least during his sojourn in Tunis, embraced Sufism.Footnote 9 Following WWI, De Giorgio moved to Paris where he was in direct contact with Guénon and became his friend and collaborator. Upon his return to Italy, he became an admirer of Padre Pio (De Giorgio, 1999) and joined the UR Group founded by Evola, but he maintained his correspondence with Guénon. In 1930, De Giorgio encouraged Evola to launch the journal La Torre where they formulated the idea of the “sacred fascism” based on ancient Roman values and the esoteric cultural icons (Iacovella, 2006 (2)). Their definition of fascism was not welcomed by Mussolini and on 15 June 1930 La Torre was shut down (Evola, 2009). During WWII, De Giorgio wrote the Tradizione Romana (Roman Tradition), in which he reconciled Roman religion with Christianity, even though on 19 June 1949, in one of his letters to Guénon, he criticized the Catholic Church and priests because of their distance from esoteric teachings.

Quite contrary to De Giorgio, Evola, especially in the Imperialismo pagano (Pagan Imperialism), published in 1928 (Evola, 2018), discarded any possibility of reconciliation between Romanity and Christianity. In this regard he was influenced by Reghini. The latter in 1920s presented Guénon’s Integral Tradition to Evola. The Baron never used the word “traditionalism”, but like Guénon, always wrote Tradition with the capital T to highlight the unique, unchangeable, and primordial quality of this heritage. Since 1928 until Guénon’s death, Evola and Guénon were in constant contact and Guénon, with 26 articles published between 1934 and 1940, contributed to Evola’s Il regime fascista (The Fascist Regime) (Del Ponte, 1989). Evola believed that the Integral Tradition had to be adopted for implementing the sacred or spiritual fascism. This fascism was capable of reinstating the sacred state, based on the model of the Roman Empire. Such a strong central state was both a political and moral entity with a rex (king) at the apex of hierarchy who possessed both Brahman (priest) and Kshatriya (warrior) spirits.

Evola translated Guénon’s books from French to Italian and divulgated his ideas in Italy: however, diverged from him on at least three crucial matters. The first and foremost discrepancy between Guénon and Evola regarded their approach to religions. According to Evola, religion in its modern sense was a reduction of the ancient wisdom. Religions for Evola did not have any intrinsic value; they were valuable only as far as they were at the service of the Tradition. This approach is visible for instance in the reasons why Evola initially praised Muslims, but in the postbellum Italy lambasted them (see next chapter). According to Guénon, instead, the conditio sine qua non for cultivating spirituality was adherence to “authentic” religious forms. He maintained:

Whoever presents himself as a spiritual teacher without attaching himself to a definite traditional form, or without conforming to the rules established by the latter, cannot truly possess the qualifications he appropriates to himself. (Guénon, 1952, p. 110)

Among religions, the largest discrepancy between the two intellectuals regarded Christianity. For Guénon, Christianity maintained some of its ties with the Tradition and could contribute to initiation, while Evola rejected the main Christian dogmas such as original sin, redemption, and the sacerdotal mediation. He even went further and called this religion the “syncope of the Western tradition, which had a negative impact on the Western spirit” (Evola, 1995, p. 323).

Evola’s approach to Christianity clearly featured influences of both Nietzsche and Reghini. He saw in the Christian exaltation of humility the ruin of humankind. In the same years that Mussolini was approaching the Catholic Church, Evola in the Pagan leveled his harshest critics to Christianity. For instance, he complained: “Semitic-Christian tradition has infected our blood and our mind” (Evola, Pagan, 2018, p. 18). The early Christianity mixed with the “spirit of Israel” comprising sin and expiation reached Europe and destroyed it. This religion that promoted fraternity and charity was distant from virile and heroic values of the “solar spiritualties”.Footnote 10

In Christianity, God became man, whereas among Romans, the absolute man became God. One of the signs of the decline of the West was the twilight of the man-god, which caused the loss of the spiritual state and the hierarchy. The democratic evil and the Semitic poison damaged all roots of the European civilization. The exaltation of the weak and of the underprivileged, typical of Christianity, ruined the aristocracy. The Semitic spirit facilitated the penetration of other Asiatic “abnormalities” that provoked the decline of the West. In the Pagan, Evola stressed the necessity of a Roman revolution of fascism. His thesis regarding the spiritual meaning of the fasces or the ancient Roman bundle (inherited from Etruscans) provoked Church’s reproach.

Evola had his own concept of spiritually. He took various elements from Nietzsche, Otto Weininger (d.1903), and Carlo Michelstaedter (d.1910); nevertheless, he believed that what had pushed these philosophers to commit suicide or go insane was the lack of spirituality in their lives (Hakl, 2012). He translated and commented Spengler’s The Decline of the West and was nicknamed the “Italian Spengler” by Gottfried Benn (d.1956), but he reprobated Spengler for his naturalistic reading of the human history that lacked references to transcendental categories. He aimed to overcome nihilism through spirituality, but not exoteric religious forms. Evola in both the Revolt and the B&C criticized Christianity because of its exoteric aspects. He claimed that Christianity not only had no initiatory tradition, but its specifically religious orientation stood in opposition to the world of initiation. Christianity, even in its Romanized and Catholic version, distanced the Western man (who had remained substantially pagan) from his authentic self. The medieval Catholicism was partly Traditional, but the modern Catholicism no longer represented anything essential in the actual life of individuals or the nation (Evola, 1995). The Church eliminated gnostic features from Christianity, while Baptism was only apparently similar to initiation.

The second point of divergence between Evola and Guénon regarded the responses they gave to the “crisis” of the modern world. While Evola concurred with Guénon on the nature of the problem, their solutions differed significantly. Evola’s solution for the atrocities of the modern world was proactive, advocating involvement in politics or even the use of violence, in contrast to the contemplative and Sufi-oriented approach prescribed by Guénon. In contrast, Guénon, akin to De Maistre, held a disdain for revolution in all its manifestations. He associated revolution primarily with Western civilizations, where action was exalted above contemplation. In Guénon’s view, revolutions would inevitably yield only instability. He regarded the desire for change as a characteristic of modern times, whereas “he who has reached a state of equilibrium no longer feels this need, just as he who has found no longer seeks” (Guénon, 2001b, p. 26). As a result, Guénon confined himself to describing the crisis, while Evola invited his readers to a “revolt” against this crisis. Guénon subordinated the action to contemplation, whereas for Evola action was a stepping-stone toward the interior realization and not the other way around. Evola believed that in the West the priority had to be given to the military action, as was practiced by Indo-Aryan Templars who were “armed priests”. Given the sacredness of the militant action, Evola in the Revolt collocated warriors above the cast of priests: a social order that costed him Guénon’s objection (Di Vona, 1985).

The third fundamental difference between the two concerned their world division. For Evola, the crisis was not in the West but in the modern world. According to Evola, the modern East and West were in a similar crisis. Indeed, the locus of the primordial Tradition was in the Past and not in the East. This objection to Guénon’s worldview was one of the constant components of Evola’s works. The Uomo della Potenza (Man of Power) (1926), Lo Yoga della Potenza (Yoga of Power) (1949) and Evola’s review on Guénon’s La Crise du Monde Moderne (1954) contains his arguments about the frivolousness of the East-West dichotomy. In the review, he stated that in the remote past, when the Tradition was still in force, there was not any difference between the East and the West. The difference between Evola and Guénon’s ideas about the East-West divide derived from Evola’s vision of human cycles. As explained in the Revolt, the primordial human beings of the Golden Age after the first cycle immigrated to a Western and Atlantic milieu. Thus, the Atlantic area remained a reference point for the Evolian definition of the Tradition. It is why he called the primordial light Hyperborean or Nordic, instead of Eastern.

Evola was not enchanted by the East, as Guénon was. Like Reghini and Steiner, the Baron was aware that the initiatory program for the West had to be independent from the Oriental initiatory pathways. Evola considered Guénon’s approach to initiation unilateral and outdated because the French intellectual had divided the world between the Eastern spirituality and the Western materialism. The consequence of Guénon’s viewpoint was that the West had to turn to the East to find a point of reference, but Evola believed that the initiatory centers of the modern East had no important role in the formation of the Eastern societies. The East in the final cycle of time had not remained the abode of the Tradition because it was contaminated by lunar civilizations.

Evola’s quest for the autochthonous forms of spirituality had its roots in Italy’s reunification movement. Evola was born in the period of Risorgimento, which on the one hand gave birth to the middle class and, on the other, generated a pathway toward fascism. The search for a “civil religion” or a religion of the homeland that could have substituted the Church accompanied this movement. The intellectuals looked for a unitary conception that had the charm of religious faith but did not depend on the Church. Most of them aspired to an intellectual and culturally aristocratic religion (Gentile, 1993).

3 Quest for a Spiritual Fascism

Between 1925 and 1926, an intellectual coterie was formed around Evola, Reghini and the Italian esoterist Giulio Parise (d.1969) that became a basis for the later UR Group.Footnote 11 Evola in his autobiography the Cammino del cinabro (Path of Cinnabar) explained about this experience. The group met in Rome, but it had branches in other cities as well. The UR accepted only male members, because women, being deeply connected to the earth, were considered incapable of developing spirituality. They published a homonymous journal and some books. The group intended to revitalize a Ghibelline and heroic state similar to the Roman Empire. It looked for the sacred fascism and wanted to fascisied Europe or even the whole world (Iacovella, 2006 (2)). Mussolini was initially interested in a similar enterprise and his campaign had a strong Mazzinian anti-clerical spirit. He had even written some affirmations on the non-existence of God. However, in 20 years (1919–1929) things evolved and eventually took another route.

Mussolini needed Church’s support for mass mobilization and the Church obviously did not desire a pagan Rome. In 1925, Evola published an article in the anti-fascist newspaper Lo Stato Democratico (Democratic State). In this article, he mocked fascism and called it the “caricature of revolution”. As confessed in the Path, he intended not only to push fascism toward imperial ideas but also to revolutionize its visions about the world, the life, and God. Evola dreamed a spiritual state that could not be realized through the type of religiosity that was offered by the Church. This spirituality could not be guaranteed by a God who was the Christian protector of the miserable. It required a warrior-God such as Mithra.

The Italian philosopher had a complex and sometimes hardly explainable relationship with the fascist party. Initially he praised the party, but never joined it officially (a fact very much propagandized by his post-war apologists). When Mussolini concluded the 1929 Concordat with the Church to settle the long-standing Roman Question, the anti-Church traditionalism lost its prominence in the Italian political scene. Following the “neo-Guelphian transformation of Mussolini” (as Reghini put it), any type of anti-Church spirituality, mysticism or occult initiatives, such as theosophy and masonry, was banned (Rossi, 2006). Evola felt disappointed of the fascist regime due to its compromises with the bourgeois life and the Church. He advocated an organic and hierarchical state that would administer both spiritual and temporal spheres: a political system that Mussolini was not willing to establish. The regime did not approve Evola’s non-conformism, his taste for esoterism and his passion for paganism. Evola on his part could not bear socialist and Catholic “degenerations” of fascism (Evola, 2013). Despite the religious-like rituals of Mussolini’s regime, such as squad communion, the cult of the flag, the cult of the leader and political celebrations, his fascism never wanted to substitute Catholicism. It intended to absorb Catholicism, rather than annihilating it.

Evola reminisced about his time at the School of Fascist Mysticism (where he had served as a teacher) with contemporaries. This school would promote fascist values such as virility, availability for battle, and death. The school would teach that war was an intrinsic masculine phenomenon, as pregnancy was a female one (Costa, 1939, p. 12).Footnote 12 The nature of man entailed that he become warrior and the regime aimed at educating men according to this presumed nature. Despite its “valuable” initiatives, Evola complained that Mussolini’s fascism did not confront the question of spirituality because it had left the administration of the spiritual sphere to the Church (Evola, 2013). The latter hindered the state from realizing its potential. Mussolini’s state was secular and this division between temporal and spiritual was against the Traditional values.

The other problem of Evola with Mussolini’s fascism was its national characteristic. Nation in Evola did not have a territorial and ethnical meaning. Evola’s empire had a super-national quality and could host all those who believed in the Traditional moral values (Evola, 2003). Evola’s ideas about the pagan imperialism had a minimal impact on fascism and Evola remained marginalized.

The Pagan was Evola’s last attempt to usher Fascism toward Roman values. The “sacred fascism” meant to support “natural” hierarchies and strong authoritarian rules. Evola emphasized on the superiority of elites over faceless masses and their “herd morality”. He believed in original and natural order in human relations. The Evolian man was uomo differenziato (differentiated man): proud to be distinguished from masses.

Evola rejected the Mussolinian fascism because under his state people could benefit from public education. He called his own fascism “absolute”, “radical”, and against any nationalist, bourgeois, and egalitarian ideal (Evola, 2013). The Traditionalist love for elitism is a corollary to its passion for secrecy. The modern world is in crisis because everything has become public and there is a hatred toward secrecy. Following Guénon, Evola acknowledged secrecy of wisdom as a sign of its authenticity. He associated the occult to nobility and refinement. Indeed, his ideal type of spirituality was magic and similar to Mithraism was imbued with secrets. This spirituality could not be the religion of everyone (Evola, 2007).

4 Postbellum Evola

In 1944, when Allies conquered Rome, Evola escaped to Vienna, where he helped the SS recruit international volunteers. He remained permanently paralyzed from waist down due to a blast shortly after Russians captured the city. After some years, he returned to Rome. In these years, due to his ties with masonry, Reghini did not enjoy popularity. On the contrary, Evola’s ideas, which were not a central point in the proto-fascism, with the twilight of the fascism as a mass movement, started to dominate the new Right (Sedgwick, 2004). Therefore, unlike other ideologists of Fascism, who were forgotten in the post-war period, Evola became even more popular. In Rome, he became the focus of his young epigones who wanted to emulate his uncompromising views. The resurgence of fascism was partly due to the fact that Italy did not experience the same post-war de-fascisization process that occurred in Germany, thus, neo-fascism emergedFootnote 13 and Evola (who had remained “innocent” during the war) was re-introduced (Ferraresi, 1995). In this period, the far right underwent several rifts and Evola became the reference point for the “spiritual” and the extra-parliamentary Right. The Ordine Nuovo (New OrderFootnote 14) was an example of this kind that Evola praised as “the only group that has remained faithful to its original ideas and has made no compromises” (Evola, 2009, p. 237). In 1953, his frontal assault against prevailing materialism and the mirage of progress, published as Gli Uomini e le rovine (Men Among the Ruins), had a bombastic effect on the “spiritual” Right so much so that a leader of the Ordine Nuovo, Clemente Graziani called the book “gospel of the international-revolutionary youth” (Savino, 2015, p. 102).

At the end of the 1950s, Evola abandoned politics as he had lost all hopes that the Right could win the modernity. The “Italian race” did not deserve the “true” fascism, namely the revival of the ancient Roman Empire. Italians degenerated fascism and affected it negatively (Evola, 2013). In 1961, he wrote a presumed vademecum for whoever wanted to survive the Kali Yuga, entitled Cavalcare le tigre (Ride the Tiger). The Chinese saying “riding the tiger” means not being overwhelmed and annihilated by what cannot be directly controlled. Evola suggested that the intellectual man opposed all expressions of the bourgeois culture and sought the sense of life beyond nihilism. The book, however, does not contain clear practical advice. Evola encouraged his readers to throw themselves in the modernity, try different experiences, and challenge their own fear. The only strategy for tackling the atrocities of the modern world was to detach oneself from here and now or to ride the tiger of modernity patiently, because the crisis of modernity was already irreversible (Evola, 2003). The Ride gave birth to two interpretations of what men could do in the modern world. One interpretation was leading an apolitical life, the other confirmed that the political activity was still possible but one should be aware not be affected by the modern world.

Although Evola did not have any clear political program and by no means could become a political leader, his ideas had indirect political consequences in the post-war period. Evola’s preference for action instead of the Guénonian contemplation and his aesthetization of warfare made him a reference point for the post-war anarchists such as Franco FredaFootnote 15 (b. 1941). Some authors believe that Evola’s responsibility for the post-war violence, besides his writings, which promote certain political views such as anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, misogynist, anti-liberal, and racist ideas, can be traced in his conducts. For instance, Evola once in his apartment in Rome had said to his followers that violence was the only strategy of survival in the modern world (Cassina Wolff, 2016). Evola’s concept of “spiritual racism” was merely a tactic to conceal his dedication to a countercurrent ideology (Jesi, 2011). He advocated terrorism (Drake, 1986) and inspired terroristic attacks of the 1960s and the 1970s (Sedgwick, 2003). An example of his involvement in violent activities was his relation with the neo-fascist paramilitary and clandestine organization Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria (Fasces of Revolutionary Action): FAR, which was active from 1945 to 1947 and from 1950 to 1951 (Savino, 2015). This involvement in 1951 costed him arrest and accusation of being the mastermind of the FAR and he was tried by the Corte d’Assise (Rigenerazione Evola, 2016). Nonetheless, some authors have taken apologetic approaches to him (De Turris, 1997; Tarchi, 2017; Rada, 2019) and deny any relationship between him and violence (Hakl, 2019). The apologetics deem him apolitical and underline his non-adherence to the fascist party.

To comprehend Evola’s impact on violence, one must consider his approach to studying human history and religions. As previously mentioned, Evola viewed religions as significant only if they could contribute to the establishment of a Traditional order, wherein violence held spiritual significance. Any civilization that provided instances of heroism and self-sacrifice suitable for the aestheticization of violence could be utilized. The cultural legacy of these civilizations could be manipulated and reinterpreted to uphold Traditional ideals. As we will explore in the following chapter, one of these civilizations was the Islamic world.