The flaws of traditionalism and Evola's subversive teachings
Miguel Serrano collected works https://archive.org/details/miguel-serrano_202312
The flaws of traditionalism and Evola's subversive teachings
By Trinti Neidr
The fundamental error in the philosophy or school of thought called "metaphysical traditionalism" is that it perceives the sexes through the jewish lense - that of Otto Weininger. Julius Evola admired Weininger, the jew who at least did what all members of his race should do (shot himself in the head) but hated everything that's feminime with the same jewish passion that burns in judeo-christianity and Islam.
Male becomes absolute good, Woman is absolutely evil, thus the whole world. Becomes a reflection of a metaphysical battle between the sexes.
Due to the fact, that traditionalists view every culture and religion through this lense, christianity and islam, even judaism becomes equal - nay superior to pagan religions. All sorts of bizarre views emerge out of this - such as you can never revolt against your king, because he is eternally superior to you and he is always right due to his ontologically superior status. (Even if he is an asshole and servant of the kikes, selling your race for shekels - Hapsburgs) The Earth is the middle of the universe, because this is how I perceive it. Thus the church - persecuting all those scientist who "anti-traditionally" dared to show that the Earth is not the center of the universe - becomes the champion of upholding "sacred science" and traditional science.
Or my favorite: Attila the Hun foresaw that his descendants (Hungarians) will have to walk on the path of christianity, so he -just like the Taoist, who's body disappear and only a sword remains - transformed himself into.... The fucking holy crown... That’s your brain on Weininger.
http://renegadetribune.com/spengler-evo ... teachings/
The SS in a report on Evola (who was allowed for a time to give lectures on university campuses and whose literary works indubitably would have been known among certain intellectual and political circles throughout Third Reich era Germany):
The ultimate and secret motivation for Evola’s theories and plans must be sought in a revolt of the old aristocracy against today’s world, which is totally alienated from the upper class. This confirms the initial German impression: that we are dealing with a ‘reactionary Roman’. The whole impression is one of an old fashioned aristocratic feudalism. Thus even his scholarship displays a trait of dilettantism and literary affectation.
In conclusion, there exist no grounds for National Socialism to place itself at the disposal of
Baron Evola. His political plans for a Romano-Germanic Imperium are of a utopian character and moreover very apt to cause ideological confusions. Since Evola is also only tolerated and barely supported by Fascism, it is tactically not necessary to accommodate his tendencies from our side. It is therefore recommended to:
Not support Evola’s current efforts for the establishment of a secret supra-national order and the founding of a magazine directed toward this goal.
Curb his public activities in Germany after this lecture series, without taking any special measures.
Prevent his further penetration into leading offices of the party and the state. Observe his propaganda activity in neighboring countries.
In a short letter (AR/83) dated August 8, 1938, it then says laconically:
The Reichsfuhrer-SS has acknowledged the report regarding the lectures of Baron Evola and is in full agreement with the thoughts and recommendations stated in the last paragraph thereof.
And what were some of Evola’s ideas? As with the preceding excerpt, the proceeding text is taken from Dr. H.T. Hansen’s (who knew Evola personally) introductory essay to the American edition of Men Among the Ruins:
…he had polemicized against Alfred Rosenberg, the ‘Ideologue of National Socialism,’ whom he also met in person. Here the November 1930 essay ‘I1 `Mito’ del nuovo nazionalismo
tedesco’ (The ‘Mythos’ of the New German Nationalism) in Vita Nova must be mentioned. Evola’s dislike was based mostly on the fact that Rosenberg valued modernity so much.
Another article against Rosenberg was ‘Paradossi dei tempi: paganesimo razzista =
Illuminismo liberale’ (A Current Paradox: Racist Paganism = Liberal Enlightenment) in Lo Stato, VI, 7 (July 1935), pp. 530-532. Evola also polemicized against Walther Darre, who was already NSDAP Reichsleiter at this time, in Lo Stato (‘I1 Nazismo sulla via di Mosca’ [Nazism on the Same Path as Moscow], March 1935, pp. 186- 195). Later in Cammino (p. 147), Evola stated about Rosenberg that ‘he lacked any understanding for the transcendental
dimensions of the sacral.’
The absence of any transcendent background was, of course, one of Evola’s main objections against National Socialism. ‘One can organize a state in the name of the spirit or in the name of matter,’ he wrote in 1937 (‘Sulle premesse di un’antibolscevismo positivo’ [On the Prerequisites for a Positive Anti-bolshevism], in Lo Stato. This and a few other quotes we have culled from Alessandro Campis’s interesting contribution ‘Organicismo, Idea Imperiale e Dottrina della Razza’ in Trasgressioni, I/1, Florence, 1986). This lack of reference to
transcendence also leads to the other points criticized by Evola, such as National Socialism’s great attachment to nature (the Volk as guiding principle); the Führer principle that answers only to the people and has no legitimation from above, and the resulting demagoguery; as well as populism and purely biological racism.”
Pfft, what a bunch of fluff. Just like the following where Evola is further quoted directly:
Due to a regrettable incompetence and pressure from immediate interests, Nordic thought, paganism, primordial symbols, and so on, today all too often see new life in the distorted form of personal affectations and slogans… .
As they are frequently understood today, Nordic thought, Aryanism, the imperial idea, and the concept of a super-race are burdened with an interpretation entirely foreign to the great free breath of the corresponding primordial traditions. According to the Aryan primordial conception, the Reich is a metaphysical solar reality. The Nordic heritage is not semi- naturalistic, only conceivable on a blood-and-soil basis, but rather constitutes a cultural category, an original transcendent form of the spirit, of which the Nordic type, the Aryan race, and the general Indo-Germanic moral being are only outward manifestations. The concept of race itself, according to its higher traditional significance, cannot have anything in common with the rational idols of modern biology and profane science. Above all, race is a basic attitude, a spiritual power, something primal and creative, whose outer, tangible forms are only a last echo…
The truly original Nordic essence melts with the Hyperborean; and here we see a primordial culture that is solar and sacral, that possesses the power and irresistibility of the universal, and that encompasses paganism and spirit, Olympian sovereign superiority and will- conditioned originality, in a grand synthesis of the mundane and the supra-mundane. Once one has reached this realization, then one can truly say that Tradition in its higher sense is synonymous with the Hyperborean, or primordial Nordic, tradition, and that the Nordic element has been present wherever a people has had a tradition, and vice versa. That is not all. In this way we can even approach the mystery of prehistory and sense a fateful correspondence between physical circumstances and higher, metaphysical meanings. If the tradition in question indeed had the polar region as its original seat, it must therefore have been geographically polar and so has always embodied the spiritual significance of a pole as an unshakable axis for any ordered movement, as a center point for any normal hierarchy and every true tradition-based Reich… .
Now, can one present such streams of thought in certain circles without being accused of an alien universalism, of Roman notions that are anti-Germanic, or even of having Jewish ideas? And yet all this belongs to the highest Aryan inheritance; this is the true level to which the motifs and symbols that the new Germany has called forth must be elevated if it really wants to stand at the forefront of the resistance and attack against the dark powers of world revolution. We must really return to the origins, and the Nordic essence must be freed from any interpretations that are infected by modern, profane intellectual prejudices and by the superstitious religion of life, becoming, and being bound to nature. We must once again find out how to imbue the Nordic-Aryan symbols and their logical consequence, the Reich, with a spiritual power and a universal gravity, something truly Olympian and transcendental. And this is indeed possible. This must be our task. The new Germany has talented and qualified powers for this and it remains only to give them the right points of orientation, true
principles instead of myths and slogans… .
We repeat: race is secondary, spirit and tradition the primary factor, because, in a metaphysical sense, race dwells in the spirit before being expressed in the blood. If it is true that without racial purity, spirit and tradition are deprived of their most precious means of
expression, then it also true that pure race deprived of spirit is condemned to be a biological mechanism and, in the end, doomed to extinction. The proof of this lies in spiritual decay, the ethical stupefaction, and the slow death of many tribes that did not commit any of the sins against the blood that have been discovered by materialistic racial science. It follows
that without the rejuvenation of the higher spiritual power latent in the Nordic symbol, all measures for the biological protection of the race will have a limited and relative effectiveness, as opposed to our superior task of a Western reconstruction of the Nordic- Aryan spirit… .
Leader and followers, organic structure, overcoming of individualism and collectivism through a virile spiritual concept of community—these foundations for an inner rebuilding of the Folk should now be valid above and beyond the individual nations, and should lead the way to an organic conception, to which independence contributes as well as unified higher leadership, ethnic diversity, as well as spiritual, supranational community. That is what
Western rebirth fueled by the Aryan spirit means… .
It follows that our front should also take account of all the surviving conservative and traditionalist forces in Europe and even strive toward a new active conservatism on a Nordic foundation, which will have this dual purpose: to rid the world in revolutionary fashion of a culture of decadence and the new materialist and collectivist barbarism and to call forth to new life the primal creative power of the ancient Aryans, in close connection with the values of personality, hierarchy, spiritual virility, and the Reich as both worldly and metaphysical reality. The first condition for this is the de-secularization of the world and of man, of realization and of action. If this prerequisite is not fulfilled, then all roads toward the understanding of primordial Nordicism remain blocked. The first assumption is that there is a higher world beyond this one. Therefore, we have to abandon any mysticism of this world, any adoration of nature and of life, any pantheism. At the same time we must strongly oppose the curious interpretation of Aryanism invented by the dilettante Chamberlain that relates to a purely rational praise and glorification of profane science and technology for the surmounting of a supposedly un-Aryan supersensible worldview. It is indeed high time that we were done with such foolery… .
Well, as anyone can see, this is clearly not the kind of thinking a jew-wise racialist movement is in need of. H.T. Hansen points out:
When it was realized (especially by the Ahnenerbe) that Evola wanted to spread totally different ideas and that his racism was far removed from the NS version, both interest and support for him waned. In spite of this, as he notes in his autobiography, Evola was long able to say things for which a German would have landed in prison.
Another document from Himmler’s personal staff should be mentioned here (archived in the aforementioned file under no. II 2113), because it shows that Himmler personally received and collected information about Evola. It reports that Himmler again ordered a thorough
examination of Evola’s Heidnischer Imperialismus, in which the German translation should even be compared to the original Italian text in order to eliminate errors in translation. At the same time, the opinion of the chief of the Sicherheitshauptamt (main security office) is given:
Evola possesses no understanding of the German folkish (volkisch) past, whereby it must be noted that he is a foreigner and probably does not know Germany’s historical conditions enough to really grasp the origins of our folkish history. His results remain a spiritual and speculative impossibility… .
His [Evola’s] words about the ‘superstition of the Fatherland’ clearly display that these traditionalist values of his are only theoretical and are not rooted in profound historical views and realizations. The following passage of Evola’s shows his basic lack of
understanding of National Socialism and Germanic values (p. 98): ‘If it is true that the swastika, the Aryan pagan symbol of the sun and of the flame burning by its own volition, certainly belongs to those symbols that more than any others might lead the way to a real Germanic rebirth, it nevertheless must be realized that the name of the political party that has taken it as its emblem and that is today revolutionizing Germany in the spirit of Fascism is anything but a fitting choice. Indeed, aside from the association with the working class, both ‘Nationalism’ and ‘Socialism’ are elements that have a hard time fitting in with the noble Teutonic tradition, and it should be clear that what Germany urgently needs is a counterrevolution against democratic socialism. The resurrected Harzburg front already showed the right path: an anti-Marxist and anti-democratic movement of revolt that called upon the front of conservative and traditionalist elements as such. One will have to be
careful that the ‘socialist’ element, even if it is a ‘National Socialism,’ does not get the upper hand and let everything become a mass phenomenon grouped around the momentary prestige of a Fuhrer: [emphasis original]
More from H.T. Hansen:
Even Guido Landra, the extremely important director of the Racial Studies Department in the Ministry for National Culture, coeditor of the official periodical La Difesa della Razza (The Defense of the Race), and coauthor of the official 1938 Manifesto Razzista, attacks Evola
vehemently. In his article ‘Razzismo biologico e scientismo’ (Biological Racism and Scientism), in La Difesa della Razza, VI, no. 1, November 1942, pp. 9-11, aptly subtitled ‘For Science and Against the Melancholic Apostles of a Nebulous Spiritualism,’ we read: “Those poor racists of the first hour who are guilty merely of having initiated the race campaign in Italy and of having remained loyal to the original as well as the official line, are now being accused of nothing less than Jacobinism and Bolshevism. The accusation—and this is painful to report—originates from a publication that can really be proud of a noble anti-Jewish tradition; and the accuser is the author Evola, who, while claiming to expatiate upon Professor Canella, attacks all those who remain loyal to the notion of biological racism If
the expressions ‘biological’ and ‘scientific’ have a negative connotation for the spiritualists, we answer that for us it is a great honor to be called biological and scientific racists.” In Vita Italiana (XXXI, no. 359, February 1943, p. 151 ff.) Landra adds: “And this is the weakest point in Evola’s teachings: that an Aryan can possess the soul of a Jew and vice versa. And that a Jew could therefore be discriminated against even though he possesses the soul of an Aryan is for us theoretically untenable. In practice, the assumption of such a principle would have terrifying consequences for racism, and ones that would exclusively benefit the Jews.”
Landra, probably the highest official racial theoretician, makes his sharpest attack in his own publication La Difesa della Razza (VI, 1, November 5, ‘1942, p. 20), singling out the following for criticism: “The essays about the problem of race, `Due razze’ [Two Races] by Giulio Evola
and `I nostri nemici’ [Our Foes] by Guido Cavalluci, that have appeared in a well-known monthly Diorama [Evola’s aforementioned Diorama Filosofico] and in which every realistic foundation of racism is doubted, even going so far as labeling anti-Semitism as a mere
polemical view . . . [and] that article `The Misunderstanding of Scientific Racism’ by Evola, which is the most exemplary document and monument of the present campaign that has been unleashed against racism in Italy …”
Attacks of this sort and the resulting sanctions from high places were also responsible for the demise of a project that surely was very dear to Evola. He was to have been the editor of a bilingual German-Italian periodical on race. The project had been worked out together with Mussolini, who moreover had already pledged his full support. Even the title of the magazine had been deter-mined: Sangue e Spirito—Blot and Geist (Blood and Spirit). The intention was to unify the approaches to the race problem in Germany and Italy, whereby both sides hoped to present their own views to each another. The steady efforts by the Church and orthodox Fascists to influence Mussolini finally succeeded in swaying him
toward the ‘biological’ racist position, which also corresponded to the NS ideology. In the end, Mussolini withdrew his approval of the magazine. Since the German Foreign Affairs Office had also noticed that Evola did not intend to champion the racism dear to the Germans, it also withdrew its support. In addition, the dramatically increasing wartime confusion made this and other similar plans seem less important. Thus the project was doomed to certain failure.
Now we turn to another question that logically follows from Evola’s racial thought: his anti- Semitism.
Dr. Hansen on Evola and the jews:
His writings never spoke out against orthodox religious Judaism [This is untrue; see Evola’s: “The Authenticity of the Protocols proven by the Hebrew Tradition”. –Blut]. On the contrary; as an example, he writes in his Tre aspetti del problema Ebraico (Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem), Rome, 1936, p. 23: “There are elements and symbols in the Old Testament that possess metaphysical and therefore universal value.” [< Subversive perennial philosophy.] Or in Revolt Against the Modern World (p. 281): “In contrast to orthodox Judaism, early Christianity can at most claim a mystical character on the same line as the prophets. And
whenever a true esotericism was subsequently created in the West, it was essentially found outside of Christianity with the help of non Christian currents, like the Hebraic Kabbalah….” Evola even names operative Kabbalah as one of the few paths that can still be followed successfully in the West today.
In light of all of Evola’s well-known anti-Jewish remarks, how could he ever have been called a ‘Jew lover’? [Earlier in the text: “In the above-mentioned polemic, Grimaldi characterized Evola as a ‘Jew lover.’ “] We have already shown a few reasons. Since Evola set supreme importance on the spiritual attitude, a Jew could of course also espouse ‘Aryan’ thought (see ‘Scienza, razza e scientismo’ [Science, Race, and Scientism], in Vita Italiana, XXX, no. 357, December 1942, pp. 556–563; there, he writes verbatim: “For example, can an ‘Aryan’ have a Jewish soul or inner race and vice versa? Yes, it is possible. ”). And Evola had surely
noticed that especially in Germany some Jews felt more ‘Aryan’ than many Germans, and this was not only in intellectual circles. In exactly this sense one must assume that Evola did
not at all regard the Jews Weininger and Michelstaedter, to whom he owed so much, as ‘Jews,’ independently of their heritage. That an opinion like this was a danger to mass propaganda could not go unnoticed by the political observers of the day.
Don Miguel Serrano discusses Julius Evola in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Ultimate Avatar: I can not fail to consider that, in this attitude of eminent Latin writers, since no German
National Socialist is to be found among the Integral Traditionalists, beneath the appearance
of wishing to show broad criticism, magnanimity, objectivity and ‘Olympic’ detachment, to use their words, one only finds the desire to somehow ingratiate the all-powerful Jew, to be pleasing to him at the same time that they declare him their enemy. Evola dares to write “in Hitler there was an element of unhealthy fanaticism in his opposition without concessions to the Jew.” Despite my admiration for the Italian writer, I must distance myself from this position. Hitler, as always, had reason.
In my interview with Julius Evola, in his apartment on the Via Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, he told me Mussolini had asked him to write a new racial theory in order to counter that of
Rosenberg. It would be the ‘Fascist racism,’ different from ‘Nazi racism.’ (As if there could be more than one racialism). And thus that entire brilliant Evolian concept of the ‘race of the body,’ the ‘race of the soul’ and the ‘race of the spirit’ was born that he labelled with the antipathetic term of ‘traditional.’ Something churned within me when I heard this word, as if before the presence of an intellectual social climbing, a literary vulgarity. This concept has been taken by Evola from Guenon, attributing it to Aryan Hinduism that mentions other bodies distinct from the physical that could be components of man, because if they only exist potentially they are virtual, being developed through the practice of yoga. They are bodies that are astral, mental, spiritual, etc. Being German, Clauss, the creator of psycho- anthropology, never called his theory ‘traditional’ or ‘traditionalist.’ He was married to a Semite, which explains his attitude towards biological racism that he tried to outflank with his psychic racism, his ‘race of the soul.’ The ‘traditionalist’ Rene Guenon also ended his days 71 converting to Semitic Mohammedanism. The brave and clear Claudio Mutti does something similar. Nevertheless he could still return to the Hyperborean Wotanism of his Lombard ancestors. Because he, thank the Gods, is still alive.
If the theory of Evola and Clauss on the races of soul and spirit can be accepted as a comfortable element of exposition, in the end they are not necessary, only complicating things, serving only to speak of racism among hybrid and mestizo people without hurting their feelings, since a mulatto or an Indian among us could always think that even though his body is coloured, his soul might not be. There is the suspicion that Evola has just invented everything to speak about race to the Southern Italians and Mussolini. Yet, although their
pride remains standing, reality does not change. […]
In Vienna it was possible for me to read an internal communication among several SS centers in which they recommended Julius Evola not be given facilities to expound ‘his
esotericism.’ I understand this was just since Evola would have generated confusion. In Italy herself he was not given better facilities. Those were times of struggle and they had to simplify. Yet the beautiful ‘race of the body’ of the Italy of today is a result of the racial selection that was then done in the last years of Fascism, carried out under the influence of Hitlerism. I wish that something like that had happened in Spain.
We repeat, unfortunately Julius Evola did not understand the enormous favor Jung gave to Aryan man with his idea of the two Collective Unconsciousnesses, the most valuable tool given to Esoteric Hitlerism. He also did not understand Esoteric Hitlerism. Perhaps he was too close to the Avatar in space as well as in time. So great was the energy that emanated from his vortex that only adoration or rejection were possible, never indifference. Humility and voluntary detachment are necessary from the self to be able to be an unconditional partisan of the Fuhrer Prinzip, essential Aryan idea that only emerges from the greatest
depths of the ‘blood memory.’ Evola ended taking refuge in the distance of ‘integral traditionalism’ and an aristocracy more of class than of race.
The Jews, on the other hand, as was logical, instantly understood the danger implied by the Jungian idea. They could not rid themselves of Jung so they had him censured, in accord with their familiars and disciples, making the theory of the two Collective Unconsciousnesses disappear from his works, in such a way that they would henceforth be found no more. Due to the mention made in the book of professor McQuire, ‘Jung Speaking,’ where the interviews in which Jung refers to Hitler are reproduced, this work was not published by the publishers in London.
Two thousand years of Judeo-Christian domination have made the term pagan pejorative. A writer as anti-Christian as Julius Evola fell into the same error of discrediting the term due to his incomprehension of Rosenberg and National Socialism. I have his essays ‘L’equivoco del Nuovo Paganesimo’ and ‘Paradosi dei temi: Paganesimo razzista, eguale iluminismo
Liberale.’
The criticisms Evola made of the gregarious State, common masses, Nazi, claiming to find a difference between Totalitarian State and Organic State, are unjust and a result of ignorance about what was happening there. Evola moved on the surface of Hitlerist events and was theorizing.
Evola was mistaken when he thought Germany aimed at a type of crushing economic and social equality of everyone, a proletarianization. This arose later, after the war, when the accent was exclusively on the economic-judaic, like in Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries, in a superlative way. Like in the entire world, including Japan, India, China, Chile, Argentina, etc. In Hitler’s 458 Germany everything was about race, not economics, least of all usury. If everyone achieved blood purity, they would be equal, in a brotherhood of Aryans, like in pre-history, in Polar Hyperborean, like in the organization of the Mannerbunde and the Court of King Arthur. Equal and free, equality among nobles. An aristocratic nation, with a racial aristocracy.–Miguel Serrano, Adolf Hitler: The Last Avatar
Published on TOQ, Flemish political and cultural activist Robert Steuckers, when asked “Do you have a ‘spiritual angle’?”:
By answering this question, I risk being too succinct. Among the group of friends who exchanged political and cultural ideas at the end of the Seventies, we concentrated of course on Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World. Some of us rejected totally the spiritual bias, because it lead to sterile speculation: they preferred to read Popper, Lorenz, etc. I accepted many of their criticisms, and I still dislike the uttermost Evolian speculations, alleging a
spiritual world of Tradition beyond all reality. The real world being disregarded as mere
triviality. But this is of course a cult of Tradition mainly supported by young people ‘feeling ill in their own skin,’ as we say. The dream to live like beings in fairy tales is a form of refusing to accept reality.
Also written released through TOQ, Michael O’Meara comments on “Evola’s Anti-Semitism“:
Evola’s anti-Semitism was largely an offshoot of his ‘Traditionalist’ opposition to liberal modernity and its assault on the Aryan spirit, just as his support for racial nationalism in the Thirties and Forties was based less on his belief in its various ideological manifestations than in its resistance to the materialist and Judaifying impulses of the Third Estate.
Yet not long after 1945, once the forces of the Third Estate had crushed the last remnants of Traditional Europe, the Jews ceased to be a target of Evola’s traditionalist critique. At the very point, then, when the lunar forces became triumphant, Evola seemed to abandon his anti-Semitism.
Why?
Part of the reason had to do with the impossibility of mounting an effective political resistance to the Judeo-liberal order of the postwar period. For once Europe fell under the yoke of the extra-European powers and every vestige of its historic past fell into ruin, all that could be done in this new dark age was to make certain that those few men left standing were able to keep the dimming embers of the Aryan spirit from being entirely extinguished.
As he wrote in 1948, “I see nothing but a world of ruins, where a kind of front line is possible only in the catacombs.” To sustain this underground resistance, it was henceforth necessary to adopt a stoic—an indifferent—attitude to the frenzied antics of what had become a totally Hebraicized world.
But there was another reason for his waning interest in the Jewish Question.
In his ‘spiritual autobiography,’ The Road of Cinnabar (1972), Evola writes that following the Second World War he thought it ‘absurd’ to continue stressing the white man’s superiority over the Jew “because the negative behavior [traditionally] attributed to Jews had now
become that of the majority of Aryans.’ ” That is, in an age where the Jewish spirit of liberal modernity prevailed and most whites had succumbed to it, it was futile to exalt Aryan values, for whites, the Aryans’ alleged heirs, now behaved no differently than Jews.
For this reason, I think his postwar stance was less an abandonment of his earlier anti- Semitic critique than a recognition that the subversive forces (of which the Jews were the most conspicuous embodiment) had become hegemonic and that those few white men who had not succumbed had no choice but to ‘ride the tiger’ until it dropped of exhaustion—the tiger being the perverted powers that had come to rule the world.
Insofar as the twenty-first century announces a new order of battle, Evola’s apolitical stoicism can no longer be our position today.