JuliusEvola.NET

Main views in his own words

excerpts (5)
miscellaneous shorts

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JuliusEvola.NET

About Germans

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About Germans(from "Revolt Against the Modern World")[...] As far as the Germans were concerned, since the times of Tacitus they appeared to be very similar to the Achaean, paleo-Iranian, paleo-Roman and Northern-Aryan stocks that had been preserved, in many aspects (including the racial one), in a state of "prehistoric" purity. The Germanic populations just like the Goths, the Longobards, the Burgundians, and the Franks were looked down upon as barbarians by that decadent "civilization" that had been reduced to a juridical administrative structure and that had degenerated into "Aphrodistic" forms of hedonistic urban refinement, intellectualism, aestheticism, and cosmopolitan dissolution. And yet in the coarse and unsophisticated forms of their customs one could find the expression of an existence characterized by the principles of honor, faithfulness, and pride. It was precisely this "barbaric" element that represented a vital force, the lack of which had been one of the main causes of Roman and Byzantine decadence.The fact that the ancient Germans were "young races" has prevented many scholars from seeing the full picture of earlier antiquity; these races were young only because of the youth typical of that, which still maintains contact with the origins. These races descended from the last offshoots to leave the Arctic seat and that therefore had not suffered the miscegenation and the alterations experienced by similar populations that had abandoned the Arctic seat much earlier, as is the case with the paleo-Indo-European stocks that had settled in the prehistoric Mediterranean.The Nordic-Germanic people, besides their ethos, carried in their myths the traces of a tradition that derived immediately from the primordial tradition. The fact that during the period in which they appeared as decisive forces on the stage of European history these stocks lost the memory of their origins, and that the primordial tradition was present in those stocks only in the form of fragmentary, often altered, and unrefined residues, did not prevent them from carrying as a deep, inner legacy the possibilities and the acquired weltanschauung from which "heroic" cycles derive.The myth of the Edda spoke about both the impending doom and the heroic will opposed to it. In the older parts of that myth there remained the memory of a deep freeze that arrested the twelve "streams" originating from the primordial and luminous center of Muspelheim, located at the "far end of the earth"; this center corresponds to the Ariyana Vaego (the Iranian equivalent of the Hyperborean seat), to the radiant Northern Island of the Hindus, and to the other figurations of the seat of the Golden Age. Moreover, the Edda mention a "Green Land" floating on the abyss and surrounded by the ocean; according to some traditions, this was the original location of the "Fall" and of dark and tragic times, since it was here that the warm current of the Muspelheim (in this order of traditional myths, the waters represent the force that gives life to people and to races) met the frigid current of Huergehmir. Just as in the Zend-Avesta the freezing and dark winter that depopulated Ariyana Vaego was conceived as the work of an evil god opposed to the luminous creation, likewise this Eddic myth may allude to the alteration that precipitated the new cycle; this is true especially if we consider that the myth mentions a generation of giants and elemental telluric beings, creatures that were defrosted by the warm current, and against whom the race of the Aesir is going to fight.In the Edda, the theme of ragna-rok or ragna-rokkr (the "destiny" or the "twilight of the gods") is the equivalent of the traditional teaching concerning the four- stage involutive process; it threatens the struggling world, which is already dominated by dualistic thinking. From an esoteric point of view this "twilight" affects the gods only metaphorically; it also signifies the "dimming" of the gods in human consciousness because mankind loses the gods, that is, the possibility of establishing a contact with them. Such a destiny may be avoided, however, by preserving the purity of the deposit of that primordial and symbolic element -gold- with which the "palace of the heroes," the hall of Odin's twelve thrones, was built in the mythical Asgard. This gold, which could act as a source of good health so long as it was not touched by an elemental or by a human being, eventually fell into the hands of Albericus, the king of the subterranean beings that in the later editing of the myth are called the Nibelungs. This clearly shows the echo of what in other traditions was the advent of the Bronze Age, the cycle of the Titanic- Promethean rebellion, which was probably connected with the magical involution in the inferior sense of previous cults.Over and against this stands the world of the Aesir, the Nordic-Germanic deities who embody the Uranian principle in its warrior aspect. The god Donnar-Thor was the slayer of Thym and Hymir, the "strongest of all," the "irresistible," the "Lord who rescues from terror," whose fearful weapon, the double hammer Mjolmir, was both a variation of the symbolic, Hyperborean battle-axe and a sign of the thunderbolt force proper to the Uranian gods of the Aryan cycle. The god Woden- Odin was he who granted victory and who had wisdom; he was the master of very powerful formulae that were not to be revealed to any woman, not even to the king's daughter. He was the eagle; he was the host and the father (1) of the dead heroes who were selected by the Valkyries on the battlefields; it was he who bestowed on the noble ones that "spirit that lives on and which does not die when the body is dissolved into the earth"; and he was the deity to whom the royal stocks attributed their origin. The god Tyr-Tiuz was another god of battles, and the god of the day, of the radiant solar sky, who was represented by the rune Y, which recalls the very ancient and Northern-Atlantic sign of the cosmic man with his hands raised.(1) According to the original Nordic-Germanic view, the only people to enjoy divine immortality were, besides the heroes chosen by the Valkyries, the nobles, by virtue of their nonhuman origin; apparently, only heroes and the nobles were cremated. In the Nordic tradition only this ritual, prescribed by Odin, opened the doors of Valhalla while those who were buried (a Southern ritual) were believed to become slaves of the earth.One of the motifs of the "heroic" cycles appears in the saga concerning the stock of the Wolsungen, which was generated from the union of a god with a woman. Sigmund, who will one day extract the sword inserted in the divine tree, came from this stock. In this saga the hero Sigurd or Siegfried, after taking possession of the gold that had fallen into the hands of the Nibelungs, kills the dragon Fafnir, which is another form of the serpent Nidhoog. This serpent, in the action of corroding the roots of the divine tree Yggdrasil (its collapse will mark the twilight of the race of the gods), personifies the dark power of decadence.Although Sigurd in the end is killed by treachery and the gold is returned to the waters, he nevertheless remains the heroic type endowed with the tarnkappe (the symbolic power that can transfer a person from the bodily dimension to the invisible), and predestined to possess the divine woman either in the form of a vanquished Amazonian queen (Brynhild, as the queen of the Northern Island) or in the form of a Valkyrie, a warrior virgin who went from an earthly to a divine seat.The oldest Nordic stocks regarded Gardarike, a land located in the Far North, as their original homeland. This seat, even when it was identified with a Scandinavian region, was associated with the echo of the "polar" function of Mitgard, of the primordial "center"; this was a transposition of memories from the physical to the metaphysical dimension by virtue of which Gardarike was also identified with Asgard. Asgard allegedly was the dwelling place of nonhuman ancestors of the noble Nordic families; in Asgard, Scandinavian sacred kings such as Gilfir, who had gone there to proclaim their power, allegedly received the traditional teaching of the Edda. Asgard was also a sacred land, the land of the Nordic "Olympian" gods and of the Aesir, access to which was precluded to the race of the giants.These motifs were found in the traditional legacy of Nordic-Germanic populations. As a view of the world, the insight into the outcome of the decline (ragna-rokkr) was associated with ideals and with figurations of gods who were typical of "heroic" cycles. As I have said, in more recent times this was a subconscious legacy; the supernatural element became obscured by secondary and spurious elements of the myth and the saga, as did the universal element contained in the idea of Asgard-Mitgard, the "center of the world." [...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Economic Spirit of Capitalism & the Call for a true Master

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Economic Spirit of Capitalism & the Call for a true Master(from "Ricognizioni: uomini e problemi")[...] Sombart furnishes an example of a serious method for studying socio-economic phenomena, one that is far removed from the deformations and biases of materialist sociology (especially of the Marxist type).For Sombart, even economic life is composed of a body and a soul. That is to say, there is such a thing as an economic spirit, distinct from the modes of production, distribution and organization, a spirit which is variable, and which imposes upon those forms a different direction, meaning and foundation, differing from case to case and from epoch to epoch. […]… We will just mention … the form that the economic process has taken on in the period of high capitalism, and with regard to which we must mainly look to America for concrete examples.It is a development that tends toward limitless expansion, because any halt or slowing down would mean falling behind, or being ousted. The immediate and natural purposes of the production process become of secondary importance. Fiat productio et pereat homo! [let there be production though man may perish].The process from which the great capitalist entrepreneur is unable to free himself, which seizes him body and soul, ends up becoming an object of love, something desired in itself and for itself, constituting the meaning of his existence, of a life that “has no time” for anything else.We are then confronted with a type of man who no longer even questions the ultimate meaning of this race to infinity, this feverish agitation, these chains of economic structures, which often drag the masses along and dictate laws in world politics, while the bosses are no more free than the least of their workers.This situation ends up appearing natural, self-evident. People think it is demanded by economic prosperity and the progress of modern civilization.Sombart believes, however, that such a state of affairs could never have been consolidated, had it not been for the predominance in our time of inner factors characteristic not so much of a true man, as of the infantile psyche; so that the hidden psychological basis of the whole process is, ultimately, regression.The corresponding traits are indicated in connection with a few characteristic points.Firstly, there is the fascination with everything big, in the sense of material grandness, of the gigantic, of large quantities. … In general, the tendency to — in the words of Bryce — mistake bigness for greatness, that is, to confuse real, inner greatness with outward size, has become almost the distinctive mark of an entire civilization. In fact, this is nothing but primitivism.Ultimately, the obsession with record-breaking in all domains leads us back to the same point: the search for something that in tangible, measurable, and hence merely quantitative terms, wins over something else, without regard for different and more subtle factors or qualities. …Thirdly, the love of novelty has to be considered. Just as a child is immediately attracted to anything that looks new, quickly abandoning a toy that has become familiar, directing his enthusiasm towards another, and leaving one thing half-done as soon as another attracts him, in the same way, modern man is attracted by newness as such, by everything that happens not to have been seen yet. The sensation is reducible, in essence, to the impression felt in catching sight of a novelty. But greed for mere sensation is one of the most characteristic features of the present era.Finally, for Sombart, there is the feeling of power in situations that psychoanalysis calls “compensation.” It is the joy — again, fundamentally childish — in feeling superior to others on an entirely exterior plane. Our author rightly states: “Analyzing this feeling, one finds that in the end, it is nothing but an involuntary and unconscious confession of weakness: which is why it is one of the attributes of the infantile psyche. A truly, naturally and inwardly great man never assigns special value to external power.”Sombart, with regard to this tendency, considers a still broader domain, and his observations are worth quoting here: “A capitalist entrepreneur,” he says, “who commands 10,000 men and takes pleasure in this power, resembles a child, happy to see his dog obey his every beck and call. And when it is no longer money or external constraints that ensure direct power over men, we feel proud to have subdued the elements of nature. Whence our exultation in ‘great’ inventions or discoveries.” Our author adds: “A man of profound and lofty feelings, or a truly great generation, struggling with the most serious problems of the human soul, does not feel elevated because of the success of some technical invention. He will accord only a secondary importance to these instruments of external power. But our age, incapable of understanding anything that is truly great, appreciates only that kind of external power, rejoicing in it like a child, worshiping those who possess it. That is why inventors and billionaires inspire the masses with endless admiration. ”These factors, as is obvious, play a part everywhere in the modern world; however, they manifest themselves in particular ways in the field of the economy and production, which, after all, was the starting point of it all. It is easy to trace their development not only in the domain of the great capitalist structures, but beyond them, in the tendency to degrade the state itself to the role of a sort of trust, a pure centralized system of labor and insane, excessive production.As for these latter considerations by Sombart, it would of course be a misunderstanding to interpret them as an attack on the ideals of activity and human self-affirmation in general, in the name of an abstract idealism. It is not activity as such that he is attacking, but agitation, not true self-affirmation, but rather its aberrant forms.There is a limit, beyond which the man who is only turned towards the outside world completely loses control over the forces and processes which he has brought into being. He is then faced with a mechanical process over which he can exercise a certain steering power only by remaining chained to it and increasing day by day his dependency on it.At the same time, it pulls the masses, and finally even nations, into its vortex-like chain reaction. This is precisely the meaning of what Sombart called the ”economic era.”It is worth adding that there might be forms of power that are not reducible to external bigness and world records, that do not aim for the material and the quantitative, but manifest themselves as the sign and seal of inner greatness, of real superiority.Every trace, indeed the very notion of such power seems more and more to vanish. Perhaps it will be found again, when men will begin to look inward, putting an end to the agitation, the fever of always going beyond, without a clear sense of the object, or the reason of all this activity, of what really is worth human effort, and what is not.Perhaps that will be the point at which everything modern man has created will find a true master, even though the paths leading to it still remain inscrutable.JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

Homosexuality: Inborn or Acquired
- a Complex Problem

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Homosexuality: Inborn or Acquired
- a Complex Problem(from “Eros and the Mysteries of Love”)… homosexuality … forms a complex problem from the point of view of the metaphysics of sex.
… Plato…referred not only to heterosexual love but also to love for epheboi and male paramours. Now let us consider "eros" in those of its exalted forms that are linked to the aesthetic factor, according to the Platonic sequence…We should pass … to rapture that can be aroused by incorporeal beauty … There is no real problem if the accidental starting point is a being of the same sex.The word "uranism," which some use to mean homosexuality, springs from Plato’s ... Aphrodite Urania … the goddess of a noble love which is not carnal and unconcerned with procreation, as is the love which has woman as its object ...But … this eros … led increasingly to carnal developments as the ancient customs in Greece and Rome declined.… If, therefore, we assume homosexuality to conform to these carnal conditions ... then we may well describe it as a deviation ... from the standpoint of the metaphysics of sex.
…It is inappropriate to apply, as Plato does, the metaphysical meaning made evident by the myth of the hermaphrodite to homosexual love or to love as practiced between pederasts or lesbians.In fact, in the case of such love, it is no longer allowable to speak of the impulse of the male or female principle, as present in the primordial being, to be reunited.The essential … loses its meaning, namely, the idea of the polarity and the complementary nature of the two sexes as the basis of the magnetism of love and of a "transcendency" in eros, and of the blinding and destructive revelation of the One.… To find an explanation it is necessary to descend to a lower level and examine various empirical possibilities.Normally two forms of homosexuality are distinguished in sexology: One has an inborn, natural character, whereas the other has an acquired character and is conditioned by psychological and sociological factors influenced by a person's environment.But in the second of these forms it is necessary to give a proper value to the distinction between forms having a vicious nature and forms that presuppose a latent predisposition which is aroused under given circumstances.… It is important, however, not to consider the inborn form of homosexuality in a rigid way but to allow a certain possibility of variation. In natural homosexuality ... the process of sexual development in its physical and, even more so, in its psychic aspects can be incomplete.… But it is necessary to ... also bear in mind cases of regression ... the surroundings and the general atmosphere of society can play a not unimportant part.... In a civilization where equality is the standard, where differences are not linked, where promiscuity is in favor, where the ancient idea of "being true to oneself" means nothing anymore - in such a splintered and materialistic society, it is clear that this phenomenon of regression and homosexuality should be particularly welcome, and therefore it is in no way a surprise to see the alarming increase in homosexuality and the "third sex" in the latest "democratic" period, or an increase in sex changes to an extent unparalleled in other eras.… But the reference to … an incomplete process of the development of sex or to a regression, does not explain all the varieties of homosexuality. In fact, there have been male homosexuals who have not been effeminate … but even men of war, individuals decidedly manly in their appearance and behavior, powerful men who have had or could have had the most beautiful women at their disposal. Such homosexuality is hard to explain, and we have the right here to speak of deviation and perversion, or "vice" linked, perhaps, to a fashion ... However, there is reason to suppose that it is merely a matter of "mutual masturbation" and that the conditioned reflexes are exploited for "pleasure" since not only the metaphysical but also the physical premises for a whole and destructive union are lacking.… On the other hand, classical antiquity bears witness ...(to) a bisexual attitude in which both women and young men were used … Here it seems that the governing motivation was simply the desire to try everything. However … we may also refer to the crude saying … that if one has had enough from a girl as a girl, she can always play the part of a boy …As to the claim for an ideal nature of hermaphroditic wholeness in the pederast who acts both as man and as woman sexually, that is obvious fallacious beyond the level of straightforward sensations; hermaphroditic wholeness can only be "sufficiency," for it has no need of another being and is to be sought at the level of a spiritual realization that excludes the nuances that the "magic of the two" can offer in heterosexual unions.… Even the rationale sometimes found in countries such as Turkey and Japan, that homosexual possession gives a feeling of power, is not convincing. The pleasure of domination can also be felt with women and with other beings in situations free of sexual intercourse. Besides, such a pleasure could be involved only in a completely pathological context where it would develop into a true orgasm.… when homosexuality is not "natural" or else cannot be explained in terms of incomplete inborn forms of sexual development, it must have the character of a deviation, a vice, or a perversion.… And if some instances of extreme erotic intensity in relations between homosexuals should be adduced, the explanation is to be sought in the possibility of the displacement of eros.
Indeed, it is enough to go through any treatise on sexual psychopathology to see in how many unthinkable situations the erotic potential of a human being can be aroused, sometimes to the level of orgiastic frenzy (from fetishism even to animal sodomy and necrophilia).The same anomalous background could include the case of homosexuality, although the latter is much more frequent: a displaced eros for which a being of the same sex can serve as a simple, occasional cause or support, as in so many cases of psychopathy, although it must wholly lack every profound dimension and every meaning higher than experience because of the absence of the necessary ontological and metaphysical premises.
…JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

The Doctrine of Awakening - Buddha's True Teaching

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“The Doctrine of Awakening":
the Only Work to Reveal
the Buddha's True Teachings(from “The Yoga of Power”)[...] I am not pleased to report that in no work other than my The Doctrine of Awakening is it possible to have an idea of what early Buddhism stood for, prior to its ensuing decadence.
[...]JULIUS EVOLA
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JuliusEvola.NET

True organic State Youth
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“Inferiority complex” driven revolutionary at all costs biological Youth

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True organic State Youth
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“Inferiority complex” driven revolutionary at all costs biological Youth(from “Ricognizioni: Uomini e Problemi”)A frequently discussed issue among Right-wing circles is … the … phenomenon … that … the new generation no longer understands the generation that preceded it, the accelerated pace of events having interposed between the one and the other a mental distance much larger than that which in other times normally would have separated them.However, …
In fact, one should start by defining … whether one is speaking of the biological level, or of a higher level … from a spiritual point of view … within a given cycle of civilization … what is truly young is that which is close to the origin … even if sometimes one can mistake for youth what really is only infantilism and primitivism … of the final generations, of those near the involuted end of a cycle.… This indifferent and unprincipled youth, absorbed by materialism and petty hedonism, incapable of any enthusiasm, incapable of coherence, livening up, at the most, to football matches and bicycle races?We would rather say that this “youth” was dead even before having been born.Today, anybody who refuses to yield, anyone who lives an idea, anyone capable of remaining standing, upright, despising everything feeble, devious, underhanded, cowardly, whatever their age, is infinitely more “young” than this peculiar “youth.”… one must understand … the fundamental characteristic of youth in this higher sense, we would define it as the will to the unconditioned. In fact, this is the factor that accounts for, on the one hand, all idealism in a positive sense, and on the other, all forms of courage, enthusiasm, creative initiative, and ability to move resolutely to new positions, with little concern for one’s own person.…One should distinguish between the most elemental phase, in which the qualities just indicated only occur spontaneously, in a disorderly and transient fashion, often like a kind of spontaneous combustion, and on the other, the phase in which these qualities are affirmed and stabilized.The first phase is common in youth properly speaking, in individuals who are then gradually “normalized,” “come to their senses,” convincing themselves that “idealism is one thing, real life another,” abdicating the will to the unconditioned, which is thereby revealed to have had, in such cases, a largely physical basis.The second phase occurs, on the other hand, when ordeals have had to be faced, hard ordeals, and these ordeals have been endured without failing.…One more point should be mentioned.It is not always easy … to give oneself an autonomous value. In order to have a sense of individuality, in order to feel important, many have a need to fret, to at all costs oppose something or someone. It is in this light that we must judge certain aspects of the “revolutionary calling” and also a certain individualist tendency of “the youth,” when it feels the need to differentiate itself at any cost, indiscriminately espousing new ideas just because they are new.Because of this, it is often, therefore, merely a case of an “inferiority complex”: the need to assert oneself in an indirect way, by antithesis and contrast, because one does not feel sure enough of oneself. …The highest ambition should not consist in being a revolutionary at all costs, but rather in being the exponent of a tradition, the bearer of a transmitted force, which should be enhanced and potentiated with anything that can secure the inflexibility of its direction. …Without getting into particulars, …, we can easily discern on this basis what, in today’s political youth, needs to be rectified in terms of general attitude, so that as a unified force, it can pursue a precise political ideal: the ideal of the true organic State.JULIUS EVOLA
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