Julius Evola: The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography (1963)

In contemporary Sweden, in these recent decades of thought-empty and weak-willed conformist Sweden, in a quasi-independent Anglo-Americanized nation where wretched cultural impoverishment and petty intolerance of opinion are regarded as normal, self-evident, and desirable, it is certainly not surprising that Julius Evola’s significant body of written work has largely remained an underground phenomenon—something perhaps engaged with by a small number of safely marginalized “suspicious subjects”, far removed from the incurably mediocre “intellectual salons” sanctioned and financed by Bonnier, Hjörne, Schibsted, et al.

I have read Evola for quite many years in various editions and in recent years also online, and now that the Temple of the Stars has sent me several of his most important works, I intend to review them. Il cammino del cinabro was originally published in 1963, when Evola was 65 years old. It offers an excellent introduction to his life, writings, and thought. He examines his past life segments from a mature and thoroughly reflected perspective, contemplates the strivings for the Numinous, insight, spiritual power, and elevating influence that characterized him as a younger man; describes his often disappointing interactions with those who swarm around us, and instructive controversies with various Fascist simpletons in possession of trivial cultural bureaucratic power.

About his private life, little is told; it was not his way to pour out details about the mundane and causal. I know almost nothing about that aspect of his life, which the so-called “critical literary biographies” typically trace with such cruel detail.

But the coolly self-distanced and, regarding the all-too-human, strictly restrained history of an intellectual and visionary dissident life in a Europe languishing in the Kali Yuga that Evola recounts, has an inherent suggestiveness. He clearly has self-interest in what he writes. He wants to defend his choices and positions. He is or would like to be the Absolute Individual, which he theorized about at one stage of his life. At the same time, he is not at all self-absorbed in any banal sense. He probably sees himself as a kind of spokesperson for the timeless, beyond-human, transcendent—“acausal”—Tradition, which in our epoch of “the rule of the inferiors” and the festively horrific noise and commotion of the far-too-many has been almost completely forgotten and abandoned.

But my jesting, sarcastic, sinisterly-humorous, misanthropic, and extremely down-to-earth temperament has not infrequently made me smile at Evola’s reasoning while reading him over the years. Sometimes too many abstractions, too much metaphysics, too many wishful dreams, too much escapist, infantilely occult obscurantism, and above all perhaps too little awareness of, or at least acknowledgment of, the stark historical reality—shaped by blood, soil, steel, passions, which can be explored through scientific methodology… Yet, I hold him in high regard and gladly return to his works, ready to at least temporarily disconnect my perhaps excessively Heraclitean-Deleuzian and cynically irreverent viewpoint.

He was a great solitary figure and a mercilessly clear-sighted critic of civilization. Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) and Men Among the Ruins (1953) are and remain magnificent testimonies to a Radical-Traditionalist way of viewing the sorrowful 20th Century reality in Europe. More on this in future texts for the Temple of the Stars.

In The Path of Cinnabar Evola, who like our fellow Swede Eric Hermelin was a baron, does not say a concrete word about his parents and his family. Well, he does admit that he was born into a Catholic family, that the Nazarene and the Papal had always been indifferent and alien to him, and that Rome was his hometown. Through other sources, one can see that his father was a nobleman of Sicilian descent. Evola’s own words are those of a sensitive and self-willed person: “I owe very little to the milieu in which I was born, to the education which I received, and to my own blood”.

He was an intellectually precocious and healthily anti-conformist youth who, at 65 years of age, retrospectively analyzes his character and finds that it has, as long as he can remember, been characterized by two fundamentally opposing tendencies, which he eventually managed to existentially harmonize in a fruitful way: on one hand, the striving for transcendence, renunciation, liberation from what the classical Persian Sufis, Stagnelius, and Hermelin called “the oscillations of the wheel of anguish” and “the oppression of the astral world”; and on the other hand, an inclination toward a kshatriya life, an action-oriented, self-affirming, and combat-ready warrior’s path. He mentions the thinkers who made the strongest impression on him as a young man: naturally Nietzsche, also Stirner, as well as the two Jewish talents who committed suicide at the age of 23: Weininger and Michelstaedter. Giovanni Papini meant a great deal for the young Evola, who views Papini and his circle of that time as the Sturm und Drang movement granted to Italians, a fresh break-up of what he perceived as sterile, provincial, philistine, pedantically academic nonsense in the moribund “liberal-democratic” Italian prewar period. Papini’s autobiographical novel Un uomo finito (1913) also made a lasting impression on me as an alienated youth in Skellefteå, I recall.

Evola served in both artillery and cavalry divisions in the Dolomites during the First World War but, according to what he says, did not experience any major battles. Already then, by the way, he considered it absurd for Italy to wage war against Germany and Austria, and generally he had little regard for chauvinistic bellowing.

After the War, he endured some personally difficult years in Rome, felt uncomfortable in the decadent and Bolshevik-threatened plebeian civilization—and was close to suicide. He was saved from it through his reading of Majjhima Nikaya, a Pali Buddhist text. Incidentally, my absolute favorite book by Evola is probably The Doctrine of Awakening, or La dottrina del risveglio (1943), a superbly executed study of early Buddhism’s practical, “solar”, “aristocratic” wisdom.

He experimented somewhat with hallucinogens and came via Italian Futurism to engage for a time in the Dadaist revolt movement, both as an abstract artist and poet. His reflections on Tristan Tzara and this phase of his life are very interesting and show the rigorous, radical consistency that characterized his search for life’s meaning in all periods of his life. He proceeds calmly and clearly in his account of life’s gauntlet, and the book offers a unique insight into cultural circles of great historical interest.

Astrazione, completion: 1921.

His esoteric-initiatory work with the so-called “UR Group” during the 1920s, his efforts with the journal La Torre in the early 30s, his continued publishing activity in collaboration with Giovanni Preziosi and Roberto Farinacci, two of the few party-affiliated Fascists he considered men of real honour, the development of his greatest works and contacts with the Ahnenerbe, his views on race and war, and not least life after the War, wheelchair-bound in the aftermath of a bombing (or, as he himself said, in the aftermath of a kundalini yoga session gone wrong), coming to terms in his nobly aimed inner self with a civilization in severe decay—all this must reasonably be read with great benefit by every alert spirit. The book also has an appendix consisting of a number of interviews with Evola between 1964 and 1972, which further clarifies his positions on certain decisive issues.

Evola should be an obvious reference point in our time. To refuse to absorb and magnanimously evaluate what he writes is a sure sign that one is a herd-following tschandala-slave who should stay far away from living culture and the indomitable human thought’s striving for freedom, knowledge, the Numinous, and reconciliation.

The Generator of the Universe, completed 1968–1970.