124 Facts About Julius Evola

Giulio Cesare Andrea "Julius" Evola was an Italian philosopher, poet, painter, esotericist, and far-right ideologue.

Julius Evola served as an artillery officer in the First World War.

Julius Evola became a Dada artist but gave up painting in his twenties.

Julius Evola said he considered suicide until he had a revelation while reading a Buddhist text.

Julius Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites.

Various writings by Julius Evola are noted for their misogyny, racism, antisemitism, and attacks on Christianity and the Catholic Church.

Julius Evola advocated for Fascist Italy's racial laws, and eventually became Italy's leading "racial philosopher".

Julius Evola fled to Nazi Germany in 1943 when the Italian Fascist regime fell, but returned to Rome under the puppet Salo government to organize a radical-right group.

Julius Evola has been called the "chief ideologue" of Italy's radical right after World War II.

Julius Evola continues to influence contemporary traditionalist and neo-fascist movements.

The paternal grandparents of Julius Evola were Giuseppe Julius Evola, a joiner by trade, and Maria Cusumano.

Giulio Cesare Julius Evola had an elder brother, Giuseppe Gaspare Dinamo Julius Evola, born in 1895 in Rome.

Julius Evola considered details about his early life irrelevant, and is noted for hiding some details of his personal life.

Julius Evola is sometimes described as a baron, probably in reference to a purported distant relationship with a minor aristocratic family, the Evoli, who were the barons of Castropignano in the Kingdom of Sicily in the late Middle Ages.

Julius Evola adopted the name Julius as a connection to ancient Rome.

Julius Evola studied engineering at the Istituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci in Rome, but did not complete his course, later claiming this was because he did not want to be associated with "bourgeois academic recognition" and titles such as "doctor and engineer".

Julius Evola was introduced to philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Otto Weininger.

Julius Evola was attracted to the avant-garde, and briefly associated with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist movement during his time at university.

Julius Evola broke with Marinetti in 1916 as Evola disagreed with his extreme nationalism and advocacy of industry.

Julius Evola returned to civilian life after the war and became a painter in Italy's Dadaist movement; he described his paintings as "inner landscapes".

Julius Evola wrote his poetry in French and recited it in cabarets accompanied by classical music.

Julius Evola was a keen mountaineer, describing it as a source of revelatory spiritual experience.

Julius Evola purportedly went through a "spiritual crisis" through the intolerance of civilian life and his need to "transcend the emptiness" of normal human activity.

Julius Evola experimented with hallucinogenics and magic, which, he wrote, almost brought him to madness.

Julius Evola said he avoided suicide thanks to a revelation he had while reading an early Buddhist text that dealt with shedding all forms of identity other than absolute transcendence.

Julius Evola began reading various esoteric texts and gradually delved deeper into the occult, alchemy, magic, and Oriental studies, particularly Tibetan Tantric yoga.

Julius Evola's writings blended ideas from German idealism, Eastern doctrines, traditionalism, and especially the interwar Conservative Revolution, "with which Julius Evola had a deep personal involvement", Ferraresi wrote.

Julius Evola viewed himself as part of an aristocratic caste that had been dominant in an ancient Golden Age, as opposed to the contemporary Dark Age.

Julius Evola considered human history to be, in general, decadent; he viewed modernity as the temporary success of the forces of disorder over tradition.

Tradition, in Julius Evola's definition, was an eternal supernatural knowledge, with absolute values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience, Furlong wrote.

Julius Evola wrote prodigiously on mysticism, Tantra, Hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism.

Julius Evola gave particular focus to Cesare della Riviera's text Il Mondo Magico degli Heroi, which he later republished in modern Italian.

Julius Evola later confessed that he was not a Buddhist, and that his text on Buddhism was meant to balance his earlier work on the Hindu tantras.

Julius Evola was attracted to the active aspect of tantra, and its claim to provide a practical means to spiritual experience, over the more "passive" approaches in other forms of Eastern spirituality.

In Tantric Buddhism in East Asia, Richard K Payne, Dean of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, argued that Evola manipulated Tantra in the service of right wing violence, and that the emphasis on "power" in The Yoga of Power gave insight into his mentality.

Julius Evola often relied on European sources about Asian creeds while evoking them for racist ends, Peter Staudenmaier wrote.

Julius Evola developed a doctrine of the "two natures": the natural world and the primordial "world of 'Being'".

Julius Evola held that the State should reflect this "ordering from above" and the consequent hierarchical differentiation of individuals according to their "organic preformation".

Reghini accused him of plagiarising his thoughts in the book Pagan Imperialism; Julius Evola, in turn, blamed him for its premature publication.

Julius Evola believed that women's liberation was "the renunciation by woman of her right to be a woman".

Julius Evola regarded matriarchy and goddess religions as a symptom of decadence, and preferred a hyper-masculine, warrior ethos.

Julius Evola was influenced by Hans Bluher, a proponent of the Mannerbund concept as a model for his "warrior-band" or "warrior-society".

Julius Evola scorned modern pornography for being a "scanty source" of erotic experience, denouncing it as "dreadfully squalid" both visually and in essence.

In Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race, Julius Evola provides an overview of his ideas concerning race and eugenics, introducing the concept of "spiritual racism", and "esoteric-traditionalist racism".

Julius Evola's interpretation was adopted by Mussolini, who declared in 1938 that "Italy's civilization is Aryan".

Wolff notes that Julius Evola seems to have stopped writing about race in 1945, but adds that the intellectual themes of Julius Evola's writings were otherwise unchanged.

Julius Evola continued to write about elitism and his contempt for the weak.

Julius Evola believed that military aggressions such as Fascist Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia were justified by Italy's dominance, outweighing concerns he had about the possibility of race-mixing.

Julius Evola argued that both Italian fascism and Nazism represented hope that the "celestial" Aryan race would be reconstituted.

Julius Evola drew on mythological accounts of super-races and their decline, particularly the Hyperboreans, and maintained that traces of Hyperborean influence could be felt in Indo-European men.

Julius Evola felt that Indo-European men had devolved from these higher mythological races.

Julius Evola encouraged and applauded Mussolini's antisemitic racial laws in 1938, and called for a "supreme Aryan elite" to oppose the Jews.

Julius Evola said Fascism and Nazism's final victory over Jews would end "the spiritual decadence of the West" and thereby "re-establish genuine contact between man and a transcendent, supersensible reality".

Julius Evola wrote the foreword and an essay in the second Italian edition of the infamous antisemitic fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion published in 1938 by the Catholic fascist Giovanni Preziosi.

Julius Evola dismissed the biological racism of chief Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg and others as reductionist and materialistic.

In 1970, Julius Evola described Adolf Hitler's antisemitism as a paranoid idee fixe that damaged the reputation of the Third Reich.

In some of his 1930s writings, and in works about magic, Julius Evola used pseudonyms, including Ea, Carlo d'Altavilla, and Arthos.

In 1928, Julius Evola wrote an attack on Christianity titled Pagan Imperialism, which proposed transforming fascism into a system consistent with ancient Roman values and Western esotericism.

Julius Evola proposed that fascism should be a vehicle for reinstating the caste system and aristocracy of antiquity.

Richard Drake wrote that Julius Evola "rarely missed an opportunity to attack the Catholic Church".

Julius Evola held that the Guelph victory against the Ghibellines represented a regression of the castes, since the merchant caste took over from the warrior caste.

Goodrick-Clarke wrote that Julius Evola "regarded the advent of Christianity as an era of unprecedented decline", because Christianity's egalitarianism and accessibility undermined the Roman ideals of "duty, honor and command" that Julius Evola believed in.

Julius Evola believed that Buddhism revealed the essence of an "Aryan" tradition that had become corrupted and lost in the West.

Julius Evola believed it could be interpreted to reveal the superiority of a warrior caste.

Julius Evola claimed that the book "received the official approbation of the Pali [Text] Society", and was published by a reputable Orientalist publisher.

Arthur Versluis stated that Julius Evola's writing on Buddhism was a vehicle for his own theories, but was a far from accurate rendition of the subject, and he held that much the same could be said of Julius Evola's writings on Hermeticism.

Julius Evola asserted that history's intellectuals starting as early as ancient Greece had undermined traditional values through their questioning.

Julius Evola was aware of the importance of myth from his readings of Georges Sorel, one of the key intellectual influences on fascism.

Julius Evola contributed to Giuseppe Bottai's magazine Critica Fascista for a time.

Julius Evola proposed the necessity of a transcendental orientation in a warrior.

Julius Evola translated some works of Oswald Spengler and Ortega y Gasset to Italian.

Julius Evola cited two models of such an elite as the Nazi SS and Romanian Iron Guard, known for their violence.

Julius Evola had access to Benito Mussolini in the last years of the Fascist regime, and advised him on racial policies, but "without much effect", Ferraresi wrote; Julius Evola "was kept on the sidelines of officialty, as some sort of eccentric".

Julius Evola was in charge of the cultural page of the influential fascist newspaper Il Regime Fascista for the regime's last decade.

Julius Evola declined to join Italy's National Fascist Party or any other party of the time; Ferraresi wrote that Julius Evola's "lofty nonconformism" and "imperial paganism" did not fit well in a party that would make the Catholic Church a regime pillar.

In May 1951, Julius Evola was arrested in Italy and charged with promoting the revival of the Fascist Party, and of glorifying Fascism.

Julius Evola experienced Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922 and was intrigued by fascism.

Julius Evola applauded Mussolini's anti-bourgeois orientation and his goal of making Italian citizens into hardened warriors, but criticised Fascist populism, party politics, and elements of leftism that he saw in the fascist regime.

Julius Evola saw Mussolini's Fascist Party as possessing no cultural or spiritual foundation.

Julius Evola was passionate about infusing it with these elements in order to make it suitable for his ideal conception of Ubermensch culture which, in Evola's view, characterised the imperial grandeur of pre-Christian Europe.

Julius Evola applauded the fascist motto "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State".

Julius Evola argued that the regime should dictate to the Catholic Church, not negotiate with it, and warned in Critica fascista in 1927 that allowing the church independent power would make fascism a "laughable revolution".

Julius Evola opposed the futurism that Italian society was aligned with, along with the "plebeian" nature of the movement.

Julius Evola opined that Mussolini should have disbanded his party after 1922 and become a loyal advisor to King Victor Emmanuel III instead.

Accordingly, Julius Evola launched the journal La Torre in 1930, to advocate for a more elitist social order.

Julius Evola wrote that Mussolini's censors had repressed La Torre, which lasted five months and ten issues; in Drake's words, Italian fascism "had as little tolerance for opposition on the right as on the left".

Regardless, a few years later in 1934, Julius Evola was put in charge of the cultural page of the influential radical fascist newspaper Il Regime Fascista, a position he held until 1943.

Julius Evola later recounted that Mussolini had found in his work a uniquely Roman form of Fascist racism distinct from that found in Nazi Germany.

Julius Evola described Berlin's Herrenklub, associated with the Conservative Revolution aristocracy, as his "natural habitat".

Julius Evola appreciated what he called Nazism's "attempt to create a kind of new political-military Order with precise qualifictions of race", and believed that the Nazis' brand of fascism had taken its traditionalist thinkers seriously.

Julius Evola thought far more highly of Adolf Hitler than Mussolini, although he had reservations about Hitler's volkisch nationalism.

Julius Evola wanted a spiritual unity between Italy and Germany and an Axis victory in Europe.

Julius Evola subsequently ascended to the inner circles of Nazism as the influence of pan-European advocates overtook that of Volkisch proponents, due to military contingencies.

Julius Evola wrote the article Reich and Imperium as Elements in the New European Order for the Nazi-backed journal European Review.

Julius Evola spent World War II working for the Sicherheitsdienst.

The Sicherheitsdienst bureau Amt VII, a Reich Security Main Office research library, helped Julius Evola acquire arcane occult and Masonic texts.

At this point, Julius Evola fled to Berlin in Nazi Germany with the help of the Sicherheitsdienst.

Julius Evola was one of the first people to greet Mussolini when the latter was broken out of prison by Otto Skorzeny in September 1943.

Julius Evola returned to Rome in 1943 to organize a radical right group called the Movimento per la Rinascita dell'Italia.

Julius Evola fled to Vienna in 1944, barely avoiding capture by the Americans when the Allies took Rome.

In Vienna, Julius Evola studied Masonic and Jewish documents confiscated by the Nazis, and worked with the SS and fascist leaders on recruiting an army to resist the Allies' advances.

Julius Evola, partially paralysed after the Soviet bombing raid in Vienna in 1945, returned to postwar Italy in 1948, after being treated for his injuries in Austria.

Ferraresi wrote that Julius Evola was "the guru" for generations of radical right Italian militants, through his writings and youth groups.

Julius Evola wrote for publications of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement but never joined the party.

Julius Evola wrote his two explicitly political books Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul, and his autobiography, The Path of Cinnabar.

Julius Evola expanded upon critiques of American civilisation and materialism, as well as increasing American influence in Europe, collected in the posthumous anthology Civilta Americana.

Julius Evola's charges were glorifying fascism and promoting the revival of the Fascist Party.

Julius Evola was carried into the courtroom on a stretcher.

Julius Evola was acquitted of all charges on 20 November 1951.

Julius Evola made an effort to differentiate his caste based aristocratic state from totalitarianism, preferring the concept of the "organic" state, which he put forth in his text Men Among the Ruins, as well as in his autodifesa.

Julius Evola sought to develop a strategy for the implementation of a "conservative revolution" in post-World War II Europe.

Julius Evola rejected nationalism, advocating instead for a European Imperium, which could take various forms according to local conditions, but should be "organic, hierarchical, anti-democratic, and anti-individual".

Julius Evola endorsed Francis Parker Yockey's neo-fascist manifesto Imperium, but said Yockey had a "superficial" understanding of what was immediately possible.

Julius Evola believed that his conception of neo-fascist Europe could best be implemented by an elite of "superior" men who operated outside normal politics.

Julius Evola dreamt that such a "New Order" of aristocracy might seize power from above during a democratic crisis.

Ferraresi wrote that "Julius Evola's thought was the 'essential mortar' that held together generations of militants".

In Men Among the Ruins, Julius Evola defines the Fourth Estate as being the last stage in the cyclical development of the social elite, the first beginning with a spiritual elite of divine right.

Julius Evola praised Ordine Nouvo as the only Italian group that had "doctrinally had held firm without descending to compromise".

Giuliano Salierni, who was an activist in the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement during the early 1950s, later recalled Julius Evola's calls to violence, along with Julius Evola's reminiscences about Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels.

Julius Evola spent his postwar years in his Rome apartment.

Julius Evola died on 11 June 1974 in Rome from congestive heart failure.

Julius Evola is widely translated in French, Spanish, partly in German, and mostly in Hungarian.

Julius Evola is described by Stanley Payne and Stephen Atkins as the leading neo-fascist intellectual in Europe until his death in 1974.

The Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Julius Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.