Julius Evola
From Metapedia
Julius Evola or Baron Evola (born Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola May 19, 1898, died June 11, 1974) was an Italian occultist and esotericist. Evola wrote extensively about Hermeticism, the history of civilization, Buddhism, mountaineering, the Holy Grail, and many other subjects. He regarded his work as upholding Ancient Tradition in a time of decay and degeneracy.
[edit] Life
Evola was born in Rome to a noble Sicilian family. He quickly became interested in mysticism and in traditionalism. During the first world war he participated as an Italian soldier, although he had an admiration for the Austrian-Hungarian empire.
When the first world war ended, he entered the dada "artistic" movement. The dada experience lasted from 1919 to 1924, and he was the Italian translator of the dada manifesto.
In the early twenties he came to know esoteric and pagan thinkers like Arturo Reghini and René Guenon, and in 1927 he founded the "gruppo di Ur" (group of Ur, where Ur is from the German Ur-, primordial).
He supported fascism, as a reprise of traditional values, although he was never a major part of it, because the Catholic fascists hated him, after the publication of the book "Imperialismo pagano" (Pagan Imperialism) in 1927 where he said that Italian fascism should look to to the Roman empire, rejecting Christianity, and exhorted fascism to become more aristocratic and less democratic.
A help for him was the friendship with gerarca Roberto Farinacci, editor of the "Regime fascista" journal; Evola, though not antisemitic, elaborated the doctrine of spiritual racism, described in such books as "Il mito del sangue" (The Myth of the Blood, 1937) and "Sintesi di dottrina della razza" (Synthesis of Racial Doctrine, 1942). In these years he met Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in Romania. He interacted with Italian Fascism until the collapse of the Italian regime in 1943. He then moved to Vienna and during World War II he worked for the SS Ahnenerbe doing research on Freemasonry. He appreciated the more aristocratic aspects of the National Socialist regime, especially Himmler's SS. However, he was regarded suspiciously, because he was considered "not volkisch", in regard to his ideas. While walking in Vienna during the Soviet bombings, meditating on the caducity of life and the end of the world, he was hit by a shell and seriously wounded.
He returned to Italy in 1946 with his legs paralyzed. He soon became the main Italian neofascist intellectual. He was boycotted by main MSI politicians, because of his radical thoughts and refusal to compromise with the Vatican and the State. In 1951, he was arrested for his ideological influence on the F.A.R., a neofascist subversive group, but was acquitted.
He died in Rome, on 11 June 1974.
He had a lot of supporters, and today remains the most important thinker of the Italian far right, as well as the most well known abroad.
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