Although Evola always writes in a discursive style, he advises us that it is only the rishis, the seers, the clairvoyants who can fully understand. In many ways, Miguel Serrano picks up on many of Evola’s themes, though from the perspective of a clairvoyant rather than a metaphysician. In the following passage, Serrano describes the highest Tantric teachings while bringing in the major elements of the esoteric teachings from the Middle Ages: the Grail legends, the Templars, troubadours.
The ultimate end is identical for both Evola and Serrano. Both reject the mysticism of pantheism which looks to the annihilation of the Self and its merging into the Totality. Rather, they proclaim the Absolute Self, the raising up from the merely human to the higher states, the process of deification, atman=brahman.

Thus were completed the different stages of this most ancient Hyperborean Initiation of A-Mor, revealed in the mystery of the Grail, in the esotericism of the troubadours and the Minnesänger of the High Middle Ages. Transported to the icy wastes of the south of the world, with Parsifal, in a Templars’ ship, with the Vermilion Cross on its white sails and all its lights on, as the saga tells us, and from ‘whence it never returned’. To the true Kingdom of Hyperborea of the White Gods of America-Albania.

And while the ultimate test of this initiation was taking place in that ancient night, with a man and a woman lying naked side by side, separated by a sword, without taking possession of each other’s physical body, she explained to him in her musical voice full of longing for eternity: ‘The light doesn’t come from the east. Light is only truly light in the depths of midnight. Now is the depths of midnight. The followers of Lucifer, of the Morning Star, do not beg to be allowed into heaven. They demand to be, because they feel that they have done everything possible to merit being deified. At the end of our road, no fusion with a god or redeemer awaits us. Our way is not the way of ecstasy of the saints but the way of separation of the magicians, of the White Gods who have become absorbed into the sources of creative energy. Creating worlds, loving each other inside and outside eternity. We do not beg, like the lunar troubadour: “Take us back to where you took us from!” We are going to try and change God, giving him a face. Therefore, my love, do not take possession of my body. Let us not create children of the flesh. I will make you pregnant with the son of death. And we will both remain virgins.’

‘I understand,’ he whispered. ‘The chastity of the sacred warrior is the nobility of his sexual act, the refusal to tolerate all that is brutal, because his feeling for the beauty of that act prevents him doing so. The Wounded King also said this.’

‘It is an immaterial irrevocability. The Grail doesn’t tolerate unbridled passions, it loves pious reticence, a reverent attitude. And I will not destroy your magic virility, dividing your flesh and mine, giving you children of the flesh to bring new opportunities to other individuals, when such a great possibility already exists for us. I will not lure you into loving my body in the only way known to the dark age, because that way death will swallow you up. I will never be the Great devouring Mother, the Primordial Female, who will turn you into a vanquished warrior, living in a dream of unfulfilled glories. I will be the She who leads you to heaven. Because it is your magic virility which will enable us to travel along the river of death. Your sacred virility will enable us to return to life. Do you remember the words of the ascetic of the Grail?: “You will become a woman if you love the body of a woman.” This is so: because only by becoming effeminate could you satisfy the erotic sensibilities of a woman’s physical body. The chaste warrior is the more virile one. To take physical possession of the beloved is to lose one’s soul. True possession is the mental possession of all he other bodies. With the memory or your beloved in your heart, you will achieve the Grail. The genuine orgasm isn’t a physical one but another which is endless, and which is produced by your contact with my invisible bodies, where you will find the perfume of my visible body, the warmth of my lips, the amorous racing of my blood intensified. As I will find in yours. We must discover this love together, when we are no longer made of mortal flesh but of red imperishable matter. By loving my body, which lies beside you, you will make it even more material, you will turn it into a body made of lead.’

from Nos: Book of the Resurrection by Miguel Serrano [emphasis by editor]

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For the country which needs considerable imports for its support must tolerate continuous intercourse with foreigners … who, having been brought up under different laws and customs, behave in many way differently from the inhabitants of the country, so that these latter are spurred on to act similarly, and social life is disturbed. Again, if the citizens devote their lives to trade, the way will be opened to many vices. For, since the aim of traders is especially to make money, familiarity with trade leads to the awakening of greed in the hearts of the citizens. The result is that everything in the State will be put up for sale, mutual confidence will be destroyed and an atmosphere favourable to deceit and fraud created. Everyone, growing careless about the Common Good, will seek only his own advantage. The cultivation of virtue will decline, since honour, the reward of virtue, will be bestowed indiscriminately upon all comers. Hence, in such a State, social morality will inevitably suffer.

~ from The Governance of Princes by St. Thomas Aquinas

It is clear that Aquinas is criticizing making trade and economics the primary end of society. Even the bishops today, ignoring their Thomist heritage, see everything in economic terms and ignore the resulting social disruption. For Aquinas, on the other hand, the social disruption arising from the “continuous intercourse with foreigners” is the most important consideration. This shows how far the Vatican II Church has moved from Tradition … apart from their peculiar animus against abortion, they reveal themselves to be modern men in every other regard.

It is tempting to say that the quoted passage is pure prophecy, as it has all come to pass. However, it is really the result of clear and rational thought.

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It is one of man’s curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them. The mysteries that surround him on all sides are not sufficient for him; he still rejects clear ideas and reduces everything to a problem by some inexplicable twist of pride, which makes him regard it as below him to believe what everyone believes.

from Study of Sovereignty by Joseph de Maistre

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The nature of man is to be a cognitive, religious and sociable animal. All experience teaches us this; and, to my knowledge, nothing has contradicted this experience.

~ Joseph de Maistre, Study of Soverignty

Evola regarded Joseph de Maistre as standing on the same side of the barricade as himself. And, like Maistre, he does not deny the obvious — man is a cognitive, religious and sociable animal. It is only the characteristics of knowledge, religion, and society that is in question.

In 1950, Evola wrote a short pamphlet, Orientations, consisting of eleven fundamental points to guide his young followers who were out to form a new right movement after the collapse of World War II. The eleventh and final point deals with the religious question.

A religious factor is necessary as the background for a true heroic conception of life which must be essential for our battle deployment. It is necessary to feel in oneself the evidence that there is a higher life beyond this terrestrial life because only those who feel that way possess an intangible and inner directed strength, only they will be capable of an absolute impulse – while, when this is lacking, defying death and taking no account of one’s own life is possible only in sporadic moments of exaltation or in an outburst of irrational forces: nor is there discipline that can be justified, in the individual, with a higher and self-sufficient significance.

from Orientamenti by Julius Evola

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After the devastations of World War II, Evola – who was never a Fascist nor a National Socialist – turned to an analysis of those two movements from the perspective of Tradition in his publication Fascism viewed from the right with notes on the III Reich.

Both movements suffered from a confusion of Traditional elements with ideals from the Enlightenment. Insofar as they were dominated by materialism, economic concerns, and scientism, they lacked a transcendent – and hence, Traditional – perspective.

As Evola pointed out in “The Individual and the Becoming of the World”, the magical act consists in bringing the idea (essence) into manifestation (existence). If the idea is confused or incoherent, the result will be disorder. In the following passage, Evola points out the strong streak of naturalism that dominated the ideology of National Socialism. As such, even if unconsciously held, it must eventually serve the aims and purposes of organized naturalism.

For Evola, everything is ultimately a spiritual problem, impervious to the methods of secular science. All depends on the quality of men, not on the layout of their chromosomes.

As for Hitler himself, valid contributions to the problematic of the vision of the world in a higher sense are not found in his writing and speeches. His Wagnerian infatuation is already significant– for him, as for Chamberlain, Richard Wagner is valued as “the prophet of Germanism” – his incapacity to recognize the measure in which, apart from the greatness of his romantic art, the distortions of not a few German and Nordic traditions and sagas must be attributed to Wagner. If in his writings and speeches Hitler often mentions God and Providence, of which he considered himself the designated one and executor, it is not clear what this Providence could be if he, on the one hand, following Darwin somewhat more than Nietzsche, recognized the right of the strongest as the supreme law of life, and on the other excluded as superstition any intervention or supernatural order whatsoever and gave himself over to an exaltation of modern science and the “eternal laws of nature”. Such an attitude was likewise characteristic of the principle ideologue of the movement,Alfred Rosenberg, who came to see in modern science “a creation of the pure Aryan spirit”, without taking into consideration that if technical conquests are owed to it, one also owes to them the more deleterious and irreversible spiritual devastations of the modern era, the desacralisation of the universe. And a bluntly Enlightenment and rationalist incomprehension of the essential aspects of religion, paradoxically going hand in hand with the mysticism of blood, if it appeared in Hitler, it was fully explicit in Rosenberg; rites and sacraments for him were superstition, creations of a non-Aryan spirit.

From “Notes on the Third Reich”, Chapter V, by Julius Evola

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The intrinsic value of an idea and a system must be judged in itself, apart from everything that enters into the world of contingencies. From a practical and historical point of view, however, what is decisive is the quality of the men who make themselves the promoters and defenders of that idea and that system.

from “Il Fascismo visto dall destra” by Julius Evola

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As a child, I was brought up in the country. We lived in the hills, in sight of the snow-, capped peaks of the Andes. Alongside of the house was a garden with dovecotes and fountains, and there I used to play by the hour. My first friends were the flowers and plants that grew in the garden.

One day I saw a hand emerge from the bell of a flower and wave to me, urging me to come near. To my childish eyes, it seemed perfectly natural that a hand should come out of a flower, and I therefore went over to it. My only worry was that I was not able to enter it as it seems to want me to; I simply could not fit. Shortly afterwards the flower wilted, and its leaves and petals fell to the ground. I gathered them up in hopes of bringing them back to life, but of course was not able to do so. Then I thought of making a paper flower, and spent many days cutting one out and paining it with bright colours. Once it was finished, I took it out into the garden and planted it where the other flower had been. My hope was that if the flower was well enough made, the hand would reappear. But when it did not come back I realized that my flower could not compare to those of the garden which had been made by God.

At that moment, I stopped being a child: never afterwards was I able to speak freely with the flowers and plants of the garden. Without realizing it, I had entered into competition with God, and so compromised my innocent relationship with nature.

from The Ultimate Flower by Miguel Serrano

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It may be remarked that the harsh opinion of Machiavelli has been more widespread in England and the United States than in the nations of Continental Europe. This is no doubt natural, because the distinguishing quality of Anglo-Saxon politics has always been hypocrisy, and hypocrisy must always be at pains to shy away from the truth. It is also the case that judgments of Machiavelli are usually based upon acquaintance with The Prince alone, an essay which, though plain enough, can be honestly misinterpreted when read out of the context of the rest of his writings. However, something more fundamental than these minor difficulties is at stake.

from The Machiavellians by James Burnham

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This is a brief outline and summary of the first part of “The Individual and the Becoming of the World“. Although its point can not be made by means of a logical argument, perhaps a logical argument can lead one to see the point.

Quest for certainty involves direct intuition

The problem is stated in terms of the quest for certainty. Following the traditions of the rishis of the Vedic period, Evola claims that certainty is achieved via an “intuitive” knowing, that is, a direct perception into the nature of reality. Again, like the rishis, such knowledge has its source in consciousness itself, since it is only the contents of my consciousness that I can know directly.

Aware of objects as representations in consciousness

Starting with that observation, I notice that what is called the “real” or “objective” world is what is presented – or re-presented – in my consciousness. Objects, then, are whatever, in my experience, seems to resist me. For example, I see my desk, I notice its colours, it is firm to my touch. Yet it resists my direct will, so I call it a “desk”. However, there is no rationale to posit the existence of a “real” desk, in addition to the “desk” represented in my consciousness, so that the former is somehow the “cause” of the desk in my consciousness.

Self is not an object but rather the constant in every act of consciousness

Besides the objects represented in my consciousness, I become aware of my self as subject. This self, however, is not just another one of those objects present in my consciousness; rather it is the constant presence in the flow of phenomena in my mind. It is not experienced, then, as an object, but as the subject.

The world is the result of my will.

I further note that I can act upon certain objects in my consciousness. This power to act and control I call my “will”.

My will can be spontaneous.

If the world is my self and its representations in consciousness, then clearly it is “I” who creates it, that is, who creates its appearance in my consciousness. This is easier to see in a dream; in a dream there are things and other people. Nevertheless, clearly it is my own mind that is creating the appearance of those other things and persons in my dream consciousness. It is doing so, however, “spontaneously”, without the conscious intervention of my “I”. Hence, even in my waking state, I am creating the world arising in my consciousness, albeit spontaneously.

Or it can be free and create knowingly and purposefully.

When the will is free, it can evaluate various possibilities and then actualize one of them – that is, bring it into manifestation. That is the definition of a magical act, hence the term “magical idealism” to name Evola’s philosophical system.

The essence of an idea is the same as the existence of a thing

The difference between the idea, or essence, of a thing and the existence of a thing is a question of degree.

It is a matter of power to bring an idea into manifestation.

The measure of power is the capability to bring an idea into manifestation, that is, to alter reality in conformance with one’s will.

As Evola put it in “Essays on Magical Idealism”: “What distinguishes magical idealism is its essentially practical character: its fundamental requirement is not to substitute one intellectual conception of the world with another, but rather to create in the individual a new ‘dimension’ and a new depth of life.”

The new dimension involves understanding the world in a radically new way. Rather than the self as a passive observer of the world which produces a mental copy of itself in consciousness, the self instead is recognized as the creator of the world as its conscious act. In effect, one’s whole worldview is reversed. The world is created from the inside out, that is, from ideas and spiritual qualities which then are manifested. It then becomes a matter of power as to which or whose ideas take hold. The world is then the battleground of spiritual forces, not simply as abstract ideals, but as a power struggle to bring those ideals into manifestation.

This the problem of knowing, that is, of self-realisation or the “magical problem” is really an ethical problem. By participation in this struggle, the individual becomes “conscious of his task and his cosmic dignity.” This revaluation of values, that is, morality as the creative act and not as strictly inhibitive, is Evola’s fundamental point:

“ today the meaning of the moral as cosmic worth has been lost, that up to now, it has been reduced to nothing more than the corroboration and canonisation of deficiency, weakness, and fear – of the plague of beautiful sentiments, of noble virtues, of holy ideals – that is, of the fundamentally immoral.”

So the issue really is how to bring about this moment of self-realisation. Since it is not simply a philosophical argument, Evola then turns, in the second part of the essay, to the question of initiation.

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The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular; a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view — and in this view alone– never for despair!

Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair –the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind– that’s our affair!

And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe, reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth–a task in which fate had perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the haunting terror, the infinite passion, and the illimitable serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle.

~ Joseph Conrad (A Personal Record)

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