anticlericalism, and the occult. Following his run with Ur, Evola joined Guénon in editing a regular section in Il Regime Fascista, the periodical of Farinacci, one of the most vicious and ruthless Blackshirt leaders and a pioneer of Fascist racism in Italy.171
As with the occultists of the turn of the twentieth century, Evola looked to the misogynist author Otto Weininger for his theory of gender. For Weininger, women did not exist outside of their recognition by men. Women manifested a kind of “zero” point symbolized by an empty womb. A society dominated by supermen could not maintain a strong female identity; instead, women represented the wilderness, the purity of nonmeaning, an inclusiveness, and a passivity. For all that men embody—nobility, violence, order, and hardness—women become the opposite: namely, a soft, spiritual vessel that men fill with meaning.172
For Evola, civilization manifested the social repression of the human spirit and particularly the male individual’s achievement of greatness. Greater than mass-based civilization, for Evola, was culture, which as he understood it could be carefully curated by elites to channel the energy of the masses toward destruction while leaving the higher echelon of spiritual warriors to play in the ashes. Evola declared himself an ardent reactionary, a counterrevolutionary utterly pessimistic about the concept of human progress. The superman Evola presented was aristocratic and sometimes anarchist. Evola embraced the egoist influence of Stirner through the idea of total freedom of the individual, aspiring to become an “absolute individual” who maintains a connection to the entire universe beyond the body. He agreed with Farinacci’s critique of Mussolini as overly moderate and looked down on Mussolini’s agreements with the Catholic Church.
According to Evolian racism, the Aryan race is the apogee of virtues like honor, fidelity, and courage. People of color could ascend to Aryanness only through spiritual and cultural practice. Nothing needed to be resisted more, in Evola’s opinion, than the notion that Aryans are equal to nonwhites: “We go from the theoretical domain to the practical one, or to ‘active racism,’ whenever we take a position before the racial components of a given nation, refusing to acknowledge to all of them the same value, the same dignity, and the same right to impart the tone and form to the whole.”173 For Evola, “active racism” meant the defense of Aryan dignity by whatever means. Resenting the notion that he would have to share the same conditions with workers and non-Italians, he wrote, “the so-called improvement of social conditions should be regarded not as good but as evil.”174
In 1937, the year before the notorious Italian racial laws, Evola wrote to the minister of popular culture that he had been engaged in a ten-year struggle “to give an anti-Semitic orientation to Fascist spirituality.”175 Although he heavily criticized Mussolini’s populism, the official Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party)’s 1938 racial laws were influenced by Evola’s ideology, and his later doctrine on race was applauded by Mussolini himself. The year Evola’s mission was accomplished, Farinacci, his cohort for Il Regime Fascista, was given a position in the Fascist Grand Council and charged with a ministerial post enforcing the racial laws.
Yet Evola would prefer to remain apart from political activism. “The activist world is also essentially a featureless and plebeian world, ruled by the demon of collectivism,” Evola wrote in 1943. “[I]t is not only the scene of triumph of what has been called ‘the ideal animal,’ but it is also a world…where action, force, strife, and even heroism and sacrifice are seen to become increasingly irrational, devoid of light, ‘elemental,’ and altogether earthly.”176 Although ultimately unavoidable for the “superman,” political activism remained, for Evola, incapable of harnessing spiritual power and bending it to the will. Only a spiritual “doctrine of awakening” could accomplish that.
“As for the doctrines of the ‘superman,’ they are based on the reinforcement of the vital energies and of the ‘I’ such as will produce invincibility and superiority to all tragedy, to all misfortune, to all human weakness, a pure force that, though it may be bent, cannot be broken, a will to power that defies men and gods.”177 According to Evola, this Aryan superman first lived in Hyperborea, the Arctic center of human origins. Then Hyperboreans fell from grace, moving slowly southward and losing their icy transcendence. The further south the Hyperborean traveled, the more ape-like he became, marking the history of the world as one of devolution into unthinking, effeminate species with little to no connection to their ancestral homeland in the Arctic. By awakening to the spiritual practices ingrained in the traditions of the Aryan mythos, humanity can reascend to superman status.
After the Allied occupation of Rome in 1943, Evola moved to Vienna, Austria, to work with the SS, where he imagined that an entire universe of superiority could be delivered out of the thin air of ancient texts and esoteric artifacts. While maintaining a sense of superiority over Mussolini’s Fascist party, Evola believed that the SS comprised the building blocks for an ideal Ordenstaat, or State of Order. Unfortunately for him, the SS work was much blander than he had hoped. Paralyzed from the waist down by a shell while taking a stroll during an Allied bombardment to test his will, Evola returned to Rome disappointed. After the war, however, Evola’s call for violence and direct action against NATO would come to paramount influence over the resurgent global fascist movement.
Savitri Devi and the Aryan Myth
Evola’s mystical teachings were linked to a growing postwar esoteric fascism that sent its apostles throughout the world. Its high priestess was Savitri Devi. Born in France to a wealthy Greek family, Devi became involved in the spiritual circles of Nazism as a young woman. During the war, she undertook a spiritual and political mission to India to study what she imagined were sacred texts on the origins of the Aryan race. By the late 1930s, Devi had become involved in the Hindu nationalist movement, approving of the idea of Hindutva preached by V. K. Savarkar, who notoriously stated that Hindu Indians should treat Muslims like the Nazis treated Jews. Devi claimed to be attracted to Hinduism because it opened her eyes to the relative insignificance of humanity on earth. Due to this insignificance, Devi viewed all “non-Aryan” humanity as parasitic on the vital energies necessary to cultivate the spiritually evolved master race.178
Like the occult mystics that preceded her, Devi believed fervently in the “new man,” for whom violence was nothing less than a spiritual duty. She organized the geographic centers of her belief system around India and Egypt, focusing on the supposedly Aryan pharaoh, Akhenaton, as well as the teachings of Tibetan spiritual leaders who she believed served as intermediaries between modern humanity and the Lemurian root-race identified by spiritualist leader Madame Blavatsky.179 In her wide-ranging spiritual doctrine, Devi tied together a collection of scriptures in order to find the revealed knowledge of white supremacist power that could regenerate Nazism and return the sacred connection between humanity and their Hyperborean ancestors.
After World War II, Devi’s books could only make cryptic reference to her hero, Adolf Hitler, who she claims stood out among other supermen like Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Akhenaton, and Buddha as the greatest “Man against Time” in the short history of humanity.180 For Devi, Hitler’s use of the elite force, the SS, was a deployment of the worldly forces of pain and agony in the service of the universal, spiritual ideal. The SS’s death’s head (Totenkopf) symbolized this usage of worldly violence for the ascendency of the hierarchy of the blood. The rigorous, austere discipline evoked by the SS in their genocidal campaigns marked the perfection of the blood through sacred purity and order.181
Like Himmler, who had committed suicide at the end of the war, Devi exalted animals and nature over hundreds of pages documenting the spiritual quality and importance of animal life. To lessen the failings of humanity, Devi encouraged vegetarianism and biocentric ethics not unlike today’s deep ecology movement. Embarking on a pilgrimage of Nazi “sacred sites” around Europe, Devi claimed to undergo the ecstasies of a mystic as she conducted solemn rituals at tombs and temples. While propagandizing the return of Nazism from India to Spain, Devi fell in with a tight-knit circle of fascist organizers, and her name was raised along with Evola as one of the preeminent spiritual leaders of neofascism.
Francis Parker Yockey and the “World Idea”
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