The lonely path of cinnabar

"Misunderstood by friends and enemies, he fought alone against the modern world": this obituary to Julius Evola highlights the 'Promethean-Luciferian' daimon that accompanied him throughout his entire earthly journey, making him a unique thinker in the panorama of ' 900, as clearly emerges from his most autobiographical work, "The journey of the cinnabar", recently reprinted by Edizioni Mediterranee.


di Marco Maculotti

ยซโ€œ Essays on Magical Idealism โ€; "Man as power"; โ€œTheory of the absolute individualโ€โ€ฆ; books that the library-goer observes in passing, presenting behind the extravagant appearances a formidable force, a fire by which it is easy to be run over and overwhelmed. I still remember the dismay aroused, albeit in small circles of scholars, by the first statements of the disturbing theory. "Crazy", "unheard of", "formidable", "worthy of the stake" ... "ย [1]

In a famous speech, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle stated that ยซThe function of the intellectuals, or at least of a certain type of intellectuals, is to go beyond the event, to attempt risky paths, to travel all the possible paths of history ". Few portraits of "intellectuals" match this identikit, which we could in a certain sense define Promethean-Luciferian, as well as one of the most controversial (and misunderstood) minds of Italian culture of the twentieth century: the Roman philosopher and โ€œtraditionalistโ€ Julius Evola (1898 - 1974).

The biographical aspect of his work (both literary and "alchemical") and the stages of an existence that took on "mythological" characteristics well before his death were narrated in the first person by Evola himself in the book-document entitledย The path of cinnabarย [2], first published in 1963. The recent reprint (2018) by Mediterranean Editions of Rome, for the series "Works of Julius Evola" edited by Gianfranco de Turris, constitutes the fourth edition corrected, revised and considerably increased with multiple notes, appendices, bibliographies, photographs, unpublished documents and essays by Twin Alvi ("The thrill of emptiness") e Andrea Scarabelli ("The editorial journey of 'The journey of cinnabar'"), for a total of almost 500 pages. An edition, therefore, not to be missed for Evola's admirers and for those who want to get to know him โ€œmore closelyโ€, with regard to the more purely historical-biographical context of his solitary earthly journey.

We are aware of the impossibility of providing, in this short article-review, an exhaustive general picture of Evola's life; on this, we refer to the full reading of the book in question. For our part, here we will limit ourselves to broadly defining the life of the Roman philosopher and esotericist, underlining here and there certain particularly noteworthy episodes and some ideological positions that he developed over the years; to this end, we will divide Evola's biography into three "macro-phases"ย (lasting approximately 25 years each)ย which we will ideally bring back, not without a hidden meaning, to the phases ofArs alchemical: the youth one or the Nigredoย (until 1922), the mature one or thealbedoย (from 23 to the end of the XNUMXs) and finally that of old age or of rubedo(from the 1974s to his death in XNUMX).

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Youth: Nigredo

Who was Julius Evola before becoming Julius Evola?ย From the early years, he affirms in the incipit de The path, two "provisions" seem to have shaped its nature: on the one hand, an "impulse to transcendence", from which he had to achieve a "certain detachment from the human" and a "certain insensitivity and coldness of soul"; on the other, an attitude "from kshatriyaยป, a term that in Sanskrit calls ยซa human type inclined to action and affirmation,โ€œ warrior โ€in the broad senseยป. And yet, continues the Roman philosopherย [3]:

ยซI cannot trace the dispositions I mentioned to environmental influences or to hereditary factors (in the current, biological sense). I owe very little to the environment, to education, to the lineage of my blood. To a large extent, I found myself at odds with both the predominant tradition in the West - Christianity and Catholicism - and with today's civilization, with the democratic and materialistic "modern world", and with the culture and mentality prevailing in the nation where I was born, Italy, is, finally, with my family environment. If anything, the influence of all this was indirect, negative: it only fostered reactions in me. "

Back in the capital after the Great War, the young Julius found himself catapulted into a period of crisis that marked a real catarsi: a topical moment of his existence, framed in the sense of a necessary initial phase of Nigredo, without which it would have been impossible to aim for the dizzying heights of thealbedo and rubedo. It is no coincidence, in our opinion, that this very important stage in the formation of the Evola "philosopher" was resolved - among other things - in a series of experiments with psychotropic substances, probably including psilocybin. Here is how Evola remembers this tragic but unavoidable phase of Nigredoย [4]:

ยซโ€ฆ The intolerance for the normal life to which I had returned, the sense of the inconsistency and the vanity of the purposes that normally engaged human activities, intensified in me. In a confused but intense way, the congenital to transcendence manifested itself. In this context, it is also worth mentioning the effect of some inner experiences that I faced at first without oneย  precise technique and awareness of the purpose, with the help of certain substances that are not the most commonly used drugs, and the use of which indeed requires, in most cases, the overcoming of a natural revolt of the organism and a particular control of it . In this way, I moved towards forms of consciousness that were partly detached from the physical senses. Not infrequently I passed near the area of โ€‹โ€‹visionary hallucinations and perhaps even madness. But a fundamentally sound constitution, the authentic character of the impulse that had led me towards these adventures, and a fearlessness of spirit carried me further. "

Lalibras ignites
Julius Evola, โ€œThe Libra Ignites and the Pyramidsโ€, 1920-21.

The greatest fruits of these experiences can be traced back to having provided him, in his own words, "points of reference which he might otherwise have reached with difficulty", perspectives and intuitions inadequate to grasp with the means of the rational mind alone. Evola related this period of troubled inner growth with an oriental concept, ยซbeing bitten by the snakeยปย [5], which precisely definesย ยซA need for intensity and absolute, to which no normal object appears adequateโ€ฆ hence, also, a kind of cupio dissolve, an impulse to disperse and get lost ".ย If the scholars ofArs alchemica and the readers of The Hermetic Tradition by Evola himself will have no particular problems in relating these concepts with the initial phase of the "Great Work" mentioned above, we will limit ourselves to noting how such impulse to disperse and get lost and ideally, in the Hindu tradition, to be connected to the guแน‡a Thomas, whose "power" is overflowing precisely in the phases of Nigredo (where the guแน‡a sattwa it is specific to the phase albedo and the guแน‡a slits ofย rubedo).

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Nevertheless it can be noted that, even in this first phase of extreme awareness, its dispositions genetic - term that we would like to understand here, following the author's indications, more in connection with the Genius that with the gens - โ€œheroicallyโ€ oriented such a potentially annihilating experience. The authentic character of the impulse who had guided him in these "psychedelic raids" and so did thefearlessness of the spirit they already demonstrate the evolian chrism, present since youth, of "warrior" - or of kshatriya, he would say. Attitudes which, on the other hand, are fully realized in the guna slits, equivalent to the urge to move, instability, activity and a burning desire for change; guแน‡a that it was not by chance that it was considered fully realized, in ancient India, by the caste of the gods kshatriya. An impulse, to quote ours again, "to bring all experience to the end, towards the limit, in order to go beyond"ย [6].ย Here the daimon-Evola even before the thinker and the philosopher; from these experiences the Evola-person he drew the directives on which he would orient his life from that moment onย [7]:

ยซ... the orientation, from then on, was essentially this: to try to justify my existence with tasks and activities that did not have a purely individual character or, at least, that did not seem such to me; then, wherever possible, to question what is commonly called destiny, testing it, in order to what referred to the continuation of my existence taken as a whole. "

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Otto Dix, "Self-Portait as Mars", 1915.

Maturity: albedo

After the "confessions" of the introductory chapter, the I walk he continues by treating the experience firsthand in Dadaist world and expounding personal considerations on abstract art (chap. 2); then the exhibition enters the heart of the evolian production, the so-called "Speculative period" or philosophical (chapter 3).ย These are the years between 1923 and '27, which see the editing (although the publication sometimes takes place several years later) of Essays on magical idealism (first publ. 1925), The individual and the becoming of the world (1926) Man as a power (1927) and Theory of the Absolute Individual (1927) and Phenomenology of the absolute individual (1930) They are the most purely philosophical texts of Evola who - while drawing heavily from classical traditions such as Taoism, Hinduism, and Hellenism - does not fail to unite his philosophical interests here stricto sensuย (among the mentioned, Nietzsche, Hegel and Michelstaedter) with his "metaphysical" and "traditionalist" passions. It is also the period of Group of Ur, an esoteric partnership which led to the publication of the magazine of the same name (of which Evola was the first director), founded in 26 by Arturo Reghini and Giovanni Colazza.

Chapter 4, "The approach to the East and the pagan myth", deals with the writings of the same period (although published decades later) which differ from the previous ones because they are completely focused on the oriental tradition, especially Hindu: The doctrine of awakening (1943) and The Yoga of power (1949). But in this chapter Evola also talks about the gestation of one of his best-known works which, although it has only marginally to do with oriental studies, enters directly into the bed of the "pagan" studies of the Roman philosopher in the 20s and ' 30 of the twentieth century, from the high-sounding title: Pagan Imperialism (1928) In this long period that begins in the XNUMXs and roughly continues until the end of the XNUMXs (a period which also includes the famous Revolt against the modern world, which will be mentioned below) can be traced back, according to our conceptual scheme the phaseย albedo of thought evolve, what we could defineย pars construensย of his thought, ideally to be placed in dichotomous contrast with the nextย pars destruensย linked toย rubedo, a phase of martially "Promethean" expansion, which can be placed temporally from the beginning of the XNUMXs to his death: years in which Evola put black and white his pungent (and somewhat prophetic) criticism of the direction that has taken the same Faustian "Modern world"ย โ€” ie "western".

dra10
Dragos Kalajic, โ€œMain Thistleโ€.

ยซ It was in the face of the world of Tradition that the modern world appeared as an anomalous and regressive civilization, born of a crisis and a profound deviation of humanity ... ยปย [8]

Since the beginning of the Thirties, the obsession with dichotomy "traditional world" / "modern world", not without contacts with the eliadian equivalent "sacred" / "profane". Some observations - or perhaps it would be better to say predictions - contained in the aforementioned book seem to be invested with an expressive power that now recalls Nietzsche now Giorgio Colli's writings of the 60s / 70s on the Greek tradition, often giving the impression of evolving to the point of paroxysm (ateschaton of the expressible, one might say); almost as if those of Evola are syntactic metastases to follow to the end, to get out of the labyrinthine trap of the "modern world".ย 

Evola's visions anticipate those of her (almost) German counterpart by a few decades Ernst Junger, especially that of At the wall of time (1959) [9], and at the same time echo the insights expounded by the latter inย The workerย (1932), on which, however, ours wrote a substantial comment (The "Worker" in the thought of Ernst Jรผnger,ย 1959). Here, by way of example, is a particularly poignant invective, full of pathos, also reported in I walkย [10]:ย 

ยซ The current "civilization" of the West is waiting for a substantial upheaval without which it is destined, sooner or later, to collapse. It has achieved the most complete perversion of any rational order of things. Kingdom of matter, of gold, of the machine, of number, in it there is no longer breath, freedom or light. The Westโ€ฆ no longer knows natureโ€ฆ nature has fallen into an opaque and fatal exteriority of which the secular sciences try to ignore the mystery with small laws and small hypotheses. He no longer knows the Wisdom... the superb reality of those in whom the idea has become blood, life, power ... He no longer knows the state ... What is war - war intended in itself as a superior value and a way of spiritual realization ... not know more, these formidable 'activists' of Europe ... who know no warriors but only soldiers ... It is a great anodyne body, which throws itself now and then pushed by dark and unpredictable forces which inexorably crush anyone who wants to oppose or just escape the mechanism. All this has been able to the "civilization" of the Westโ€ฆ And the circle closes more and more around the few who are capable of great disgust and great revolt. "

forge-studio-of-noises-1918
Julius Evola, โ€œForge, study of noisesโ€, 1918.

Old age: rubedo

Themes that re-emerge also after World War II, although in this third phase of his life Julius Evola turns more towards a type of philosophical-sociological analysis than a merely mythical-traditional one (with the exception of Metaphysics of sex, one of his best works, published in 1958), as imperturbable and detached as it is fervent and dramatically prophetic. It is the period of Guidelines (1950) The men and the ruins (1953) and, later, Riding the tiger (1961), as well as the essays contained therein The bow and club (1968), which will be published five years later The path of cinnabar.ย Here too the impression is that of perceiving Jรผngerian echoes - especially as regards the eschatological vision of At the wall of time, with its dark "mythical powers", awakened by the triumphant hysteria of the "machine world", and the unspeakable sensation of approaching at an increasingly insane speed, in the maze of the Timewave Zeroย [11], towardseschaton conclusiveย - and considerations that echo Spengler and Guรฉnon de The crisis of the modern world (1927) and The reign of quantity and the signs of the times (1939), like the following (taken from chap. 9 of I walk, "The 'Revolt against the modern world' and the mystery of the Grail"), which exhibits a not at all reassuring image of the chaos that pervades the contemporary Westย [12]:

ยซ General desecration of existence, at first individualism and rationalism, then collectivism, materialism and mechanism, finally openings to forces belonging no longer to what is above man but to what lies beneath him, to determine the forms, the interests and the sinister power of a general planetary civilization in the accelerated motion that leads to the closing of a great cycle, in far broader terms than the Spenglerian "decline of the West". "

Again, to escape fromimpasse ideological and existentialย it is essential return to the Ancients, to the way of thinking traditional, through which every โ€œhealthyโ€ society that has ever existed has always decoded and shaped the โ€œworld of realityโ€. From this perspective, a reminiscence of the Viล›nu Purana or some Latin classics can also be a lesson with regard to mechanisms Ahrimanics of this distorted "modern world", even in these "last times" in which it seems that "all is now lost"ย [13]:

ยซโ€ฆ I remembered that a sentence of Tacito he had already indicated precisely the process that was to take place on a large scale in recent times: โ€œTo overthrow the State [the true, organic, traditional State] they bring freedom forward; once they have reached this point, they will also attack this one โ€. "

The cyclical-traditional and involutionary vision of the history of the cosmos - esoteric doctrine that was a "battle horse" have evolved since at least the indispensable "treatise on the morphology of the history of civilizations" Revolt against the modern world (1934), corroborated by the Sacred Wisdom of Hindus, Persians, Hellenic, Far Eastern and Pre-Columbians - is experienced by the philosopher in this period as a bitter and unavoidable prophecy, herald of a catastrophic event that must inevitably be realized . Hence the strong pessimism of his analyzes of the 60s and the ever more pressing impression that by now "there is nothing left to try" but to try to remain, stoically, standing among the ruins.

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Der_Anarchist.jpg
Sascha Schneider, "The Anarchist", 1894.

It was really the coherent and repeated profession of an order of ideas to such an extent outdatedย eย anti-modern, in addition to the publication of the already mentioned Guidelines and writing a couple of articles for the magazine Empire, to plunge the philosopher into what can rightly be defined a Kafkaesque tragicomedy. The farce began on May 24, 1951, the day Evola was arrested with the charge of being the "inspirer" (the "moral mandator", one would say today) of an alleged "conspiracy intended neither more nor less than to restore the fascist regimeยป [14]. As proof of the inconsistency of the accusation, almost all the defendants were acquitted, the trial ended in a soap bubble and "only served to ridicule the zealous officials of the political police of the new Republic".ย Amid the general embarrassment, two guards led the convalescent Evola into the courtroom, now disabled due to theViennese explosion of which he had been a victim a few years earlier, who, despite the state of health in which he was lying, chose to defend himself in the first person from the charges that were paid to his person. The gist of his defense (which is still extremely current today, despite almost seventy years have passed) is reported in chapter 12 of I walk, in which you can readย [15]:

ยซI said that it was absurd to attribute" fascist "ideas to me. Not because they were "fascists", but only because they represented, in fascism, the reappearance of principles of the great European tradition of the Right in general, I could have defended and could continue to defend certain conceptions of the doctrine of the state. One was free to process such conceptions. But in that case, Plato de The state, a Metternich, a Bismarck, Dante del From Monarchia and so on. But, evidently, in the current lowlands, for the most part there was nothing but the fascism-anti-fascism antithesis, and not being democratic, socialist or communist was automatically equivalent to being a "fascist" ยป

In these pages of the I walk, Evola announces for the umpteenth time its ideal yearning for an "organic" and "traditional" state, similar to the one that has governed the human consortium for millennia, from pharaonic Egypt to the Fertile Crescent, from the Greeks to the ancient Rome and therefore, although already more feebly, in the Middle Ages, and which ended with the Age of Enlightenment, finally degenerating into the so-called "modern world of the machines". An ideal, as we can well understand, in strong contrast with the Western paradigm, democratic and progressive, materialist and mechanistic, atheist and scientist, and in which the feared and senseless "Demon of the economy", in whose "closed and dark circle ... both Marxism and capitalism move, an identical materialistic conception of life and values โ€‹โ€‹underpinning bothยป [16].

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To conclude this in-depth analysis of the figure of Julius Evola, we must finally underline the fact that, as often happens in the biographies of such peculiar characters, death had an absolute coherence with life. On the verge of death, the philosopher asked those present to support him, in order to expire standing, looking at the Janiculum outside the window of his Roman apartment on the seventh floor. Cremated in the manner of the ancient Indo-European knights and Roman patricians, his ashes were later, at his explicit testamentary request, dispersed to the winds of Monte Rosa, whose slopes Evola climbed in life; wonderful metaphor of an existence always faced counter-current, perennial uphill and in ascetic solitude, and of a spirit really free that, even after the physical departure, I will continue to rise to unexplored heights, where only very few dare to reach, far from the noisy multitudesย [17].

"Misunderstood by friends and enemies,
he fought alone against the modern world. "

(Obituary appeared in Corriere della Sera of 13 June 1974)

evola-becchetti-1974-1
Julius Evola's last photo, 1974.

Note:

[1]ย E. Servadio, Evola, or the magician, In J. Evola, The path of cinnabar. Mediterranee, Rome, 2018, p. 179.

[2] Cinnabar or cinnabrite or cinnabarite or mercury sulphide is a mineral belonging to the class of sulphides, with a reddish appearance, chemically a union of sulfur and mercury. Due to its ability to transform itself into mercury, cinnabar is the basis of all Chinese alchemical thought of antiquity, and also plays a role of primary importance in the techniques of longevity and the search for immortality, typical of Taoism. According to Mircea Eliade [Metal arts and alchemy, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2018, pp. 103 - 104) "cinnabar hides [...] the mystery of regeneration through death [...] It follows that it can ensure the perpetual regeneration of the human body and, ultimately, procure immortality".

[3]ย I walk, P. 48.

[4]ย Ibid, pp. 53-54.

[5]ย The Austrian novelist Gustav Meyrink, best known for The Golem (1915), he was able to write, in one of his essays, on the experience of the "snake bite", in these terms that well reflect on the one hand the "confessions" of Evola, on the other our additional clarifications: "Men of every people and of every epoch bear the marks of the bite of this serpent, and from their hosts - which have become exterminated in the course of time - that army was born, tormented by thirst for the transcendent, which, by setting itself hidden goals, constitutes for the others an irresolvable enigma. โ€œDegeneratedโ€, Max Nordeau defined these beings bitten by the snake, but Jesus Christ called them โ€œthe salt of the Earthโ€. The snake's venom causes a dark impulse in someย  and incomprehensible to self-punishment and asceticism, while in others it manifests itself as a yearning longing for a supersensible force, for knowledge and metaphysical knowledge, or as a religious thirst for the divine "(G. Meyrink, The way of the fakirin At the frontiers of the occult, edited by G. de Turris and A. Scarabelli, Arktos 2018, p. 64). On Meyrink, cf. M. Maculotti,ย Gustav Meyrink at the frontiers of the occult, on AXIS mundi.

[6]ย I walk, P. 55.

[7]ย Ivi, p. 56.

[8]ย Ivi, p. 182.

[9]ย An article-review by Evola onย At the wall of timeย by Jรผnger is collated in the collection of essaysย Reconnaissance. Men and problemsย (1974)

[10]ย I walk, P. 150.

[11]ย To use the terminology of Terence McKenna, another unforgotten "explorer of the astral" (although belonging to a completely different cultural current from that of Evola) of the last century; cf. M. Maculotti,ย Towards โ€œTimeWave Zeroโ€: Psychedelia and Eschatology in Terence McKenna, on AXIS mundi.

[12]ย I walk, P. 265

[13]ย Ivi, p. 357.

[14]ย Ivi, p. 351.

[15]ย Ivi, p. 353.

[16]ย Ibid, p. 358. Evola's peculiar conception of US capitalism and Soviet communism as two sides of the same coin has emerged since revoltย and in many works and is present in many articles written in the 50s / 60s; for the reader who wishes to investigate it thoroughly, it is recommended, by way of example, to read the collection of essaysย American civilization. Written on the United States 1930-1968ย (edited by Alberto Lombardo; Controcorrente Edizioni, Naples 2010).

[17]ย Evola's passion for mountaineering can be considered, as emerges from his own Meditations on the peaks: writings on the mountain 1927-1959ย (published with perfect timing in 1973, just before his physical departure), as a "physical-practical extension" of his philosophical-metaphysical conceptions. It can be said that Evola intended mountaineering as an ascetic and meditative practice: the aim he set himself was, here too, the overcoming of the limits of the human condition through action and contemplation, to the point that they become, in this way,ย contiunctio oppositorum, the two inseparable elements of "an ascent that turns into asceticismยป(F. Demattรจ,โ€œ Julius Evola, Meditations of the peaks โ€, in Secolo d'Italia, 26 August 2003).