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Madison Grant
Madison Grant in the early 1920s
Born	(1865-11-19)November 19, 1865 New York City, New York, United States
Died	May 30, 1937(1937-05-30) (aged 71)
Cause of death	Nephritis
Resting place	Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	Caucasian
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Yale University (B.A.), Columbia Law School
Occupation	Lawyer
Known for	Eugenics, Scientific racism, The Passing of the Great Race
Home town	New York City
Parents	Gabriel Grant, Caroline Manice

Madison Grant (November 19, 1865 – May 30, 1937) was an American lawyer, historian and physical anthropologist, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist. As a eugenicist, Grant was responsible for one of the most famous works of scientific racism, and played an active role in crafting strong immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation laws in the United States.

As a conservationist, Grant was credited with the saving of many different species of animals, founding many different environmental and philanthropic organizations and developing much of the discipline of wildlife management.

Early life[link]

Grant was born in New York City, New York to Gabriel Grant, a well-known physician and American Civil War surgeon, and Caroline Manice. Madison Grant's mother, Caroline Manice, was a descendant of Jesse De Forest, the Walloon Huguenot who in 1623 recruited the first band of colonists to settle in the New Netherland. On his father's side, Madison Grant's first American ancestor was Richard Treat, dean of Pitminster Church in England, who in 1630 was one of the first Puritan settlers of New England. Grant's forebears through Treat's line include Robert Treat a colonial governor of New Jersey, Robert Treat Paine (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), Charles Grant (Madison Grant's grandfather who served as an officer in the War of 1812) and Gabriel Grant (father of Madison), a prominent physician and the health commissioner of Newark. Dr Gabriel Grant was awarded the congressional medal of honor for his service in the Civil War organizing the Second New Jersey volunteers.^[1] Grant was a lifelong resident of New York City

Grant was the oldest brother among four siblings. The children's summers, and many of their weekends, were spent at Oatlands, the beautiful Long Island country estate built by their grandfather DeForest Manice in the 1830s.^[2] As a child he attended private schools and traveled Europe and the Middle East with his father. He attended Yale University, graduating early and with honors in 1887. He received a law degree from Columbia Law School, and practiced law after graduation; however, his interests were primarily those of a naturalist. He never married and he had no children. He first achieved a political reputation when he and his brother, De Forest Grant, took part in the electoral campaign of New York mayor William Lafayette Strong in 1894.

Nordic theory[link]

Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the "racial history" of Europe. Coming out of Grant's concerns with the changing "stock" of American immigration of the early 20th century (characterized by increased numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as opposed to Western and Northern Europe), Passing of the Great Race was a "racial" interpretation of contemporary anthropology and history, stating race as the basic motor of civilization.

Similar ideas were proposed by Gustav Kossinna in Germany. Grant promoted the idea of the "Nordic race"—a loosely defined biological-cultural grouping rooted in Scandinavia—as the key social group responsible for human development; thus the subtitle of the book was The racial basis of European history. As an avid eugenicist, Grant further advocated the separation, quarantine, and eventual collapse of "undesirable" traits and "worthless race types" from the human gene pool and the promotion, spread, and eventual restoration of desirable traits and "worthwhile race types" conducive to Nordic society:

"Maximum Expansion of Alpines" — Map from Passing of the Great Race showing the "essentially peasant" Alpine migrations into Europe.

"Expansion of the Pre-Teutonic Nordics" — Early Nordic influence spreading over the continent.

"Expansion of the Teutonic Nordics and Slavic Alpines" — Further Nordic expansion, as well as the Alpines.

"Present Distribution of the European Races" (1916) — Grant's vision of the status quo, with the Nordics in red, the Alpines in green, and the Mediterraneans in yellow.

In the book, Grant recommends segregating "unfavorable" races in ghettos by installing civil organizations through the public health system to establish quasi-dictatorships in their particular fields. He states the expansion of non-Nordic race types in the Nordic system of freedom would actually mean a slavery to desires, passions, and base behaviors.

In turn, this corruption of society would lead to the subjection of the Nordic community to "inferior" races who would in turn long to be dominated and instructed by "superior" ones utilizing authoritarian powers. The result would be the submergence of the indigenous Nordic races under a corrupt and enfeebled system dominated by inferior races and both in turn would be subjected by a new ruling race class.

Nordic theory, in Grant's formulation, was similar to many 19th century racial philosophies which divided the human species into primarily three distinct races: Caucasoids (based in Europe), Negroids (based in Africa), and Mongoloids (based in Asia). Nordic theory, however, further subdivided Caucasoids into three groups: Nordics (who inhabited Northern Europe and other parts of the continent), Alpines (whose territory included central Europe and parts of Asia), and Mediterraneans (who inhabited Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East).

In Grant's view, Nordics probably evolved in a climate which "must have been such as to impose a rigid elimination of defectives through the agency of hard winters and the necessity of industry and foresight in providing the year's food, clothing, and shelter during the short summer. Such demands on energy, if long continued, would produce a strong, virile, and self-contained race which would inevitably overwhelm in battle nations whose weaker elements had not been purged by the conditions of an equally severe environment." The "Proto-Nordic" human, Grant reasoned, probably evolved in eastern Germany, Poland and Russia, before migrating northward to Scandinavia.

The Nordic, in his theory, was Homo europaeus, the white man par excellence. "It is everywhere characterized by certain unique specializations, namely, wavy brown or blond hair and blue, gray or light brown eyes, fair skin, high, narrow and straight nose, which are associated with great stature, and a long skull, as well as with abundant head and body hair."^[3] Grant categorized the Alpines as being the lowest of the three European races, with the Nordics as the pinnacle of civilization.

Grant while aware of the "Nordic Migration Theory" into the Mediterranean appears to reject this theory as an explanation for the high civilization features of the Greco-Roman world.

Grant also considered North Africa as part of Mediterranean Europe :

Yet, while Grant recognized Mediterraneans to have abilities in art, as quoted above, later in the text he pondered if the Mediterranean achievements in civilization were due to Nordic's original ideals and structure:

According to Grant, Nordics were in a dire state in the modern world, where due to their abandonment of cultural values rooted in religious or superstitious proto-racialism, they were close to committing "race suicide" by being miscegenated with and out-bred by more inferior stock who were taking advantage of the transition.

The book was immensely popular and went through multiple printings in the United States, and was translated into a number of other languages, notably German in 1925. By 1937 the book had sold 16,000 copies in the United States alone. Nordic theory was strongly embraced by the racial hygiene movement in Germany in the early 1920s and 1930s; however, they typically used the term "Aryan" instead of "Nordic", though the principal Nazi ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, preferred "Aryo-Nordic" or "Nordic-Atlantean". Stephen Jay Gould described The Passing of the Great Race as "The most influential tract of American scientific racism." Grant's work was embraced by proponents of the National Socialist movement in Germany; Passing was the first non-German book ordered to be reprinted by the Nazis when they took power, and Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant that, "The book is my Bible."^[5]

Grant's work, while a subject of popular discussion in the United States from the 1910s through the 1930s, was often attacked by scientists. who believed it to be little more than racism by an amateur in the fields of history and anthropology. It is considered one of the most influential and vociferous works of scientific racism and eugenics to come out of the United States. One of his long-time opponents was the anthropologist Franz Boas. Grant disliked Boas and for several years tried to get him fired from his position at Columbia University.^[6][7] Boas and Grant were involved in a bitter struggle for control over the discipline of anthropology in the United States while they both served (along with others) on the National Research Council Committee on Anthropology after the First World War.

Grant represented the "hereditarian" branch of physical anthropology at the time, despite his relatively amateur status, and was staunchly opposed to and by Boas himself (and the latter's students), who advocated cultural anthropology. Boas and his students eventually wrested control of the American Anthropological Association from Grant and his supporters and used as a flagship organization for his brand of anthropology. In response Grant founded the Galton Society with American eugenicist and biologist Charles B. Davenport in 1918 as an alternative to Boas.^[8]

Immigration restriction[link]

Grant advocated restricted immigration to the United States through limiting immigration from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, as well as the complete end of immigration from East Asia. He also advocated efforts to purify the American population through selective breeding. He served as the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League from 1922 to his death. Acting as an expert on world racial data, Grant also provided statistics for the Immigration Act of 1924 to set the quotas on immigrants from certain European countries.^[9] Even after passing the statute, Grant continued to be irked that even a smattering of non-Nordics were allowed to immigrate to the country each year. He also assisted in the passing and prosecution of several anti-miscegenation laws, notably the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 in the state of Virginia, where he sought to codify his particular version of the "one-drop rule" into law.

Though Grant was extremely influential in legislating his view of racial theory, he began to fall out of favor in the United States in the 1930s. The declining interest in his work has been attributed both to the effects of the Great Depression, which resulted in a general backlash against Social Darwinism and related philosophies, as well as the changing dynamics of racial issues in the United States during the interwar period. Rather than subdivide Europe into separate racial groups, the bi-racial (black vs. white) theory of Grant's protege Lothrop Stoddard became more dominant in the aftermath of the Great Migration of African-Americans from Southern States to Northern and Western ones (Guterl 2001). The rise of the Nazis in Germany also contributed to Grant's intellectual falling out of favor, as the similarity of their overtly racist theories to Grant's would become a liability even before they were officially an enemy at war against the United States.

Conservation efforts[link]

Grant was a close friend of several U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, and also was an avid conservationist. He is credited with saving many natural species from extinction, and co-founded the Save-the-Redwoods League with Frederick Russell Burnham, John C. Merriam, and Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1918. He is also credited with helping develop the first deer hunting laws in New York state, legislation which spread to other states as well over time.

He was also the creator of wildlife management, helped to found the Bronx Zoo, build the Bronx River Parkway, save the American bison as an organizer of the American Bison Society, and helped to create Glacier National Park and Denali National Park. In 1906, as Secretary of the New York Zoological Society, he lobbied to put Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy, on display alongside apes at the Bronx Zoo.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he served on the boards of many eugenic and philanthropic societies, including the board of trustees at the American Museum of Natural History, a director of the American Eugenics Society, vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, a founding member of the Galton Society, and one of the eight members of the International Committee of Eugenics. He was awarded the gold medal of the Society of Arts and Sciences in 1929. In 1931, the world's largest tree (in Dyerville, California) was dedicated to Grant, Merriam, and Osborn by the California State Board of Parks in recognition for their environmental efforts. A species of caribou was named after Grant as well (Rangifer tarandus granti, also known as Grant's Caribou). He was a member of the Boone and Crockett Club (a big game hunting organization) since 1893, where he was friends with president Theodore Roosevelt. He was head of the New York Zoological Society from 1925 until his death.

Historian Jonathan Spiro has argued that Grant's interests in conservationism and eugenics were not unrelated: both are hallmarks of the early 20th-century Progressive movement, and both assume the need for various types of stewardship over their charges. In Grant's mind, natural resources needed to be conserved for the Nordic Race, to the exclusion of other races. Grant viewed the Nordic race lovingly as he did any of his endangered species, and considered the modern industrial society as infringing just as much on its existence as it did on the redwoods. Like many eugenicists, Grant saw modern civilization as a violation of "survival of the fittest", whether it manifested itself in the over-logging of the forests, or the survival of the poor via welfare or charity.^{[verification needed]}

Legacy[link]

Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America, especially in New York. Grant's conservationism and fascination with zoological natural history made him very influential among the New York elite who agreed with his cause, most notably Theodore Roosevelt. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald featured a reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. Tom Buchanan, the husband of Daisy Buchanan, the novel's principal woman character, was reading a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard", a combination of Passing of the Great Race (Grant) and his colleague Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (Stoddard; Grant wrote the introduction to Stoddard's book). "Everybody ought to read it", the character explained, "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." Throughout the book Tom espouses Goddard's racial theories confusedly; the narrator calls Tom's focus on Goddard's ideas "pathetic."

Grant left no offspring when he died in 1937 of nephritis. Several hundred people attended Grant's funeral,^[5] and he was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York. He left a bequest of $25,000 to the New York Zoological Society to create "The Grant Endowment Fund for the Protection of Wild Life", left $5,000 to the American Museum of Natural History, and left another $5,000 to the Boone and Crockett Club.

Passing of the Great Race was said^[who?] to be Adolf Hitler's favorite book, and Hitler even wrote a 'fan letter' to Grant applauding it, stating that the book was "his Bible". At the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Grant's Passing of the Great Race was introduced into evidence by the defense of Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician and head of the Nazi euthanasia program, in order to justify the population policies of the Third Reich or at least indicate that they were not ideologically unique to Nazi Germany.

Grant's works of "scientific racism" have been cited to demonstrate that many of the genocidal and eugenic ideas associated with the Third Reich did not arise specifically in Germany, and in fact that many of them had origins in other countries including the United States.^[10] As such, because of Grant's well-connectedness and influential friends, he is often used to illustrate the strain of racist-based eugenic thinking in the United States which had some influence untill the Second World War. Because of the use made of his eugenics work by the policy-makers of Nazi Germany, his work as a conservationist has been somewhat ignored and obscured as many organizations, (such as the Sierra Club) with which he was once associated do not generally want to overstress their connections with him.^[5]. This is also true of other organizations which promoted eugenics before the war, such as Planned Parenthood.

Grant was mentioned prominently in Anders Behring Breivik's 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, in whiclh Breivik argued for the preservation of the Nordic race whilst criticizing miscegenation.

Works[link]

• Grant, Madison. "The vanishing moose, and their extermination in the Adirondacks," Century Magazine 47(1894): 345-356.
• ________. The caribou. New York, Office of the New York Zoological Society, 1902.
• ________. "Moose." Report of the Forest, Fish, Game Commission, State of New York (1903): 225-238.
• ________. The Rocky Mountain goat. New York, Office of the New York Zoological Society, 1905.
• ________. "Condition of wild life in Alaska," Smithsonian Institution Annual Report, 1909 (Washington, 1910): 521-529.
• ________. The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916.
• ________. The passing of the great race, or, The racial basis of European history. New edn., rev. and amplified, with a new preface by Henry Fairfield Osborn. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918.
• ________. Saving the redwoods; an account of the movement during 1919 to preserve the redwoods of California. New York, Zoological Society, 1919.
• ________. The passing of the great race, or, The racial basis of European history. rev. ed. with a documentary supplement, with prefaces by Henry Fairfield Osborn. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921.
• ________. Der Untergang der grossen Rasse, die Rassen als Grundlage der Geschichte Europas. German translation of The passing of the Great Race by Rudolf Polland. München, J. F. Lehmann, 1925.
• ________, ed., with Charles Stewart Davidson. The founders of the republic on immigration, naturalization and aliens, collected for and edited by Madison Grant and Charles Stewart Davidson. New York, C. Scribner’s Sons, 1928.
• ________, ed., with Charles Stewart Davidson/ The alien in our midst; or, "Selling our birthright for a mess of pottage"; the written views of a number of Americans (present and former) on immigration and its results. New York, The Galton Publishing co., 1930.
• ________. The conquest of a continent; or, The expansion of races in America. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933.

See also[link]

• Eugenics in the United States

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Madison Grant

• Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Univ. of Vermont Press. ISBN 978-1-58465-715-6. Lay summary (29 September 2010). 
• "Madison Grant, 71, Zoologist, Is Dead," New York Times (May 31, 1937), p. 15.
• Barkan, Elazar. The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
• Cooke, Kathy J. "Grant, Madison." American National Biography. Online, Feb. 2000.
• Guterl, Matthew Press. The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Spiro, Jonathan P. "Patrician racist: The evolution of Madison Grant." Ph.D. diss., Dept. of History, University of California, Berkeley (2000).
• ________. "Nordic vs. anti-Nordic: the Galton Society and the American Anthropological Association," Patterns of Prejudice 36:1 (2002): 35-48.
• ________. "The Alien in Our Midst."
• Regal, Brian. Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (Ashgate, 2002).
• Regal, Brian. "Maxwell Perkins and Madison Grant: Eugenics Publishing at Scribners," Princeton University Library Chronicle LXV:2 (Winter 2004):317-341.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Madison Grant

• Passing of the Great Race available online
• Madison Grant, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1921). The Passing of the Great Race. C. Scribner's sons. http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC09053224&id=Q9cKAAAAIAAJ&printsec=titlepage. , available via Google Books
• Excerpts from Passing of the Great Race used at the Nuremberg Trials

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Julius Evola
Passport photograph, circa 1940
Born	Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (1898-05-19)19 May 1898 Rome, Italy
Died	11 June 1974(1974-06-11) (aged 76) Rome, Italy
Occupation	philosopher, writer
Nationality	Italian
Genres	Traditional School
Notable work(s)	Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins and Ride the Tiger.
Influences Nietzsche, Plato, Spengler, Guénon, de Maistre, Donoso Cortes, Jünger, Michelstaedter, Benn, Vico, Tzara, Weininger, Stirner, Bachofen, Laozi, Eckhart, Novalis, Merezhkovsky, Papini
Influenced Hesse, Serrano, Moynihan, Dugin, Benoist, Almirante, Scaligero, Eliade, Saviano, Godwin, Yourcenar, Vikernes

Barone Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (May 19, 1898 – June 11, 1974) also known as Julius Evola, was an Italian philosopher and esotericist. Evola regarded his stances and spiritual values as aristocratic, masculine, traditionalist, heroic and defiantly reactionary.

Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites, spiritual oblivion and organised deviancy. To counter this and call in a primordial rebirth, Evola presented his world of Tradition. The core trilogy of Evola's works are generally regarded as Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins and Ride the Tiger. According to one scholar, "Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century."^[1] Much of Evola's theories and writings are centred on spiritualism and mysticism; the inner life. He authored books covering themes such as Hermeticism, the metaphysics of war and of sex, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism, mountaineering, the Holy Grail, the essence and history of civilisations, decadence and various philosophic and religious Traditions dealing with both the Classics and the Orient.

Though never a member of the National Fascist Party (and rejected for being a member^[2]), or the Italian Social Republic and constantly criticized fascism and declared he was an anti-fascist^[3] Evola regarded his position as that of a sympathetic right-wing intellectual, saw potential in the movement and wished to reform its errors, to a position in line with his own views. One of his successes was in regards to the racial laws; his advocation of a spiritual consideration of race won out in the debate in Italy, rather than a solely materialist reductionism concept popular in Germany. Since World War II many Radical Traditionalist, New Right, Conservative Revolutionary, Fascist and Third Positionist groups have taken inspiration from him, as well as several apolitical occultists, such as Thomas Karlsson and Massimo Scaligero.

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome to a noble Sicilian family. His father, Vincenzo Evola, was born in Cinisi. He fought in World War I as an artillery officer on the Asiago plateau. After the war, attracted to the avant-garde, Evola briefly associated with Filippo Marinetti's Futurist movement, but became a prominent representative of Dadaism in Italy through his painting, poetry, and collaboration on the shortly published journal, Revue Bleu. In 1922, after concluding that avant-garde art was becoming commercialized and stiffened into academic convention, he reduced his focus on artistic expression such as painting and poetry.^[4]

Entry into esotericism[link]

Around 1920, his interests led him into spiritual, transcendental^{[disambiguation needed ]} and "supra-rational" studies. He began reading various esoteric texts and gradually delved deeper into the occult, alchemy, magic, and Oriental studies, particularly Tibetan Lamaism and Vajrayanist tantric yoga. He had also experimented with hallucinogenic drugs to experience altered states of consciousness during this period, but later came to criticize such drugs in Ride the Tiger, as he did not consider stimulation as a means to transcendence.

In 1927, along with other Italian esotericists, he founded the Gruppo di Ur. The group's aim was to provide a "soul" to the burgeoning Fascist movement of the time through the revival of an ancient Roman Paganism.^[5]

Involvement with Fascism[link]

Evola never joined Mussolini's National Fascist Party, he considered himself and anti-fascist, and cataloged fascist squadristi as peasants.^[6] Mussolini considered Evola of of the "hysterical fanatics" who could serve the fascist interests.^[7] According to Daniel McCarthy:

Evola was one of a number of right-wing ideologues who opposed Benito Mussolini's Lateran Accords with the Roman Catholic Church and rejected the Fascist party's nationalism and its focus on mass movement mob politics; he hoped to influence the regime toward his own variation on fascist racial theories and his "Tradionalist" philosophy. Early in 1930, Evola launched Torre, a bi-weekly review, to voice his conservative-revolutionary ideas and denounce the demagogic tendencies of official fascism; government censors suppressed the journal and engaged in character assassination against its staff (for a time, Evola retained a bodyguard of like-minded radical fascists) until it died out in June of that year. From 1934 to 1943, he edited the cultural page of Roberto Farinacci's journal Regime Fascista.

Mussolini read Evola's Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza in August 1941, and meet with Evola and offer him his praise. Evola later recounted that Mussolini had found in his work a uniquely Roman form of fascist racism distinct from that found in Nazi Germany. With Mussolini's backing, Evola launched the minor-journal Sangue e Spirito (Blood and Spirit). While not always in agreement with German racial theorists, Evola traveled to Germany in February 1942 and obtained support for German collaboration on Sangue e Spirito from leading Nazi race theorists.^[9]

Evola supported Fascism for his own ends, but was rebuked by the regime because his ends were not always theirs. When World War II broke out, he volunteered for military service in order to fight the Communists on the Russian front; he was rejected because he had too many detractors in the bureaucracy (Hansen 2002). Italian Fascism went into decline when, during the midst of the War in 1943, Mussolini was deposed and imprisoned. Evola, although not a member of the Fascist Party, and despite his apparent problems with the Fascist regime, was one of the first people to greet Mussolini when the latter was broken out of prison by Otto Skorzeny in 1943.

After the Italian surrender to the Allied forces on September 8, 1943, Evola moved to Germany, where he spent the remainder of World War II, also working as a researcher on Freemasonry for the SS Ahnenerbe in Vienna.

It was Evola's custom to walk around the city during bombing raids in order to better 'ponder his destiny'. During one such Soviet raid, in March or April 1945, a shell fragment damaged his spinal cord and he became paralyzed from the waist down, remaining so for the remainder his life (Stucco 1992, xiii).

Evola and the SS[link]

"But in spite of all these negative aspects, there was something in National Socialism that attracted Evola: the concept of a state ruled by an Order, which he felt was embodied by the SS. 'We are inclined to the opinion that we can see the nucleus of an Order in the higher sense of tradition in the 'Black Corps,' he wrote in Vita Italiana (August 15, 1938). Again in Vita Italiana (August 1941, 'Per una profonda alleanza italo-germanica' [For a Deep Italian-Germanic Alliance]) he writes: 'Beyond the confines of the party and of any political-administrative structure, an elite in the form of a new 'Order'—that is, a kind of ascetic-military organization that is held together by the principles of 'loyalty' and 'honor,' must form the basis of the new state.' As mentioned, Evola held the SS, which Himmler strove to design according to the model of the Teutonic Order, to be this elite.

The castles of the SS Order, with their 'initiations,' the emphasis on transcending the purely human element, the prerequisite of physical valor, as well as the ethical requirements (loyalty, discipline, defiance of death, willingness to sacrifice, unselfishness), strengthened Evola in his conviction. He also was of the opinion that the ethics of the SS were borrowed from the Jesuits" (Dr. H. T. Hansen in "Julius Evola's Political Endeavors" introduction to "Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist").

Post-World War II[link]

After World War II, Evola continued his work in esotericism. He wrote a number of books and articles on sexual magic and various other esoteric studies, including The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way (1949), Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex (1958), Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest (1974), The Path of Enlightenment According to the Mithraic Mysteries (1977). He also wrote his two explicitly political books Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1953), Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (1961), and his autobiography The Path of Cinnabar (1963).

In the post-war years, Evola's writings were held in high esteem by members of the Neo-fascist movement in Italy, and because of this, he was put on trial from June through November 1951 on the charge of attempting to revive Fascism in Italy. He was acquitted because he could prove that he was never a member of the Fascist party, and that all accusations were made without evidence to prove that his writings glorified Fascism (Evola - "Autodifesa/Self-Defence" in appendix to Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist 1953).

Ride the Tiger, Evola's last major work, which saw him examining dissolution and subversion in a world in which God was dead, saw him reject the possibility of any political/collective revival of Tradition due to his belief that the modern world had fallen too far into the Kali Yuga for any such thing to be possible. Instead of this and rather than advocating a return to religion as Rene Guenon had, he crafted what he considered an apolitical manual for surviving and ultimately transcending the Kali Yuga. This idea was summed up in the title of the book, the Tantric metaphor of "Riding the Tiger" which in general practice, consisted of turning things that were considered inhibitory to spiritual progress by mainstream Brahmanical society (for example, meat, alcohol and in very rare circumstances, sex, were all employed by Tantric practitioners) into a means of spiritual transcendence. The process that Evola described involved potentially making use of everything from modern music, hallucinogenic drugs, relationships with the opposite sex and even substituting the atmosphere of an urban existence for the Theophany that Traditionalists had identified in virgin nature.^[10]

Death[link]

Evola died unmarried, without children, on June 11, 1974 in Rome. His ashes were deposited in a hole cut in a glacier on Mt. Rosa.

Philosophy[link]

Friedrich Nietzsche heavily affected Evola's thought. However, Evola criticized Nietzsche for lacking the "transcendent element" in his philosophy, thus ultimately leading to the latter's mental collapse. A reference point is needed according to Evola, and this point can not be reached with senses or logic but with transcendental experiences achieved through symbolism of the heroic element in Man.^{[citation needed]}

Tradition[link]

Evola's systematic and detailed references to ancient and modern texts make it difficult to speak about influences, though affinities could exist between Evola and Plato, Oswald Spengler, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur de Gobineau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Meister Eckhart, Homer, Jacob Boehme, René Guénon and certain Catholic thinkers like Juan Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre. The Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico provided Evola with the concepts of primordial heroic law, "natural heroic rights" and the meaning of the Indo-European Latin term vir as indicative of "wisdom, priesthood and kingship." Crucial to Evola's formulation of the idea of "solar masculinity" versus "chthonic masculinity" and matriarchal regression was the maverick 19th century Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen. Other prominent, philosophically foundational influences for Evola include the ancient Aryo-Hindu scripture that teaches the concept of "detached violence", the Bhagavad Gita, and the Aryan kshatriya sage Siddartha Gotama, the historical Buddha (Evola, "Il Cammino del Cinabro" 1963).

Like Guénon, he believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga of the Hindu tradition, the Dark Age of unleashed, materialistic appetites. The Kali Yuga is the last of four ages, which form a cycle from the Satya Yuga or Golden Age through the Kali Yuga or the Hesiodic Iron Age. Evola argued that both Italian fascism and National Socialism held hope for a reconstitution of the primordial "celestial race."^[11]

For Evola, the word Tradition had a meaning very similar to that of Truth. The doctrine of the four ages, a broad characterization of the attributes of Tradition and their manifestations in traditional societies makes up the first half of Evola's major work Revolt Against the Modern World. In Revolt Against the Modern World, he expounds according to the ancient texts that there is not one Tradition, but two: An older and degenerate tradition that is feminine, matriarchal, unheroic, associated with the telluric negroid racial remnants of Lemuria (continent); and a higher one that is masculine, heroic, "Uranian" and purely Aryo-Hyperborean in its origin. The latter one later gave rise to an ambiguous Western-Atlantic tradition, which combined aspects of both through the historical Hyperborean migrations and their degenerating assimilation of exotic spiritual influences from the South.

According to Evola, in the Golden Age there existed in the dominating elites, the "Divine Kings", a convergence of the two powers, namely the spiritual principle and the royal principle. From the Aryo-Hindu tradition, he sees the human type of the Rajarshi as an embodiment of the Golden Age ideal and quotes the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1.4.11): "This is why nothing is greater than the warrior nobility; the priests themselves venerate the warrior when the consecration of the king occurs." Evola argues that in the Hindu tradition there are plenty of instances of kings who already possess or eventually achieve a spiritual knowledge greater than that possessed by the later-times degenerated brahmana. This is the case, for instance, of King Jaivala, whose knowledge was not imparted by any priest, but rather reserved to the warrior caste; also, in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (4.3.1) King Janaka teaches the brahmana Yajnavalkya the doctrine of the transcendent Self. Evola explains that, according to tradition, the primordial gnosis was handed down, starting from Ikshvaku, in regal succession (cf. Bhagavadgita, 4. 1-2); the same Sun Dynasty (surya-vamsa) was connected with blue-eyed, fair-skinned^[12] Gautama Buddha's aristocratic Aryan family (Sutta Nipata, 3). In the laws of the second or Silver Age, the Laws of Manu, the text states "rulers do not prosper without priests and priests do not thrive without rulers" and that "the priest is said to be the root of the law, and the ruler is the peak" (11.321-2;11.83-4).

In reference to Christianity, Evola distinguished between 1) the mystical character of primitive Christianity and its later social history on the one hand, and 2) the primordial-Hyperborean elements and the decadent Judaic elements on the other. In Revolt Against the Modern World, he asserts "in the symbolism of Christ there are traces of a mysteric pattern" (p. 281) and "Jesus' saying in Matthew (11:12) concerning the violence suffered by the kingdom of Heaven and the revival of the Davidic saying: 'You are gods' (John 10:34), belong to elements that exercised virtually no influence on the main pathos of early Christianity" (Revolt, p. 284). Evola states "the Christian legend of the three magi is an attempt to claim for Christianity a traditional character in the superior sense I give to the term" (The Mystery of the Grail, p. 45). In the same work, Evola argues "the Jewish notion of a Messiah and the Christian notion of God's Kingdom, which many people believe to have greatly influenced the medieval imperial myth, are nothing but an echo of the ancient and pre-Christian Aryo-Iranian concept" of the Saoshyant as "lord of a future, triumphal kingdom of the God of Light" and "slayer of the Ahrimanic dark forces" (ibid., p. 39)

Evola recalls the mysterious figure of the priest-king Melchizedek as a primary point of juncture with the primordial sacral-royal Tradition of the origins. Abraham receives an almost feudal spiritual investiture from Melchizedek in the biblical episode of Genesis 14, giving the mysterious priest-king tithes, thus symbolizing the Abrahamic tradition's implicit dependency (cf. St. Paul: "It is beyond dispute that the inferior is blessed by the superior", Heb. 7:1-3). Evola often notes the role of the "regal religion according to Melchizedek" in the Ghibelline ideology. Evola finds the testimony of Eginhard significant, who states that after Charlemagne was consecrated and hailed with the formula, "Long life and victory to Charles the Great, crowned by God, great and peaceful emperor of the Romans!" the pope "prostrated himself (adoravit) before Charles, according to the ritual established at the time of the ancient emperors." Evola emphasizes how the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund (1368–1437), founder of the militant-Catholic chivalric Order of the Dragon, continuing a long tradition of Christian-Roman and Byzantine imperial dominance in religious matters, summoned the Council of Constance (A.D. 1413) on the eve of the Reformation^{[clarification needed]} in order to purify the clergy from schisms and anarchy.

The classical Traditional polity is structured according to a strict hierarchy of sociopolitical functions, where the lower functions are concerned with mere matter and organic vitality and the ascending functions progressively ruled by spirit. This order, in which powers of spirit correlate to societal status, Evola finds crystallized in the Indian caste system, the Republic of Plato, ancient Iranian society and the medieval hierarchical class divisions between peasants, burghers, nobility and the clergy and military religious orders (see estates of the realm). The involution through the cycle of the ages was mirrored in the law of the regression of the castes, from the primal "heaven-born" kings to the deconsecrated slavish usurpers and raceless pariahs of the present. Evola saw the Ghibelline dynasty of Hohenstauffen emperors (1152–1271) as the Germanic champion of the primordial "sacred regality" in a renewed Holy Roman Empire. Once the solar, golden, sacred regality of the mythical first age fell, power devolved upon a lunar, silver, feminized priestly caste before an unconsecrated warrior nobility struggled against it, announcing the Bronze Age. Then power shifts to the mercantile caste, represented by the Italian comune, Freemasonry, the Jewish financial oligarchy of the Renaissance, and New World American Judeo-Protestant plutocracy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, organized labor and Marxist-Trotskyite subverters sought to transfer power to the last caste of slaves or sudras, or the consumer-pariah, reducing all values to matter, machines, dysgenic egalitarianism and the reign of abstract quantity.

Paths to Enlightenment[link]

The path to enlightenment is the chief subject of a number of Evola's works. First and foremost is the Buddhist ascesis as he rediscovered it following over two thousand years of obstruction of the Buddha's teachings (The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts). He tries to show the ways that allow a man to survive spiritually intact in the modern age of obscuration and to achieve supra-human liberation or transcendence. Evola based his interpretation of Buddhism on the original Pali Canon, rejected western interpretations of Buddhism as a humanitarian religion of compassion for all beings, held reincarnation as a false tenet not found in the original Pali Canon and saw the Mahayana tradition as heterodox along with certain aspects of Theravada.^[13]

Even in his book Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest Evola discussed mountaineering as a possible approach or support on the way of initiatic ascesis in which heroic action is combined with specialized knowledge and training culminating in an initiation — the climbing of the mountain. In this way, and not as a sport or a recreation, mountaineering can be a "spiritual quest," as the subtitle of the book suggests.

Ascesis and Initiation[link]

According to Julius Evola, tradition in its purest form encompassed asceticism, which he described in The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts as a discipline. He describes two basic and complementary types of asceticism — that of action and that of contemplation. The asceticism of action is personified by the warrior while that of contemplation by the pure ascetic; he described Buddhism as the highest form of the asceticism of contemplation, a form very suitable for the warrior in his preparation for inner and outer warfare.

Metaphysics of War[link]

In The Metaphysics of War - Battle, Victory & Death in the World of Tradition Evola describes how war can be a means through which the warrior can be called to a higher form of spiritual existence. He mentions many armies that have waged war for a spiritual purpose, for example the Christian knights during the crusades, the Islamists' Jihad, the pagan Asatru, etc., where those who died in battle were seen as heroes and went to a "higher place" after they died.

Evola rejected pacifism as it, according to him, was materialistic and made people comfortable and weak in their existence, while war breaks the routine of "comfortable life" and offers a transfiguring knowledge of life: "life according to death". Evola writes that war always has an anti-materialist value, a spiritual value. In his works Evola calls for the "reawakening of heroic ideals" and spiritualism through war.

Metaphysics of Sex[link]

In The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way and also Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, Evola described the practice of sexual magic as an asceticism of action that allows one to achieve transcendent states through physical action, primarily sex.

To explain the metaphysics of sex, Evola cites the original meaning of the word "orgy" as "the state of inspired exaltation that began the initiatory process in the ancient Greek mysteries. But when this exaltation of eros, itself akin to other experiences of a supersensual nature, becomes individualized as a longing that is only carnal, then it deteriorates and ends finally in the form constituted by mere "pleasure, or venereal lust" (The Metaphysics of Sex, p. 48).

In his sexual philosophy, Evola followed the esoteric Hindu and Buddhist schools in the teaching of retention of semen as a means of ontological energization and ultimate self-mastery. "Virya, or spiritual manhood, if lost or wasted results in death and if withheld and conserved leads to life" (ibid., p. 219). Evola considered Traditional chastity as signifying "control, limit, anti-titanic purity, overcoming of pride, and immaterial unshakability, rather than a moralistic and sexuophobic concept" (The Mystery of the Grail, p. 80).

Evola considered sex as being "the greatest magical force in nature", and he fiercely opposed homosexuality, viewing it as a dysfunctional undermining of the magnetic polarity and complementary nature of the two sexes, and thus of the possibility of erotic transcendence. "In a civilization where equality is the standard, where differences are not linked, where promiscuity is in favor, where the ancient idea of 'being true to oneself' means nothing anymore—in such a splintered and materialistic society, it is clear that this phenomenon of regression and homosexuality should be particularly welcome, and therefore it is no way a surprise to see the alarming increase in homosexuality and the 'third sex' in the latest 'democratic' period, or an increase in sex changes to an extent unparalleled in other eras" (The Metaphysics of Sex, p. 64).

Evola refers to Plotinus, who deemed homosexual loves to be shameful and abnormal, like diseases of degenerate persons "which do not arise from the essence of being and are not the outcome of the development thereof" (Enneads, III). The ancient Aryo-Zoroastrian view on homosexuality, as exemplified in the Vendidad, elicits Evola's full approval: sodomites were classed among the ranks of those criminals to be destroyed on the spot; "Four men can be put to death by any one without an order from the Dastur (high priest): the Nasu-burner (cannibal), the highwayman, the Sodomite, and the criminal taken in the deed" (Vendidad, 8:73-74^[14]). With equal vehemence, Evola scorned modern pornography for being a "scanty source" of erotic experience, denouncing it as "dreadfully squalid not only in the facts and scenes described, but in its essence" (The Metaphysics of Sex, p. 4).

Politics[link]

There are contradictory views among scholars as to Evola's political categorization and his possible relationship with fascism and neofascism. He has been described as a "fascist intellectual,"^[15] a "radical traditionalist,"^[16] "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular,”^[17] and as having been "the leading philosopher of Europe's neofascist movement."^[17] Gregor writes that, "Evola opposed literally every feature of Fascism."^[18] Heinrich Himmler's SS kept a dossier on him, and in dossier document AR-126 described him as a "reactionary Roman," with a secret goal of "an insurrection of the old aristocracy against the modern world," and recommended that the SS "stop his effectiveness in Germany" and provide no support to him.^[19] When he met with "esoteric Hitlerist" Miguel Serrano, Evola denied that he was a fascist or Hitlerist, but rather saw Metternich as a conservative ideal. Serrano himself was critical of Evola and saw him as an "old-style traditionalist."^[20] Evola's first published political work was an anti-fascist piece in 1925, and he wrote a second in 1928.^[21] Evola called Italy's fascist movement a "laughable revolution," based on empty sentiment and materialistic concerns. He opposed the futurism that Italian fascism was aligned with, along with the "plebeian" nature of the movement.^[22] Although he never formally aligned himself with such school, one can see strong similarities between Evola's thought and the Conservative Revolutionary movement in Germany, such as a traditionalist worldview rejecting a purely biological concept of race and the 'self'

Evola held that politics, like everything else in life, should look upward and beyond the self. Evola's main argument against modern "demagogic" politics is its inverted materialistic focus and mentality, stemming from an inverted order of castes. According to Evola, in modernity, due to what he calls the regression of the castes, the once-preeminent warrior caste (crystallized in the medieval military religious orders and ethical chivalry and its warrior code) has been downgraded into the figures of the mere democratic soldier and mercenary, who are servants of the artificial, soulless needs of the now-dominant mercantile and industrial interests. As Evola states, "Opposite to the 'soldier' was the type of the warrior and the member of the feudal aristocracy; the caste to which this type belonged was the central nucleus in a corresponding social organization. This caste was not at the service of the bourgeois class but rather ruled over it, since the class that was protected depended on those who had the right to bear arms"^[23]

On the meaning of his anti-middle-class stance, Evola stated:

We are "anti-bourgeois" not in the descending sense of subversive collectivists but in the sense of opposing the dominance of the lower manifestations of the modern bourgeois spirit (effeminate materialism, commercialism, gangsterism, etc.). The bourgeois tendency has its inevitable role in society, but must not be absolutized; rather, the bourgeoisie must be purified, contained, its values given their space but subordinated to superior values. We are anti-bourgeois because the bourgeois type, while ranking above the proletarian, yet stands inferior to the soldierly-heroic and spiritual-priestly orders. The bourgeois type, compared to the sacral-warrior, only represents a lesser degree of progressive manhood (unedited Italian edition of Men Among the Ruins).

Evola attempted to influence Italy's fascist movement in the conservative-revolutionary direction he believed it should go — the direction of radical Traditionalism; i.e. away from the exoteric modern Christian Church, the bourgeoisie, and the masses.^{[citation needed]} His efforts to influence the regime were a failure, and he believed that by not following his advice, Mussolini's party failed to fulfill its function.^{[citation needed]} He would maintain the view that a revolutionary movement, similar to Fascism but in harmony with "Tradition", was necessary for the return to a higher form of civilization.^{[citation needed]}

In the decade immediately following the war, Evola wrote two books which fall loosely into the categories "asceticism of action" and "asceticism of contemplation" in their prescriptions for political action.^{[citation needed]}

In Men Among the Ruins, Evola described a Traditionalist attitude — possibly leading to a reactionary revolution — like what he had hoped Fascism could have been with the right leaders. This attitude is a sort of asceticism of action calling for political action to reform current society in a conservative-revolutionary / radical Traditional direction. But he also felt that the acceleration of modernity following World War II's outcome and thus, the elimination of any truly opposing forces, made any such revolution rather impossible, unless the 'unforeseeable' imposes a radical change of circumstances.

In Ride the Tiger, he prescribed a so-to-speak apolitical asceticism of contemplation in which a man is advised to act in the modern world, while remaining intellectually and spiritually detached from and above it. Evola argued that in order to survive in the modern world an enlightened or "differentiated man" should "ride the tiger". As a man, by holding onto the tiger's back, may survive the confrontation once the animal ends exhausted, so too might a man, by letting the world take him on its inexorable path, be able to turn the destructive forces around him into a kind of inner liberation.

Race[link]

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A number of Evola's articles and books deal explicitly with the subject of race.

A.J. Gregor comments: "In the [German translation of Imperialismo pagano], Evola considered principled anti-Semitism one of the essentials of a salvific 'racial rebirth' in the modern world. Not only did Evola make a point of identifying Karl Marx, one of the architects of the modern world of materialism, inferiority, pretended equality, and cultural decay, as a Jew--but he spoke of a Jewish capitalistic yoke that obstructed every effort at racial regeneration" (Mussolini's Intellectuals, pps. 200-201).

In Revolt Against the Modern World, he said that he considered himself to be a critic of the "racist worldview" by which he meant the demagogically-minded, simplistic, antisemitic theories of mainstream Nazis and others of his contemporaries. However, he wrote an introduction to an Italian language version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious antisemitic document, long proven to be a Tsarist fabrication,^[24] that alleges a Jewish conspiracy to run the world through control of the media and finance, and replace the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation.

Evola was indifferent as to whether the document was authentic or not. He classified it as a 'myth'.^[25] In 1937, a year after the publication of Giovanni Preziosi's Italian edition in 1936, when it was claimed to be a fiction, Evola wrote as follows:

In short, he was unconcerned that could be a forgery, because, in his hermetic mode of understanding, that did not alter what he believed was the essential truth enciphered in what the public and scholarly world declared to be a fake.

In his introduction to the 1938 Italian edition of the Protocols, Evola wrote that the tract had "the value of a spiritual tonic," that Jews "destroy every surviving trace of true order and superior civilization," and that, "above all, in these decisive hours of western history, [the Protocols tract] cannot be ignored or dismissed without seriously undermining the front of those fighting in the name of the spirit, of tradition, of true civilization."

For Evola this text represented a manipulation by occult powers trying to hide behind the Jewish and Freemasonic historical drive toward a merchant society soon to be replaced by the chaos of "mass society" which could eventually turn against both.^[27]

Evola accused Jews, as well as what he termed the "semitic spirit,"^[28] of having a corrosive effect on the "Nordic" race (a race that was, in Evola's mythology, analogous to the Nazi's "Aryans"). Evola argued that not only Jews, but even non-Jews "Judaicized in their souls" must be combated by a "coherent, complete, impartial" anti-Semitism given the means to "identify and combat the Jewish mentality."^[29] Evola supported the Nazi anti-Semitic view that there was a hidden form of Jewish power and influence in the modern world; he thought this Jewish power was a symptom of the "modern" world's lack of true aristocratic leadership.^[27] Evola further held that Jewish people denigrated lofty "Aryan" ideals (of faith, loyalty, courage, devotion, and constancy) through a "corrosive irony" that ascribed every human activity to economic or sexual motives (à la Marx and Freud) (Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, p. 309). In a 1938 article Evola accused Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Cesare Lombroso of being "proponents of Jewish materialistic culture in the nineteenth century;^[30] two years later, in an essay entitled "Jews and Mathematics," Evola characterized Judaism as the antithesis of "Aryan civilation," and broadly attacked a range of what he considered examples of Jewish influences, from Pythagoreanism to mathematics.^[30] The article was illustrated with pictures of notable Jews interspersed with classic anti-Semitic representations.^[30]

In The Metaphysics of Sex (Inner Traditions, 1st US edition 1983, pps. 9-10), Evola discoursed on his philosophy of de-evolutionary spiritual racism: "Our starting point will be not the modern theory of evolution but the traditional doctrine of involution. We do not believe the man is derived from the ape by evolution. We believe that the ape is derived from man by involution. We agree with Joseph De Maistre that savage peoples are not primitive peoples, in the sense of original peoples, but rather the degenerating remains of more ancient races that have disappeared. We concur with the various researchers (Kohlbrugge, Marconi, Dacque, Westenhofer, and Adloff) who have rebelled against the evolutionary dogma, asserting that animal species evince the degeneration of primordial man's potential. These unfulfilled or deviant potentials manifest as by-products of the true evolutionary process that man has led since the beginning."

Evola believed that a race of "Nordic" people, anciently emanating from Golden Age Arctic Hyperborea, originally semi-immaterial and "soft-boned", had played a crucial founding role in Atlantis and the high cultures both of the East and West. In Evola's eyes, half-remembered, cryptic memories of a "more-than-human race" once existing in a "northern paradise" constitute the patrimony of the traditions of many diverse peoples. In this occult belief, Evola was additionally influenced by Arctic Home in the Vedas by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, which posited the polar North as the original home of the white Ur-Aryan tribes before their later separation into Western (Hellenic, Roman, Celtic, Germanic) and Eastern (Iranian, Indo-Aryan) divisions.

According to Joscelyn Godwin's research: "the basic outlines of Evola's prehistory resemble those of Theosophy, with Lemurian, Atlantean, and Aryan root-races succeeding each other, and a pole-shift marking the transition from one epoch to another" (Arktos, p. 60). Evola's dualism between the Northern Light and the Southern Light, and also the capture of the Atlanteans by the latter, is also found in the writings of Theosophy's co-founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky:

Dr. Victor A. Shnirelman, a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, has noted that cosmological racial ideas also appear in the Neo-Theosophical writings of H. P. Blavatsky's one-time disciple Alice Bailey. Shnirelman wrote that in Bailey's teachings, "Jews were depicted as the 'human product of the former Solar system,' linked with 'World Evil'"; he identified "similar ideas" in the works of Bailey and Evola.^[33]

According to Evola, the hierarchy of races is really a hierarchy of embodied spiritualities; the spirit, rather than ethnic substance, determines culture; but at the same time race is the biological "memory" of a certain spiritual orientation. In order to describe what he called the lower, telluric, Negroid races, he frequently made use of the term "Southern" whereas to him higher races were "Northern." "North" and "South" are indicated as having simultaneously metaphysical, geographical and anthropological meanings:

Evola quotes the Confucian Chung Yung (10.4) to reinforce his point:

According to Evola, the more recent Northern, White and Indo-European peoples (despite racial mixing) implicitly preserved more of the primordial Arctic Hyperborean blood-memory and are objectively spiritually superior to the archaic, matter-obsessed degenerate remnants of the races of the South. Evola (Revolt, p. 245) sees the sign of the Hyperborean Tradition and its antagonism with the forces of Antitradition in the Indian mythology surrounding the Vedic divinity Indra (cf. Thor), who is "fair of cheek" (Rig Veda, I.9.3) and with his "fair-complexioned friends" (I.100.18) annihilates the lawless black Dasyu, "giving protection to the Aryan color" (III.34.9), blowing to nothingness "the swarthy skin which Indra hates" (IX.73.5).

On the "demonic" nature of the lower negroid races and their degenerating remnants, Evola relies on an old Aryo-Zoroastrian tradition that teaches negroids belonged to the dark side owing to their alleged origin in the union between a demon and a wicked witch: "Zohak, during his reign, let loose a dev (demon) on a young woman, and let loose a young man on a parik (witch). They performed coition with [the sight] of the apparition; the negro came into being through that [novel] kind of coition" (Bundahishn, XIVB).

Flowering forth in the Greek, pre-Celtic, Indo-Aryan, Aryo-Persian, Armenic, Roman, Germanic, Tiwanaku, Teotihuacán, early Chinese, Aztec-Nahua, Inca and first Egyptian dynasties' representatives, with more or less ethnic but great spiritual purity, the "Northern Light" was considerably lost to the Atlantean offshoot which defiled itself through spiritual integration into the spiritual lunar sphere of the world of the "Mother" or "Earth" of the "Southern Light" and further miscegenation with bestial, dark Lemurian stocks. Revolt Against the Modern World presents world-history to be the saga of dualistic conflict between the "Northern Light" and the "Southern Light": on one side stand the Uranian, patriarchal stocks of purer Hyperborean lineage, climatically harshly conditioned and heroic-minded celebrators of the winter solstice (cf. Rene Guenon: "The starting-point given to the year that one can call normal, as being in direct conformity with primordial tradition, is the winter solstice", Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles, p. 24); on the other stand the chthonic and titanized inferior races and the spiritually/ethnically bastardized heirs of the fallen Atlantean civilization captured by the "Southern Light" and its sacerdotal and naturalistic-pantheist religion of promiscuous vegetal and animal fertility.

Evola cites Plato's description of the fall of Atlantis by Atlantean miscegenation with humankind (Critias, 110c; 120d-e; 121a-b) and the biblical myth of the benei elohim, the Sons of God catastrophically mixing with the "daughters of men" (Genesis 6: 4-13) as support for his esoteric, Aryanist anthropogenesis. Evola interprets archeological findings of semi-human hominid fossils as not purely primordial but evidence of the mismating of the celestial boreal race with inferior animalistic breeds as well, and most often, as remnants of degenerating, bestialized races in their final involutionary stages preceding extinction.

Just as Evola affirmed the natural hierarchy between different individuals of the same race, so he affirmed a natural rank ordering of the different human races. As the best-preserved remnants of the primordial celestial Hyperboreans, Evola affirmed the white race in its different branches as the creator of the greatest planetary civilizations:

"We have to remember that behind the various caprices of modern historical theories, and as a more profound and primordial reality, there stands the unity of blood and spirit of the white races who created the greatest civilizations both of the East and West, the Iranian and Hindu as well as the ancient Greek and Roman and the Germanic" (The Doctrine of Awakening, p. 14).

In fact, Evola publicly celebrated Italian Fascism as a means to ensure and restore in a modern decadent world white supremacy:

"And if Fascist Italy, among the various Western nations is the one which first wished for a reaction against the degeneration of the materialist, democratic and capitalist civilisation, against the League of Nations ideology, there are grounds for thinking, without even any scintilla of chauvinistic infatuation, that Italy will be on the front line among the forces which will guide the future world and will restore the supremacy of the white race" ("Il Problema della supremazia della razza bianca" [The Problem of the Supremacy of the White Race], Lo Stato, 1936).

While characterizing race as something hereditary and biological, Evola also claimed that race was not simply and linearly defined by mere skin color and the various other hereditary factors. In other words, in addition to predominantly "Aryan" or, more broadly, "Northern" biology, the initial necessary precondition for further racial differentiation, one must prove oneself spiritually "Aryan". The fact that in India the term Arya was the synonym of dwija, "twice-born" or "regenerated" supports this point. To him higher race implied something akin to supra-human, spiritual caste. Evola wrote, "the supernatural element was the foundation of the idea of a traditional patriciate and of legitimate royalty."

In 'Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist,' Thomas Sheehan points out that "Evola prided himself on developing a theory of races that went beyond the merely biological to the spiritual. What constitutes a superior race for Evola is the spiritual orientation of a given stock, the subsumption of the requisite biological material (and that did mean the Aryan races) under a qualitatively elevating form, namely reference to the realm of the spirit. But in fact all that Evola's theory does is to promote biological-ethnic racism a step higher. There are enough references in his works to the 'inferior, non-European races,' to the 'power of inferior strata and races,' to disgusting 'Negro syncopations' in jazz, to 'Jewish psychoanalysis'--and enough adulation of the Aryans—for us to divine that Evola's 'spiritual' racism may have had something other than disinterested Apollonian origins."

In Mussolini's Intellectuals, A. James Gregor discusses Evola's racism as follows: "[In the German rendering of Imperialismo pagano], Evola argues that it is out of the creativity of an 'ur-Aryan' and 'solar-Nordic' blood that world culture emerges. Conversely, culture decline is a function of the feckless mixture of Aryan, with lesser 'animalistic,' blood ... According to Imperialismo pagano, the 'natural' and endogamous caste system of antiquity that sustained the 'purity' of the culture-creating 'Hyperborean-Nordics' slowly disintegrated over time under the corrosive influence of Semitic religion and the 'Semitic spirit'.

While Evola was clear about the relative insignificance of the physical attributes of race, he did acknowledge that the 'original Hyperboreans,' which he was critically concerned, were probably 'dolichocephalic, tall and slender, blond and blue-eyed' (Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza, p. 67).

Evola held that the physical mixture of races, particularly between Aryans and races that were 'alien' (i.e., non-Aryan), was always hazardous — but mixture between 'related' races might produce hybrid vigor. Given his generous notion of what constituted an Aryan race (Evola was convinced of the Hyperborean origins of most Europeans, the indigenous peoples of North and South America, as well as those of the Indian subcontinent), those candidate races Evola considered to be truly 'alien' were never explicitly catalogued—except in terms of Semites and the deeply pigmented peoples of sub-Saharan Africa (see Evola, 'Psicologia criminale ebraica,' Difesa della Razza 2, no. 18, pp. 32–35; Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza, pp. 74, 237). What seemed eminently clear, for all the qualifiers, was that all the material races Evola identified as capable of serving as hosts for the extrabiological and supernatural spiritual elements were purportedly biological descendents of the 'Aryan-Nordics' of Hyperborea.

In the golden age, the celestial race was spiritual—only gradually, over time, taking on material properties ... As a necessary consequence of miscegenation, there was a continual and irreversible decline of the celestials in ancient times (Evola identifies the Jews as providing a 'ferment of decomposition, dissolution and corruption' in antiquity; see Evola, Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza p. 160; Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, p. 314), a tenuous revival under the Romans, and another by the Nordic-Germans during the course of the Holy Roman Empire--but by the time of the Renaissance, with its humanism, rationalism, universalism and its gradual submission to the theses of the equality of all humans, humankind had entered the kali-yuga, the terminal age of 'obscurity,' the end of this current race cycle. For Evola, given the fateful path traversed by history, there remained only one course for contemporary humanity: an attempt at reconstitution of the primordial celestial race, amid the debris of previous race cycles, employing the racial remnants of the Hyperboreans.

For Evola, spiritual forces shaped races for their own inscrutable purposes. The notion that mutations, governed from 'on high,' might be the source of raciation was a relatively common conviction among German esoterics (See Pauwels and Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, pp. 400–5). Geneticists, Evola argued, failed to provide a compelling account of how mutations occur. He maintained, as a consequence, that 'the cause is to be found elsewhere, in the actions of a superbiological element not reducible to the determinism of the physical transmission of genetic materials.' The true cause of hereditary variation was to be found 'rather by starting from another point of view that affords one an entirely different set of laws' than those of empirical science.

Given this supposition, Evola proceeded to argue that Fascism or National Socialism—with their heroism, their sacrificial and ascetic ethic, their authoritarian and hierarchical order, together with their appeal to myth and ritual—provided an environment compatible with the 'spirit' of the celestials. That might be enough to prompt a cosmic, if gradual, reemergence of the celestial race. In such circumstances, the formative spiritual principle that, in the ultimate analysis, governs the transcendent 'superhistory' of humankind might literally reconstitute the individuals of the primordial creative race of Hyperborea. Evola sought to show that such an outcome would not be essentially determined by biology, but by the cosmic spirit—that its formative influence could transform individuals into persons accommodating a properly corresponding soul and spirit—to render them once again 'pure.'"

The eminent scholar of Fascism, Renzo De Felice, maintained that while Evola's spiritual, neo-idealist racial theories were wrong, they had a notable intellectual ancestry, and Evola defended them in an honorable way: "Evola for his part completely refused any racial theorizing of a purely biological kind, which went so far as to draw to himself the attacks and sarcasms of a Landra, for example. This does not mean that the 'spiritual' theory of race is acceptable, but it had at least the merit of not totally failing to see certain values, to refuse the German aberrations and the ones modeled after them and to try to keep racism on a plane of cultural problems worthy of the name" (Storia degli Ebrei Italiani sotto il Fascismo, or The History of Italian Jews under Fascism [Milan, 1977]; 465).

Christophe Boutin, in his major work on Evola, Politique et Tradition: Julius Evola dans le siècle, 1898-1974 (Paris, 1992), discusses Evola's views on racism and Negroes (Boutin, pp. 197–200). Boutin mentions that in Evola's 1968 collection of essays, L’Arco e la clava (Milan, 1968, revised 1971), there is a chapter on "America Negrizzata," in which Evola criticizes the "Telluric" Negroid influence on popular American culture, while acknowledging that there has been little actual miscegenation. Evola also argues against American racial integration in this chapter. The unadulterated 1972 Italian edition of Men Among the Ruins ends with an appendix entitled "Appendix on the Myths of our Time," of which number 4 is "Taboos of our Times" (Gli uomini e le rovine, Rome, 1953, revised 1967, with the new appendix, 1972). In this section Evola argues that modern irrational taboos forbid an honest, frank discussion on the working classes and Negroes. Evola notices that the mere word 'Negro' had connotations of offensiveness in the left-wing atmosphere of the era: "la tabuizzazione che porta fino ad evitare l'uso della designazione 'negro,' per le sue implicazioni 'offensive'" (ibid., p. 276). Evola opines that a true Rightist movement will not compromise with this sort of moralistic development. (The Inner Traditions English translation suppressed Evola's appendix, ironically bearing out Evola's thoughts on the "taboos of our times.")

Evola and the Grail[link]

To Evola the Grail was based on the Ghibelline tradition, being the apex of Western Civilisation. The Ghibelline tradition during the medieval period was represented by the German Hohenstaufen imperial line in opposition to the papacy.^[34]

Influence[link]

Evola's writings have continued to have an influence both within occult intellectual circles and in European far-right politics. He is widely translated in French, Spanish and partly in German. Amongst those he has influenced are Miguel Serrano, Savitri Devi, GRECE, the Movimento sociale italiano (MSI), Falange Espanola, Gaston Armand Amaudruz's Nouvel Ordre Européen, Guillaume Faye, Pino Rauti's Ordine Nuovo, Alain de Benoist, Michael Moynihan, Giorgio Freda, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei) and Forza Nuova. Giorgio Almirante referred to him as "our Marcuse—only better."^[35] According to one leader of the neofascist and terrorist Ordine Nuovo, "Our work since 1953 has been to transpose Evola’s teachings into direct political action."^[36] The now defunct French fascist group Troisième Voie was also inspired by Evola.^[37] Jonathan Bowden, English political activist and chairman of the New Right, has spoken highly of Evola and his ideas and has given lectures on his philosophy.

Evola's work is available in the United States through publisher Inner Traditions. He has also gained some attention in Russia, where some of his work has been analyzed by Alexander Dugin and others from a nationalistic Russian view, with but few translations of some of his shorter texts. His work is also available in translation in the U.K., Spain, Poland, Scandinavia, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Mexico, Argentina, and Turkey where his Revolt Against the Modern World was published in 2006. In 2010 Revolt Against the Modern World was published in Brazil by a small traditionalist group, in an edition limited to 100 copies.

In addition to Evola's political influence on right-wing and traditionalist groups worldwide, he has also considerably influenced followers of certain occult traditions. Of note is Thomas Karlsson, founder and head of Dragon Rouge, a Left-Hand Path magickal order which cites Evola's thought as one of its influences, and Daniel Pinchbeck, a spiritual writer who is most known for his writings on 2012, has cited Evola's writings on Hermeticism and sex magick as influences on his writings.^[38][39]

Books and selected articles[link]

Books listed with titles in English are available in translation.

1. Arte Astratta, Posizione Teoretica (1920)
2. Le Parole Oscure du Paysage Interieur (1920)
3. Saggi sull'idealismo magico (1925)
4. Teoria dell'Individuo Assoluto (1927)
5. Heathen Imperialism (1928)
6. Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus (1929)
7. Fenomenologia dell'Individuo Assoluto (1930)
8. The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art (1931)
9. Maschera e volto dello Spiritualismo Contemporaneo: Analisi critica delle principali correnti moderne verso il sovrasensibile (1932)
10. Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga (1934)
11. Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem (1936)
12. The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit (1937)
13. Il Mito del Sangue. Genesi del Razzismo (1937)
14. Sintesi di Dottrina della Razza (1941)
15. The Elements of Racial Education (1941)
16. Die Arische Lehre von Kampf und Sieg (1941)
17. Gli Ebrei hanno voluto questa Guerra (1942)
18. The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts (1943)
19. The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way (1949)
20. Orientamenti (1950)
21. Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1953)
22. Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex (1958)
23. Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (1961)
24. The Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography (1963)
25. Il Fascismo. Saggio di una Analisi Critica dal Punto di Vista della Destra (1964)
26. L'Arco e la Clava (1968)
27. Il Taoismo (1972)
28. Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest (1974)
29. Ultimi Scritti (1977)
30. The Path of Enlightenment According to the Mithraic Mysteries (1977) ISBN 1-55818-228-4
31. Zen: The Religion of the Samurai (1981)
32. Rene Guenon: A Teacher for Modern Times (1984)
33. Taoism: The Magic, the Mysticism (1993)
34. Metaphysics of War: Battle, Victory and Death in the World of Tradition (2007)

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

Constructs such as ibid., loc. cit. and idem are discouraged by Wikipedia's style guide for footnotes, as they are easily broken. Please improve this article by replacing them with named references (quick guide), or an abbreviated title. (March 2010)

• Aprile, Mario (1984), "Julius Evola: An Introduction to His Life and Work," The Scorpion No. 6 (Winter/Spring): 20-21.
• Bolton, Kerry (1997), "Julius Evola — Above the Ruins," The Nexus, # 10.
• Coletti, Guillermo (1996), "Against the Modern World: An Introduction to the Work of Julius Evola," Ohm Clock No. 4 (Spring): 29-31.
• Coogan, Kevin (1998), Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, ISBN 1-57027-039-2).
• Drake, Richard H. (1986), "Julius Evola and the Ideological Origins of the Radical Right in Contemporary Italy," in Peter H. Merkl (ed.), Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations (University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-05605-1) 61-89.
• Drake, Richard H. (1988), "Julius Evola, Radical Fascism and the Lateran Accords," The Catholic Historical Review 74: 403-419.
• Drake, Richard H. (1989), "The Children of the Sun," in The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ISBN 0-253-35019-0), 114-134.
• Faerraresi, Franco (1987), "Julius Evola: Tradition, Reaction, and the Radical Right," European Journal of Sociology 28: 107-151.
• Godwin, Joscelyn (1996), Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, ISBN 0-932813-35-6), 57-61.
• Gelli, Frank (2012), Julius Evola: The Sufi of Rome (Published by Amazon Kindle. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0082BSGFU)
• Godwin, Joscelyn (2002), "Julius Evola, A Philosopher in the Age of the Titans," TYR: Myth—Culture—Tradition Volume 1 (Atlanta, GA: Ultra Publishing, ISBN 0-9720292-0-6), 127-142.
• Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2001), Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, ISBN 0-585-43467-0, ISBN 0-8147-3124-4, ISBN 0-8147-3155-4), 52-71.
• Griffin, Roger (1985), "Revolts against the Modern World: The Blend of Literary and Historical Fantasy in the Italian New Right," Literature and History 11 (Spring): 101-123.
• Griffin, Roger (1995) (ed.), Fascism (Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-289249-5), 317-318.
• Hansen, H. T. (1994), "A Short Introduction to Julius Evola," Theosophical History 5 (January): 11-22; reprinted as introduction to Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1995).
• Hansen, H. T. (2002), "Julius Evola's Political Endeavors," introduction to Evola, Men Among the Ruins, (Vermont: Inner Traditions).
• Moynihan, Michael (2003), "Julius Evola's Combat Manuals for a Revolt Against the Modern World," in Richard Metzger (ed.), Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult (The Disinformation Company, ISBN 0-9713942-7-X) 313-320.
• Rees, Philip (1991), Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 (New York: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-13-089301-3), 118-120.
• Sedgwick, Mark (2004) Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-515297-2).
• Sheehan, Thomas (1981) "Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist," Social Research, 48 (Spring): 45-83.
• Stucco, Guido (1992), "Translator's Introduction," in Evola, The Yoga of Power (Vermont: Inner Traditions), ix-xv.
• Stucco, Guido (1994), "Introduction," in Evola, The Path of Enlightenment According to the Mithraic Mysteries, Zen: The Religion of the Samurai, Rene Guenon: A Teacher for Modern Times, and Taoism: The Magic, the Mysticism (Edmonds, WA: Holmes Publishing Group)
• Stucco, Guido (2002). "The Legacy of a European Traditionalist: Julius Evola in Perspective". Occidental Quarterly 3 (2). http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/archives/vol2no3/gs-evola.html. ^{[dead link]}
• Wasserstrom, Steven M. (1995), "The Lives of Baron Evola," Alphabet City 4 + 5 (December): 84-89.
• Waterfield, Robin (1990), 'Baron Julius Evola and the Hermetic Tradition', Gnosis 14, (Winter): 12-17.

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Julius Evola

• Julius Evola, A Radical Traditionalist
• Julius Evola's Political Testament By Nigel Jackson
• Julius Evola, Magic and Awakening
• Julius Evola in Russian
• Julius Evola: SS-Archiv in German
• Corneliu Codreanu and the New European Empire According to Julius Evola
• JuliusEvola.NET, contains pictures of Evola, his paintings and a large text archive
• Julius Evola texts, a comprehensive archive of texts in German and English
• Matthew Mitchem: Julius Evola: Tradition's Triumphant Caesar
• arrakis.es, Evola bibliography in Italian
• OswaldMosley.com, contains Kerry Bolton's presentation of Evola
• CentroStudiLaRuna.it contains an 'Appreciation for Julius Evola's 100th Anniversary'
• RoseNoire.ORG, contains an extensive chapter-by-chapter summary of Evola's Men Among the Ruins
• Kevin Coogan's Conceptualization of the Order, a Dave Emory broadcast presenting Coogan's view of Evola's connection to the Fascist International.
• Fascist Occultism and its Close Relationship to Buddhist Tantrism, chapter 12 of Part II of The Shadow of the Dalai Lama by Victor and Victoria Trimondi.
• Selection of Evola's Futurist and Dada works, 1917-20

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (April 2009)

Francis Parker Yockey (September 18, 1917 – June 16, 1960) was an American political thinker and polemicist best known for his neo-Spenglerian book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, published under the pen name Ulick Varange^[1] in 1948. This 600-page book argues for a culture-based, totalitarian path for the preservation of Western culture.^[2]

Yockey was active with many far right causes around the world and remains one of the seminal influences in many extremist right political and racial / nationalist movements. ^[3] Although he was a devotee of Oswald Spengler (who was critical of the Nazis), Yockey was a passionate proponent of the most severe criticism of Jews, and expressed a reverence for German National Socialism, and a general affinity for fascist causes. Yockey contacted or worked with the Nazi aligned German-American Bund and the German-American National Alliance. After the defeat of the Axis in the Second World War, Yockey became even more active in neo-Fascist causes. As Russia switched to supporting the Arabs against Israel, Yockey believed an alliance between Soviet Communism and the extreme Right could (and should) be advanced to weaken the strategic position of the United States,^{[citation needed]} which he believed was controlled by Zionist Jews. Yockey also met Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and wrote anti-Zionist propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian government, seeing Arab nationalism as another ally to challenge "the Jewish-American power." While in prison for falsified passports, he was visited by the American Rightist Willis Carto, who later became the chief advocate and publisher of Yockey's ideas, and remains a central figure in the extreme right movement in the United States.

Early life[link]

Many biographical facts about Yockey cannot be known with absolute certainty. The majority comes from the accounts of those who knew him and from FBI efforts to gain intelligence in regard to his activities, as recorded by his biographer Kevin Coogan in his book Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International.

Yockey was born in Chicago, Illinois, but his family returned to their original homestead in Ludington, Michigan during the Great Depression. His parents were anglophiles who raised Yockey to appreciate Europe and high culture. Subsequently, Yockey's mother introduced him to classical music. Young Francis had a prodigious talent for the piano and developed his repertoire to include pieces by Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, and Haydn. Yockey claimed that his ideas about race were initially the result of a car accident, wherein he was assaulted by several African Americans. As a result of this attack he lost his front teeth and wore dentures for the rest of his short life.

Before becoming a devotee of elitist and anti-materialist Oswald Spengler, he briefly flirted with Marxism. Aside from Spengler, he was heavily influenced by the ideas of German legal scholar Carl Schmitt. Like Spengler, he rejected the strict biological view of race, instead preferring a spiritual conception of race married with Karl Haushofer's idea of geopolitics; but unlike Spengler, who regarded the Nazis as too bourgeois, Yockey believed in German National Socialism, and supported various Fascist and neo-Fascist causes for the remainder of his life, including anti-Semitism.

As a university student in the late 1930s, Yockey had his first political essay published in Social Justice, a periodical distributed by Fr. Charles Coughlin, known as the "radio priest," At the time Coughlin was widely known for his sympathetic view of the anti-Bolshevist policies associated with Adolf Hitler's Germany, Benito Mussolini's Italy, and Gen. Franco's Spain.

Yockey attended at least seven universities. He studied for two years (1934–36) as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and then transferred to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Arizona, and graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame Law School in 1941.

Later life and works[link]

Over time, Yockey contacted or worked with many of the far-Right figures and organizations of his day. These included the German-American Bund, the German-American National Alliance, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, Sir Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, George Sylvester Viereck, the American H. Keith Thompson, Gerald L.K. Smith, and James H. Madole's National Renaissance Party. Thompson and Madole, in particular, became advocates of Yockey's worldview. While Yockey's pro-Fascist activities began in the late 1930s, they did not end there. Unfazed by the defeat of the Axis in the Second World War, Yockey actually became even more active in neo-Fascist causes after 1945. From this point forward, he remained dedicated solely to his cause of reviving Fascism. He dispensed with any semblance of an ordinary life, and remained constantly on the move, travelling to wherever he felt he could pursue his goals most effectively, and cultivating countless contacts along the way.

Yockey's ideas were usually only embraced by those, however, who could countenance the necessity of an alliance between the far Left and the far Right, which was a fundamental pillar of Yockey's ideas. The American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell, for example, rejected Yockey on the basis of his anti-American attitude, as well as his willingness to work with anti-Zionist Communist governments and movements, as the ANP adhered solely to the ideals of absolute anti-Bolshevist National Socialism, as had been advocated by Hitler. (Yockey, however, seems to have remained unaware of Rockwell, as he told Willis Carto that he had never heard of the ANP when Carto visited him in prison in 1960.) Other proponents of Universal Nazism, such as Rockwell's ally Colin Jordan, disagreed with Yockey's views on race, and saw Yockeyism as advocating a kind of "New Strasserism" which would undermine true Nazism.

In early 1946, Yockey began working for the United States War Department as a post-trial review attorney for the Nuremberg Trials in Germany. He soon began agitating against Allied occupation of Germany, as well as what he perceived to be the biased procedures of the Nuremberg tribunal. Eventually, he was fired for "abandonment of position" in November 1946.

Without notes, Yockey wrote his first book, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, in Brittas Bay, Ireland over the winter and early spring of 1948. It is a Spenglerian critique of 19th century materialism and rationalism. It was endorsed by far-Right thinkers around the world including former German General Otto Remer; Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois, Revilo P. Oliver; and Italian esotericist Julius Evola. Yockey became embittered with Sir Oswald Mosley after the latter refused to publish or review Imperium upon its completion, after having promised to do so. Guy Chesham, one of the leaders of Mosley's movement, actually resigned from it, in part because of Mosley's treatment of Yockey. Imperium subscribes to Spengler's suggestion that Germany had been destined to fulfil the 'Roman' role in Western Civilization by uniting all its constituent states into one large empire.^[4]

Along with former Mosleyites Guy Chesham and John Gannon, Yockey formed the European Liberation Front (ELF) in 1948-49. The ELF issued a newsletter, Frontfighter, and published Yockey's virulent anti-American, anti-communist and anti-semitic text The Proclamation of London.^[5] In Yockey's view, "social decay" was permeated by the Jew, who as a "Culture-distorter" and a "bearer of Culture-disease", "instinctively allied himself with all forms, theories, doctrines and practices of decadence in every sphere of life". "America is [the Jew and the liberal-communist-democrat]'s programme in process of actualization, and its example shows Europe what the liberal-communist-democratic regime of Culture-distortion is preparing for it during the coming generations".^[5] Yockey was also approached by the group around the anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1951. He was asked to ghost-write a speech for McCarthy which stressed the importance of greater friendship between Germany and the United States, although McCarthy never delivered it as the theme of the speech, when it was announced, aroused a great deal of controversy.

In late 1952, Yockey traveled to Prague and witnessed the Prague Trials. He believed they "foretold a Russian break with Jewry", a view he put forward in his article What is Behind the Hanging of the Eleven Jews in Prague?.^[6] Indeed, that prediction was vindicated by the fact that the last Jewish member of the Soviet Presidium, Lazar Kaganovich, was expelled in 1957 - having been sidelined as early as 1953. (In addition, after sympathizing with Israel in its 1948-49 war, Russia switched sides and supported the Arabs in subsequent conflicts.) Yockey believed that Stalinism had purged Soviet Communism of Jewish influence. He spent the remainder of his life attempting to forge an alliance between the worldwide forces of Communism and the international network of the extreme Right of which he was a part, with an aim toward weakening or overthrowing the government of the United States.

Yockey met Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he called "a great and vigorous man", in Cairo in 1953. He worked briefly for the Egyptian Information Ministry, writing anti-Zionist propaganda. Yockey saw the rise of non-aligned states in the Third World, and in particular Arab nationalism, as significant geopolitical challenges to "the Jewish-American power".^[7] Some speculate that Yockey made clandestine trips during the 1950s into East Germany, and possibly even into the USSR itself, attempting to cultivate Communist ties. It is also known that Yockey visited Cuba shortly after the revolution of Fidel Castro, in the hopes of winning Cuban support for his anti-American alliance. He met with some lower-level officials, but nothing is known to have come of it.

Yockey was continuously pursued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for over a decade, which he avoided by adopting numerous aliases. He was finally arrested in 1960 after returning to the United States from abroad, as his suitcase was sent to the wrong airport. When the authorities opened it to determine whose suitcase it was, they discovered several of Yockey's falsified passports and birth certificates. When this was reported to the federal government, the FBI tracked him down in Oakland, California and arrested him. (Curiously, he was staying at the home of a friend who was thought to be Jewish, a Holocaust survivor and teacher of Hebrew at Temple Beth Abraham, a local synagogue^{[citation needed]}.) While in prison, he was visited by the American Rightist Willis Carto, who later became the chief advocate and publisher of Yockey's ideas. Yockey was soon after found dead with an empty cyanide capsule nearby while in a jail cell in San Francisco under FBI supervision, leaving a note in which he claimed that he was committing suicide in order to protect the anonymity of his political contacts.

Maurice Bardèche, a French writer of fascist sympathies, wrote about his meeting with Yockey in his semi-autobiographical novel Suzanne et le taudis. Yockey, called "Ulrich Clarence" in the book, was described by Bardèche as a "lunatic." Most of Yockey's other acquaintances, however, always regarded him as a brilliant and dedicated fighter for the cause in which he believed.

The impact of Yockey's ideas[link]

Yockey was rather unique among thinkers of the far right wing post-Second World War. Most European and American neo-Fascists and other rightists of the post-war period advocated an alliance with the United States as the best hope for the survival of Western culture under the threat of Communism. But Yockey felt that an alliance of the Right with the Left was a far-more desirable course.^{[citation needed]} This proposed alliance is referred to as a Red-Brown Alliance (the color red representing the Far Left and the color brown representing the Far Right). Yockey felt that American universalism, democracy and consumer culture, which was by then spreading into western Europe and much of the rest of the world, as well as its alliance with Zionism, was far more corrosive and deadly to the true spirit of the West than was the Soviet Union.^{[citation needed]} Yockey believed that the USSR had become genuinely anti-Zionist under Stalin, that in its authoritarianism it preserved something of the traditional European concept of hierarchy, and he felt it could more easily be adapted to a Rightist orientation over time than was possible in the egalitarian United States.^{[citation needed]} He thus believed that true Rightists should aid the spread of Communism and Third World anti-colonial movements wherever possible, and he remained staunchly opposed to the government and culture of the United States, which he did not even consider to be truly Western in nature. He was also rather unique at the time (along with Evola) in his advocacy of a spiritual, as opposed to biological, understanding of race.^{[citation needed]}

Legacy[link]

Yockey himself did not have a very significant influence on the American extreme Right, however, which, throughout the Cold War, for the most part remained staunchly anti-Communist. He had a much greater impact in Europe, where intellectuals of the Right, especially the current of thought sometimes called the European New Right, including the Belgian Jean Thiriart, the Russian Aleksandr Dugin, and French writers Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, adopted many of Yockey's views.

Yockey's present influence is reflected mostly through the work of Willis Carto, considered to be one of America's most influential political racial theorists and his Liberty Lobby and successor organizations. Carto ran the Youth for George Wallace group supporting segregationist Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign. That group formed the basis for the National Youth Alliance which promoted Yockey's political philosophy and his book Imperium. Many supporters of Yockey, such as H. Keith Thompson, claim that Carto failed to understand Yockey's ideas on their deepest level.

See also[link]

• German-Soviet Axis talks
• Neo-Nazism
• Far-right politics

Footnotes[link]

1. ^ Willis Carto, ADL.
2. ^ ADL Research Report 'Poisoning the Airwaves: The Extremist Message of Hate on Shortwave Radio' U.S. Newswire February 1, 1996
3. ^ Liberty Lobby in the spotlight with Duke, Buchanan in race Chicago Tribune January 12, 1992
4. ^ Brief Review of "Imperium"
5. ^ ^{a b} The Proclamation of London, full text
6. ^ What is Behind the Hanging of the Eleven Jews in Prague?, full text
7. ^ Francis Parker Yockey (February 1961). "The World in Flames: An Estimate of the World Situation". Archived from the original on 2009-10-26. http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/world.html&date=2009-10-26+00:28:00. Retrieved 2008-09-15. 

References[link]

• Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1998 ISBN 1-57027-039-2 (publisher's blurb, Table of contents) - The only biography of Yockey ever written, Coogan's work on Yockey's life is definitive, but the 'facts' he presents regarding other figures should be regarded with caution.
• Varange: Life and Thoughts of Yockey by Kerry Bolton, (Renaissance Press, New Zealand, Catalogue)
• Imperium by F. Yockey ISBN 0-911038-10-8
• Francis Parker Yockey, The Proclamation of London, Shamley Green: The Palingenesis Project, 2012. ISBN 978-0-9561835-9-0
• The Enemy of Europe: The Enemy of Our Enemies by Francis Parker Yockey and Revilo P. Oliver ISBN 0-942094-00-X Oliver's part 2nd section 3rd 4th 5th and 6th
• Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy, and Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.
• The Beast Reawakens by Martin A. Lee, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. ISBN 0-316-51959-6

External links[link]

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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Francis Parker Yockey

• "Imperium" e-book
• The Francis Parker Yockey Collection
• Review of Dreamer of the Day
• "The Tragic Life of a Spenglerian Visionary" -- Review of Dreamer of the Day
• "An American National Bolshevik" -- Review of Dreamer of the Day
• Dave Emory's For The Record broadcast #237 Interview with Kevin Coogan
• Dave Emory's For The Record broadcast #354 Interview with Kevin Coogan
• Gnostic Liberation Front's Yockey collection second page third page (criticism)
• Imperium the foe of the NWO