Sol Invictus crowned with a diadem of sun rays
634 words
Editor’s Note:
This year, the Winter Solstice falls on December 22.
Translation and commentary by Cologero Salvo
In “Roma e il natale solare nella tradizione nordico-aria” (La Difesa della razza, 1940), Evola writes: Read more …
Arktos, 2010
150 pp
paperback: $20
These essays, originally written by Evola during the 1930s and ’40s, deal with war from a spiritual and heroic perspective. Read more …
John William Godward (1861–1922), "A Priestess," 1894
2,469 words
It is perhaps appropriate to point out the misunderstandings that are current at the moment in some radical circles, who believe that a solution lies in the direction of a new paganism. This misunderstanding is already visible in the use of terms such as “pagan” and “pagandom.” I myself, having used these expressions as slogans in a book that was published in Italy in 1928, and in Germany in 1934, have cause for sincere regrets.
Certainly the word for pagan or heathen, paganus, appears in some ancient Latin writers such as Livy without an especially negative tone. Read more …
Translated by Sergio Knipe
Artkos Media, 2009
284 pages
paperback: $25
Julius Evola (1898–1974) was a renowned Dadaist artist, Idealist philosopher, mystic, anti-modernist, anti-liberal, and scholar of world religions and the occult. The Path of Cinnabar is Evola’s intellectual autobiography. Read more …
1,522 words
Translated by Greg Johnson
Individuals who help us put a finger on the disturbing way in which the existence of the great majority of people has been, metaphysically speaking, degraded, are rare in our times and run the risk of being confused with charlatans.
To this category belongs, without a shadow of a doubt, the “mysterious Mr. Gurdjieff,” namely George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866–1949). Read more …
2,388 words
The recently-deceased [in 1945] John Dewey was applauded by the American press as the most representative figure of American civilization. This is quite right. Read more …
2,563 words
Translation anonymous, revised by Greg Johnson
Franz Altheim’s latest book, recently published [Der unbesiegte Gott: Heidentum und Christentum (The Unconquered God: Heathenism and Christianity) (Hamburg: Rohwolts Deutsche Enzyklopädie, 1957)], should be of special interest to the readers of this review, for it deals with a significant encounter between the ancient civilizations of East and West.
2,566 words
Translated by Bruno Cariou
Part 1 of 2
We would now like to consider the concerns of young generation a little more specifically. There are youths who revolt against the socio-political situation in Italy, and who are at the same time interested in what we call, in general, the world of Tradition. Read more …
4,766 words
Jack Kerouac
Translated by Bruno Cariou
Part 1 of 2
Editor’s Note:
The following essay, written in 1968, and published in Evola’s volume L’Arco e la Clava (The Bow and the Club, 1968), falls naturally into two parts. The first is Evola’s sympathetic critique of the youth rebellion of the 1950s and the 1960s, with a focus on the Beatniks.
1,604 words
Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, 1885–1921, photographed in 1921
Translated by Greg Johnson
Translator’s Note:
The following text, published in 1942 or 1943 under the title “Baron von Ungern Venerated in Mongolian Temples,” deals with one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic figures whom I first encountered in the pages of Ferdinand Ossendowski’s brilliant Beasts, Men, and Gods.
2,929 words
Translated by Bruno Cariou
Editor’s Note:
The following text is Evola’s Preface to his translation of Robert Reininger’s Friedrich Nietzsches Kampf um den Sinn des Lebens [Nietzsche's Struggle for the Meaning of Life] (1922) as Nietzsche e il senso della vita [Nietzsche and the Meaning of Life] (Rome: Giovanni Volpe, 1971).
1,996 words
Translated by Bruno Cariou
The facility with which ideas lacking any real consistency sometimes acquire an evocative force, to the point of becoming a sort of alibi for the passions, is amazing: those who have held them to be true, experience them as such so vividly that they end up believing they have found confirmations of them in their own deepest experiences.
Osiris Enthroned
1,335 words
“Philosophy and Religion”
Translation anonymous, revised by Greg Johnson
Boris De Rachewiltz
Il libro dei Morti degli antichi Egiziani
Milan: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1958
Juan Donoso Cortés, marqués de Valdegamas, 1809–1853
1,308 words
Translated by Greg Johnson
Along with Count Joseph de Maistre and Viscount Louis de Bonald, Juan Donoso Cortés, the Marquis of Valdegamas, is part of the triad of the great counter-revolutionary thinkers of the 19th century whose message is still relevant today. In Italy, those aspects of Donoso Cortés’ teachings that are most important in our eyes are hardly known.
2,918 words
Translator anonymous, revised by Greg Johnson
The new edition of René Guénon’s book The Crisis of the Modern World
Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
1,657 words
Translation anonymous, revised by Greg Johnson
Eugen Herrigel
Zen in the Art of Archery
New York: Vintage, 1999
[Zen nell’arte del tirar d’arco (Turin: Rigois, 1956)]
Kakuzo Okakura
The Book of Tea
Stone Bridge Press, 2007
[II Libro del Te (Rome: Fratelli Bocca, 1955)]
Aurobindo Ghosh, 1872–1950
778 words
Translation anonymous, revised by Greg Johnson
Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghosh)
Secret of the Veda
Pondicherry, India: Aurobindo Ashram, 1995
From 1944 to 1946 the periodical Arya—issued in Pondicherry in a limited number of copies and impossible to find anywhere today—published a series of essays by Sri Aurobindo on the secret of the Vedas. Read more …
1,269 words
Translated by Cologero Salvo
Published as “Che cosa vuole il ‘Falangismo’ spagnolo” in 1937.
While the phases of the Spanish Civil War are followed by all with keen interest, less attention is paid to the exact ideas that inspire the revolt of the Spanish national forces against communism: perhaps because many believe that the positive ideological phase, in revolutions, always develops at a later date.
4,171 words
Translated by Bruno Cariou
Translator’s Note:
The relationship between Judaism and Freemasonry is one of the aspects of the Masonic question which Julius Evola investigated in a series of articles published in La Vita italiana from 1937 to 1942. Read more …
3,050 words
Translation anonymous, revised by Greg Johnson
Editor’s Note:
The following essay was originally published in English in East and West, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1950): 28–32. I have revised the translation based on the Italian original, published in Julius Evola, Oriente e Occidente (Saggi vari), ed. Gianluca Nicoletti and Marco Pucciarini (La Queste, 1984). Read more …
