Julius Evola: Key Concepts
From Academic Agent's video by the same name


1. The Absolute
The metaphysical, transcendent Truth which is manifested in the inherited ancient wisdom of all civilized peoples and is higher than life.

2. Myth is truer than recorded history
The Absolute, since it does not belong to the profane, material world, is more accurately recorded in myth than it is recorded in events.

3. Esoteric knowledge
Esoteric knowledge is secret knowledge only for the select few as against the exoteric knowledge of the masses. Virtually none of Evola’s writings are intended for a mass audience. He viewed the plebian with absolute disdain, but rather he wrote for the aristocrats of the soul who seek something higher than the animal instincts. He explores some specific esoteric knowledge in the Hermetic Tradition and the mystery of the Grail.

4. The Four Castes
Priests, warriors, merchants, peasants. These were the four castes outlined by Hesiod, traditional Hinduism and ancient Persian writings. Evola believed that while the priest caste had dominated in the East, the West it was mostly the warrior caste which had prevailed. But both were infinitely preferable to rule by merchants.

5. Kali Yuga and the Four Ages
The Golden Age led by a warrior priest King, or a divine King, in a solar phase degenerates into a Silver Age where warriors have lost their transcendent status and now are mere military leaders who require the support of priest class who then come to take over and usher in a feminized lunar phase which then degenerates further into a Bronze Age led by the dominant merchant class which completely dissolves transcendent values into mere matter. This finally gives way to the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, which Evola believed we are living through now. In the Kali Yuga all energies are downwards, any sense of transcendence is lost and society becomes entirely profane. Tradition and hierarchy have been entirely inverted before its final stage which is the rule of the peasants or mass man. By this stage all values are reduced to matter, machines, dysgenic egalitarianism, and the reign of abstract quantity.

6. Xeniteia
The condition of living abroad or being absent from ones homeland; to live surrounded by barbarous people and customs; away from ones polis; an exile from the world of Tradition. This is the basic attitude outlined in Revolt Against the Modern World.

7. Apoleteia
Abstention from active participation in the construction of the human polis; an inner attitude of indifference and attachment. You must become a differentiated man says Evola. This is the attitude cultivated in both Men Among the Ruins and particularly Ride the Tiger.

8. Autarkeia
Self suffiency and spiritual independence. Evola maintained that there were 2 paths to achieve liberation from the conditioned world – the path of action and the path of contemplation. He explores various ways to achieve this liberation in the Yoga of Power which explore the Left Hand Path, the Path of Action and the Doctrine of Awakening which explores the Right Hand Path, the Path of Contemplation. He also returns to the Right Hand Path in Eros and the Mysteries of Love. It is important to note that no element of Evola’s thinking is shrouded in mysticism or mumbo jumbo, the goal is always absolute self control and self mastery while being fully conscious. There is no element of escapism, no recourse to the subconscious taking mind altering drugs, looking at crystal balls or tarot cards, losing oneself, getting in touch with nature, or any other such woolly modern minded nonsense, all of which are critiqued as false spirituality in The Mask and the Face of Contemporary Spiritualism, reprinted as the Fall of Spirituality. For Evola, spiritual initiation and awakening can be achieved through discipline alone.

9. No dialogue with modernity
There is no negotiation with subversion. He asserted absolute truths that were not up for debate and as such did not seek to persuade anyone and he always placed the focus on self questioning and to the cultivation of an inner self.

10. The spirit always comes above the blood
For Evola, Spirit was the fundamentally defining feature that dictates hierarchy and practically everything else. The regality of spirit comes before the regality of blood. He also saw this as being true of races where by somebody might be one race by birth but spiritually come to belong to another by taking on their animating essence.

'A tradition has been handed down by the ancient thinkers of very early times to the effect that these heavenly bodies are gods. The rest of their tradition has been added later in a mythological form to influence the vulgar.'

- Aristotle, Metaphysics

@EuropeanTribalism

The first and perhaps the only source of all the ills we experience is contempt for antiquity, or, what amounts to the same thing, contempt for experience.

- Maistre

"...and to the noble, all things are noble, and to the base, all things are base."

"We have been given so many excellences, so many skills, and a mind, moreover, which can penetrate anything with the force of its application, swifter than the stars whose courses, many centuries hence, it anticipates. And what a wealth of harvests we have, of riches, of treasures one piled up on top of the other. You may go round all creation and, finding nothing which in its entirety you would rather be, pick out from everything individual gifts which you would like to have – if you make a true judgment of Nature’s kindness, you must confess that you are her favourite. The fact is that we have been, and are, dearest to the immortal gods. They have bestowed the greatest honour possible on us by placing us next to them. Much we had given to us. We had no room for more." 

~Seneca

@ImperivmRenaissance

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."

~Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

@ImperivmRenaissance

"Through his evolving awareness, and his awareness of that awareness, he can merge with the miraculous - to which we can attach what better name than "God"? And in this merging, as long sensed by intuition but still only vaguely perceived by rationality, experience may travel without need for accompanying life. Will we then find life to be only a stage, though an essential one, in a cosmic evolution of which our evolving awareness is beginning to become aware? Will we discover that only without spaceships can we reach the galaxies; that only without cyclotrons can we know the interior of atoms? To venture beyond the fantastic accomplishments of this physically fantastic age, sensory perception must combine with the extrasensory, and I suspect the two will prove to be different faces of each other. I believe it is through sensing and thinking about such concepts that great adventures of the future will be found."

- Charles A. Lindbergh

Keep the purity of your noble body by practicing chastity in diet and habit; maintain the piety of your noble soul with mindfulness and reflection

A more base, accessible introduction