Reviews of the Writings of the “Traditionalist” Julius Evola

The writings of Julius Evola (1898-1974), the renowned, iconclastic “traditionalist,” or “perennialist,” provide a stark contrast to much of contemporary spiritual and sociopolitical literature. Whereas the Divine Feminine is in vogue nowadays, Evola was a staunch advocate for the Divine Masculine; whereas equality and egalitarianism are now prevalent themes in the zeitgeist, Evola argued for a social hierarchy, with military and spiritual “warriors” at the top of the pyramid, in a monarchistic rather than a democratic sociopolitical order. Evola eschewed pacifism, and as his writings make clear, he viewed even the spiritual quest in terms of battle.

Evola has recently been “discovered” by factions of the Alt-right, who are enamored with his arguments for nationalism, patriarchalism, and anti-semitism. Curious about Evola’s quasi-fascist sociopolitics, I recently decided to give his controversial, again popular “Revolt Against the Modern World” a read. But I didn’t make it very far into the book, because the writing was poor, and Evola’s arguments did not impress me. And as a Jew, I found his criticisms of my “race” to be baseless and absurd.

What of Evola’s spiritual writings? I’ve read (and reviewed at Amazon) three of his spiritual books. I found one good (four stars), “The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts,” one mediocre (three stars), “The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way,” and one not good (two stars), “The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art.”

Herewith are my reviews of Evola’s texts:

Deep-Core Pali Buddhism ["The Doctrine of Awakening"]

This is the second Julius Evola (1898-1974) book I have read (and reviewed at Amazon), and I found it much better than the first, “The Hermetic Tradition” (see my two-star review).

In this book, Evola, focusing mainly on the Sutta Pitaka, the most important and most ancient portion of the Pali Canon, provides numerous deep and interesting insights about the Buddha’s original teachings. He also displays his own limitations as a spiritual exegete, and I’ll consider them after I first provide some samples of the “good stuff” in this book.

At the beginning of the book, Evola sets the tone for this text by defining the term “ascesis” (asceticism) as really meaning “tapas,” which means “to be hot” or “to glow,” pertaining to “the idea of an intensive concentration, of glowing, almost of fire.” And as Evola makes clear, early Buddhism, which focused on this “fire,” gradually lost it and its virility and Ariyan spirit, as the religion devolved into Hinayana and Mahayana.

Modern, politically correct Buddhism books ignore the Buddha’s damning assessment of both the common crowd (“heaps of rubbish”) and women (”insatiable with respect two things: sex and motherhood”), but not Evola, who also shoots down the common idea of the Buddha as a pacifist. The Buddha, a member of the warrior caste, likened spiritual life to warfare, and Evola, an unabashed fan of the Ariyan warrior mentality, repeatly quotes the Buddha so as to emphasize the theme of sadhana as warfare. Here are a couple of the quotes: “Summon the will, arm the spirit, bravely struggle, fight, do battle.” “Better to die fighting than to live as one vanquished.”

What makes this book a must-read for serious students of Buddhadharma is Evola’s discourse on Buddhist meditation. Although I’ve read dozens of books on the Buddha’s teachings, I have never before encountered some of the descriptions of contemplation and the jhanas (samadhis) that Evola provides. Of particular interest to me was Evola’s identification of two paths in early Pali Buddhism – a “dry path” and a “wet path.” The dry path is the path of Vipassana and Jnana Yoga (the practice of Neti-Neti), and the wet path is that of “irradiant contemplations,” of being “bathed with inner bathing” which results in “limitless redemption of the mind.” Evola quotes the Sutta Pitaka on this “bathing”: “The body is not only pervaded but also covered by the new force, it is enveloped in the force as if the body did not contain the force, but the force contained the body.”

What’s there not to like about this book? First, the writing is clumsy, imprecise, and less than copacetic, though this might be the translator’s fault. (Evola was Italian.) Secondly, although this book is deep, Evola, not a Buddhist himself, is in over his head when he considers some esoteric aspects of spiritual Dharma. I could write pages deconstructing various statements of his. But since this is just a review, I’ll provide just a few examples of his faulty Dharma understanding.

Evola depicts Nirvana as “beyond being and becoming.” Unbeknownst to Evola, Nirvana is not beyond Being; it is Being, and this Be-ing is equivalent to Hindu Sat-Cit-Ananda. Evola describes the Buddha’s teachings as the “coup de grace delivered to the Brahmanical theory of atma.” This is hardly the case, and in later forms of Buddhism, the Atma re-emerges under the synonym of “Buddha-nature.” Evola seems to vacillate on the ontological status of the transcendental ‘I’, and perhaps this is why he never engages in an in-depth consideration of the subject. Lastly, he mistakenly correlates the Buddhist Trikaya (Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakaya) with the three bodies (Karana Sarira, Sukshma Sarira, Sthula Sarira) in Hinduism.

The redeeming plusses of this book well outweigh its negatives. With this in mind, I will be adding it to the Recommended Spiritual Reading List that I provide for my students.

“The Serpent Power” Redux  ["The Yoga of Power"]

This is the third Julius Evola text I have reviewed (see my two-star review of “The Hermetic Tradition”and my four-star review of “The Doctrine of Awakening”), and probably the last. For although Evola had contempt for two-dimensional academic treatises, his own texts are quasi-academic, and do not reflect the gnosis of a mystic who “cracked the cosmic code.” Those who haven’t grokked the esoteric Perennial Philosophy might appreciate the writings of Evola and others of his ilk (such as Alain Danielou, Mircea Eliade, Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, et al), but those who have will find them lacking in many ways (which is not to say they aren’t worth reading, and that one can’t learn from them). But the sad truth is that not as single big-name intellectual in the spiritual field satisfactorily explicates the deeper dimensions of the Awakening project. Evola deserves credit for attempting to consider various spiritual traditions on an esoteric level, but as soon as he moves from a basic academic-type comparison of the metaphysical principles of different spiritual systems (especially Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta, and Tantra Dharma) into a more demanding analysis of the yogic practices and experiences themselves, he reveals his limitations as a spiritual exegete.

A big problem with this text is that much of its material derives from (or reflects the views of) Arthur Avalon’s texts “Shakti and Shakta” (see my three-star review) and “The Serpent Power” (see my two-star review), and not surprisingly, Evola corresponded with Avalon. The bottom line is that Avalon and Evola only consider the lower, or ascending “spinal-column,” Kundalini, and are ignorant of the higher, or descending “frontal-line,” Kundalini, which is experienced via Shaktipat, the descent of Divine Power (which ultimately culminates in the union of Shakti and Siva in the spiritual Heart-center, and not the Crown, or Sahasrara, as Avalon and Evola have it.

Evola does a satisfactory job explaining the philosophical differences amomgsy Tantra Dharma, Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta, and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, but, again, when he attempts to explain the yogic, or “inner,” aspects of these systems, the results are unsatisfactory. For example, his descriptions of the samadhis in the Yoga Sutras are unwieldy, and even contradictory. For instance, he writes that “’Bhava’ corresponds to the ‘formless’ or ‘causal’ plane (arupa, karana), but then he tells us, “The lower form of samadhi (or bhava’s samadhi) is one in which the concept and its name still subsist.” This is a direct contradiction. Moreover, the correct name for this lower samadhi with form is savikalpa (oe samprajnata) samadhi, not bhava samadhi, which can pertain to both lower (with form) and higher (formless) states of engrossment that are characterized by the experience of ecstatic bliss.

Evola ventures into Tibetan yoga in this text, and again he displays his ignorance, this time regarding the practice of thodgal (togal), Clear Light contemplation. He describes various visualization practices of Tibetan letters, flowers, and symbols, but these practices do not pertain to thodgal. Rather, they are preliminary tantric exercises. Thodgal (togal) means “leap-over,” which means the yogi, rather than having to practice trekcho (cutting through spiritual materialism to get to Spirit, the Clear-Light continuum), directly and immediately connects to and channels Clear-Light Energy, the Shakti, or Sambhogakaya..

This is a heavy academic-type text that those unfamiliar with yoga philosophy and Sankrit yoga terms will find rough sledding. And while newbies will be challenged by the material, spiritual experts will cringe at parts of the book. Hence, it’s a work best suited for those who fall somwhere in between these two extremes. Apart from its philosophic flaws, the book is very well written, translated, and edited, so I prefer it to Avalon’s “The Serpent Power.” And because it is replete with exoteric esoteric information that will educate non-expert readers on Tantra Dharma, despite its flaws, I still consider it a worthwhile read for many students of the Yoga tradition.

Second-Rate Hermeticism ["The Hermetic Tradition"]

I received this text/document for free – and quit on it about halfway through, just skimming the remainder. I was glad that I didn’t waste any coin in procuring it.

I’m knowledgeable about Hermeticism and sacred alchemy, which the author Julius Evola rightly identifies as one and the same. And this text not only didn’t provide me with any profound insights into Hermeticism, it is written in a stilted acadamese style that makes it almost unreadable. Add the lack of a copacetic writing style (perhaps the fault of the translator) to the lack of real gnosis of the subject, and you have the recipe for a less-than-impressive text.

Evola will bedazzle the pseudo-cognoscenti with his surface-level cosmology, mythology, symbolism and correspondences, but not the true cognoscenti. And when it comes to the real crux of Hermeticism – esoteric spirituality (or mysticism) – he is clueless. He is simply a scholar – a pretentious, elitist one -- who has repackaged what he has read and couched it in contrived, oblique language that adds an air of mystique to his writing.

There is an overly very heavy emphasis on astrology in this book, but all of this information became obsolete with the discovery of the outer planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto), which Evola ignores. A true Hermeticist would have attempted to consider alchemy in the context of these planets, which the ancients were ignorant of; but Evola is just an intellectual, not a true Hermeticist.

A student of mine suggested that I check out Evola, so before I totally dismiss him, as I have Frithjof Schuon, Franz Bardon, Sammy Aun Weor, Rudolf Steiner, and many other revered 20th-century spiritual and/or occult writers, I’ll peruse at least one more text by him