Julius Evola

Biography

In 1922 Evola, then twenty-three, by his own account seriously considered suicide. What saved him was reading an early Buddhist text. A few years later he gave up the painting and poetry that had made his name.

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born on 19 May 1898 in Rome, into an aristocratic family. He is sometimes called a baron. He thought the details of his early years unimportant and himself concealed much about his life. His education was technical, in engineering: he did not finish the course and later explained this by his unwillingness to carry the title of “doctor and engineer”. In his youth he took up painting, read Oscar Wilde and Gabriele d’Annunzio, and became acquainted with Friedrich Nietzsche and Otto Weininger. During his university years he briefly associated with the Futurists around Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, but broke with him in 1916 over his extreme nationalism and cult of industry.

In the First World War he served as an artillery officer on the Asiago plateau; he volunteered in 1917 and saw frontline service only briefly, in 1918. After the war he joined the Italian Dada movement. He called his paintings “inner landscapes”, wrote his poems in French and recited them in cabarets to classical music. He worked on the short-lived journal Revue Bleue. His abstract works were shown in Rome, Berlin and Paris, and one is held in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. Disillusioned with Dada, he concluded that the avant-garde was becoming commercialised and stiffened by academic conventions, and in 1922 he abandoned art. Around the same time, at about twenty-five, he took the name Julius, in homage to ancient Rome. He was also a mountaineer and saw in the mountains a source of spiritual experience.

After that, a different life began. In the 1920s he turned to the occult, alchemy, magic and Tibetan Tantra, and met Arturo Reghini, and through him René Guénon. In 1927, with Reghini and other Italian esotericists, he founded the Ur Group. His philosophical works, “Theory of the Absolute Individual” (1927) and “Phenomenology of the Absolute Individual” (1930), were aimed against the Hegelianism that dominated Italy. In 1928 came “Pagan Imperialism”, in which Evola proposed building Fascism on the values of ancient Rome; the book was criticised by both the Fascist authorities and the Vatican. He wrote for Giuseppe Bottai’s journal Critica Fascista, and in 1930 launched the journal La Torre (The Tower), which closed after ten issues. Then followed “The Hermetic Tradition” (1931) and “Revolt Against the Modern World” (1934), a book that, in historians’ view, had little influence in the author’s lifetime but later gained a cult status on the far right.

From 1934 to 1943 he ran the column “Philosophical Diorama” in Il Regime Fascista, the newspaper of Roberto Farinacci. Evola never joined Mussolini’s party. He wrote on race: in “Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race” (1941) he put forward the idea of “spiritual racism”, and Mussolini himself endorsed the book. In 1938 Evola brought out an Italian edition of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” with a foreword and an essay of his own. He travelled to Germany, gave lectures, and frequented the Herrenklub in Berlin. By his own account, he worked for the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence service. In 1938 he met Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in Romania. When Mussolini’s regime fell in 1943, Evola went to Germany, then returned to Rome and organised a radical right-wing group, and in 1944 moved to Vienna.

In Vienna in 1945 he studied confiscated Masonic archives. During an air raid a shell fragment damaged his spine, and for the rest of his life he was paralysed from the waist down. He returned to Italy in 1948.

He spent the postwar years as a commentator and mentor to young right-wing radicals. He wrote for publications of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement but did not join it. Among the books of this period are “The Yoga of Power” (1949), “Orientamenti” (1950), “Men Among the Ruins” (1953), “Eros and the Mysteries of Love” (1958), “Ride the Tiger” (1961), “The Cinnabar Path” (1963) and “Fascism Viewed from the Right” (1964). In April 1951 he was arrested in a case concerning organisations that had taken his ideas as their basis; he declared that he was not a Fascist and called himself a “superfascist”, and in his defence speech maintained that his worldview was traditionalism. On 29 December 1951 he was acquitted. Later, according to some accounts, he was convicted in another trial.

Evola died on 11 June 1974 in Rome at his desk, by a window overlooking the Janiculum. In accordance with his will, his body was cremated and his ashes were placed in a glacier on one of the peaks of Monte Rosa.