Hugh Urban (Ohio State University) has just published the "first history of western sexual magic as a modern spiritual tradition:" Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
Urban devotes one of his eight chapters to Julius Evola, described as "one of the most influential twentieth-century authors on Tantra and the spiritual aspects of sexuality." This is chapter 5, "The Yoga of Power: Sex Magic, Tantra, and Fascism in Twentieth-Century Europe" (pp. 140-61).
Urban devotes one of his eight chapters to Julius Evola, described as "one of the most influential twentieth-century authors on Tantra and the spiritual aspects of sexuality." This is chapter 5, "The Yoga of Power: Sex Magic, Tantra, and Fascism in Twentieth-Century Europe" (pp. 140-61).
4 comments:
I've been recently having a back-and-forth on Julius Evola back on my blog in the comments section and it occured to me that you might have some useful thoughts on the subject. Do you think it would be fair to say that Evola is a "racist"? Do you think it is possible to seperate the racist aspects (if any) from the rest of his comments on culture, civilization, various groups of people?
It depends, of course, what is meant by "racist." If you mean did he ever accept Nazi-style biological race ("zoological determinism"), the answer is clearly "no." He argued against it. However, if you mean did he believe that such a thing as "race" existed and mattered, the answer is equally clearly "yes"--he wrote about this extensively, especially in the 1930s. Of course his definition of "race" was primarily spiritual, which gives it another meaning, but he didn't even totally exclude the biological--he just argued that it wasn't the determining factor.
There's also the problem of his associates, and what in Against the Modern World I call the "recognition of evil test." My own view is that Eliade passed this test, but Evola didn't.
HOWEVER, I don't draw from this the conclusion that everything he ever wrote is discredited as a result.
"Of course his definition of ‘race’ was primarily spiritual," says Mr. Sedgwick. For a taste of Evola’s supposedly "spiritual" racism, one only has to read those excerpts from his essay on "Negrified America" (from the collection The Bow and the Club, Arktos Media Ltd., 2018):
"Inconsistent sentimentality, banal pathos, especially in love affairs, put Americans much closer to Negroes than to truly civilised Europeans. (…) The much-vaunted high sexual performance of Negroes is really only of a crudely quantitative priapic character. (…) This [mistaking bigness for greatness] is a trait found only in truly primitive and childish races like that of the Negro. It is no exaggeration to assert that the foolish pride of Americans in spectacular ‘bigness’, in the ‘achievements’ of their civilisation, reek of the Negro psyche. (…) the social and cultural ‘integration’ of the Negro, which is spreading in Europe itself and even in Italy, [is] promoted through the subliminal effects of imported films (where blacks and whites are shown mixing in social functions, as judges, police officers, lawyers, etc.) and television, in spectacles showing black dancers and singers mixed up with white ones, so that the general public is gradually accustomed to interracial fraternisation and loses every remaining natural sense of race and every feeling of distance. The hysteria caused by the shapeless, screaming mass of flesh that is the Negress Ella Fitzgerald during her performances in Italy is a phenomenon as sad as it is indicative. As is the fact that the most blatant glorification of Negro ‘culture’, of négritude, comes from a German, Janheinz Jahn, in a book entitled Muntu, issued by a venerable old publishing house in Germany (the homeland of Aryan racism!) (…) this movement [of the Beat generation] is characterised by its fraternising with blacks, in a veritable religion of Negro jazz and deliberate race-mixing, including white women having sexual relations with Negroes."
To say that Evola "didn't totally exclude the biological" is a bit of an understatement. Also, it should be remembered that the above-mentioned lines were originally published in 1968, not in the 1930s or 1940s.
Unsurprisingly, the author of the book’s laudatory introduction, Arktos editor-in-chief John Bruce Leonard, also happens to be among the leaders of the white supremacist, neo-Nazi group Nova Europa Society.
So much for Julius Evola’s lofty brand of racism.
That is quite a quote, François Gravel! Even so, not typical of Evola's approach to race. I should stress that I am not attempting to defend Evola, but rather to answer the question of what his main approach to race was. In the end, racism is racism, whether zoological or spiritual. Can any sort of racism ever be "lofty"?
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