2025 is a great year for those interested in Julius Evola. First, an exhaustive biography (actually published in 2024) has become available: Andrea Scarabelli’s Vita avventurosa di Julius Evola. Una biografia (The Adventurous Life of Julius Evola: A Biography), 816 pages, in Italian. Secondly, the journal Aries has published a special edition on Evola with four excellent articles.
I have not yet read Scarabelli’s book, but hope to, and to review it in this blog. I expect it to be well-informed, as Scarabelli is deputy secretary of the J. Evola Foundation, which houses Evola’s archive, and I also expect it not to be entirely objective, for the same reason—Scarabelli’s role in the Evola Foundation. This was established by Evola himself “to reaffirm the traditional values of culture… [and] enhance and disseminate the thought and work of Julius Evola.” It is not a neutral body.
Now to the Aries special issue, available here. It is edited by Julian Strube and entitled “Far-Right Politics and the Study of Esotericism,” but it is mostly about Evola, though it includes one article (on “The German Jewish Occult: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Philosophy of the ‘Irrational’” by Ansgar Martins) that does not mention Evola, and which this post will ignore. The articles that deal with Evola are discussed in turn. It is therefore a very long post, but it makes sense to discuss these articles together.
✸ The first article is by Peter Staudenmaier, “Evola’s Afterlives: Esotericism and Politics in the Posthumous Reception of Julius Evola,” Aries 25 (2025): 163–193. It shows that Evola was closer to the Italian Fascist Party and to the German National Socialists than he later admitted.
After the end of the Second World War, Evola airbrushed his record. Distancing himself from the Fascist Party, he emphasized that he had never been a member. What he did not mention was that this was because his application to join the party was rejected, twice. The Fascists found him too abrasive, and were nervous about his strange connections. This did not stop him playing a larger role in Fascist racism and antisemitism than he later admitted, however.
The story is much the same when it comes to the Nazis. Not everyone in the SS approved of him, as has often been emphasized. Overall, however, the SS worked happily enough with him, and he was at one point on the payroll of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service, by then a branch of the SS).
This certainly modifies the general view of Evola's life, but does not require any major reassessment of his work. There was already evidence pointing in this direction, and Evola never claimed to have been an active anti-fascist or anti-Nazi, nor could anyone sensible take him as such.
Staudenmaier notes that “The persistence of profoundly distorted images of Evola for decades, including scholarly venues, should be occasion for reflection.” One explanation, he suggests, is partly that the evola Foundation has never allowed much access to its archive. Another is that many people have followed Evola’s own later accounts too uncritically. And then “difficult questions arise with Hans Thomas Hakl, whose work has molded so much of Evola’s international reputation.” Hakl (born 1947) is discussed in more detail below.
✸ Then comes Davide Marino and Milan Reith, “Pagan Imperialisms: Julius Evola’s ‘Esoteric Collaborationism,’” Aries 25 (2025): 194–225. It shows that Evola’s reading of esotericism sometimes followed political imperatives. The “collaborationism” of the title is political, demonstrated through a comparison of two different versions of Evola’s Pagan Imperialism, the Italian original of 1928 and the German version of 1933. Each is placed in its political context, and differences between them are highlighted.
The conclusion is that “Evola seamlessly shifted from one political position to another, continually finding new ‘esoteric’ justifications for his ideological stances,” and this is argued convincingly. As the authors say, “The cult of Mithra could be the herald of the ‘Mediterranean tradition’ in 1928 yet become ‘the avatâra of the ancient Aryan god of the luminous sky’ in 1933. Italians could alternatively be ‘Mediterranean and thus essentially Western,’ distinct from ‘the race of blond Germanic barbarians,’ or ‘Aryans, heirs of the sacred Caesars and the royal sons of Thor and Odin.’” Certainly, on these occasions, political logic was guiding the esotericism, not the other way round. In future, we will need to look more carefully for the political logic, and take the esotericism less at face value.
✸ Next comes Moritz Maurer, “Reading Evola in Germany,” Aries 25 (2025): 226–257. This shows that Evola’s works in German served as occasion for internal Nazi discussions. As Maurer puts it, Evola “could serve as an inspiring intellectual but more often acted as a defining foil against which differing concepts and notions of National Socialism and Germanness were negotiated.” This article is especially interesting since so little is known of the reception of any variety of Traditionalism in Germany. It is based on reviews of Evola’s works in the German press from 1933 to 1943, sources used by neither Scarabelli or Hakl
Maurer explains that “that National Socialism lacked a unified ideological doctrine” and that its success was in part due to its ability to be inclusive—within certain very clear limits. The most important of these were the rejection of anything Jewish, democratic, or Bolshevik. Evola transgressed none of these limits. His criticism of modernity could be read as criticism of the Weimar Republic and all that it had stood for. Reviews of his work could therefore, as Maurer argues, allow debates internal to National Socialist thought, notably over the relationship with the Catholic Church and with Neopaganism. This was one reason for the initial Nazi interest in Evola. Another was that his status within Italian Fascism seems to have been generally overestimated. Although sometimes welcome, his ideas were more often rejected as un-German. Despite the alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, there was little desire to incorporate Italian Fascism into Nazism. The Italians were Italians, not Germans.
The two works that led to most discussion were Heidnischer Imperialismus (Pagan Imperialism) and Erhebung wider die moderne Welt (Revolt against the Modern World), both published in the relatively peaceful years before 1940. The situation after 1940 was different, as Maurer explains, with stricter censorship and, beyond that, paper shortages and economic challenges for publishers. Given this, the 1943 publication of Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre (Fundamentals of Fascist Racial Science) indicates very definite approval within the Nazi state, and also the Italian state—Mussolini himself approved the translation, according to Scarabelli, who gives no source for this information. On this occasion, Evola’s status as a representative of Italian Fascism was perhaps not over-estimated. The book, however, did not give rise to much discussion, presumably given the circumstances of the times.
The Nazi reception of Evola tells us more about Nazism than it does about Evola, even though Evola did manage his reception in Germany, adjusting his views to the German market in his German translations, as Marino and Reith showed. Criticism of Evola’s conception of aristocracy by Bernhard Kummer, a prominent Nazi theorist and Nordicist, is particularly interesting. Kummer “counter[ed] Evola’s aristocratic-pagan ideas,” writes Maurer, “with a völkisch-Protestant conception of Germanness, contrasting aristocracy with the idea of Volksgemeinschaft.” The same position was taken in a journal controlled by a more senior Nazi ideologist, Walther Darré. Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the nationally and racially defined people irrespective of class, was not exactly a Nazi dogma, but was very close to one, and in this respect Evola’s views contradicted Nazism, being more individualist and thus, in some sense, more liberal. More on this below.
As Maurer notes, the picture of Evola in the Third Reich that emerges from his work differs from the postwar attempt by Evola to distance himself from Nazism, and from the pictures painted by his more partisan chroniclers (Hakl, Scarabelli).
✸ Finally comes Julian Strube, “Esotericism, the New Right, and Academic Scholarship,” Aries 25 (2025): 304–353. This long article (50 pages) falls into two parts, one of which complements Maurer by dealing with reading Evola in postwar Germany, and one of which looks mostly at the reception not of Evola, but of Hakl. I will deal with these two parts separately.
✩ In the first part of his article, Strube covers the relatively well-known topic of the international reception of Evola by the New Right. More importantly, he covers the postwar German-language reception of Evola, about which far less is known.
Strube clearly demonstrates the importance of Hakl in the German-language reception of Evola, both as translator and as commentator. Armin Mohler (1920–2003), the secretary of Ernst Jünger, popularized (from 1949) the idea of an interwar “Conservative Revolution” group that was distinct from Nazism and so, by implication, innocent of Nazism’s crimes. The association between Evola’s activities and the Conservative Revolution was later encouraged by Evola himself, and followed by others, including Hakl, who systematically presented Evola is the most favorable possible light.
Strube does not inquire into Hakl’s motivations, but notes how a sanitized Evola serves the objectives of the New Right, and the number of New Right journals in which Hakl published: Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Junge Freiheit, Sezession, Neue Ordnung, Deutsche Stimme, and Criticón. Strube does not mention Hakl's explanation, that he chose these journals because they were interested in Evola when nobody else was (see interview here), nor does he mention the alternative explanation of Hakl’s favorable presentation of Evola: that he wanted to save the good esoteric content from being drowned out by the bad political elements (see Francesco Baroni, here). But whatever Hakl’s motivations, his role in the popularization of Evola in German New Right circles is clear.
Strube also covers the later reception of Evola by Martin Sellner (born 1989), the Austrian leader of the Identitarian movement and one of the leading figures in today’s German as well as the Austrian Radical Right, and by Martin Lichtmesz (born 1976, legally Martin Semlitsch), another Identitarian, and at the Institut für Staatspolitik and in its journal Sezession.
Interestingly, Strube notes in passing that the concept of ethnopluralism, central to today’s Identitarians and thus to the Radical Right as a whole, was developed not by GRECE in France as is generally thought (and as I thought myself), but by Henning Eichberg (1942–2017), a German-Danish sociologist, in 1973. Ethnopluralism, as Strube writes, “calls for separated ‘ethnic communities’ (Volksgemeinschaften).” It is unclear whether Eichberg used the term Volksgemeinschaft or whether this is Strube’s own gloss, but in either case it raises the interesting question of the relationship between today’s Identitarianism and the Nazi quasi-dogma that Evola rejected.An obvious difference is what was and is seen as the opposite to the Volksgemeinschaft: class struggle for the Nazis, and bland cosmopolitanism for the New Right.
✩ In the second part of his article, Strube turns to the reception of Evola in European academia, notably that part associated with the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). Here I must declare an interest: I was one of the founder members of ESSWE, and served on its board for many years, and I am also friends with several of the scholars who will be mentioned below. Despite this, I write as neutrally as possible.
Strube demonstrates—though he would not put it this way—that many scholars took Hakl too much at face value as a reliable source on Evola. He does not mention my own work, but he might well have done so: I drew on Hakl’s work in my Against the Modern World (2004), and asked him to write the chapter on Evola in my collection on Key Thinkers of the Radical Right (2019). In retrospect, having read the first part of Strube’s article, I was perhaps at times too uncritical, though I followed normal scholarly practice in using other, mostly primary, sources, and as a result I think that the overall picture I have painted of Evola over the years has not been too far wrong—though I admit that I was surprised, and also amused, to learn that the reason he never joined the Fascist Party was that they would not accept his multiple applications. One of the reasons that I relied on Hakl’s work twenty years ago was that there was then almost nothing else available, and even today it would be hard to identify an expert other than Paul Furlong, author of Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola (2011), who has now retired and whose former colleagues have all lost contact with him. Scarabelli of the Evola Foundation, whose book was mentioned at the start of this post, is too obviously partisan. Hakl was never that obviously partisan. This was another reason that I relied on his work: it is not actually that bad. The presentation of Evola is certainly favorable, but Hakl’s scholarship is otherwise generally good.
Strube, however, takes a different view of the academic reception of Hakl’s work. He looks at the work of Joscelyn Godwin (b. 1945), Marco Pasi (b. 1968), and Wouter Hanegraaff (b. 1961), and identifies “a hermeneutic... that actively prevents the rigorous research and possibly uncomfortable self-reflection needed. The motivations for these tendencies are most likely diverse and not necessarily ideologically driven, but they constitute a failure, if not active resistance, to reflect on the history of the field of ‘Western esotericism’ that continues to shape its scholarly debates.” He also writes of “collaborations with far-right milieus.” “It is particularly problematic” he concludes, “when such collaboration leads to the adoption of narratives and polemical rhetoric... Even when the reasons for such reactions are not ideologically motivated, they at least distort an understanding of not only the historical but also the contemporary dynamics between far-right politics and esotericism.”
This, I think, is going too far, even if he concedes that “motivations… are… not necessarily ideologically driven.” The only real collaboration with far-right milieus was Hakl’s, although Godwin did indeed collaborate with Hakl who organized the second of a series of meetings known as the Palladian Academy that had been started by Godwin, and Pasi and Hanegraaff have defended Hakl (see Pasi in Religiographies, here). Strube notes that “there is nothing to suggest that these Palladian Academy meetings were political in nature or guided by any particular ideology,” so does that collaboration really matter?
So far as I know, the reason that Pasi and Hanegraaff defended Hakl was that they respected his pioneering work on esotericism as a whole, including his fine study of Eranos (Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Routledge 2013), and that they did not see him as an activist for the Radical Right. In which they may well have been right, despite his choice of journals for his articles on Evola.
The only “adoption of narratives” that Strube seems to demonstrate is that Hanegraaff adopted Hakl’s narrative that “The chief source of attacks against esotericism and New Age movements was and still remains the Frankfurt School” (Hakl, quoted approvingly by Hanegraaff, quoted by Strube). This might indeed slightly “distort [the] understanding of… the contemporary dynamics between far-right politics and esotericism,” but Hanegraaff himself insists that he arrived at this conclusion independently and quoted Hakl not because he was his source, but simply because he agreed with his assessment (personal communication). Strube, then, really demonstrates no collaboration, impact, or lack of scholarly rigor.
✸ The special issue opens with an introduction jointly written by Egil Asprem, editor-in-chief of Aries, and Strube. This takes some of the positions from the second part of Strube’s article even further, suggesting that “the field of ‘Western esotericism’ has proved a hospitable environment for various misconceptions and tendentious narratives about Evola, his politics, and its relation to esotericism. This is all the more problematic because some of the esotericism scholarship on Evola that emerged in the 1990s resulted from collaboration with leading far-right stakeholders.” Certainly, Hakl collaborated with leading far-right stakeholders, and promoted some tendentious narratives. That is not, in my view, enough to condemn an entire field. The introduction also states that Evola’s status as a key thinker of the radical right is “the result of concerted efforts by far-right actors.” This is true. And the actors concerned are not part of the field of Western esotericism, a field that produced the four, or perhaps three and a half, excellent articles contained in this special edition.
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