More on Béla Hamvas

For more on the leading Hungarian Traditionalist Béla Hamvas (1897-1968), see the chapter on “Traditionalismus in Ungarn” (Traditionalism in Hungary) in Magdalena Marsovszky, Erfindung und Okkultisierung des Magyarentums, der heilige Gral und die heilige ungarische Krone: Völkische Esoterik in Ungarn als Gegenkultur und Modernisierungsabwehr (The invention and occultization of Magyarism, the Holy Grail, and the Holy Hungarian Crown: Ethnic esotericism in Hungary as counterculture and resistance to modernization), Springer 2025, €69.99 e-book.

Marsovszky has previously published a fine introduction to Traditionalism in Hungary in 2023, discussed here. This article also discussed Hamvas, though in less detail than in the new book chapter, which focuses on him. After an introduction, there are sections on his work between 1933 and 1943 (“Humanization as degeneration; desire for unification of the German-Italian spirit”), his conception of a leading elite (Führungselite), his “theories on the emergence of the ‘New Man,’” his Scientia Sacra (written 1943-44, published in 2000), and Scientia Sacra. Das Christentum (Scientia Sacra: Christianity, 1966).

Marsovszky writes of Scientia Sacra that “had it not been published in Hungarian, a language with limited circulation, it might long ago have found a central place as the ‘sacred text of Traditionalism.’” Its importance in Hungary, she suggests, was also that it was “the first manifestation of modern European Neoplatonic and Ariosophical thought in the Hungarian language.”

Marsovszky analyses Scientia Sacra under the following headings:

• Cultural pessimism 
• Hostility toward science 
• Hostility to evolution 
• Archaic-cosmic anthropology 
• Cyclical view of world history 
• Racist caste system 
• Those worthy of life versus those unworthy of life 
• The spiritual leader 
• Numerology 
• Gnostic dualism 
• Samsara, the swastika, and initiation 
• Gnostic elitist thinking 
• Intellectuals as alchemists of modernity 
• The image of women in Sophia mysticism 
• The unity of theory and practice 
• Hinduism, Buddhism, yoga, the Bhagavad-Gita 
• The Grail a s a symbol of spiritual
•  Aryan purity

If one knows other Traditionalist works, one can imagine relatively easily what many of these are. Less familiar is “archaic-cosmic anthropology.” By this Marsovszky means Hamvas’s view that (in his own words) “There has never been primordial architecture, a primordial religion...  just as there has never been a primordial people, a primordial race, or a primordial language.” Instead there was a “spirit” (Geist) on which peoples of all races and languages drew, and which might now be recovered through Hermetic science and made available to a new “Logos race” that was Hamvas' own version of Helena Blavatsky’s new “sixth race.” These are “those worthy of life.”

The much later Scientia Sacra: Christianity drew strongly on Leopold Ziegler (1881-1958), the German Traditionalist whose work still awaits a full treatment. After examining Ziegler’s debt to Guénon, Marsovszky observes that “What was new in Ziegler’s thinking was that he envisioned the religious future of the world in terms of a ‘new Catholicity’ (neuer Katholizität) that incorporated the integral tradition… he criticized… [the] ‘Christian arrogance’ with which Eastern philosophies and religions… were summarily dismissed as pagan. He therefore called on Christians to ‘raise themselves to a higher vision,’ by which he meant the integral tradition.” “What is important for Hungarian Traditionalism,” proposes Marsovszky, is “the theological justification that made it possible… to embed Catholicism within the integral tradition.”

Marsovszky also notes that Ziegler “denounced the devastating consequences of centuries of ecclesiastical masculinization of the Trinity” and proposed the replacement of the Holy Spirit with the (female) Heavenly Sophia. Hamvas does not seem to have followed Ziegler in this.

Evola in the Italian Ministry of Culture

Alessandro Giuli (born 1975, pictured right), Italian Minister of Culture since September 2024, is a Traditionalist.

As a young man he belonged to a far-right group called Meridiano Zero, where Evola was read. In 1998 he published an article on Evola and esotericism in Studi Evoliani, the journal of the Fondazione J. Evola, edited by Gianfranco de Turris. In 2001 he helped the publication of a new edition of Evola’s Gli uomini e le rovine (Men Among the Ruins) by translating the introductory essay contributed by Alain de Benoist, the leading figure in the French New Right. In 2006 he again collaborated with de Turris, contributing a short interview with the political scientist and historian Giorgio Galli for a volume on Esoterismo e Fascismo (Esotericism and Fascism) that de Turris edited. In 2008 he gave a lecture on Evola at an anniversary conference in Genoa, and in 2022 contributed an appendix to an edition of the correspondence between Evola and the philosophers Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile.

Also in 2022, shortly after a new right-wing government was formed under Giorgia Meloni, Giuli was appointed director of MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century [XXI] Art, by Gennaro Sangiuliano, the new minister of culture. Some objected that he had no experience in art. Then, after Sangiuliano had to resign because of a scandal involving an ex-girlfriend and possible misuse of official funds, Meloni appointed Giuli to succeed Sangiuliano as minister of culture, and to “continue the effort to revive national culture, consolidating the break with the past that Italians have asked for and that we have initiated since we took office.”

The question thus arises of to what extent Evola may help to "revive national culture." An argument that Evola matters (available here) was made shortly after Giuli's appointment as minister by Roberto de Mattei, a Catholic historian and blogger, on the basis of Giuli's Gramsci è vivo. Sillabario per un'egemonia contemporanea (2024, Gramsci lives: Syllabus for a contemporary hegemony). What worried de Mattei most was the anti-Catholicism that he found in this book, and which he traced, probably correctly, to Evola. Instead of the Catholic tradition, it is clear that Giuli wants to restore what he sees as the basis of the Italian genius loci (spirit of the place): Roman paganism. In Gramsci è vivo, Giuli calls on the Right to abandon “the irrational rhetoric of the barbarian at the gates” and to remember that ancient Rome was based on “culturally homogeneous but ethnically diverse populations.” The culture in question was Roman, not Christian. In this call one may also see an echo of Evola’s criticism of crudely biological racism.

Giuli's enthusiasm for Roman paganism is clear in his other publications. In 2011 he published a book entitled Venne la Magna Madre. I riti, il culto e l’azione di Cibele romana (Come the Great Mother. The rites, worship, and actions of the Roman Cybele). “Venne la Magna Madre” was a quotation from a poem by the Italian poet and hero of the First World War Gabriele D'Annunzio, referring to the Cybele, an Anatolian mother goddess known as Magna Mater (Great mother) in Rome. The book was primarily a historical study. In 2025 he published a collection of his earlier articles published as Antico presente. Viaggio nel sacro vivente (The ancient present: A journey into the living sacred), described in its blurb as “a journey through the stories of a past that is always present.” 

Evola may also have been present in a speech that Giuli gave at the Frankfurt Book Fair, in which he described the roots of Italian culture as “what can be called solar thought: the meeting point between the rigidity of ideologies that dissolves in the noonday light of the Mediterranean spirit, the light so dear to the finest German aesthetic tradition.” The term “solar thought” was ascribed to Albert Camus in the official transcript of the speech released by the ministry, but for some journalists, Evola was the more likely source, and also for “Mediterranean spirit.”

Intention and effect are of course different things, especially in politics. To what extent Giuli will succeed in reviving pagan solar Mediterranean spirit in Italy remains to be seen.

Against the Modern World in Polish

 

Against the Modern World is now available in Polish, as Przeciw nowoczesnemu światu. Tradycjonalizm i sekretna historia intelektualna XX wieku.

It is published by Instytut Myśli Politycznej in Warsaw, and sells for 45 zł. Available here.

The translation includes a short preface written by me for the Polish edition.

Evola in the BJP

A contributor to Swarajya, a somewhat disreputable English-language Indian magazine closely aligned with India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), recently published an article supportive of the tough approach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah to the long-running (Maoist) Naxalite insurgency in central and east India. It was Kishan Kumar, “Hammer of the State: End of Naxalite Nightmare Under Modi-Shah Doctrine,” available here. 

So far, so unremarkable. What was remarkable was the article made frequent use of references to Julius Evola to drive its message home, without any explanation of who Evola was, other than that “Julius Evola taught that decadence must be met with the sword, that the regression of the modern world is not to be negotiated with but to be crushed.”

Evola, we are told, “reminds us that true authority requires the destruction of that which defies hierarchy. That is precisely what the home ministry has done.” “Evola, the article concludes, “taught us that modernity must be resisted with transcendence. India is now fighting not merely for land or law but for Dharma. The forest has been cleansed with fire. The citadels of ideology have been breached. The Kali Yuga still lingers, but the hammer has struck.”

Kishan Kumar, the author of the article, evidently knows his Evola and appreciates Evola's message. Whether he refers to him without introduction because he thinks his readers will all know who he was, or whether he is the only BJP supporter who has ever heard of Evola, is unclear. There are no other references to him in Swarajya, so perhaps the latter.

Maybe a BJP expert will read this post and help out with a  comment

Charles-André Gilis (1934-2025)

Charles-André Gilis, also known as Abd ar-Razzâq Yahya, photograph to the right, died on July 3, 2025, at the age of 91.

Gilis was a leading French Traditionalist (of Belgian origin), an expert on Ibn Arabi, and a follower of Michel Valsan (1907-1974), the most important Traditionalist Sufi shaykh in France during the later twentieth century.

His first two books, published in 1960 and 1964, dealt with the Belgian Congo. His later books, of which there were many, dealt mostly with Islam, but he also wrote on other Traditionalist topics such as Free Masonry and on Guénon himself. His books on Islam included titles like Marie en Islam (Mary in Islam, 1990), La Doctrine initiatique du Pèlerinage (The Initiatic Doctrine of the Pilgrimage, 1994), and L'Intégrité islamique ni intégrisme, ni intégration (Islamic Integrity: Neither Fundamentalism nor Integration, 2011). Several were translated, most often into Italian. In addition, he published several translations of classic texts with notes and commentary, most notably a two-volume translation of Ibn Arabi’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, as Le livre des chatons des sagesses (1997). In addition to writing and translating, he served as Friday preacher in a Paris mosque.

An unsigned obituary on the website Conscience Soufie concluded:

Charles-André Gilis was… a combination of Ibn 'Arabî and Ibn Hazm, an eagle with a hieratic posture and a contemplative nature, who could swoop down on his prey at any moment like a marksman. Like everyone else, he had the qualities of his faults and the faults of his qualities. But it is up to believers to consider the greatness of a man by what he leaves behind, a legacy that is, in this case, essential for anyone who wishes to immerse themselves in the serious study of Ibn 'Arabi and Sufism in its speculative mode of expression.