Traditionalism now available in Italian

Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Pelican Books) is now available in Italian, as Tradizionalismo: Verso un nuovo Ordine Mondiale (Rome: Atlantide), €22.

It was the suggestion of Atlantide that the English "sacred order" should become a "new world order" in Italian.

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.

More research on Evola

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.

Update on Passages

The first number of a new Traditionalist journal, Passages, edited by the American Traditionalist Jafe Arnold, was released in 2023 (and reviewed here). The second number was released earlier in 2025. It is much the same size as the first number (382 pages, fifteen articles) but has grown more Russian, with six Russian contributors (including Alexander Dugin), as against two in 2023. There are about the same number of Italians (five as against six) and Hungarians (three, unchanged). Unlike 2023, there are no American, English or French contributors, perhaps because of the Ukraine war.

A note on Guénon’s sources for Dante

A new article on the esotericism of Dante focuses on the way in which the Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste (1854) of Eugène Aroux, a major source for Guénon’s L’Ésotérisme de Dante, is plagiarized from La Beatrice di Dante (1842) by Gabriele Rossetti. It is Piero Latino, “The Forgotten History of an Indirect Influence: From Gabriele Rossetti to Eugène Aroux, «L'eminente Plagiario», and the Spread of a Silent Idea in European Literature,” Studi Medievali e Moderni 29 (2025), pp. 135-156. 

Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854) was an Italian poet, nationalist revolutionary activist (and consequently later exile in London), and an enthusiast of Dante. One of his sons, Dante Gabriele Rossetti (1828-1882), was among the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London. Eugène Aroux (1793-1859) was a less distinguished French politician and writer, and in his Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste, révélations d'un catholique sur le Moyen Âge (Dante: heretic, revolutionary, and socialist: Revelations of a Catholic about the Middle Ages) reversed the central message of Rossetti, still basing that new version largely on Rossetti’s work. 

Traditionalist takes over at the Biennale

The (slightly ironic) appointment of the Italian Traditionalist Muslim Pietrangelo Buttafuoco (pictured) as president of the distinctly avant-garde Venice Biennale draws attention to the career of a major figure on the Italian Traditionalist scene and a prolific writer.

Buttafuoco was born in Sicily in 1963 into a family that supported the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), in which he himself became active as a young man. It is not clear when he became a Traditionalist, but in 2001 he published a collection of his articles as Fogli consanguinei (Kin Pages) with the Edizioni di Ar, which was run by Franco Freda, an Evolian who had created a Gruppo di Ar named in honor of the Gruppo di Ur to which Julius Evola had once belonged. Buttafuoco also contributed to a volume on Evola and Spengler published by the Edizioni di Ar in 2004. He became known as a Muslim in 2015, but had probably converted earlier, to judge from his literary output, discussed below. He is a Shi’i, and so, presumably, a member of one of the groups studied by Minoo Mirshahvalad in her Crises and Conversions: The Unlikely Avenues of "Italian Shiism”, discussed in an earlier post here. He stresses the Muslim history of Sicily, and took the name Giafar al Siqilli (the Sicilian) in honor of Jafar ibn Muhammad, the conqueror of Syracuse in 878.

Buttafuoco has published at least one novel or book of essays most years since 2002. Many of these focus on Sicily. The novels are usually historical and quite dramatic and/or romantic, and several feature Islam. One of his non-fiction books is pure Traditionalism, and some others deal with Islam.

From our perspective, Buttafuoco’s most interesting period was 2005-2011. In 2005, his first novel, Le uova del drago. Una storia vera al teatro dei pupi (The Dragon's Eggs: A True Story at the Puppet Theater) was set in wartime Sicily, where the “dragon’s eggs” were eleven Muslim militiamen of various nationalities, under the authority of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who fought bravely against the Allied invasion together with Italian Fascists and a glamorous female German spy. Two years later came L'ultima del Diavolo (The Devil’s last woman, 2008), which Buttafuoco described as “the first Muslim novel in the Italian language.” It switches between the time of the Prophet Muhammad, based on the sira, and the present day, in which the Devil is trying to organize the seizure of documents about the monk Bahira in order to prevent the Christian legitimization of Muhammad, against some Russians who want to bring Orthodox Christians and Muslims closer. The Americans are allied with the Devil. L'ultima del Diavolo is a sort of Islamic Dan Brown with a definite ideological message. I wonder whether Alexander Dugin has read it.

Buttafuoco’s Traditionist book, Cabaret Voltaire. L'Islam, il sacro, l'Occidente (Cabaret Voltaire: Islam, the Sacred, the West) was published in 2008. It attacks modernity and the false worship of rationality and science and the illusions of freedom and democracy in true Guénonian fashion. It further argues that Islam is misunderstood as a result of what is written in the “false liberal” and American-dominated press, and is in fact where one can still find “the sacred, the primordial forces of nature, the original bond.”

Following this came a somewhat different type of book on woman and how to seduce them, Fìmmini. Ammirarle, decifrarle, sedurle (Women: Admire them, decipher them, seduce them), before Buttafuoco returned to Sicily in 2011 with Il lupo e la luna (The Wolf and the Moon), in which a young Sicilian is captured by the Turks and brought up by the Sultan as a military commander. He later returns to Sicily and comes into conflict with his faithfully Catholic brother.This novel is evidently inspired by the life of Giovanni Dionigi Galeni (d. 1587), a not a Sicilian but a Calbrian who was captured, converted to Islam, and ended up as Grand Admiral of the Ottoman navy.

2011 marks the end of Buttafuoco’s most Islamic period. Only two of his later novels and essays in 2012-2023 mention Islam. Il feroce Saracino. La guerra dell'Islam. Il califfo alle porte di Roma (The ferocious Saracen: The War of Islam, The Caliph at the Gates of Rome, 2015), argues against terrorism, seen as an aspect of a struggle within Islam between good and bad Muslims. This is a view with which most experts would mostly agree, but that is not so obvious for the general public. Sotto il suo passo nascono i fiori. Goethe e l'Islam (Flowers bloom under his footfall: Goethe and Islam, 2019) was written together with an Italian Muslim theologian, Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre (b. 1987), and covers Goethe’s encounter with Islam, ending with his (alleged) conversion. The title is taken from a line in his “Mahomets Gesang” (The Song of Muhammad, 1817/21). Goethe is a favorite of those who want to strengthen Islam's roots in Europe.

It is not clear that Buttafuoco has succeeded in making the Italian right more sympathetic towards Islam. It is clear, though, that his Islam has sometimes been a problem for his own political career. After the MSI in which he started his political career had become the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) in 1995 and the AN had merged into Silvio Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL), Buttafuoco joined the Lega Nord, previously allied to the AN. Giorgia Meloni, later Italian Prime Minister, who had also been a prominent member of AN and PdL, is said to have vetoed Buttafuoco’s attempt to stand as the Lega Nord candidate for the post of Governor of Sicily in 2015, given that having a Muslim stand for that post would send all the wrong signals. Keeping a little quieter about Islam may have improved Meloni’s view of Buttafuoco when it came to the Bienale.

My thanks to TR for bringing Buttafuoco to my attention.

A new journal and a new generation

A new Traditionalist journal was published in 2023: Passages: Studies in Traditionalism and Traditions (cover to left). It represents a new generation of Traditionalists: Americans, Russians, and Europeans.

Passages describes itself as “a textual forum for studies on and in Traditionalism” in succession to earlier Traditionalist journals such as Études traditionelles, Studies in Comparative Religion, Sophia, and Sacred Web, and is published by PRAV Publishing, on whom more below. It is more of an annual than a journal, as the first volume is 393 pages long, and the next volume is due in 2024 or perhaps early 2025.

The lead editor of Passages and the Editor-in-chief of PRAV Publishing is Jafe Arnold, an American with an MA in Religious Studies and Western Esotericism from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in Philosophy and Education at the University of Warsaw, where he submitted a dissertation on “Heidegger’s Ins and Outs of Plato’s Cave: The Mythical Liberation of Education in Heidegger’s On The Essence of Truth” in 2024. Arnold is one of the most active Traditionalists of the new generation, and has worked on and with Alexander Dugin. One article of his was previously discussed on this blog (see here). 

The opening article in Passages 1 is a translation of Dugin’s “René Guénon: Traditionalism as Language,” originally a 1998 lecture, and certainly one of Dugin’s most important pieces on this topic. Of the following seventeen articles, two are by Russians, three by Hungarians, and six by Italians, including two authors from the Julius Evola Foundation (definitely not the new generation). There are also two Americans, one Belarusian, one Englishman, and one Frenchman—this last being Jean-Pierre Laurant, the venerable doyen of French scholars of Guénon, neither new generation nor usually associated with Dugin.

PRAV Publishing (website at pravpublishing.com) describes itself as “devoted to the publication of scholarly and popular works which build bridges of ideas between Continents and Civilizations.” The ideas in question are those of Traditionalists, especially Russian ones. So far it has published sixteen books. These include three volumes on the Foundations of Eurasianism, translated and edited by Arnold together with John Stachelski, an American who recently completed a PhD on “The geopoetics of an undiscovered continent: Eurasianism as a writing practice” at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale. The first volume of the Foundations is introduced by the contemporary Russian Traditionalist and Eurasianist Leonid Savin, and contains texts by the classic first-generation Eurasianists, especially Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), Petr Savitsky (1895-1968), and Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). These are the thinkers on whom Dugin’s Eurasianism, sometimes called neo-Eurasianism, builds, combined with Guénon and Evola.

Two of the other books are by Daria Dugina (1992-2022), the daughter of Alexander Dugin who was killed by a Ukrainian car bomb that was probably intended for her father. There are no books by Dugin himself, as the English translations of these are mostly published by Arktos, an older publisher focusing on Traditionalist works, established in 2009. Five of PRAV’s other books are by Askr Svarte (Evgeny Nechkasov), a Russian Pagan Traditionalist who was once a prominent member of Dugin's Eurasian Youth Union and in 2011 founded Svarte Aske (Norwegian: Dark Ash[tree]), an Odinist community in Siberia. Then there are two books by Boris Nad, a Serbian writer whose Vreme imperija (Time of Empires, 2002) was published with an introduction by Dragoš Kalajić, the leading Serbian Traditionalist of the first generation, discussed in a recent blog post here. In addition there four more books written by two Americans, a Russian, and an Italian. 

I am told that PRAV is working on an English translation of Andrea Scarabelli’s Vita avventurosa di Julius Evola (The Adventurous life of Julius Evola), a monumental biography of Evola, a blog post on which is overdue. 

PRAV, Passages, and Arnold and his collaborators are definitely worth watching. 

This post has been edited to correct a number of small errors.

Book that covers Traditionalist influence on European Sufism now available in English

Francesco Piraino's book on Sufism in Europe: Islam, Esotericism and the New Age, first published in French in 2023 (see here), is now available in English from Edinburgh University Press. Only £22.50 as an e-book (here), which is a lot better than £90 for the hardback.

After introductory chapters on "Sufism as Mysticism" and "Sufi Pioneers in Europe," there are studies of the Qādiriyya Būdshīshiyya , the Shādhiliyya Darqāwiyya ʿAlāwiyya, the Naqshbandiyya-Ḥaqqāniyya, and the Aḥmadiyya-Idrīsiyya Shādhiliyya. This last was founded by Abd al-Wahid Pallavicini (1926-2017) (see here) as a quintessentially Guénonian order.

New book on Shi’i Traditionalists in Italy

A new book has just been published on Shi’i Traditionalists in Italy. It is Crises and Conversions: The Unlikely Avenues of “Italian Shiism”, by Minoo Mirshahvalad, available here.

The book has three sections, though they are not explicitly identified as such. The first section introduces Evolian Traditionalism, paying especial attention to Evola’s views on Islam. The second tells the almost unknown story of the rise and flourishing of Shi’i Traditionalism, and the third looks at various issues and contradictions arising from this.

The book is based on careful readings of relevant texts and on high-quality ethnographic fieldwork, and is beautifully written, with an excellent eye for revealing detail.

The rise of Shi’i Traditionalism in Italy starts with Pio Filippani-Ronconi (1920-2010), an Italian Orientalist who integrated Julius Evola and the very pro-Iranian views of the great French Orientalist Henry Corbin. Having first read Evola in 1934, Filippani-Ronconi remained true to his principals throughout his life, including a period serving in the Waffen-SS, where he reached the rank of Obersturmführer (second lieutenant). But it as a pro-Shi’i Orientalist, not as an SS officer, that he matters. Mirshahvalad also discusses the early roles of Adriano Romualdi (1940-1973), the son of Pino Romualdi (1913-1988), the leader of the MSI, Italy’s largest and most important Neo-Fascist movement, and of Claudio Mutti (born 1946), who is already known to students of Italian Traditionalism.

For the flourishing of Shi’i Traditionalism, Mirshahvalad introduces us to three Italian organizations, the Ahl al-Bayt Association in Naples, the Dimore della Sapienza (houses of wisdom, DDS) in Rome, and the lower-profile Tarsis in Trieste. The Ahl al-Bayt Association was founded by Luigi Ammar de Martino (1964-2019), who as a young man belonged to the Evolian activist (and terrorist) group Ordine Nuovo, converted to Sunni Islam in 1982, and then to Shi’i Islam in 1983, one of many in Italy to follow this pattern, which can be seen as representing a shift from the more standard Guénonian position to a less standard position based on a specifically Italian reading of Evola.

Beyond these three organizations there is also a more general sympathy with Iranian Shi’ism on the Italian Right represented, for example, by the production by members of CasaPound, perhaps Italy’s highest profile Far Right group, of posters commemorating the death of Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, part of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, assassinated by an American drone in 2020.

The third part of the book, as has been said, looks at various issues and contradictions arising from the sometimes uncomfortable alliance of Evola, Shi’ism, and the Iranian state. Mirshahvalad starts with culture, which she describes as “the Achilles’ heel” of the Shi’i Traditionalists, and Traditionalists in general. This issue has been dealt with by other scholars before, but never quite as directly and as clearly as by Mirshahvalad. Esra Özyürek, for example, wrote in 2014 of the ambivalent relations between German converts to Islam and immigrant Muslims in Germany. The point that Mirshahvalad makes is that for both Guénon and Evola, what mattered was the tradition, and culture was a human creation, not part of the tradition. But of course whatever Guénon and Evola thought, scholars of religion know that religion and culture are interwoven. the Shi’i Traditionalists generally try to keep religion and culture separate: “Converts’ Shiism is not a family heritage but an attempt for crafting a shield against modernity. This shield is fabricated independently from Shi’ism in its original contexts.” But it is not always so easy. “My wife is Iranian … but we are not Iranians, we are Italians,” one informant told Mirshahvalad. One wonders.

A number of other issues are considered, including the way that Shi’i Traditionalists often ignore central features of Iranian Shi’ism, from gender segregation to the all-important institutions of the marjiʿ  and the hawza, the foundations of Iranian Islamic authority and among the most important things that make Shi’i Islam different from Sunni Islam in the first place. An equally important question that is discussed is the way in which the view that Shi’i Traditionalists have of Iran differs in many ways from the view that most Iranians now have, a view which binds them tightly to the ever more discredited conservative leadership. There is also a brief but convincing discussion of what the Iranian state and leadership gain from their relationship with Italy’s Shi’i Traditionalists

All in all, a fascinating book, strongly recommended.

Special issue on Hans Thomas Hakl and Julius Evola

The journal Religiographies has just published a special issue (available here) on “Hans Thomas Hakl and his Library” (library pictured to the left). Much of the special issues is in fact about Hans Thomas Hakl and Julius Evola, as it is for his work on Evola that Hakl is best known, at least among those who have not visited his library.

One article is devoted to Hakl and Evola: “The Philosophical Gold of Perennialism. Hans Thomas Hakl, Julius Evola and the Italian Esoteric Milieus,” by Francesco Baroni. Evola is also discussed in most of the other articles. In “Hans Thomas Hakl: Reminiscences and Reflections on the Challenges of Studying Esotericism in Problematic Contexts,” Marco Pasi addresses “the perceived connection between modern and contemporary esotericism and far-right politics.” In “Hans Thomas Hakl: Three lives in One,” Bernd-Christian Otto explains how Hakl encountered Evola and covers the work he did on him. Evola is also discussed in Joscelyn Godwin’s short “Hans Thomas Hakl: Personal Reminiscences.” 

Most interesting for those interested in Evola, however, is Baroni’s article. Here is the abstract: 

This article examines the relationship between the Austrian entrepreneur and scholar Hans Thomas Hakl (born 1947) and the esotericist Julius Evola (1898–1974), the most influential Italian representative of the so-called “Traditionalist School.” Best known as a far-right ideologue, Evola was frequently blacklisted from academia, and received scarce scholarly attention until the 1980s. After translating Evola's main books into German, Hakl has established himself as one of the most reliable specialists of Evola, thus contributing to his international resonance, as well as to his recognition as a legitimate object of academic research. As Hakl has shown in his publications, Evola has been a significant personality in 20th-century cultural history. His groundbreaking contributions on Eastern spiritualities and hermeticism, for instance, have interacted with mainstream culture more than many were willing to admit, which is confirmed by Evola’s lasting relationships with famous scholars of religion such as Mircea Eliade and Giuseppe Tucci. Later on, in the context of globalization, Evola’s idea of Tradition was seen as a tool for negotiating alternative worldviews, as well as for a radical reshaping of cultural identities. Our research took place mainly in Graz, where Hakl’s archives are located. Access to these facilities proved invaluable, enabling the identification and study of unpublished documents. 

The occasion for the special issue is that Hakl has donated his magnificent library to the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, the institution that sponsors the journal Religiographies.

New book covers Traditionalist influence on contemporary European Sufism

Just published: Francesco Piraino, Le soufisme en Europe. Islam, ésotérisme et new age (Sufism in Europe: Islam, esotericism and the new age), Tunis: IRMC, €35, soon to be available also in English translation.

According to the abstract,

Sufism... is undergoing a phase of expansion in the twenty-first century, guided by charismatic masters who are renewing their message, attracting new disciples and transcending their original cultural-geographical frameworks. This book describes the development of Sufism in Western Europe, particularly in France and Italy, through extended empirical research based on participant observation in four Sufi brotherhoods in Paris and Milan: the ʿAlāwiyya, the Būdshîshiyya, the Naqshbandiyya-Ḥaqqāniyya and the Aḥmadiyya-Idrîsiyya Shādhiliyya.... the author shows the tension present in contemporary Sufism between... mysticism centred on direct experience of the divine which enables a measure of creativity, and... the tradition based on the sacred texts which reproduces Islamic structures and moral order. It also describes the various forms of hybridization between the Islamic Sufi tradition, Western esoteric discourse, particularly Guénonian Traditionalist, and New Age discourse; hybridizations which often lead to the creation of new rituals, doctrines and organizational structures, and which give rise to a variety of universalist discourses. Finally, the book discusses the different political positions taken by Sufism in Europe, including indifference due to imminent eschatological expectations, civic engagement and metapolitical elitism.

With a foreword by Mark Sedgwick.

Evola on Italian public TV

Guest post by Davide Marino

Rai 3, a state-owned Italian TV channel (traditionally considered the most left-leaning channel of Italian public television) broadcast a 35-minute program on Julius Evola on 30 March 2022. The episode, which can be seen here (in Italian), belonged to a series entitled “Passato e Presente” (Past and Present), a daily show in which the host, the political journalist Paolo Mieli, discusses with a guest historian (and three history students) a historical event or figure. The guest on the show was Alessandra Tarquini, Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Rome Sapienza and author of a good Storia della cultura fascista (History of Fascist Culture).

The episode was divided into three parts, mainly following the periodization used by Evola himself in his autobiography Il cammino del cinabro (The Path of Cinnabar). Part 1 described Evola’s artistic period, his juvenile enthusiasm for Futurism and Dadaism, and his relationship with important exponents of the Italian culture of his time. Part 2 discussed his relationship with the Fascist and Nazi regimes and his Sintesi di dottrina della razza (Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race), presented as different from Rosenberg’s “biological racism.” Part 3 followed Evola in post-war Italy where, after being accused (and later acquitted) of being the inspiration for a neofascist bombing attempt, he became an influential figure for the extra-parliamentary Right.

None of the participants is a sympathizer of Evola’s ideas, and Mieli introduced him as “ultra-fascist, more than fascist, anti-Semitic without a doubt, [...] and appreciated by Mussolini.” However the discussion remained calm and factual, and Evola was described as “an original philosopher, useful for understanding the twentieth century”. Even when discussing Evola’s racism, Mieli argued that Sintesi di dottrina della razza contains “horrible theories but formulated in an original manner,” more sophisticated than other contemporary racist authors.

Not everyone in Italy appreciated this approach, which was considered by some as an attempt to whitewash Evola. In Italy, the public discourse remains extremely polarized and Evola is normally either celebrated as a master by Far-Right circles or, in the famous formulation of Furio Jesi, considered “a racist so dirty that it is repugnant to touch him with one’s own fingers.”

The scope of the episode was, however, limited. With the exception of the Romanian Dadaist Tristan Tzara, Hegel and Nietzsche, there is no mention of the European culture that really influenced Evola. Bachofen is never mentioned and, most importantly, nobody explained that Evola’s “Traditionalism” was influenced by Guénon, not even when discussing Evola’s Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Revolt Against the Modern World). Also, Mieli correctly noted that Evola’s “tradition” was “invented”, but not that his “Orient” (today quite influential in Italy) was constructed among similar lines (as recently demonstrated by Filippo Pedretti, see article here). Similarly, there was no mention of the enormous influence that Evola had, and still has, outside Italy, and the presenters ended the program by stating that “there are no Evolians,” which is hardly the case.

At the end of each episode, the guest historian normally recommends three books about the topic discussed, normally one primary source and two books of critical literature. However, in this case, Alessandra Tarquini simply pointed to three of Evola’s own books (Imperialismo pagano, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, and Il cammino del cinabro), saying that “given the complexity of this author, the best thing to do is to start reading him”. This is hardly true. Complex and controversial authors need more critical literature, not less. The truth is that, to date, not much serious academic work on Evola has been published in Italian, and those who study Evola prefer to publish in English, a language inaccessible to a large part of Rai 3’s audience.

New book on Arturo Reghini and the background to Evola's Pagan Imperialism

Christian Giudice has just published the first book in English on Julius Evola’s early teacher, Arturo Reghini (1878-1946). This is Occult Imperium: Arturo Reghini, Roman Traditionalism and the Anti-Modern Reaction in Fascist Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). The book is based on Giudice's PhD thesis, previously reviewed on this blog.

Reghini was an Italian esotericist who translated some of René Guénon’s works in journals he published with help from a small group including Evola, and who in 1914 wrote a crucial article on “Pagan Imperialism” (Imperialismo pagano) that became, in 1928, the basis of Evola’s own work of the same title. Evola’s 1928 publication was one of the causes of a breach between Evola and the Reghini group that ended up with Evola losing a court case against Reghini, but Reghini losing much of his reputation in Fascist Italy. Giudice translates the original “Pagan Imperialism”  in an appendix to this book.

It was Reghini who developed the idea of an Italian imperial tradition that Evola adopted, a Western alternative to Guénon’s Oriental tradition. Evola’s fierce anti-Catholicism and the blaming of Christianity for the fall of the Roman empire also come from Reghini, or at least from Reghini’s milieu, where such ideas were widespread, popularized by the novelist Ciro Alvi (1872-1944) among others. As Giudice shows, Italian nationalism had always tended in a pro-pagan and anti-Catholic direction, if only because the nationalists of the Risorgimento wanted imperial Rome as their inspiration, not the Papacy’s Rome, and because the Papacy initially opposed Italian unification. While modern paganism in Britain and Germany inevitably referred to obscure folk traditions, modern paganism in Italy instead referred to the well-documented and respected classical tradition.

Occult Imperium is interesting for the light it sheds on Evola’s thought. The connection with Guénon in fact started with Reghini’s own teacher Amedeo Armentano (1886-1966), who together with another Italian, Giulio Guerrieri (1885-1963), visited Guénon in Paris during the 1910s. Armentano founded the Schola Italica group that Reghini later took over, and Reghini was on good terms with Guénon during the 1920s, accepting Guénon’s concept of the perennial tradition and much of his anti-modernism, though not sharing his interest in the Orient. The idea of the Middle Ages as a period of relative tradition is common to Guénon, Reghini, and Evola. 

Occult Imperium is also interesting for what it shows of the Italian esoteric milieu before and after the First World War, a milieu that resembled that of Paris, for example in the importance of Theosophy and esoteric Freemasonry, but that also had its own special characteristics, of which the idea of Pagan Imperialism was probably the most important. Occult Imperium also tells the story of the groups and journals led by Reghini that Evola was part of: the journals Atanòr, Rivista di Studi Iniziatici (Atanòr, Journal of Initiatic Studies, 1924), Ignis (Fire, 1925), and then Ur: Rivista di Indirizzi di una Scienza per l’Io (Ur: Journal of Orientations Towards a Science for the I, 1927).

An important contribution to our understanding of the background of Evola's thought.

Julius Evola’s impact on the postwar and contemporary radical right

A new-ish article gives a concise account, in English, of Julius Evola’s ideological impact on the postwar and thus also the contemporary radical right. It is “CasaPound Italia: ‘Back to Believing. The Struggle Continues’” by Elisabetta Cassina Wolff, in Fascism 8 (2019) pp. 61-88, available on academia.edu. Not everything in the article is new, but much of the work on which it draws has been available only in Italian, and the story is clearly and convincingly told.

Much of the article deals with Evola’s disciple Pino Rauti and his Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo (New Order Study Group). It then proceeds through later groups (Roberto Fiore’s Terza Posizione, International Third Position, and Forza Nuova, and then Gabriele Adinolfi’s Centro Studi Orientamenti e Ricerca) to Gianluca Iannone and CasaPound Italia. This is one of contemporary Europe’s most important radical right groups. The article reports that in 2018 it had some 230,000 followers on Facebook.

The article’s conclusion is that “all these movements have contributed to the survival and dissemination of typical fascist ideology,” as “there has been a constant evolving of right-wing radical discourse.” I am not sure this really works. How should one conceive of a single “typical fascist ideology” if it has been constantly evolving? In fact, the article shows evolution more than anything else, and also shows that Evola, Rauti, and the Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo were responsible for much of this evolution.

The article argues that Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo was important for its diffusion of Evola’s ideas in Italy and abroad, and through this activity also of a general shift away from “the traditional and national authors of historical Fascism” like Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile to a whole range of new authors, including Evola himself, as well as others from Oswald Spengler and René Guénon to Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Knut Hamsun. All these new authors are reference points for CasaPound today, and also, one might add, for the broader radical right. Evola, Rauti, and the Centro Studi Ordine Nuovo further reoriented the radical right away from “historical Fascism” (and its “stigma”) to the confrontation with modernity and the consequences of the French Revolution, against “the moral decadence deemed as a con¬sequence of the cultural hegemony of the humanitarian, globalist and Marxist left.” And, perhaps most importantly, they reoriented the radical right away from a focus on a narrowly defined nation (state) to “an ideal nation… [that] transcends physical boundaries and includes all people who are loyal to tradition,” and also away from biological racism to culture and thus to today’s Identitarianism.

The article also comments on the “theoretical distinction” often made by scholars between a mainstream or “institutionalized” parliamentary right and a radical or extremist extra-parliamentary right. In Italy, “the distinction is indeed a theoretical and academic one; the very same people continuously went in and out of the [institutionalized] MSI and the contraposition between parliamentary and non-parliamentary activity was never clear-cut.” I suspect that the same is true of most other countries.

An important article, well worth reading.

New collection on Ivan Aguéli

Just published: Anarchist, Artist, Sufi: The Politics, Painting, and Esotericism of Ivan Aguéli, edited by Mark Sedgwick (Bloomsbury). 

14 chapters by 13 scholars, plus English translations of some of Aguéli's own writings. Sections on art (and anarchism) in Paris, Sufism in Cairo, and Traditionalism--influence on René Guénon. and Traditionalist theories of art. 

Chapter 13, "The significance of Ivan Aguéli for the Traditionalist movement," looks directly at Aguéli, Guénon, and later Traditionalists, but the chapters on Aguéli the Sufi will also be of interest to those who are interested in Traditionalism. And the chapters on Aguéli the Anarchist Artist place everything in a wider context.

And as the blurb says, the book shows that "Islam occupied a more central place in modern European intellectual history than is generally realized. [Aguéli's] life reflects several major modern intellectual, political, and cultural trends. This book is an important contribution to understanding how he came to Islam, the values and influences that informed his life, and-ultimately-the role he played in the modern Western reception of Islam."

The table of contents is:

1. Ivan Aguéli: politics, painting and esotericism, Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University, Denmark)

Part I: Ivan Aguéli, the Anarchist Artist
2. Ivan Aguéli's life and work, Viveca Wessel (formerly Moderna Museet, Sweden)
3. Exploring the territories of the avant-garde: Ivan Aguéli and the institutions of his time, Annika Öhrner (Södertörn University, Sweden)
4. Ivan Aguéli the esotericist in reality and fiction, Per Faxneld (Södertörn University, Sweden)
5. Ivan Aguéli's monotheistic landscapes: From perspectival to solar logics, Simon Sorgenfrei (Södertörn University, Sweden)
6. Painting the sacred as an initiatic path: Art and Cubism in the eyes of Ivan Aguéli, Thierry Zarcone (CNRS, Paris, France)
7. “Kill the audience:” Ivan Aguéli's moralistic utopia of anarchism and Islam, Anthony T. Fiscella (Formerly Lund University, Sweden)

Part II: Ivan Aguéli the Sufi
8. Ivan Aguéli's second period in Egypt, 1902–09: The intellectual spheres around Il Convito/Al-Nadi, Paul-André Claudel (University of Nantes, France)
9. Sufi Teachings for pro-Islamic Politics: Ivan Aguéli and Il Convito, Alessandra Marchi (University of Cagliari, Italy)
10. Ivan Aguéli and the legacy of Emir Abdelkader, Iheb Guermazi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
11. Ivan Aguéli's humanist vision: Islam, Sufism and universalism, Meir Hatina (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
12. Feminism and the Divine Feminine: An exploration of female elements in Ivan Aguéli and subsequent Traditionalist thought, Marcia Hermansen (Loyola University, USA)

Part III: Ivan Aguéli and Traditionalism
13. The significance of Ivan Aguéli for the Traditionalist movement, Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University, Denmark)
14. What is esotericism in art? Ivan Aguéli's art versus the Traditionalists' “traditional Art,” Patrick Ringgenberg (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)

Part IV: Writings by Ivan Aguéli
15. Letter from Paris
16. Letter from Ceylon
17. The Enemies of Islam
18. Pure Art
19. Universality in Islam

Bibliography
Index

The book is currently available only in hardback at £85 or $137.60 and on Kindle at £51.11 or $82.80, so get your library to order or it or wait for the paperback. And in the meantime you can read the introduction and bits of some other chapters on Google Books here.

Traditionalism and Islamic esotericism in Italy and in theory

A new issue of Correspondences has three articles of interest, all available open-access online. One deals specifically with the Ahmadiyya Idrisiyya that was established in Italy by Abd al-Wahed Pallavici, and two deal with the meaning of "esotericism" at a theoretical level.

The articles are:

• Francesco Piraino, "Esotericisation and De-esotericisation of Sufism: The Aḥmadiyya-Idrīsiyya Shādhiliyya in Italy."
• Liana Saif, "What is Islamic Esotericism?"
• Mark Sedgwick, "Islamic and Western Esotericism."

Panel on Traditionalism at European Academy of Religion

There will be a panel on "Dynamics of Local and Global Reception of Traditionalism: Reconsidering the Heritage of René Guénon" at the 2019 Conference of the European Academy of Religion, to be held in Bologna, Italy from Monday 4th to Thursday 7th March, 2019.

The panel is on March 7, 16:45-18:45.

Panel abstract:

One of the most influential Philosophers of the 20th century, René Guénon (1886-1951) has left a rich heritage, whose intricate history and ramifications are only beginning to be studied. The aim of this panel is to present some cases of this heritage, insisting on the local factors modeling its reception, as well as on its adaptation to metapolitical and global concerns. Attemptive typologies of the complex reception of Traditionalism will also be proposed and discussed. 

Chair: Ionuţ Daniel Băncilă (University of Erfurt)

Panelists:

• Marco Giardini (Independent Scholar) - The Journal “L´Ultima” and the Reception of René Guénon in Catholic Italy

The journal “L'Ultima” occupies a special place in the landscape of Catholic thought between Second World War and the Second Vatican Council, although it has been surprisingly neglected by the majority of scholars of Church History of History of Religions. Marked by a strong eschatological vocation, it gathered several authors who proposed original interpretations of Catholicism inspired by the “traditionalist” current that was taking shape in the mid-twentieth century around the works of René Guénon. In particular, contributors such as Attilio Mordini (1923-1966) and Silvano Panunzio (1918-2010) wrote a considerable amount of articles in which the main aspects of Christian doctrines re-interpreted in line with the metaphysical and cosmological principles that these authors “discovered” in Eastern traditions through the works of Guénon and his first followers. The paper intends precisely to highlight some aspects of Mordini and Panunzio's writings for “L'Ultima” in order to assess the original aspects of what may be called the first organic reception of Guénon's works within Italian Catholic circles, in a way that reveals a very positive stance to the “traditionalist” current in contrast to various forms of criticism leveled to the French metaphysician in previous decades.

• Ionuţ Daniel Băncilă (University of Erfurt) - A Typology of Romanian Traditionalism

While the reception of R. Guénon in Romania reached its peak in 30es, not one single profile of the intellectuals involved in this process (M. Avramescu, M. Valsan, V. Lovinescu, A. Dumitriu) was like the other. My paper aims to give these and other actors in this complex reception process their proper historical and cultural contextualization, but also to discuss affinities of other individuals and groups with guénonian thinking. Later reception of Guénon through the reading-group established by V. Lovinescu at the end of the 50es and its reactivation under different auspices after the fall of the Communist regime will also be discussed. The individual intellectual profiles marked by the thinking of Guénon are then to be summed up in a tentative typology of his reception in Romania.

• Marco Toti (Independent Scholar) - Metapolitics as Esotericism Through Geopolitics. A. Dugin and C. Mutti’s Eurasian Perspective

This paper aims to focus on the so called “Eurasian perspective”, by way of analyzing some of the most significant topics endorsed by two of its most important spokesmen, the Russian A. Dugin (1962-) and the Italian C. Mutti (1946-): their major sources and essential geopolitical purposes, with special reference to the “heterodoxically metapolitical” rereading of Guénon and Evola, “revised” through a wide spectrum of assorted ideological insertions. In particular, the paper aims to clearly distinguish their perspective from American “apolitical” perennialism (H. Smith, J. Cutsinger). This does not mean that the respective Weltanschauungen could not often converge, although “metapolitical purposes” are irrelevant to the latter. The main point, as we understand it, is the relationship between metapolitics and "pure metaphyscs".

Abd al-Wahid Pallavicini (1926-2017)

Abd al-Wahid Pallavicini, the leading Italian Traditionalist, has just died, aged 91.

Pallavicini was born in 1926 and started his Traditionalist career in 1951 as a member of the Maryamiyya, to which he was introduced by Julius Evola. He then left the Maryamiyya and in 1971 joined the Singapore branch of another Sufi order, the Ahmadiyya Idrisiyya, which he established in Italy during the 1980s. At this time he was deeply involved in interreligious dialogue with various Catholic organizations.

The Italian branch of the Ahmadiyya Idrisiyya prospered, in France as well as in Italy, and became the basis of another organization, Coreis, the Comunità religiosa islamica italiana (Italian Islamic Religious Community), which played an active role in representing Islam to the Italian government. Pallavicini was distinguished by his commitment to the classic Traditionalism of René Guénon and, of course, to Sufism.

He is succeeded by his son, Yahya.

Evola and Tolkein

A new article on how the thought of Julius Evola and J. R. R. Tolkien came together in Italian "Hobbit Camps" in the late 1970s and early 1980s has just been published by John Last. It is "How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism."

As Last shows, there was something of the (lowercase t) traditionalist about Tolkien, both in his dislike of modernity and his interest in ancient myth. This fitted well with the mood of the Italian Right, as did the work of Evola.

It would be interesting to know whether this is just coincidence, or whether there is a deeper connection. What inspired Tolkien, other than the myths he worked wth as a scholar?

New PhD thesis on Arturo Reghini and Italian Traditionalism

Christian Giudice of Gothenburg University has just successfully defended a PhD thesis on "Occultism and Traditionalism: Arturo Reghini and the Antimodern Reaction in Early Twentieth-Century Italy." The thesis is available online here.

Reghini (pictured) is the leading figure in the Italian Traditionalist movement to which Julius Evola at one point belonged, and was in contact with René Guénon during the 1920s, helping Guénon with L'ésotérisme de Dante (The Esoterism of Dante, 1925). He is best known as the author of  "Imperialismo Pagano" (Heathen imperialism), published in 1914 and then republished in 1924, the inspiration for Julius Evola's famous work of the same title. Reghini, however, rejected Guénon's interest in the East and drew instead at the Roman Tradition.

As Giudice shows, the links between Italian Traditionalism and Guénonian Traditionalism go back to 1910, when Guénon was visited in Paris by Reghini's mentor Amedeo Rocco Armentano (1886-1966) and by Giulio Guerrieri (1885-1963), both of the Schola Italica (Italic School), a neo-Pythagorean initiatory order to which Reghini also belonged.

After an introduction, the second chapter of the thesis gives the nineteenth-century background to Italian Traditionalism, including the close association between Italian nationalism and Freemasonry on the one hand and anti-Catholicism on the other hand during the Risorgimento. Chapters three and four cover Reghini's early years, including his encounter with Theosophy and subsequent turn towards the Schola Italica, the Florentine avant-garde, and Freemasonry. Chapter five focuses on Reghini's most important article, "Imperialismo Pagano," a translation of which is provided in an appendix. In this context, "imperialism" refers to a particular understanding of the natural future of the Italian nation: in a sense, imperialismo pagano is really anti-Catholic Italian nationalism. Reghini's article celebrates Dante as well as Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi. It draws on Virgil, Pythagoras, and ancient religion.

Chapters six and seven will be of most interest to readers interested more in Traditionalism in general than in purely Italian Traditionalism. Chapter six covers the early Italian reception of Guénon's work, and especially of his idea of an intellectual elite. It also considers the Guénon-Reghini correspondence (1923-26), including Reghini's contribution to Guénon's L'Éstoerisme de Dante. Chapter seven considers the journal Atanòr, which published Guénon and Evola, and its successor, Ur. It ends with the end of the dream of a Roman imperialism represented by the 1929 Concordat between Mussolini and the Catholic Church. Chapter seven covers the remainder of Reghini's life after this, and chapter eight is  a conclusion.

Giudice's thesis represents an important piece in the jigsaw that is the history of Traditionalism, showing that the Italian Traditionalism that produced Evola was not just a local version of Guénonian Traditionalism, but also had its own very specific origins and characteristics.