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.

Traditionalism, the myth of Hyperborea, and Masculinity

A new article by Christopher E. Forth traces the development of the myth of Hyperborea and its entanglement with Julius Evola’s views on gender. It is “From the far north to the far right: white masculinity and the myth of Hyperborea,” Journal of Gender Studies online first, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2025.2576814.

Forth finds the origins of the Hyperborean myth in Pinder, and proceeds from there to Helena Blavatsky and the Traditionalists, particularly Evola, who added a north-south axis to the more standard east-west axis, associating the northern (and thus Hyperborean) with the male and the southern with the female. This pair is then adopted by Alexander Dugin and the far right in general, joining concern at what Guillaume Faye called “devirilization.”

Forth argues that myths such as this are important for understanding the appeal of the far right to many men, and that standard arguments referencing patriarchy and the loss of male white (material) privilege do not fully explain what is going on. He sides with the “growing number of gender scholars who acknowledge that… many males… seek existential or ‘ontological security’… in the semblance of a meaningful and inhabitable future.” Concerns about “the erosion of traditional structures of identity, community, and meaning – structures that necessarily include gender roles and expectations” may be legitimate, even if the responses offered by the far right are not.

The remainder of the article discusses Hyperborean memes and the issue of whether Hyperborea is real or mythical. Here Forth cites Greg Johnson, who welcomes myths because they offer “a concrete vision, a story of who we are and who we wish to become... Myths can inspire collective action to change the world.”

An interesting article. It raises questions about the relationship between Evola’s understanding of gender as primarily spiritual and contemporary understandings that might be described as “biological determinism.” In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola wrote:

It is not a coincidence for a being to “awaken” to itself in the body of a man or a woman... The physical difference should be viewed as the equivalent of a spiritual difference; hence a being is a man or a woman in a physical way only because a being is either masculine or feminine in a transcendental way; sexual differentiation, far from being an irrelevant factor in relation to the spirit, is the sign that points to a particular vocation and to a distinctive dharma.

Evola’s “particular vocation” and “distinctive dharma” are spiritual, not really what is usually meant today by “gender roles.”

Kathleen Raine, almost a Traditionalist

A new study of the poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) has just been published: Jenny Messenger, Kathleen Raine: Classics and Consciousness (Bloomsbury 2025). This supplements the “authorized biography” by Philippa Bernard, No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine (Shepheard Walwyn 2012). 

Raine was almost a Traditionalist, and it is interesting to explore how she differed from the Traditionalists on whom this blog focuses. She was a perennialist and worked (in her own words) to “reaffirm the Perennial Philosophy which, like an underground river, has flowed through all civilizations and all ages, and wherever it sends up springs and fountains, Beauty and Wisdom have flowered.” She was well versed in the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, and in Messenger’s view built on their work, though it is not explained quite how. She also worked with individual Traditionalists in England. Her Temenos journal (now the Temenos Academy Review) was established with the help of Keith Critchlow, Brian Keeble and Philip Sherrard, all of whom were probably Maryamis. Speakers at her Temenos Academy have included many Traditionalists. Raine also disliked the modern world, and—like many but not all Traditionalists—was a scholar who was somewhat on the margins of the mainstream, since she insisted that the important thing about ancient texts was their meaning for people today, more than their place in the historical context.

Several things make Raine different, however. One is that although she disliked the modern world, she did not systematically attack it or develop a theoretical basis for condemning it. Another is that she admired and studied two (relatively) modern figures, William Blake and W. B. Yeats. Then come her ancient sources: Plato and the Neoplatonists, who the Traditionalists have generally ignored—wrongly, in my view, since the Sufi philosophy that Traditionalists have studied with such attention contains much that is derived from Neoplatonism. As Messenger puts it,

She did not view eastern religions and philosophies as entirely hers, however. Hinduism and Buddhism were not her culture or tradition, she felt. Plato and Plotinus, enfolded within the grand arc of Western civilization, were – despite the fact that the Neoplatonists were not at all ‘western’ and instead were from places like Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

Finally, Raine was a woman, which—for some reason I have never understand—none of the major figures in the Traditionalist movement have been.

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.