Ok, I haven't written an essay in years. I own that the writing may be improved, and I need to read some of the name's mentioned more deeply.
I wanted to push the transcendental, ontological, metaphysical and spiritual aspects of Evola's work. I think it's something that men really need to get a hold of.
A Love Letter to the Absolute, a Death Notice to Modernity.
Tradition, Metaphysical Idealism, Esoterica, Action - A Path From The Fall Of Modern Man’s Soul Toward The Infinite, in Julius Evola’s ‘Ride The Tiger’.
‘No negation of God is possible: to negate or doubt God would be to negate or doubt oneself’ - Julius Evola, ‘Ride the Tiger’.
Corresponding to the level of consciousness with which one reads Julius Evola’s ‘Ride the Tiger’, one may feel moved to pursue any number of reactions. Anger at the dissolution of the modern age; an innate desire to rebel, philosophical discussion of many doctrines on existence. All of these are valiant choices. At the very worst, one will make a complete dismissal of his work. This final group can, in this writer’s opinion, burn whilst falling to the depths of our surrounding modern ocean, too stupid to heed the incredulous, astounding, beautifully offered life-raft which is ‘Ride the Tiger’. For the very best, an initiation will soon begin, embodied phenomenologically and Absolutely. There will be a change in every aspect of your thought, consciousness and paradigm. For the fortunate, Evola will kill all those latter things like rabbits. More than ‘riding the tiger’, you will find death and rebirth.
This essay will explore Evola’s themes of Tradition and Metaphysical Absolute Idealism, Esoterica, reliance on action, and the opening to an internal power far beyond anything offered in the modern world of today, as solution to the degeneracy of modernity. It will explore how lack of Tradition, Absolute Idealism, Traditional Doctrine and initiatic paths has resulted in the decay and destruction of modern man within modern society. This is a world with no meaning. The Writer will Explore some of Evola’s challenges to Rene Guenon.
As Evola himself declares, this is not a work for the ordinary man. The modern man ‘"sucked" into ordinary existence without any awareness of the fact, without noticing the automatic or "somnambulistic" character that this existence has.’ Pulled into the whim of illusionary lure of the modern world, with all it’s false hopes of ‘progression’, materialism, rationalism, individuality, and it’s worst; liberalism. A world of degeneracy, and in the final stages of the ‘Kali Yuga’. That man is not needed here.
Here a definition of Modernism is needed; ‘Modernism refers to a reforming movement in art, architecture, music, literature and the applied arts during the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. Modernism was essentially conceived of as a rebellion against 19th Century academic and historicist traditions and against Victorian nationalism and cultural absolutism, on the grounds that the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life (in a modern industrialized world) were becoming outdated. The movement was initially called "avant-garde", descriptive of its attempt to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo. The term "modernism" itself is derived from the Latin "modo", meaning "just now".
With this rebellion against Tradition and Metaphysical Idealism, it is important to drive home the causal diseases impregnated into society, of which symptoms have been sold to us as rewards. Modernism has given birth to Individualism. ‘Individualism is a moral, political or social outlook that stresses human independence and the importance of individual self-reliance and liberty. It opposes most external interference with an individual's choices, whether by society, the state or any other group or institution (collectivism or statism), and it also opposed to the view that tradition, religion or any other form of external moral standard should be used to limit an individual's choice of actions.
The modern world has also succumbed to the cancer of Liberalism. ‘’Liberalism includes a broad spectrum of political philosophies that consider individual liberty to be the most important political goal, and emphasize individual rights and equality of opportunity. Although most Liberals would claim that a government is necessary to protect rights, different forms of Liberalism may propose very different policies (see the section on Types of Liberalism below). They are, however, generally united by their support for a number of principles, including extensive freedom of thought and freedom of speech, limitations on the power of governments’.
You were sold a lie. There was an evil done at the turn of modernity, with the killing of Tradition. Men without guns, swords or ships, and in the name of progression stole your lifeblood and threw you to dog-like rabid teeth of the modern, individualized, liberal ‘free’ world, slowly gnawing and digesting every part of your vitality. Like a fucking drug addict who steals your wallet then helps you look for it. While your soul existed before you had a face, the weapons were set-up and turned toward you. The teeth sunk in in the forms of technology, pornography, social media, meaningless work, industry, materialism, degenerate levels of communication.
Evola explains that we are ‘in an environment that is utterly different socially, psychically, intellectually, and materially; a climate of general dissolution; a system ruled by scarcely restrained disorder, and anyway lacking any legitimacy from above. Thence come the specific problems that I intend to treat here’.
If your levels of denial, rationalism and dissociation allow you to refute these circumstances, congratulations. You will fall to your knees as quickly as the vapid women Evola describes as ‘jellyfish’. Denial and the like are a female’s game. Unfortunately you can’t feel your way out of the state of things. Surrender. Surrender to win. Fortunately and hopefully the majority of so-called ‘men’ this age has produced will spurn the words of Evola and pass away with the futile meaning modernity has imprinted on them. Or lack thereof. Such as will be the lack of details rightfully missing on the metaphorical tombstone of this insignificant epoch.
In defining of Tradition, it is worth emphasizing that Evola does not mean bourgeois society. Bourgeois, with its moralistic codes and standards simply replaced Theism in being a set of projected moral standards imposed on the masses. This has been alluded to, but Theism and enforced moral conduct will be discussed in due course.
On the bourgeois, Evola writes ‘’Even now, especially in Western Europe, there are habits, institutions, and customs from the world of yesterday (that is, from the bourgeois world) that have a certain persistence. In fact, when crisis is mentioned today, what is meant is precisely the bourgeois world: it is the bases of bourgeois civilization and society that suffer these crises and are struck by dissolution. This is not what I call the world of Tradition’.
As for the important world of tradition which modernism rejected, Evola writes ‘I use the word tradition by a special sense, which I have defined elsewhere. It differs from the common usage, but is close to the meaning given to it by Rene Guenon by his analysis of the crisis of the modern world. By this particular meaning, a civilization or a society is "traditional" when it is ruled by principles that transcend what is merely human and individual, and when all its sectors are formed and ordered from above, and directed to what is above. Beyond the variety of historical forms, there has existed an essentially identical and constant world of Tradition’.
Tradition may be also defined as ‘a philosophical and theological doctrine, disseminated through parts of Europe of the 19th century, according to which the principal truths of a metaphysical and moral nature can be attained by man through God's revelation alone. According to traditionalism, human reason by itself is not capable of coming to these truths; it needs external instruction—in the last resort, divine revelation. God must teach man not only supernatural truths but also the natural truths of His existence, the immortality of the soul, the moral law, the nature of authority, and the concept of being. God's revelation is diffused among men by tradition, that is, by oral and social instruction’.
Put off by the ‘God’ reference? Then turn back now. Though, it is impossible to turn back from yourself. As is so emphatically layered through Ride the Tiger, this is what modernity has wanted you to do. Turn back from the power that is Self.
As Evola quotes Nietzsche ‘God is dead’. A dissolution through Theism towards the total denouncement of God is our death, cloaked in the robe of liberty. He quotes Dostoyevsky; ‘if God does not exist, everything is permitted’.
Everything has been permitted. Liberalism has lulled you into being whatever you want to be. Fat, lazy, physically, mentally and emotionally weak, fearful, subservient men proudly uphold their liberties. They lost the art of thought, philosophy, and moulding mind around our Divine intelligence. Men who add nothing to the strength of a collective. Masculinity is redefined or deemed ‘toxic’. In fear, they renounce misogyny and patriarchy. We have lost connection with Divine Apollonian, as scholar Camille Paglia writes ‘"The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.
These men care what everybody thinks. They read cushy self-help books which stress self-acceptance, platitudes, bromides and affirmations. It’s all they have. Fluffy and hollow mantras which sooth the senses. A total death knell. Nobody cries for you. Nobody cares. Left alone with our liberties always will we turn them into shovels and begin to dig. Fuck you and your liberties, you do not deserve to do whatever you want.
From Evola; ‘The phrase (God is dead) expresses "unbelief turned to daily reality," a desacralization of existence and a total rift with the world of Tradition that, beginning by the West at about the period of the Renaissance and humanism….Man, at a given moment, wanted to "be free." He was allowed to be so, and he was allowed to throw the chains that did not bind him so much as sustain him. Thereupon he was allowed to suffer all the consequences of his liberation, following ineluctably up to his present state which "God is dead" and existence becomes the field of absurdity where everything is possible and everything is allowed.
Without the connection to our true nature as part of Divinity, from a centralized structure pointed above, we lack the order and Divine laws, spirituality and intelligence which guide society from above. We lack initiatic paths. We lack discipline, toil and a dedicated path toward Absolute masculine power.
We become the ‘empty ghosts’. ‘Liberty’ and Individualism was freedom from what holds our place in the world. We search aimlessly for meaning. Dualism became a sort of Monotheism where what we buy becomes our God. Liberalism largely handed down our rules of social conduct, in much the style of Theistic Religion. Capitalism saw us sent to jobs many hate, cogs in a system. But we have lighting fast internet to sooth us. We consume, we eat, and we buy. We have false idols on Instagram and Facebook. We compare, we lack and we die. In a Jungian sense, the ‘persona archetype’ struggles to piece together a mask through which our ego can interact with the world. We are thrown everything in mass media culture in 5g speed. We end up on Reddit Red Pill looking for scripts, because bourgeois Liberalism handed down so many social restrictions, castrating masculine behaviour. Feminism was allowed to run free. Our ego is hypnotized to forget The Absolute which we are, and we are trained like Pavlov’s dog. It is no wonder why this epoch is littered with anxiety, depression, suicide and a multitude of disorders.
In recent times we went to war. Now we silently surrendered whilst the modern world built a graveyard around us. What meme or fucking emoji will adorn your grave?
Evola captures the tumbling loss begun with the fall of Metaphysical Idealism; ‘For some time, a good part of Western humanity has considered it a natural thing for existence to lack any real meaning, and for it not to be ordered by any higher principle, arranging their lives by the most bearable and least disagreeable way they can. Of course this has its counterpart and inevitable consequence by an inner life that is more and more reduced, formless, feeble, and elusive, and by a growing dissolution of any uprightness and character. Another aspect of the same process is a regime of compensations and anesthetics that is no less deceptive for not being recognized as such’.
‘Existence is reduced to itself in its naked reality, without any reference point outside itself that could give it a real meaning for man,’ writes Evola. Most of modernity’s ‘progressions’ are in fact regressions. Most of what is deemed as having substance has no essence. ‘That is the nihilistic phase in the proper sense, whose chief theme is the sense of the absurdity, the pure irrationality of the human condition’. Modern Man is Nietzsche’s ‘last man’ and slave. Everything the modern world was built on becomes meaningless. Total nihilism.
If by any measure you feel on the outer looking in at the decay, detached and with a drive for Transcendence, you may be the man for whom Evola provides Absolute solutions. He describes you as a man that ‘feels himself, in essence, as belonging to a different race from the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries’. You may be an initiate. In the themes of Mircea Eliade, we may undertake our own ‘eternal return’. You may be the man Evola wrote to in ‘This is precisely the type of man that the present book has in mind. To him applies the saying of a great precursor: "The desert encroaches. Woe to him whose desert is within!" Evola wants us to ‘transcend’ a world too far lost from its metaphysical roots to be saved
What are Evola’s solutions? How to transcend? Towards what doctrine may we turn? He systematically dissects and rejects some modern philosopher’s doctrines for us, citing their lack of the Absolute source of Transcendence. These men did not subscribe to Metaphysical Absolute Idealism.
He cancels out Nietzsche’s naturalism, however valiant his effort. He sees in Nietzsche shades of the passion and vitality needed. However, for Nietzsche ‘God is dead’, which leaves him to self-reference. He makes his own laws. Evola shows that without a transcendent anchor in the Divine he is doomed to fail. Nietzsche waged a war in spite of God. In effect, he waged war in spite of himself. A raging effort to find himself, without the strength of his Self. A possible set-up for his descent into madness, being his stern declaration of the death of God. If only he had looked through and up. Sad that a society so lacking in Divinity obscured a possibly saving path for such a mind.
Existentialism is dismissed by Evola, also on Divine Terms. Reading Sartre’s attempts to find a solution is painfully absurd in his self-defeating inability to become one with an Absolute he appears to comprehend. Instead he remains dis-empowered in his freedom of choice, which he never uses to choose a return to Self.
Heidegger simply seems lost, trying to find a meaningful way to live through exploring mundane concepts such as Deisan. I feel it’s one of the most underwhelming philosophical concepts of the age.
Evola is quick to put aside a theistic hypothesis of a Divine Godhead. A God separate from the world, steeped in moralistic projections, one where devotion and sacrament are the follower’s major practice. He critiques Christian religious Theism as a contribution to the current state of things. In his words it belongs to ’the "all too human… because it does not possess an "esotericism," an inner teaching of a metaphysical character beyond the truths and dogmas of the faith offered to the common people."
Powerfully and necessary, in this seminal work Evola exposes a timeless path towards transcendence. For a man, possessing a certain strength, insight and infinitely sourced Divine intelligence, will have his being pulse at what is laid before him. This writer would almost say ‘secret’ path, but it is too disgusting to admit Evola’s solutions would be secret to the masses. The masses who will throw this work aside in the pull towards screens, pornography and self sacrifice. The irony is, in a sense Evola alludes to, modern men dismissing the central solutions of Evola means they dismiss their Self.
These are dangerous times. We must follow the path of Tradition, guided by the metaphysical Divine within, without resting on any outside support. Traditional outside supports are dissolved with the modern world. Evola explains, ‘the support that the Tradition can continue to give does not refer to positive structures, regular and recognized by some civilization already formed by it, but rather to that doctrine that contains its principles by their superior, preformal state, anterior to the particular historical formulations: a state that the past had pertinence to the masses, but had the character of an esoteric doctrine’.
In ‘Path of Cinnabar’, Evola explained his methodology in ‘Ride the Tiger’; ‘I referred to traditional doctrines when examining the prospect of 'riding the tiger', it is the 'inner doctrines' of Tradition that I examined: those doctrines that, in traditional civilizations, were usually known to a privileged minority alone’.
His is the desire to follow traditional doctrines which lead to a deeper, direct, powerful and eternal truth. The Divine experience we were robbed of. Robbed of the Divinity which structures man. The truth that we ARE God.
In the writer’s opinion, Evola calls for a return to Metaphysical Absolute Idealism. Plato’s theory of forms alludes to this. The world is but shadows of an eternal realm, limitless in its perfection.
Objective Idealism is vital to mention as a contributing school of thought to Absolute Idealism. The view that ‘world "out there" is in fact Mind communicating with our human minds. It postulates that there is only one perceiver and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived’.
Objective Idealist Friedrich Schelling’s doctrine explains ‘that there is no such thing as matter in the materialist sense, and that spirit is the essence and whole of reality. However, he argued that there is a perfect parallel between the world of nature and the structure of our awareness of it. Although, this cannot be true of an individual ego, it can be true of an absolute consciousness. He also objected to the idea that God is separate from the world, arguing that reality is a single, absolute, all-inclusive mind’.
According to Objective Idealism ‘the Absolute is all of reality: no time, space, relation or event ever exists or occurs outside of it. As the Absolute also contains all possibilities in itself, it is not static, but constantly changing and progressing. Human beings, planets and even galaxies are not separate beings, but part of something larger, similar to the relation of cells or organs to the whole body.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel contributed to Objective Idealism and is considered the formulator of Absolute Idealism. Hegel ‘started from Kant's position that the mind can not know "things-in-themselves", and asserted that what becomes the real is "Geist" (mind, spirit or soul), which he sees as developing through history, each period having a "Zeitgeist" (spirit of the age). He also held that each person's individual consciousness or mind is really part of the Absolute Mind (even if the individual does not realize this), and he argued that if we understood that we were part of a greater consciousness we would not be so concerned with our individual freedom, and we would agree with to act rationally in a way that did not follow our individual caprice, thereby achieving self-fulfilment’.
The writer is aware that Julius Evola rejected some of Hegel’s philosophy, especially in regard to the process of history. However, through Ride the Tiger Evola alludes to many ways his ‘certain kind of man’ can draw transcendence from an Absolute Idealist philosophy.
The idea that man exists in the mind of the Absolute. That spirit exists in and through us. We are connected to The Absolute and an ontological ‘rupturing’ is needed. "Spirit is the life that cuts through life".
Evola refers to the Absolute spirit pervading everything; ‘Zarathustra i? fact announces nothing new when he says: ''Everything that becomes seems to me divine dance and divine whim, and the liberated world returns to itself". It is the same idea that Hinduism casts i? the well-known symbol ?f the dance and play ?f the naked god Shiva. As another example, we might recall the doctrine ?f the transcendent identity ?f samsara (the world of becoming) with nirvana (the unconditioned), that ultimate peak of esoteric wisdom’.
‘The ''other world" attacked by European nihilism, presented by the latter as sheer illusion or condemned as an evasion, is not another reality; it is another dimension of reality i? which the real, without being negated, acquires an absolute significance i? the inconceivable nakedness of pure Being’.
He accepts no traditional ‘dualist’ approach. He never mentions a doctrine which states two realities; one of the spiritual and one of the physical. Of which dualist philosophers claim we are part of the latter. Not divided from the Absolute, but instead firmly part of it; ‘Now, the conception of a god in different terms is not ??ly possible but essential within all the great traditions before and beside Christianity, and the principle of nonduality is also evident in them. These other traditions recognized as the ultimate foundation of the universe a principle anterior and superior to all antitheses’.
In a previously lost interview, Evola was asked the difference between his and Guenon’s approach to traditionalism. Evola says Guenon is an intellectual. That he prefers the Priestly caste of past societies. Evola says Guenon ‘emphasizes the role of contemplation and knowledge’. While he doesn’t discount knowledge, Evola says he emphasises the Warrior caste. He is focused on action.
In ‘The Path of Cinnabar’, Evola also criticized Guenon’s desire for exoteric norms; ‘Guénon had argued that superior forms of knowledge ought not be pursued on a level removed from the general norms established by a positive tradition ('exotericism') - less still in opposition to, and in revolt against such norms. The two spheres - the exoteric sphere and the esoteric - Guénon suggested, ought to be complementary: so that an individual who is incapable of following 'exoteric' norms aimed at investing life with order and sacredness ought not attempt to pursue a higher path’.
However, Evola challenged Guenon in the same work; ‘the basic premise of Ride the Tiger, however, was precisely my realistic acknowledgement of the fact that it is impossible to follow such exoteric norms in the present day: for no positive, meaningful and truly legitimate institutions exist to provide a support for the individual. A 'consecration', therefore, of external, active life today can only derive from a free and genuine inner drive towards transcendence, rather than from given moral or religious norms’.
To the world of action, Evola refers our man to initiation. To a true spiritual, ontological rupture. His description of this bares shades of a Shamanistic ‘Death and Rebirth’, a ‘dark night of the soul’. The Shamans believe spirit chooses man for this when he is ready to ascend and gain healing abilities.
‘It depends on this last trial to resolve, or not to resolve, the problem of the ultimate meaning of existence in an ambience lacking any support or "sign." After the whole superstructure has been rejected or destroyed, and having for one's sole support one's own being, the ultimate meaning of existing and living can spring only from ? direct and absolute relationship between that being (between what one is in a limiting sense) and transcendence (transcendence in itself).’
A complete death of ego and the death of those internal structures a man thought he needed to survive. Carl Jung referred to this as a man going inward. Inward to connect to a life force beyond himself’’.
‘In less qualified types, in those in which the original inheritance, as ? called it, is not sufficiently alive existentially, this trial almost always requires a certain "sacrificial" disposition: such a man has to feel ready to be destroyed.’
This is initiation. This is the ‘the action of beginning something’. Fortunately, Evola says this is possible for the man of today. ‘The other cases concern an "acquired dignity." The second case is the possibility of the power in question appearing in cases of profound crises, spiritual traumas, or desperate actions, with the consequence of a violent breakthrough of the existential and ontological plane. Here it is possible that the person is not wrecked, he may be led to participate in that force, even without his having held it consciously as a goal’.
It is here Evola’s words resonate with my personal experiences. I experienced a Shamanistic ‘death and rebirth’ four years ago. An experience over two months I cannot explain to the average reader. Of such pain, physical brokenness and mental anguish. Daily, I would feel my body wanting to float from the earth, and an inability to ground. There was a mystical, other-worldly dimension to the physical world. As if in the world of spirits. I planned suicide for six weeks. I felt a literal shedding of every egoist belief and attachment to what I thought I needed to be. It was stepping out slowly with a connection to something else. In Shamanic initiations no normal worldly medicine helps, and restoration is miraculous. I visited doctors, psychiatrists and spoke of my desire to leave this life. Weeks later I was healed. I don’t speak to people of the experience, because I can’t put it into words. Shamanistic people are put through pains of a thousand people, so we can be called to heal. I am shamanistic by nature, drawn to healing others and pushing men to rise. The traditional paths are almost impossible to find in the modern western world, so I am forced to be shamanistic, but not a shaman. I do not have an elder to take me through the years of full initiation. Evola has inspired me to have the inner resolve to forge my own path based on tradition.
There is an essence to the Divine that is beyond words. Evola’s work speaks to me, and I am filled with emotion when I read him. Through forms of meditation, I drift into the limitless, infinite feeling of The Absolute. My entire body pulses with short heaves of ecstasy. My entire spirit feels like it is ripping from my body and the pull into infinity is so beautiful and beyond words. When I am connected, it sits in the base of my pineal like a warm blanket.
Evola’s words are true. As he reports a Buddhist master saying in ‘The Doctrine of Awakening’, they do not care for opinions or over-thinking. The ancient Buddhists believed that when you know, you know.
In his lost interview, Evola alluded to their being different ways to achieve transcendence. He wrote ‘The Hermetic Tradition: Secrets and Symbols’ as an initiatic beginning of the ‘wet’ path. The path he saw most resonate of the western spirit. ‘Doctrine of Awakening’ is his introduction to the ‘dry’ path. The wet is toward seeing yourself as Divine and all things being a part of you. The dry path is systematic order, seeing the Divine in everything. Evola so generously introduces the differentiated man to different doctrines. It is a matter of finding what suits your disposition. Both paths lead to gnosis, esoterics and transcendence, and there are streaks of wet and dry through ‘Ride the Tiger’. Read, lift, write, and whatever you do, choose a fucking path.