Julius Evola- The Sufi of Rome

by Frank Gelli

  He did, however, approve of the English educational system: ‘The English public schools train the elites of England. Their empire is run by ex-public school boys. The English have a saying: “The battle of Waterloo was first won on the playing fields of Eton.” Eton is their top boarding school. The Duke had been a student there. The idea that he learnt how to be a leader at Eton. It is a tough system, one that forms the boy’s character. Just imagine, a bunch of school boys running a huge country like India! If I had had a son, I think I would have sent him to Eton.”

  That was a rare reference to the possibility of his having had children. He had deliberately refused marriage and physical procreation as lower vocations. Though no celibate, he had no offspring. (Later I was to learn more about that.) Did he ever regret that? Deep down, perhaps. I sometimes liked to imagine I was his son – or that he considered me like a son in a spiritual sense. I, the son he never had. A fantasy? Probably, but what is wrong with that? Of course, he did not remember me in his will, nor did I expect him to. The relationship between us, our talks were hush-hush. His expressed order, Pythagoras-fashion, was that I should tell no one, not even my parents. Until now I kept the secret. If I break my promise it is because I think it is right. I believe that what I have to say will cast a novel, better light on him. Anyway, if he left me nothing, his books, for example, which I much coveted, that was very much like him... And, if in any way he felt I was like a son to him, he would not have wanted anyone to know it, I am sure.

  ‘The Stuart kings had some redeeming features but the Hanoverians...George I was a Guelph. He came from that rotten branch historically opposed to the Ghibellines, the imperial party. The Guelphs had been fanatically papalists till the Reformation, when they switched to Protestantism but the spirit was basically the same. A dynasty dedicated to destroying the imperial ideal. The British Royal family descends from them. Modern Britain has truly lived up to its subversive heritage...It has always opposed the forces of Transcendence...But now, the empire over, the chickens have come home to roost. The law of karma, I am tempted to call it...’

  He praised, however, the way the British had set apart some races and ethnic groups in India and instilled in them the notion that they were martial races. People like the Sikhs and the Rajputs. ‘The Rajputs! Great fighters. They descended from the warrior caste of Aryan India, the kshatryas. Some left-wing writers disagree, they say it is an invention, but it does not matter. Whether historically true or not, it is irrelevant. They understood themselves that way and fought accordingly. No one can deny their ethos was martial. The British, an empire-building race, could spot that. I could have been a Rajput!’

  There was a place in England he would have much wanted to see. That was Stonehenge. He confessed that while speaking about the great Arthurian saga. His excellent book, The Mystery of the Grail, contains a reference to the giant stones of that celebrated prehistoric site. ‘It was a solar temple but before that I believe Stonehenge initially was dedicated to a lunar, female, matriarchal cult. Later the men took over and the female votaries were driven underground...’

  His discussion of the Grail tradition is valuable but unfortunately it is flawed. His pervasive anti-Christian worldview entailed that he systematically dismissed as spurious any distinctive Christian elements in the Arthurian cycle. I of course could not have questioned that at the time. Only much later, after I visited places like Stonehenge, Tintagel and, above all, Glastonbury, and after delving into the literature, I became critical of Evola’s one-sided interpretation. But, scholarly debates aside, what really made a difference was not argument but an experience. One summer day in Glastonbury, walking amongst the ruins of the ancient Benedictine Abbey, I felt a spiritual surge, such a phenomenal “high” that it convinced me that King Arthur was indeed connected with the place. The famous tree, putatively descended from the sprig Joseph of Arimathea brought from the Holy Land, was suddenly bathed in a supernal light. Even the trivial tourists around – a noisy, food-chomping bunch – seemed to me like the reincarnations of pious pilgrims from the ages of faith. Angels hovered about... Must stop here. You cannot try to describe the indescribable. Was Evola still alive, I am sure he would agree, though perhaps still determined to run down Christianity. (I like to visualise him, like Farinata degli Uberti in Dante’s Inferno, still stiff, proud and disdainful, whatever his actual fate may be in the invisible world.) Anyhow, my exaltation led me to attend Mass in a church nearby. During the raising of the Host, I saw – or I thought I saw - the Grail, in all its unendurable splendour. Dare I say it? I understood what St Teresa of Avila said she felt in the transverberation...But here words fall short. Whereby one cannot speak....silence is best.

  There is only one other place in the world where I felt a high, an inner glow comparable to what I experienced at Glastonbury. That is Mashad, in Iran. Out of twelve Imams of the Shia, Imam Reza is the only one whose tomb is on Iranian soil. In Khorassan, Eastern Iran. Evola has mentioned it once, speaking of a fun book by Robert Byron, The Road To Oxiana, which gives a description of the shrine. Ever since I had wanted to see it with my own eyes. At last, in 2009, exploring the ‘lone Khorassanian shore’, I entered the shrine of the Imam. Glastonbury Abbey is solitary and melancholy in its ruined state, but Mashad is alive, teeming with pilgrims from all over Iran. The haram, the sacred precinct in which Imam Reza rests, was being mobbed by the faithful. They prayed aloud, they kissed the ground, they cried, they beat their breasts, they were in ecstasy. After a bit of a struggle I managed to touch the sarcophagus with the Imam’s body. I felt...the equivalent of an electric shock but then it was not like that. I fell down to my knees, my eyes streaming with tears. It was as if the Imam and I were one. Then I espied another figure – like an Imam behind the Imam – was it a glimpse of the Hidden Imam, Imam al-Mahdi? The awaited Islamic redeemer? That could hardly be possible...Then the light dawned upon the whole.

  THE MAGICIAN

  It took me some time to muster up the courage to bring up another subject that bothered me about his reputation. I mean about the vexed matter of magic, of his alleged occult powers. This is no joke, because even Mussolini had been fearful of him on that score. Stories circulating about Evola were the stuff of legend. He had, they say, the power of making women falling in love with him. As a young rake, beautiful women of all classes - writers, poetesses, debutantes, housemaids and prostitutes - they had all fallen into his lap. In numbers large enough to make a Casanova jealous. And there was a rumour widespread among the Solstice boys as to how the 1945 Allied bombing of Vienna had resulted in the Baron losing the use of his legs. At the time, the story went, he had been engaged on performing a magical ceremony aimed at defeating the advance of the Red Army. However, the procedure for the ritual had not been correctly followed – the wrong Spirit had been summoned – and catastrophe had befallen the magus.

  Laughable stuff. We did not believe it, of course. It was a bit of joke. Was it all simply a matter of superstition, the familiar tendency of so many Italians to believe in iettatura? The idea of the evil eye, a malevolent influence some peculiar individuals are thought to possess. Ridiculous though it may seem, even a sober philosopher like Benedetto Croce had not ruled that out: “I don’t believe in it but there is no harm in doing the exorcism!” he once quipped. The philosopher had followed that up by making the well-known superstitious sign for le corna. That means thrusting out the first and the little finger of a hand, forming a kind of fork, to ward off the evil spirits. Although we scoffed at it, the belief was not entirely dismissed. We went as far as to avoid taking the Master’s name in vain. We usually referred to him indirectly. Call it a coincidence, but one of the few times I unguardedly dropped Evola’s name casually over the phone, shortly afterwards in the Via Nazionale I nearly got run over by a speeding car!

  I did not ask him straight: ‘Is it true you are a magus?’ It would have felt preposterous. Instead, I sought to lure him into discussing the subject. It was on a sultry, stifling sum
mer day. I told him that while on holiday in Paris I had read Somerset Maugham’s novel, The Magician. Based on the person of the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley. Of course, I knew what he had mentioned Crowley in his books. There he had credited him with being a real initiate, one endowed with true magical powers. I was stunned, therefore, when he came up with something very different: ‘I have not read Maugham but I know about Crowley. He was not a genuine magus...More likely, a clever trickster. Had he been authentic, he would never have fathered children. It is incompatible...physical fatherhood and initiation do not go together. When in Sicily, in the town of Cefalu’, Crawley set up a group of so-called Satanists....They were idiots...He was a showman, a ham actor, a pseudo-D’Annunzio...Too many took him seriously...why do so many people automatically trust an Englishman? That race takes undue credit for trustworthiness but shiftiness is more to the point. True centres of spiritual initiation in England are rare – their whole famed Empire was a counting house, it says a lot. Accountants running an Empire! I don’t think Crowley was not in touch with any true mystical centre. A certain Arab sheikh in his coterie possibly may have played some role but it is unclear... If anything, it is likely Crowley was a spy. His contacts with British intelligence during the war are well-documented. Occultism was a cover. His tricks bowled over gullible people and so they gave him an undeserved reputation as a magician. He was a joke. Leave him alone. Not worth the trouble...’

  ‘The one thing I do like about Crowley, though, is that he was a passionate alpinist. He was into high peaks, mighty mountains...that is something we had in common. Despite everything, it argues for something noble in his soul. It was his redeeming feature.’

  I was dying to ask him how he could so flagrantly contradict the opinions he had expressed in writing about Crowley but I could not do it. Instead, I told him that after reading The Magician late into the night in my Paris hotel I had fallen asleep, the book on my lap. Then I had woken up with a start. Something was frantically hopping across my chest. Quite frightened, I reached for the light switch. It was a large black cat. He had got in through the open window. Might the feline have been Crowley reincarnated, perhaps?

  He grinned: ‘Not a chance! If Crowley reincarnated in anything, it would not be something as nice as a cat. More likely, it would be a rat or a weasel. I think your cat must have been looking for company, they are sociable creatures – I hope you did not scare him!’ So, Evola did have a sense of humour, after all.

  ‘Cats are good animals in Islam, not unclean, so it is all right to keep them as domestic pets, unlike dogs’, he said. ‘There is a hadith that a cat once woke up the Prophet in time for prayer. Wonderful story, don’t you think? And another hadith about a woman who had imprisoned and ill-treated a cat, until the creature died. For that, she was sent to Hellfire. It is true that someone objected to this hadith, on the ground that a human being is more valuable than a cat but the hadith is sound, I believe.’ After that, he embarked on a disquisition about the method of verification of hadith in Muslim scholarship. Not something I could grasp at the time but, in hindsight, evidence of how much he knew about the Islamic faith. More than just as a student, I would say, but as an insider.

  ‘Dogs too are not neglected in the law of Islam. Although they are ritually unclean, not right to have them in the house, they can be kept as watchdogs. Some hadith mention people acquiring merit for giving water to a thirsty dog. The Prophet praised even a prostitute for that. But the most important dog in the Qur’an is Qatmir, the faithful dog of the Sleepers. Believing youths whom God had caused to fall asleep to protect them from persecution. A dog stretches out his paws before the entrance of the cave and hides them from their enemies. That dog is justly commended.’

  I said I had been reading Wittgenstein’s short essay, Reflections on Fraser’s Golden Bough. He had not read the philosopher’s work it but knew Fraser’s book well. When I told him that Wittgenstein had taken apart Fraser’s idea of magic as resulting from supposed, crude ignorance of causal relations, his eyes lit up. ‘Bravo! You know, I don’t care for your Wittgenstein’s linguistic lucubrations but, from what you say, he was spot on. Fraser was learned but limited. When it comes to understanding magic, the cleverest people can be very stupid indeed. Whatever magic may be, it is not about crude physical causality. Your Wittgenstein got that absolutely right.’

  ‘Actually, magic is there in the Catholic Mass. You can analyse that central rite of Catholicism as a system of incantations. The priest’s words and movements in the Tridentine Missal are as carefully structured as the actions described in magic rituals. And the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at the words of consecration spoken by the priest – what are they if not the culmination of a magic procedure? I know, Catholic theologians stress the distinction between manipulating the Divine, forcing God to do things for them, twisting his arm, and the Mass but it is a fine distinction. ..Those who dismiss magic have to explain why in essence the Mass does not boil down to the same thing.’

  In his books, Crowley appears in connection with the notorious way of the left hand. That is an expression I always found fascinating but also a bit opaque and sinister. He was quite willing to discourse about it. What he said at first, however, did not differ from what I had already read. There are two ways or methods into transcendence. They relate to three distinct characters of the Supreme Identity. The first two conceive the Divine under its twin aspects of Creator and Sustainer, or Preserver of the world. Together, they form the way of the right hand. The destructive element in the Divine, however, constitutes the way of the left hand. It is through the Destroyer that the left hand finds its way into life, into the world. Especially in connection with sexuality. Eros’ potentialities can be transfiguring but also ruinous, destructive. They operate at all levels, ethical as well as material. Evola explained: ‘These doctrines arise from the Hindu school of Tantrism but you can find a counterpart in Christianity. The Father is the Creator, the Son the Preserver and the Holy Spirit...’ ‘Surely not a destroyer?’ I butted in - he was used to my occasional interruptions and did not mind: ‘If you study the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers, I mean, if you read them esoterically, you will discover the Holy Spirit acts in ways not at all conventional. The writer of the gnostic Gospel of the Egyptians says that the Flood that wiped out erring humanity was the work of the Holy Spirit. St Augustine suggested that it was God’s Spirit who told Samson to bring down the Temple of the Philistines. That was tantamount to ordering Samson to self-destruct. Something directly opposed to the teaching of the Church. Yet Samson is praised as a type, a hint given beforehand, of Christ. You can read the effects of the descent of the Spirit on Jesus’ disciples at Pentecost described in the Acts of the Apostles. They are so wild that the bystanders thought the disciples were drunk. The Gospel of St John has a telling verse – “The Spirit blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” An allusion to the disrupting results of the way of the left hand. And you must know that Muslims believe that the coming of a final Prophet, Muhammad, is actually promised by Jesus in words reported by the Fourth Gospel. If correct, it would entail that the destructive Spirit of God would be at work even inside the New Testament itself. I mean, by destroying the very credentials of the Christian revelation.’

  I was beginning to see what he was leading up to. On the other hand, the left hand way was also linked with sexuality. But I did not want to bring that subject up. Call me prudish – I’ll plead guilty to that. I really did not care to discuss the practices of the Marquis de Sade or the details of sexual magic with the Baron. I had read the relevant bits in his books. Opaque, unintelligible stuff, I thought. Or at least it felt like that back then. Only later I came to realise that it was all part of his Sufi way. The destructive element was self-referential. It was Evola’s way, the malamatiya way, the way of blame and sha
me, the way of rejection, the way of the left hand, what else?

  I would even go as far as to say that now I feel – somewhat absurdly, I admit it – that there was something Christ-like about Evola. He would not thank me for saying this – it would annoy him a lot, I guess, but I still believe it a valuable insight. His wicked reputation was really self-inflicted. A form of self-annihilation. Or, to press the metaphor, to make it even more outrageous, of self-crucifixion. The work of the Spirit as a destroyer. Only, the Spirit in this case was in himself.

  THE TWO LADS OF LINZ

  ‘In Germany, a certain history professor I met at the Herrenclub told me there was a bizarre story going around. It regarded Hitler’s schooldays in Linz. Apparently he was a contemporary there with another boy, a Jew. There is a reference to that lad in Mein Kampf, but no name is given. Hitler and that boy detested and fought each other like wildcats. It was not the kind of ordinary dislike, even hatred, that children are prone too. There was more to it. Secretly, each admired, each was envious of the other. Each obscurely felt the other was destined to great things, to make a unique impact on the world. Each found that thought unbearable. At last they swore a strange pact. Each vowed to the other that his achievements were going to be the greater, superior ones. From that moment they stopped fighting openly but the struggle went on in their minds, in their hearts.’ Evola paused, looked at me sharply. I was hanging on his lips. I wondered what he was leading up to: “Which boy outdid the other, then?” He smiled one of his thin, taut smiles. ‘Well, we know what Hitler did. What he tried to do. We also know how he failed dismally. The other boy, however, no one knows anything about. My professor said there were rumours...apparently he became a philosopher. His name and putative accomplishments have remained obscure, however. No one seemed to know. Presumably, he failed, too. It leaves plenty of space for speculations but...rather unsatisfactory, don’t you think?’