by Frank Gelli
It was a tantalising anecdote. I tried to puzzle it out but to no effect. I think – or perhaps I believe I think - Evola was sincere in telling me no one knew about the other boy’s identity. Was he alive today, I feel it would give him some pleasure to learn that the mystery is no more. Ludwig Wittgenstein was Hitler’s hated schoolmate at Linz. Only partly Jewish of course and baptized (and even a little bit himself anti-Semitic, we happen to know) but that would not have stopped young Adolf from calling him a Jew and loathing him...So the other side of the challenge is known. Wittgenstein’s infinite, cosmic work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was meant to solve all the age-old problems of philosophy, for good. Parmenides, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel – they are all put in their place, like naughty, remedial schoolboys. The author boasted so openly. Wittgenstein was quite consistent – after he penned the last word to his book, he gave up doing philosophy, became a school teacher. He was modest, however. “Little is achieved when those problems are solved”, he declared. I suspect he realised his success was his failure. On the other hand, if the schoolboy Hitler hated him so much he must have perceived some real greatness in Ludwig. Hitler’s doings were atrocious, of course. He tried to change the course of Western history, but ended up committing suicide, his shocked nation smashed to pieces, German cities in ruins. Wittgenstein’s outward life, after the storm of WWI, was peaceful, tranquil, spent mostly in Cambridge’s leafy lanes. He engendered a new brand of philosophising, a peculiar un-academic style of pursuing the old discipline...later he reneged on the Tractatus, started another, arguably tedious trend, based on an analysis of all types of human language. He hated academia, being a professor, but that is what he became, paradoxically – and he hated it. Many of his students also became academics, against his desires. His last words were: “I have lived a wonderful life.” Why did he have to say that? Maybe he realised his life had not meant much. And his philosophy certainly did not radically change the world of thought. More likely, it became another highbrow fad. Professor Grayling even doubts posterity will regard Wittgenstein as a great thinker. Both boys failed then? Huh!
AL-HALLAJ, THE ISLAMIC CHRIST
That afternoon I had been walking from the Pantheon, where the radical rightist Avanguardia Nazionale was based, to his place in Corso Umberto. In the splendid Piazza facing the ancient temple of the gods I had seen some turbaned Arabs in their white, flowing robes. By way of mental association, it put me in mind of things Islamic. By the time I got to Evola, I was curious what he made of al-Hallaj. The great Sufi mystic who suffered atrocious martyrdom in Baghdad for claiming divinity. I had read about him here and there and the guy fascinated me. I even wrote a play about that extraordinary man but no one was interested in staging it. I somehow expected Evola to praise al-Hallaj as a fellow maudit figure but he was guarded. ‘Al-Hallaj is said to have divulged the secret of all secrets – man’s identity with the Divine – a heresy in exoteric Islam. The truth is that the Qur’an, despite its strict monotheism, also affirms a real closeness between man and God – “We are nearer to you than the neck vein” says a celebrated verse. You can argue al-Hallaj was saying nothing new. Besides, some believe that his notorious cry, “Ana al-Haqq”, I am the Truth, was perhaps a mishearing – he actually said “Ara al-Haqq”, I see the Truth. Quite amusing, really! Much politics was involved in his trial and condemnation. It is possible much of what is known about al-Hallaj actually comes not from him but from his disciples. They cast him in the role of a saviour, to which he was ill-suited – a bit like Jesus of Nazareth, some naughty critics might observe...But he had extreme ideas, no doubt. Such as regarding Iblis, the Devil, as the prototype of a perfect lover and God’s devotee. Huh! Islam and Satanism do not go well together. Still, other Sufis had said that before...nothing new there. I wonder whether...’He did not finish the sentence, a habit that often cropped up in his conversation, something which intrigued me, even annoyed me a bit at times, until I understood. It was part of his teaching technique. Not to stuff my mind with clear-cut, definitive statements but to leave me with intellectual question marks. It was kind of Socratic, the art of a spiritual midwife, bringing not bodies but souls into the light of understanding via questioning. It was also very Sufi-like. A teaching by hints, allusions, suggestions, rather than by dogmatic assertions. Something which puzzled me but now I see it as fitting in perfectly well with his doctrines. The distinction inner/outer, esoteric/exoteric was a flexible, relative one. Who was inside? Who was on the outside? It depended on the circumstances. And on the person he was addressing. Although with me he generally ‘dropped the mask’, at the same time he could be very indirect, subtle and enigmatic. He understood the stage I was at and adjusted, modulated his words accordingly, like a true, fine teacher.
‘Nietzsche says something very interesting about esoterism. I think it is in Jenseits von Gut and Boese – Beyond Good and Evil. It has nothing to do with bookish, academic distinctions. The true philosophers, Eastern and Western, never mind which, understood the key difference as being not so much with the outsiders, the exoteric brigade, as between those insiders who consider reality “from above downwards”, so to speak, and those who look up from below. Does one dwell on the peaks or on the swamps? Higher human types have a very different perspective on reality from that of the multitude...’
‘Louis Massignon has made a special study of our man, La Passion de Hallaj. I knew Massignon. He showed me some of his papers. He was obsessed with al-Hallaj. Thought he had found another Christ, or a Christ-like figure in Islam. It was wishful thinking. There is no Christ in the Christian sense in Islam. Jesus, yes, he is in the Qur’an all right but he is not the Jesus of Christian doctrine. He cannot be, as the Qur’anic Jesus prepares the way for Muhammad. The analogies Massignon drew between Christ’s Passion and that of al-Hallaj are fanciful. Also, in Massignon’s writings you find constant, not-so-veiled references to pederastic love. He calls it “Uranian”, meaning ‘heavenly’. He virtually built that into a system. A pseudo-esoteric theory. There is even a spurious, fake hadith from the Prophet which is meant to back it up! All indebted to Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium. Alas, I fear it should be traced back to Massignon’s own inclinations. As a young man, he had indulged in Arab boys. As a Catholic, that was impermissible, a perversion. He carried his guilt for the rest of his life. Mircea Eliade told me Massignon often talked about rent boys, obsessively so. Eliade found that embarrassing. Pederasty shocks the bourgeois mind but, if a man is ruled by that kind of drive, if he really has to, well, let him do it – go ahead and be damned! Why repress it and then turn it into a theological thing? Metaphysics should not be abused that way. It rules the physical, not the other way around. Massignon did harm. How sad...’
There was, however, a saying of al-Hallaj which he liked, as he mentioned it more than once: ‘A certain fellow asked al-Hallaj to pray for him. He answered: “I will pray for you but you must promise me one thing.” “What is that?” the man asked. “That you never utter one word of praise of me. You must only say the most hateful things about me. You must proclaim to all that I am a heretic, a monster, a Satanist. You must then accuse me to the authorities and do the utmost to have me condemned to death.” Evola seemed to find the anecdote of great interest: ‘If it is not something which al-Hallaj actually said, it certainly something he should have said’, he elucidated.
As to al-Hallaj’s controversial feats, whether miracles or tricks, he said: ‘Many of the reports have come down from al-Hallaj’s enemies.They always give natural explanations for them. For instance, al-Hallaj’s body was seen becoming enormous, so as to fill a whole room. A phenomenon actually created by the wind blowing up his clothes, his enemies glossed. Hidden pipes and so on. Dead birds brought back to life – an allusion to Jesus’ miracles as related in the Qur’an. Rationalist detractors detracted and admirers admired, that is what it boils down to. But the extraordinary intervention of supernatural beings c
annot be ruled out a priori. No Muslim can do that, Sufi or not.’
One evening he spoke, as if reciting, words to this effect: ‘I am called a holy man, a friend of God. My disciples revere me. My enemies call me a blasphemer. They say that because they are pious Muslims. They hate me out of fervour for Islam. Between my friends and my enemies I prefer my enemies. I love them more. Because my friends venerate me as a created being, whereas my enemies abominate me for the sake of God. The former are closer to my heart.’
He stopped and was silent. His eyes had a far-away expression. Then they changed to that quizzical look of his that I had come to know so well. He wore it when he meant to convey a meaning, a message in an indirect way. Not verbally but, as it were, psychically. Of course, I realised he was quoting something al-Hallaj had said but I felt helpless. What was it he wanted to me to understand? I could not fathom it. Now, I do – or I think I do, anyway. He was hinting at a comparison between his fate and that of al-Hallaj. Not an exact comparison, mercifully. He would have wished to suffer anything like the Sufi’s atrocious death. But his paralysis, the ostracism and the obscurity to which his reactionary, racist and anti-Jewish views, publicly expressed and enshrined in his many books, had gained him were a self-inflicted martyrdom. You could not imagine him saying prayers or indeed any formal invocation to God on his lips. If he was a kind of saint, he was a saint of a perverse kind. A saint maudit, an accursed one. But the curse was one he had deliberately, voluntarily brought on himself. It was his vocation, that of the people of blame and shame, malamatiya path. The obscure sect of which we know little, perhaps next to nothing. Maybe the malamatiya never existed. Perhaps they are a literary invention, a conceit, an esoteric fiction, like the Knights of the Round Table. Yet, I am convinced that Evola was one of them. Evola may even have been the chief sheikh of the sect. A sect he himself had created. Like the fictional planet Tlon, the imaginary world conceived by the writer Jorge Louis Borges. The fantasy of Tlon exerts such a hold on people’s minds that they end up bringing their fantasy into actuality. The idea of a society of anti-saints, of occult, hidden men who choose to make themselves into objects of hostility and scorn appealed to his aristocratic, haughty inclinations. Call it inverted mystical snobbery, perhaps. To me, it makes sense.
Another famous Sufi, Abu Yazid al-Bistami, interested him. ‘His blasphemies on the face of it were even more shocking to pious Muslims than anything al-Hallaj ever said. It is reported he stated that he was Allah and he invited the faithful to worship him. Al-Hallaj never went as far as that! There is a scholarly problem about the authenticity of al-Bistami’s sayings – it is likely the original utterances were overlaid with successive legends and inventions. It is the problem of source-criticism...But, in a way, it is irrelevant. The stories as we have them show what simple people were interested in, what they liked to hear. They are unsophisticated, many of them. Crude miracles...talking animals...it is the religion of the masses, the spiritual pabulum they hanker after. Especially stories where the unbelievers end up becoming Muslims. It is the kind of happy ending simpletons enjoy and desire. You can bet those endings were added on later...I don’t believe Abu Yazid was deep.’
JINNS
‘Al-Islam teaches that jinns are part of a world, a reality, parallel with ours. But it is an invisible world, one to which human beings have no access. Yet, its inhabitants can and do impinge on us. It is an unimaginably vast and unseen universe. Its creatures are born, marry and are given in marriage. They have homes, children, eat and drink, own possessions, pets and so on. Just like us. And like us they are rational beings. That is why they can choose between good and evil. So some jinns are good and some wicked. Some follow chastity, others fornicate. Some have faith in divine law, some do not. The Qur’an mentions the former, as recipients of a message from Allah...’
‘In Islam a large body of legal rulings exists concerning jinns. The ulama’s discussions are vast and detailed. Scholars debate whether jinns are material or immaterial. They dispute about their sexual habits and their marital and property rights. Mischievous and libidinous jinns are said to haunt the dreams of human beings. Sometimes, they have sex with human beings in their sleep. Not all scholars treat these claims seriously – they prefer, more soberly, or sceptically, to invoke the likelihood of hysteria or mental illness. A Muslim modernist even suggested that when the Qur’an speaks of jinns, it is merely speaking of microbes!’
Did he actually believe in jinns, then? In those problematical, non-human beings, created from fire, whose existence is asserted in the Qur’an? I was anxious to know. A positive answer might have clarified his position on magic. Unfortunately, he preferred to change the subject. No matter how often I tried to lure him out, he sensed the trap and steered clear of it. I suppose, as a good teacher, he knew the importance not to overteach. More crucially, he knew it was best to leave me to work out my own way. I think I later did, thanks to insights gained from Wittgenstein – not necessarily something of which Evola would have approved - but that’s another story.
Nevertheless, when living in the Arab world I realised that many ordinary people are afraid of jinns. I occasionally sought to reassure them. “It should rather be the other way around”, my line ran. Who knows whether Jinns keep out of sight for fear of human beings? They must know the horrors of which men are capable... It was after reading Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights, that I formed the conviction that, even if jinns exist, they are more likely to be afraid of us than we should be of them. The terrible figure of Heathcliffe led me to that conclusion. As Bronte describes him, he was found as a stray child on a Liverpool dock, “a little black-haired swarthy thing” as dark as if it came from the devil, mouthing a “jibberish that nobody could understand”. It dawned on me as I read that description that Heathcliffe could be a prime candidate for the role of jinn. Of course, the physical side is not important. What makes Heathcliffe jinn-like in the malevolent sense is the horrible, inhuman way he behaves. Charlotte Bronte herself, in her introduction to her sister’s fine work, notes insightfully that the Heathcliffe is less that a human being than “a man’s shape animated by a demon life – a Ghoul – an Afreet.” Note that both epithets derive from the Arabic language. Maybe Heathcliffe was a Jinn disguised as a man. Or, more likely, he was indeed human but actually much, much worse than any bad Jinn...
NINO, POOR NINO!
There is no getting away from it: one reason why Evola’s halo is so dark is because of his association with fascism. Today that suggests violence, although of course fascism hardly had a monopoly of that. In the days of Mussolini’s regime violence was kind of institutionalised and Evola’s role was minimal. A fairly obscure polemicist and writer, his name was known only to tiny coteries. That was a bit of a paradox. Under Mussolini his disdainful elitism had angered some black-shirted militants so much that they threatened to beat him up. After the war, however, things were different. Whether he liked it or not, he became a guru of far right activists. The civil war which had followed the regime’s collapse and the final defeat had embittered many young people on the Right. The Italian State had outlawed any attempt to restart the old fascist party. There seemed to be no democratic option. Communism was powerful in Italy – over twenty per cent of the national vote – and the possibility of a totalitarian takeover was far from remote. Because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the spectre of a nuclear holocaust haunted the world. Pessimism was in the air. Evola’s anti-philosophy of the disintegration of the West appealed to apocalyptically-minded youths. And there is something romantically attractive about his vision of an elite rebelling against the modern world. So some youths in desperation went in for urban terrorism – Evola himself was tried but acquitted. He nearly always advised his followers to have nothing to do with criminal acts, conspiracies, military coups and the like. Not that he objected to the use of force per se. He just saw it was futile. But not all of his followers heeded his words.
Nino Aliotti was one. A fringe member of the
Solstice, he was one of the lads who had been at the original meeting chez Evola. Years later his dead body was found in a car, the boot crammed with arms and explosive. He had died of a gunshot wound. Suicide or foul play? Rumours abounded. I knew Nino well. He was a few years older than me. We had met at the hang-out of Avanguardia Nazionale, near the Pantheon in Rome. A curly-headed, arrogant and good-looking youth, he had at first displayed a distinct dislike of me. “Green horn, naive and dangerous”, he mocked me with words like that. (Perhaps he was right.) One day, however, he asked me over his home, under the pretext of showing me some books. His relatives were out. After a while he started caressing and kissing me on the mouth. Then he tried to get me into bed. I refused point-blank and left. I never spoke to him again but that was chance, not choice on my part. Same-sex was not my thing but that did not mean I found gays perverted or anything like that. Actually, I liked Nino and I regretted the situation. When the news of his tragic end reached me, I mentioned it to Evola. He already knew. He mused aloud: