by Frank Gelli
CAIRO ENCOUNTERS
Confirmation of Evola’s esoteric identity came once through an unusual source, during a trip to Cairo. A person whose name I am not at liberty to disclose had entrusted me with a mission – a parcel to be conveyed to a lady in Alexandria, Egypt. When I told Evola about it, he suggested I should take the opportunity to visit a certain Herr Omar Amin, an old acquaintance of his. The fellow lived in Cairo and I was glad of the opportunity to spend a few days in the fascinating city Egyptians call Umm al-Dunya, the mother of the world.
It took me a while in the dusty chaos of the teeming metropolis to locate Omar Amin’s address. The bearded, toothless taxi driver wanted to talk about the Trinity and, meanwhile, he took me to the wrong parts of town. Once, he nearly drove the car into a ditch. Eventually, after nearly three hours, we arrived at the right destination.
Omar Amin was a neat, smallish man in his early sixties. At first, as he opened the door, he looked at me suspiciously – I learnt later he was afraid of being kidnapped and taken back to Germany to be put on trial for his rampant anti-Semitism. As a former theoretician on racial matters in the Third Reich, Omar Amin Von Leers was a wanted man. (I had no knowledge of the man’s real identity and background back then. All that Evola had told me was that Omar Amin was a scholar, a learned chap.) But, as soon as I handed him Evola’s letter of introduction, his manner changed. Beaming friendship, he invited me in. We drank sweet tea from small, pear-shaped bottles. He spoke nonstop in rapid, German-accented Italian, leaving me hardly a chance to get a word in edgeways. His conversation was far-ranging. From reminiscences of the time he had spent in Italy, to Dante, whom he adored, and Guenon, whom he seemed to like less. He also spoke about Zionism – he considered himself a visionary, a supporter of “spiritual Zionism”, having encouraged Zionism from early on, he claimed. Of course, his idea of Zionist goals did not quite coincide with that of Jewish Zionists. He blamed the British for the Balfour declaration and for allowing Jewish immigration – “colonialism”, he called it - into Palestine. He had no time for the Catholic Church, either – “This Pope looks Jewish. Are we sure he is a pure Italian?” he wondered, referring to Paul VI. That struck me as a bit weird. (What is a ‘pure’ Italian, anyway? My people are one of the most mixed races in the world. Evola had no doubts about it.)The Vatican and the Synagogue do not quite see eye to eye. And wasn’t the first Pope, after all, a Hebrew? St Peter was hardly Aryan. But it is true that, long before becoming Pontiff, the young Giovan Battista Montini had crossed swords in print with Evola over his paganising ideas. In a veiled manner, Omar Amin seemed to suggest that in opening up to the Jews Pope Paul was continuing his anti-Evola polemics. It sounded like pie in the sky to me. Yet...I am not so sure...Anyway, I admit I found him an engaging fellow. Still, although I was not aware of it, Omar Amin had been a Nazi. Perhaps that is a contradiction in terms but...Yes, he came across as a nice man. A nice Nazi, then – is that too Dadaist? Not that he would have still considered himself a Nazi. He declared himself a Muslim and a Sufi. National-Socialism has nothing to do with those, surely?
At some point my host begged to be excused. ‘Time to pray’, he announced. Von Leers of course had embraced Islam, adopting the name of Omar Amin. He invited me along, suggesting I should wait for him at a cafe outside the mosque. ‘There are some interesting people you should like to meet’, he said. With some alacrity, I agreed.
After his Salat, Omar Amin emerged from a small masjid at the end of an alley, accompanied by a smiling young man of my age. ‘This is Ali’, Omar said. We walked together to the great Huseyin Mosque nearby. Ali spoke a little French, so we conversed about politics and fiction but his real passion was the Qur’an. Unfortunately his French was too broken to allow for a really meaningful conversation but Ali’s shiny brown eyes did the talking, somehow. By the time Omar had led us all the way to another, huge cafe, I felt Ali and I were friends.
Three dignified old men sat around an inlaid table inside, smoking the nargile, the water pipe. Omar introduced me to each in turn. Much shaking of hands and salaams. ‘We do zikr’, he explained, forgetting to explain his explanation. I later learnt the meaning of zikr in Sufism – the remembrance of God’s Name. I did not understand Arabic, but Omar interpreted. ‘This sheikh knows Evola. He has read many of his books...’ ‘Yes, Sheikh Julius Evola is one of us’ the portly fellow asserted, with finality.
As next day I had to leave to fly back to Rome, I whispered to Omar that I was sorry, I could not stay long. Again, courtesies were exchanged. Ali embraced me and swore he would never forget me. I was touched. On the way back I asked Omar: ‘What did the man mean when he said “Evola is one of us”?’ ‘Don’t you really know?’ Omar replied. I really did not. ‘The sheikhs you have just met are...’ he did not finish the sentence. I guess he expected Evola to have disclosed the secret to me. ‘One day you will find out’, he added. Now, many years on, I think I have. I have no doubt. The word Omar Von Leers would not pronounce was ‘’Sufi’. He left the blank for me to fill in. A hint. How very much like a Sufi...
Omar Amin’s parting shot, near his flat, was a quotation from Dante, in resonant, precise Italian: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita.” In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, having lost the way. The opening line of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Was he just showing off his knowledge, priggishly, or...was there more to it? An admission? A recantation of his wartime errors? I still wonder.
I did not return to Egypt until 2009. Tracking down Ali was not easy but I made it at last. He had grown plump and bearded but the smile and the sparkling eyes were unchanged. A manager in a poky internet cafe, Ali looked really moved when he saw me. After much rejoicing, we went together to a small mosque nearby to do zikr. Naturally, we spoke about Omar and Evola. ‘Yes, Evola is well-known amongst us in Cairo’, he confirmed. ‘ Actually, we call him al-Roumi al-Thani, the second Roman. To distinguish him from the first Roumi, Jelaluddin. The Roman the Turks call Mevlana. Omar wanted to tell you but he felt it was better you should work it out for yourself.’
The second Roman! Would Evola have minded the title? Playing second fiddle to the great Roumi? Certainly, he was not particularly modest – quite the opposite – but being placed next after perhaps the greatest Sufi Master, the Roman of Konya, is not at all a bad achievement, I think.
AFGHANISTAN: A SUFI PROPHECY
In the early 70’s, I spent two months in Afghanistan. Visiting a friend, Alighiero Boetti. He was an interesting man. An artist and a craftsman, he had set up a workshop producing all manner of textiles in Kabul. I had got to know him through Maria, who was friends with a girl close to him. Boetti struck me as a visionary, almost a genius. His art movement is known as arte povera, poor art. Aiming at giving a new impetus to the crafts of non-industrial cultures, like Afghanistan. He delighted in behaving in a rather unconventional way. Bislacco, eccentric, he came across a bit like that. He claimed to be not one but two persons, one called Alighiero and the other named Boetti. So this double personality was exactly the kind of crazy guy I was attracted to.
While in Kabul I discovered that there were around a number of young, hippy-like Westerners who had gone to Afghanistan in search of adventure and drugs, but they had soon run out of money and means of support and so they had had to hire themselves out to local riff-raff, who exploited them most unpleasantly. Like slaves, I thought. They filled me with pity. Alighiero tried to help them. Anyway, he seemed to have become very interested in Sufism. Some local magician had become his personal guru. I craved to know more but Alighiero was not really a very communicative person and kept his mouth pretty shut. I remember, however, that he was fascinated by the Persian allegorical tale, The Conference of the Birds. We discussed the possibility of turning it into a movie or a play but nothing came of it. One day, however, he appeared to be very cheerful indeed. It was then that he told me that the Sufi master had predicted the
exact date of his death. It was supposed to happen well over the age of 80. At the time Alighiero was still young and so the news could hardly be displeasing to him. Alas, he died many years in advance of the date predicted, in his early fifties, I think. Being two different persons did not help him much, because neither Alighiero nor Boetti were ever heard of again. I wonder what he would have said to the Sufi master, had he had the chance...
Evola did not live long enough to see the Alighiero prediction being falsified but I recall his reaction when I gave him an account of my time in Kabul. ‘The Sufi fellow in question could be a fraud, of course. There are so many of them around. They hide themselves behind the spell of a great name. But it is not impossible to tell. If they demand money...that is always a pretty good test. On the other hand, the man might well be bona fide. Still, that does not mean the man might not make a mistake in his calculations, get the death date wrong. It also happens in the secular realm, even an accountant can get his figures wrong, no? Likewise, a spiritual guide could get his predictions wrong. There is no absolute precision or certainty in these matters. Only the Imams are granted infallibility...Or the error could reside in an outside chain...’ He saw the puzzled look on my face. ‘Sometimes a Sufi master will rely on another power. It could be a spirit or a jinn or an angel. But things can go wrong there too...’ He would not elaborate further on that. ‘Still, the mistake might turn out to be no mistake at all. Perhaps a Sufi, for reasons best known only to him, may want someone to believe something, because in the end it might be in a person’s best interest. A Murshid might say that there something God knows, while you don’t know. Words by St Teresa of Avila come to mind... She said that sometimes, when God wished to chastise men, he will answer their prayers. That is deep...I suppose your friend will be able to verify the truth of the Sufi’s prediction, for good or ill.’
It turned out to be ill.
THE SOUTH
I first learnt of Wittgenstein’s philosophy via a mediocre play by Alberto Moravia, The World is What it is. It puzzled me. Moravia contrasted Marx with Wittgenstein. Marx wanted to change the world by changing society, the means of production, while Wittgenstein, Moravia said, wanted to change the world by changing our language. That is hardly correct but at the time the claim fascinated me. Hoping for enlightenment, I shared my discovery with the Baron. The Austrian thinker’s linguistic meditations never impressed him (‘Philosophical Byzantinism’, he unfairly called them), but some details of Wittgenstein’s biography he did like: ‘So he preferred cold lands to hot ones! That argues in his favour. Cold climates sharpen up the mind, hot ones put it to sleep...You say Wittgenstein refused to travel to Spain? Good! Instead, he liked going to Norway. There he wrote in a hut, by a fjord...I can’t imagine a better place more conducive to crisp, searing sentences. Goethe’s celebrated Journey in Italy does not improve when he gets South of Rome. Instead, it becomes banal, self-complacent, decadent. Do you know the play South by Julien Green? It is set in an American Southern State before the Civil War. It is all about degeneracy. Heat and torbid, unmanly passions...the fateful melange. Ecstasy, inebriation, unbridled erotic drives...All so very South!’
‘Wittgenstein was unmarried? He left no physical progeny but many intellectual children – his followers. That too speaks volumes on his behalf. Marriage and motherhood in the Mediterranean world are intrinsically linked to fertility rites...They gesture towards the lower, subterranean, womb-like dimension of human existence. Your philosopher was not inclined to that – I sympathise. Like Weininger, like Schopenhauer, like Kant he had no wife and engendered no offspring. The disciples of those great minds are their true, unfleshy children. Wittgenstein admired them, didn’t he? Fancy his being a war prisoner of the Italians in Monte casino after WWI! Writing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus near the great monastery of St Benedict. That was suitably penitential. You say he wanted to become a monk? Well, that need not have been escapism. It could be interpreted in better ways...’
It is significant that in his youth the Baron had spent time in monasteries, like indeed Wittgenstein also had done. Of course, Evola’s retreats had been intellectual, not religious in any strictly Catholic sense of the word. Yet, his allusions to those monastic experiences were not at all negative. The figure of St Bernard of Clairvaux, the reformer of the Cistercian Order, was congenial. A nobleman of Germanic origins, St Bernard had drawn up the Rule for Order of Templars. The Saint had preached a crusade against the Turks, which ended in catastrophe. ‘The crusaders’ aims were less than pure, that is the problem. Too many looked forward to pillage and land-grabbing. It was condign punishment’, Evola stated, agreeing with St Bernard. But I deliberately avoided pointing out an ironic counter-example to his praise of cold climates. Because it was exactly the murderous cold of the Russian winter that had beaten the German onslaught on Bolshevism. The forces of nature, it seems, did not quite always operate in the desired way...
MAGIC, MUTANTS AND MONSTERS
The Dawn of Magic is a peculiar, disordered book by two chaps, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. At the time, a bit of a best-seller. Much read and even admired by both occultists and people on the Right. One of its claims was that Hitler and National Socialism had sprung up on earth like aliens from outer space. On the other hand, I had also read William Shirer’s History of the Third Reich, in which the cultural roots of Hitler’s regime were traced back to key strands in German and European history. Nothing extraterrestrial about them. The Baron, who, unlike me, disliked science-fiction, had his own opinions: ‘Taken literally, the claim is laughable. A cheap trick, a gimmick to bump up the sales of their book. Unless they meant it metalinguistically...But, whether the authors realised it or not, they stumbled on an important truth. The Third Reich stood for values, ideas and principles that have become as remote from our Zeitgeist as the sky is from the earth. They would not have been so for traditional man. In that sense, yes, National Socialism was like something from Mars, if you care to use that comparison. But you can turn the image around. Take the England of today, with her moronic singers, the permissiveness and promiscuity. Plus third world immigrants. An England ruled by the Labour Party – a bogus Socialist body - and at war with a former English colony like Rhodesia. Would men like Dr Johnson, Admiral Nelson and the Duke of Wellington not think their beloved country has become another planet? Indeed, a horrid one. Something utterly strange, alien, even loathsome? All right, England since the Reformation has been infected by liberal-bourgeois ideas and practices, you know that. But people like Burke could still argue, against the French revolutionaries, that England at least had managed to maintain a kind of balance between the monarchical, the aristocratic and the mercantile principles. The result of a compromise, yes, but it provided a kind of stability...Metternich, when he visited Wellington long after the Restoration, said that staying with the Duke reminded him of the way things were before the Revolution, la douceur de vivre – a big compliment! Although the English never joined the Holy Alliance, under Wellington and Castlereigh they were not stirring up revolutions everywhere... I believe that the England of today would be worse than a foreign country to those great Englishmen...Pauwels and Bergier are right though when they observe that in the end what decided the struggle in WWII were not principles or even valour, but sheer, brute material and technical superiority. Tanks, big guns and bomber planes. The Germans could not match that. Goering was perhaps, objectively speaking, the greatest criminal on the German side. Not because he planned aggressive war or anything so absurd. He was a Verbrecher because he failed to build enough war planes to fight off the Allied onslaught from the skies. The victors hanged Goering and others at Nuremberg basically for losing the war – that is the unadorned truth - but, had Germany won, I believe the Germans themselves should have executed him - for his colossal, unpardonable negligence. America’s intervention, with all its monstrous material superiority, truly decided the outcome of the war. Hitler was a fool in declaring war on America first...well, a
ll water under the bridge, dear Julian...’
The Dawn of Magic has weird passages about the rise on earth of a new race of mutants. That stimulated Evola to chat. He seemed to know quite a lot about biology – genes, chromosomes, phenotypes, all that stuff – and I cannot recall the many technical terms he used. He commented, however, how the popular notion of a mutant often tends to stress its negative connotations. Beings menacingly abnormal, that is. That led him on to discuss monstrosities: ‘Have you heard of the monster market? It existed 2000 years ago, in ancient Rome. It had plenty of buyers. Plutarch mentions it somewhere. A text on curiosities, I think. Roman law required freaks to be drowned at birth but despite that many people were keen on purchasing them. Plutarch criticised the eccentrics who preferred unfortunate creatures born with a cow’s head or snake-like arms or other deformities to handsome youths. I think Plutarch must have been a bit naive about human nature...’
‘I anticipate a proximate epoch in which freaks will be created on order, for a buyer’s delectation. Free market, free buying and selling, is of the essence of a capitalist society. In many Western countries super-markets are becoming the norm, replacing the old custom of the corner shop. Nothing to do with the fantasies of libertarians like Orwell. Such as his rather cliche’ totalitarian nightmare, 1984. Totally outdated. Democratic capitalism – liberal democracy - can accomplish the control of human behaviour and habits far more than any old-fashioned dictatorship. Desires for consumption of all sorts of superfluous things are created all the time by advertising and the mass media. Today you can buy a pet. Tomorrow you’ll purchase a non-human being, a freak, to order. Bull-like mutants. Or sirens. Or centaurs. Some designed to accomplish super-sexual feats, I suppose. The demand for that will be inexhaustible!’