The Hollow Soldier
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

A reflection on the decline of combat from a sacred, transcendent pursuit of honor to a secularized, materialistic instrument of modern nationalistic myths.

...ell as spiritual. Heroic asceticism and the untameability of the warrior vocation strengthened by a supernatural direction are the necessary instruments that allow the inner unity to be analogically reflected in the outer unity, namely, in the social body represented by many peoples that are organized and unified by the same one great conquering stock. Moreover, those who love to contrast the past with our recent times should consider what modern civilization has brought us to in terms of war.
A change of level has occurred; from the warrior who fights for the honor and for the right of his lord, society has shifted to the type of the mere "soldier" that is found in association with the removal of all transcendent or even religious elements in the idea of fighting. To fight on "the path to God" has been characterized as "medieval" fanaticism; conversely, it has been characterized as a most sacred cause to fight for "patriotic" and "nationalistic" ideals and for other myths that in our contemporary era have eventually been unmasked and shown to be the instruments of irrational, materialistic, and destructive forces.
It has gradually become possible to see that when "country" was mentioned, this rallying cry often concealed the plans of annexation and oppression and the interests of monopolistic industries; all talk of "heroism" was done by those who accompanied soldiers to the train stations. Soldiers went to the front to experience war as something else, namely, as a crisis that all too often did not turn out to be an authentic and heroic transfiguration of the personality, but rather the regression of th...
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Spirit Over Evokers
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

A vision of how the secularization of European states led to the instrumentalization of religion, transforming it into a private concern or a tool for economic and political ends.

...ost on the same level as priestly ordination. Later on, the Society of Jesus often accentuated the antitraditional lay view of royalty (even though they sided with the absolutism of those monarchies that were subservient to the Church, the Jesuits in some cases went as far as legitimizing regicide ), in order to make it clear that only the Church enjoys a sacred character and that therefore every primacy belongs to her alone. As I have already mentioned, however, exactly the opposite came true.
The spirit that was evoked overcame those who evoked it. Once the European states became the expressions of popular sovereignty and found themselves governed merely by economic principles and by the acephalous organizations (such as the Italian city-republics) that the Church had indirectly sponsored in their struggle against imperial authority, they became self-subsistent entities. These entities eventually became increasingly secularized and relegated everything that had to do with "religion" to an increasingly abstract, privatistic, and secondary domain and even used "religion" as an instrument to pursue their own goals.
The Guelph (Gregorian-Thomist) view is the expression of an emasculated spirituality to which a temporal power is superimposed from the outside in order to strengthen it and render it efficient; this view eventually, replaced the synthesis of spirituality and power, of regal supernaturality and centrality typical of the pure traditional idea. The Thomist worldview attempted to correct such an absurdity by conceiving a certain continuity between state and Church and by seeing in the state a "pr...
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The Deconsecration of Power
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

A thesis on the decline of the Empire, suggesting that the rise of secular national states deprived rulers of spiritual authority and invited lower social forces.

...s if they were schisms, and their reciprocal opposition not only as political and temporal units but also as almost mystical entities refusing to submit to any superordained authority. One thing becomes very clear: if the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal.
What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated "Christendom," but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority. Moreover, the deconsecration of the rulers as well as their insubordination toward the Empire, by depriving the organisms over which they presided of the chrism bestowed by a higher principle, unavoidably pushed them into the orbit of lower forces that were destined to slowly prevail.
Generally speaking, whenever a caste rebels against a higher caste and claims its independence, the higher caste unavoidably loses the character that it had within the hierarchy and thereby reflects the character of the immediately lower caste. Absolutism—the materialistic transposition of the traditional idea of unity—paved the way for demagogy and for republican, national, and antimonarchical revolutions. And in those countries in which the kings, in their struggle against feudal aristocracy...
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Rites as Empty Shells
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

A reflection on how traditional institutions become empty, secularized shells once their inner spiritual meaning is lost, eventually crumbling despite external attempts to preserve them through force.

...minal, then the pinnacle dissolves and the support crumbles. A highly significant legend in this regard is that of the people of Gog and Magog, who symbolize chaotic and demonic forces that are held back by traditional structures. According to this legend, these people attack when they realize that there is no longer anybody blowing the trumpets on that wall upon which an imperial type had previously arrested their siege, and that it was only the wind that produced the sounds they were hearing.
Rites, institutions, laws, and customs may still continue to exist for a certain time; but with their meaning lost and their "virtue" paralyzed they are nothing but empty shells. Once they are abandoned to themselves and have become secularized, they crumble like parched olay and become increasingly disfigured and altered, despite all attempts to retain from the outside, whether through violence or imposition, the lost inner unity. As long as a shadow of the action of the superior element remains, however, and an echo of it exists in the blood, the structure remains standing, the body still appears endowed with a soul, and the corpse—to use…
When the last residue of the force from above and of the race of the spirit is exhausted, in the new generations nothing else remains; there is no longer a riverbed to channel the current that is now dispersed in every direction. What emerges at this point is individualism, chaos, anarchy, a humanist hubris, and degeneration in every domain. The dam is broken. Although a semblance of ancient grandeur still remains, the smallest impact is enough to make an empire or state collapse and be replace...
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Progress's Superstition Shift
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

The author contends that the concept of 'progress' has reduced human action to mere mechanical animal strength, stripping competition of its connection to a superior, objective order.

...unties" the extreme tension of the ordeal and of the danger being faced) that were destined to open the closed human "circuits" to wider "circuits," and through which it was possible to generate unusual and apparently miraculous effects. This view explains and gives the proper meaning to traditions and customs such as the abovementioned ones. In the order of these customs, truth and reality, might and law, victory and justice formed one thing having the supernatural as their center of gravity.
These views were destined to be regarded as pure superstition wherever "progress" systematically deprived the human virtues of any possibility of establishing an objective contact with a superior order of things. Once man's strength was thought to be on the same level as that of animals, that is, as the faculty of mechanical action in a being who is not at all connected to what transcends him as an individual, the trial of strength obviously becomes meaningless and the outcome of every competition becomes entirely contingent and lacking a potential relation with an order of higher "values."
Once the ideas of truth, law, and justice were turned into abstractions or social conventions; once the sensation, thanks to which in Aryan India it was possible to say, "The earth has truth as its foundation," was forgotten; once every perception of these "values" as objective and almost physical apparitions of the supernatural amid the network of contingencies was lost—then it is natural to wonder how truth, law, and justice could possibly influence the determination of the phenomena and fac...
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