The Two Cities
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

This thesis examines how the traditional view of loyalty as a supernatural sanction was undermined by a Christian worldview that separated the divine state from the earthly 'sinful' world.

...Christians refused to perform this very act, consisting of a ritual and sacrificial offering made before the imperial symbol, since they claimed that it was incompatible with their faith; this was the only reason why there was such an epidemic of martyrs, which may have appeared as pure folly in the eyes of the Roman magistrates. In this way, the new belief imposed itself. Over and against a particular universalism, a new, opposite universalism based on a metaphysical dualism affirmed itself.
The traditional hierarchical view according to which loyalty enjoyed a supernatural sanction and a religious value, since every power descended from above, was undermined at its very foundation. In this sinful world there can only be room for a civitas diaboli; the civitas dei, or the divine state, was thought to belong to a separate plane and to consist in the unity of those who are drawn to the otherworld by a confused longing and who, as Christians, acknowledge only Christ as their leader as they await the Last Day.
Wherever this idea did not result in a virus that proved to be a defeatist and subversive one, and wherever Caesar was still given "the things which are Caesar's," the fides remained deconsecrated and secularized; it merely had the value of a contingent obedience to a power that was merely temporal. The Pauline saying, "all authority comes from God" was destined to remain ineffectual and meaningless. And thus, although Christianity upheld the spiritual and supernatural principle, historically...
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Spirit's Future Revolt
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

A visionary call for a spiritual revolt against the modern world, suggesting that the collapse of current materialistic systems is a necessary 'fertilizer' for the rebirth of Tradition.

...sures an essential and functional correlation between analogous elements, presenting them as simple homologous forms of the appearance of a central and unitary meaning; and epistemologically and subjectively by the generalized use of the principle of induction, which is here understood as a discursive approximation of a spiritual intuition, in which what is realized is the integration and the unification of the diverse elements encountered in the same one meaning and in the same one principle.
In this way I will try to portray the sense of the world of Tradition as a unity and as a universal type capable of creating points of reference and of evaluation different from the ones to which the majority of the people in the West have passively and semiconsciously become accustomed; this sense can also lead to the establishment of the foundations for an eventual revolt (not a polemical, but real and positive one) of the spirit against the modern world. In this regard I hope that those who are accused of being anachronistic utopians unaware of "historical reality" will remain unmoved in the realization that the apologists of what is…
In the present work I will limit myself to offering guiding principles, the application and the adequate development of which would require as many volumes as there are chapters; thus, I will point out only the essential elements. The reader may wish to use them as the basis for further ordering and deepening the subject matter of each of the domains dealt with from the traditional point of view by giving to them an extension and a development that the economy of the present work does not allo...
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Time's Spiritual Transformation
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

The author contends that modern epistemology fails to recognize that the perception of time has devolved from a spiritual, non-linear experience into a purely historical and linear one.

...previously pointed out that the difference between traditional and modern man is not simply a matter of mentality and type of civilization; rather, the difference concerns the experiential possibilities available to each and the way in which the world of nature is experienced according to the categories of perception and the fundamental relationship between I and not-I. For traditional man space, time, and causality had a very different character than they have in the experience of modern man.
The mistake of epistemology from Kant on is to assume that these fundamental forms of human experience have always remained the same, especially those with which we are most familiar in recent times. On the contrary, even in this aspect it is possible to notice a deep transformation that reflects the general involutive process at work in history. With this said, I will limit myself to discussing the difference in the perception of space and time. As I mentioned in the foreword, my main contention is that time in traditional civilizations was not a linear, "historical" time. Time and becoming are related to what is superior to time; in this way the perception of time undergoes a spiritual transformation.
In order to clarify this point it is necessary to explain what time means today. Time is perceived as the simple irreversible order of consecutive events; its parts are mutually homogeneous and therefore can be measured in a quantitative fashion. Moreover, a distinction is made between "before" and "later" (namely, between past and future) in reference to a totally relative (the present) point in time. But whether an event is past or future, whether it takes place in one or another point in ti...
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Lost Unitary Tradition
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

The author suggests that myths like the Tower of Babel represent the historical loss of a unitary primordial tradition, where common origins were forgotten and civilizations became dissociated following a cataclysmic cycle.

...Celts and to the Scandinavian people. Moreover, its original content is a historical event; according to the tale of Plato and Diodorus it essentially represented the end of an Atlantic land. The center of the Atlantic civilization, to which its colonies were subordinated for a long time, sank into the sea in an era that by far predates the time that according to Hindu tradition, inaugurated the Dark Age; according to some traces of chronology built into the myth, this is what indeed happened.
The historical memory of that center gradually disappeared in the civilizations that derived from it but in which elements of the ancient heritage were retained in the blood of the dominating castes, the roots of various languages, and also in social institutions, signs, rituals, and hierograms. In the Hebrew tradition, the theme of the tower of Babel, with the ensuing punishment represented by the "confusion of the various languages" (Gen. 11:7), may refer to the period in which the unitary tradition was lost and the various forms of civilization were dissociated from their common origin and could no longer understand each other after the…
The West, in which Atlantis was located during its original cycle (when it reproduced and perpetuated the much older "polar" function), very often represented a nostalgic reference point for the fallen ones. By virtue of a transposition onto a different plane, the waters that submerged the Atlantic land were called "waters of death," which the following postdiluvian generations, consisting entirely of mortal beings, must cross through initiation in order to be reintegrated with the divine state...
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Christianity's Spiritual Emasculation
Julius Evola
Revolt Against the Modern World

The text argues that Christianity represents a spiritual decline toward 'lunar' egalitarianism, which undermines the heroic ideal of personality and the hierarchical order of differentiated beings.

...entually adopted was that of the Mother (Mother Church). The epitome of true religiosity became that of the imploring and prayerful soul, that is aware of its unworthiness, sinfulness, and powerlessness before the Crucified One. The hatred early Christianity felt toward any form of virile spirituality, and its stigmatization as folly and sin of pride anything that may promote an active overcoming of the human condition express in a clear fashion its lack of understanding of the "heroic" symbol.
The potential that the new faith was able to generate among those who felt the live mystery of the Christ, or of the Savior, and who drew from it the inner strength to pursue martyrdom frantically, does not prevent the advent of Christianity from representing a fall; its advent characterized a special form of that spiritual emasculation typical of the cycles of a lunar and priestly type. Even in Christian morality, the role played by Southern and non-Aryan influences is rather visible. It does not really make much of a difference that it was in the name of a god instead of a goddess that equality among human beings was spiritually proclaimed…
And so it happened that Christian egalitarianism, based on the principles of brotherhood, love, and community, became the mystical and religious foundation of a social ideal radically opposed to the pure Roman idea. Instead of universality , which is authentic only in its function as a hierarchical peak that does not abolish but presupposes and sanctions the differences among human beings, what arose was the ideal of collectivity reaffirmed in the symbol of the mystical body of Christ; this lat...
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