Julius Evola- The Sufi of Rome Read online

  3

  JULIUS EVOLA: THE SUFI OF ROME

  This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true. St John, 21:24

  Enter thou, then, amongst my Devotees. Qur’an, 89:29

  PROLOGUE

  In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Approach to al-Mu’tasim, the nameless protagonist, a fugitive Muslim student, searches for a remote person, a man – or more than a man - called al-Mu’tasim. A messiah, perhaps, or a magus, or the master of an arcane, heavenly fraternity. The way the young man has intuited al-Mu’tasim existence is problematical, as it befits its enigmatic subject. Borges writes of “the subtle reflections” the person of al-Mu’tasim has left on others, even the lowest, most despicable characters. And yet, such trifling traces are enough to make the hero set out on his quest. Years go by. After an odyssey of vertiginous adventures in the Indian subcontinent the searcher does at last attain his ineffable goal, although the reader remains tantalisingly ignorant as to the precise nature of the murky al-Mu’tasim.

  The hero, or anti-hero - take your pick - of this book is not quite like the elusive character conjured up by Borges’ fantasy. His identity is all too well-known. Unlike the hidden al-Mu’tasim, Julius Evola’s friends and disciples found it easy to approach him, confined as he was to a wheelchair in his attic in central Rome. Nonetheless, I believe this very exposure has tended to obscure Evola’s true meaning and character. As opacity and distance blurred and concealed the person of al-Mu’tasim, so proximity and publicity have obstructed Evola’s genuine recognition. In a nutshell, he was misunderstood. That is why this writer feels a bit like the searcher in Borges’ tale. One difference is that the figure searched for is not generally considered saintly but satanic. For so many, Evola’s reputation is indeed so infamous that my task is beset with dangers – I am fully aware of that. I also realise how some will perhaps judge me as blameworthy as my subject. (Indeed, like the runaway student I too have long been in flight, I too have trodden the paths of infamy...) But at least I can claim to know the extraordinary figure I write about. The innumerable reflections he has left on my soul have led me to pen these Erinnerungen. I have done so in order to put the record straight. To tell the truth – or what I believe to be the truth – about Julius Evola. I owe it to the man whom, in hindsight, I have come to regard almost as a mentor – and whom, I believe – or I like to believe – considered me like the lost son he never knew.

  Julius Evola. Not quite the tenebrous magus mythologised and maligned by his many enemies, but, like Borges’ al-Mu’tasim, an intriguing, spell-binding teacher. To paraphrase Rene’ Guenon, verily Evola was an implausible but actual Roi de Rome.

  INTRODUCTION

  Julius Evola was, like me, a Roman, a Roumi, to use the Arabic for it. Unlike me, Evola’s name has become a byword for things, ideas, orientations that are heretical, loathsome and abominable to our Zeitgeist. He was accused, like Socrates, of being a corrupter of youth. That was because of a cult following amongst young men on the far right, including even a few terrorists. But that was not all. Equally outrageous is Evola the occultist, the magician, the sinister figure endowed perhaps with supernatural power to kill at a distance, as even Mussolini believed. He had known Himmler, and had lectured in the castles of the Schutzstaffel Order. Evola, a man under a curse. The very mention of his name brings danger. It might make you suspect, bring you discredit and disgrace, cause you to lose your job, be prosecuted, physically attacked...und so weiter.

  Yet the thesis of this book is that Julius Evola’s deeper, true ideas were somewhat disguised in his works. Or, rather, openly displayed, so that the discerning reader might surmise the joyful truth. Like the stolen missive in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter, Evola’s true, unknown personality and beliefs are hidden - hidden in plain view. Indeed, that is the best hiding place, as most people are dazzled by the obvious. To my knowledge, I am the first one who has divined this. Is this presumptuous? Maybe, but I believe it is true.

  Evola was a Sufi. Or, better, a crypto-Sufi. A hidden, self-concealing follower of the path of Tasawwuf. A mystical, if heretical, master in the Islamic tradition. Rene Guenon, that occult French writer and convert to mystical Islam, had secretly initiated him into a Sufi fraternity. Evola came close to admitting that at times. Like many Sufis, he often taught not directly but by hints, allusions and suggestions. The clues to his authentic views are disseminated through his writings, and more openly and blatantly in the conversations he had with me. He took a wicked pleasure in upsetting right-thinking, conventional and dull people, both of the Right and of the Left. Yes, he enjoyed being contrary, perverse, also shocking his admirers and friends.

  Of course, it was a dangerous game. It meant exclusion, alienation from intellectual circles and spheres of power. Indeed, even during Mussolini’s regime, one that perhaps approximated his outer views, Evola was barred from having any real influence. I suspect that was intentional. It was a daring strategy, one that courted contempt, rejection and persecution, but it was his own way.

  Sufis are a large, confusing and mixed bag of tricks, some quietist and contemplative, others activist, fierce and war-like. Evola, I believe, belonged to perhaps the most outrageous, far-out type of all. The malamatiya, the people of blame. No detailed knowledge of what such sect teaches is extant because the available source material is sketchy and contradictory but this is clear: the malamatiya deliberately flaunt conventions. They indulge in conduct that brings them shame. That has nothing to do with things pathological, such as masochism. Rather, it is the outcome of a genuine spiritual vocation. There are analogies in Christianity, amongst the Desert Fathers of Egypt, for example. Sufi mystics desire to draw close to the Divine – even to annihilate themselves (fana’) in God. Because of that, they live dangerously. So did Evola. But the seeming paradox posed by some of the more atrocious of his outer teachings, such as certain racial views, I hope can be reconciled when we see it for what it really was: part of a self-chosen, arduous Sufi spiritual path. A self-abasement, a lowering of oneself in the service of what was a higher, necessary stage, he felt, in the journey towards immortality. Of course, he hardly ever used the word ‘God’ positively in his teachings, because of the crudely personal connotations that term has acquired in popular monotheism. He preferred to speak of Transcendence, of ‘what is higher’ - surely a different way of expressing the same thing.

  Despite his exaltation of the military caste, Evola was not a man of overt action. Hence his malamatiya posture was conveyed largely through his works and private talks. In the books the reader finds frequent references to secret Sufi circles. At times he gestures towards the Shia strand of Islam. I am morally certain he had had direct experience of Sufism through Rene Guenon and through another, nameless master. Meetings during my trips to Cairo were a confirmation of that. He told me again and again of his admiration for the esoteric teachings of Twelver Shiism, and the figure of the Imam al-Mahdi. Before he died, he also prophesied an imminent resurgence of Islam. As we know, he was right.

  Evola the heretical Sufi. Evola the Islamic initiate. A thesis that will annoy many people, I am sure. Especially among the Right, in whose ranks Evola’s disciples are still not insignificant. The reason is that the European Right has made anti-Muslim agitation one of its main political planks. I believe Evola would say that they are wrong in that. I also believe the evidence for Evola’s unorthodox Sufism is overwhelming. This book sets out to show it.

  MEETING THE MAGUS

  I got to know Evola in this way. A friend, Bruno, invited me to the gatherings of a student club, the Solstice. We met at various venues – the mai
n one being in Prati district - but occasionally in central Rome, near Via di Pietra, a little alley off the trendy, shopping Via del Corso. Via di Pietra was different. A haunt of prostitutes and louche characters. The Solstice boys were students and fogeys deep into conservative thought. The circle’s soul was Adriano Romualdi, a bespectacled young man with a mop of fizzy, gingerish hair. I remember his perennially quizzical, ironic look and his precise, finicky manner of speaking. Amusingly, Adriano was rumoured to be Mussolini’s grandson, because his father, the far-right MP Pino Romualdi, apparently boasted of being the Duce’s natural offspring. Fact or fiction, Adriano was one of Evola’s intellectual followers. I do not think he particularly liked me – I was not from his social set of Roman snobs – but when Bruno asked if I could also be allowed to visit the guru, Adriano grudgingly agreed.

  It did not go well. There were four of us sitting around Evola. The host, black-haired and, despite his age, still handsome, acknowledged all the others but I might as well have been invisible. He totally ignored me, not honouring me with a single glance. As no one likes rejection, especially from a famed teacher of wisdom, I left feeling somewhat depressed. Next day the phone rang. It was Adriano. ‘Evola would like to see you again’, he said. I could feel the ill-concealed annoyance in his voice. I was taken aback – I thought the Baron had disliked me - but of course I agreed. So, days later I returned with Adriano to the flat in Corso Vittorio. This time Evola was friendly - I cheered up. Another call from Adriano followed. Evola wanted to speak to me. ‘Where shall I meet you?’ I asked Adriano. ‘Just you’, Adriano said, acidly. ‘You go by yourself.’ He must have been just as stunned as I was, though not as pleased.

  That was the start of a long relationship. I would not call it a friendship. The age difference was too great. I was also too much in awe of him. But I was flattered. Also, to be honest, a bit worried. As many insecure young men, I was suspicious of gays – then disparagingly called froci in Italian. There were many froci among far right militants. It was a paradox: officially homophobic, even engaging in occasional gay-bashing, the far right abounded with people preferring their own sex. Pretty youths were not safe. There were rumours about Evola. Under the fascist regime his elitist and aristocratic ideas had earned him attacks from the brain-dead side of the regime’s activists. “Miss Evola, a pederast”, they mocked him. Utterly untrue. Evola’s sexuality was straight. I can vouchsafe that. Nonetheless, on my way to see him, I was a little bit apprehensive. I should not have worried. Evola displayed none of the mannerisms attributed to a certain type of gay man. Not a single time, for example, do I remember any attempt at physical contact, even the slightest and more innocent. Unlike Englishmen, Italians touch each other all the time but Evola was different. He regarded tactile tendencies as a sign of low extraction. All right, there was an element of aristocratic, even religious disdain in that. Noli me tangere – “don’t come near me”, as the risen Christ told Mary Magdalene. However, with me he behaved perfectly naturally. Over time, I grew to regard him as a mentor, but with qualifications. His avowed racialism, for instance, ‘spiritual’ and misunderstood though it was supposed to be, bewildered me. I could not make sense of it. Only much later I found out the secret behind the views that had made him notorious.

  Gradually, I made another, happy discovery. The language, or manner of speech, he used with me was not how he talked in group gatherings, as when the Solstice brigade had visited. On that occasion he had spoken very much in the way he wrote. Formal, frigid and distant in tone. As to his literary style, I think even Evola’s greatest admirers would be reluctant to describe it as easy. It was dry, stiff and ponderous. Given the subjects he wrote on – usually abstract and abstruse aspects of mythology, religion and philosophy – it often conveyed a sense of professorial pedantry. Like reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, perhaps. They say Kant was the freshest and most charming of speakers, very much unlike Kant the writer. Evola’s formality extended to his public conversations, as I found out at first. “Cool and detached” are perhaps the words that described him best. However, with me he was different. He gradually unwound, shed the academic mode of speech and became chatty, natural. A bit paternal. Occasionally, he fell into the Roman dialect, which we had in common. That surprised me but also delighted me. Not that I ever dreamt of getting familiar with him. His persona was still surrounded by such a halo – a thrilling one, yes, but still forbidding. He was the magus, the man with occult powers (well, so it was rumoured, anyway), the Baron who had taught the new Templars , but also the maudit intellectual, the Dadaist artist, the Socrates of the far-right, maybe an inspirer of revolution and terrorism...all that. But, as time went by, I became to feel very comfortable in his company. I looked forward to our irregular meetings with eagerness. He would contact me beforehand and fix a time. Usually only the two of us. If anyone called, Evola would send them away. A few times Adriano was present. (A third man also sometimes attended but his name will be omitted.) Evola was aware that Adriano was jealous of my having become close to him and so tried to avoid seeing us together. He made me promise that I would tell no one that I saw him – a promise I kept, so far.

  Actually, I liked to imagine myself as bound to a sort of Pythagorean rule of silence and secrecy about Evola. Of course, breaking the rule brought disaster to a member of that ancient brotherhood. The fate of Hippasus of Metapontum bears witness to that. The secret he broke is meant to have been the discovery of the irrationality of the square root of 2. Surely mathematicians should be grateful to Hippasus for that? And non-mathematicians should be beholden to me, dear reader, for telling the hidden truth about another great Master, Julius Evola.

  Hippasus paid the ultimate penalty, by the way...

  HIS SILENCE

  Sometimes, after the exposition of a topic or a recollection, Evola would suddenly fall quiet and remain silent. Maybe for as long as half an hour. At first it puzzled and even embarrassed me. I could not understand why he would say nothing for so long. Had I perhaps said something that had crossed him? I could not see how, though I was afraid of that. Nonetheless, I dared not break the silence. His eyes had a faraway, lost look, as if he was staring into remote, inward, inaccessible worlds. Although his body was perfectly still, I noticed the fingers of his left hand twitched just a little. I fancied there was a rhythm, a kind of tune, a beat or a system in those tiny movements but then I think I was mistaken. It was as if he had fallen into a trance but not in the sense that it would alarm me. When he spoke again, suddenly, there was no explanation, no remark as to what had happened. He would start on a new topic, or resume a previous one. Or he would ask me something, pick up a book and refer to some interesting passage in it. I guess I could have asked him the reason for his trance-like stints but I never did. However, years later, reading Plato’s Symposium, I learnt of Socrates’ strange habit of going apart, standing still wherever he happened to be, sometimes for hours on end. Perhaps he was working out the solution to a metaphysical problem. Or perhaps Socrates was in communication with his tutelary genius, the mysterious voice or spirit that warned him at times as to the right course of action. So, maybe Evola’s silences were Socratic. Unlike Socrates he never referred to an inner voice or anything like that, no. Yet, like the Greek philosopher, Evola was an initiate. It is a fact that the Greek thinker belonged to the Orphic brotherhood and had partaken of their mysteries. As the claim of this book is that Evola too was part of an esoteric fraternity, I like to imagine that his trance-like states were a manifestation of inspiration from altrove, elsewhere. Perhaps, like Orpheus in the underworld, he would descend – or ascend – into unsuspected dimension of existence, his mind ecstatically standing outside his body, exploring hitherto unsuspected realms...Fanciful, I know. The truth is that I shall never know for sure what went through his mind during those spells. Magic and mystery were part of his appeal, anyway, so...everything is possible.

  THE GOD OF EVIL

  One morning the Baron looked tired
. ‘I have been suffering from insomnia’ he said. ‘When I write late into the night...the problems stay with me...and the monsters.’

  He did not clarify his meaning. Instead, he plunged straight into a discussion of the Egyptian god Seth. That figure seemed to fascinate him: ‘Seth was the bad guy in the Egyptian pantheon. A reprobate god. Feared and loathed for having murdered the good one, Osiris. Yes, that insipid husband of Isis. So Seth was made into an embodiment of evil. They even thought he sided with the foreign invaders of Egypt. A Nazi collaborator, like a divine Quisling...’ He smiled a thin smile – Vidkun Quisling, the pro-German Norwegian statesman in WWII, was no bad guy for him.

  ‘Seth was a rebel. Dispatched his own brother. Like in the case of Romulus and Remus, only the other way around. As if it was Remus who killed Romulus. Osiris was a solid bourgeois deity, married, respectable. Par contre, they portrayed Seth with an animal head, an ugly snout, horns and a tail. A kind of brutish devil. His sacred animal was the hippopotamus. But I believe Seth was beautiful. His beauty was unbearable to the established priests so they sought to uglify him, an old trick. You remember Nietzsche? Zarathustra speaks: “O miserable wretches! In your stupidity, I know, my superman you would call evil.” An inversion of values. The higher is made into the lower. The eternal ruse of the vile and unworthy. Seth aided the foreign conquerors because the Egyptians had become effete, decadent, useless. They deserved defeat, they needed to be conquered, to be mastered by the Hyksos. Seth had rightly reproached them: “Look what rabble you have become! You were masters and now you are servants. Fit only to be ruled by whoever is strong enough to conquer you. It is not worth being your god. I am going to leave you. I hate your worship, your sacrifices. I’ll become your conquerors’ god - it serves you right.”