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52 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tradition and Trancendence vs. the Modern World, March 29, 2003
REVOLT AGAINST THE MODERN WORLD by Sicilian noble Julius Evola formulates the doctrines and ideals of ancient tradition as embodied in the Indo-European ("Aryan") myths and ledgends of the Hindus, Germans, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Sumerians, Chinese, Japanese, Aztecs and Incas. Christian beliefs, especially those of Catholicism, and Islam's Koran also figure in this concept. Although Evola's ideas could be categorized as being occult and esoteric, they have absoloutely no relation to the "New Age" and humanist types of belief widely popular today. There is little in REVOLT about human brotherhood and "luhv," as these modern ideas come from inferior spiritualities that were opposed to Tradition. The concept of Tradition, as being self-existent from what is "above" and which is "transcendent" is very non material and abstract, so it is rather hard to put a finger on it. Furthermore, Evola's spirituality is not for everyone, which in fact, is the whole beauty of it.Mankind, especially the denizens of the West, have lost touch with the divine, trancendent and superindividual elements in their lives and social structures. The current modern world is called the 'Kali Yuga' in Hinduism, the 'Iron Age' by Hesiod and the 'Age of the Wolf' in the Nordic Edda. The characteristics of the modern world are radical egalitarianism, confusion of gender and caste rolls and the non-functioning of divine regality. Evola is pro-caste system, showing that disorientation occurs when individuals within castes are unable to fulfill what their status in life. There are many areas in this book which differ from most occult thought. Evola is strongly anti-feminist, and disdains female based spirituality as being opposed to the masculine principles in tradition. This is evidenced by the glorification of Heracles for having killed the warrior Amazonian tribeswomen, among other examples. Female sprituality tends to be regressive, which symbolically brings people back towards the darkness and unconsciousness of the womb rather than onward to greater action in the light, as embodied by masculine orientated spirituality, the Solar principle. The fact that the word "Aryan" appears about five times on nearly every page is also not in vouge. Evola voices contempt for the breakdown of the traditional family structure, the increased rate of divorce and sexual promiscuity. In Evola's final analysis, he comes out against spectator sports as a mere plebian pastime, against dance concerts as the epitome of the mindless human mass under control, and demonizes modern day science as being the "science of dead matter." As far as religious outlook is concerned, Evola belives in some kind of myth that the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans came from a distant land in the north (Hyperborea, likely a vegetated Greenland before the Ice Age), and rejects Darwin's theory of evoloution. There are a good number of anti-Christian statements, but his assessment of Catholicism is relativly positive. As to God's Law, traditional men believed that the Law was given by the Divine from above to guide man, in keeping with the Biblical teaching. Evola is against the concept of religion as being merely moral and humanistic speculation without any unifying rites of worship. The tone throughout is very pessimistic, and his quote from a Hindu text describing the Kali Yuga that describes America down to the last detail. However there is a note of optimism: Hesiod wrote that he was glad that he was not born in the Iron Age. Evola disagrees with him. Anyone who is standing among the ruins in today's modern world in the name of what comes from above will be a greater hero then the ones in the ages before. As it was written on the Kamikaze aircraft, "You are gods who are free from all human yearnings."
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39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Restoration - The Return to Tradition., March 19, 2001
The Modern Age is falling and the West is in an era of decadence. The darkest of all the dark ages, what the Hindus called the Kali Yuga, is before us and Ragnarok (Twilight of the Gods) is at hand. Tradition has been trammeled upon by modern utilitarian, pragmatist, and collectivist thought and the once sacred has been made profane. Mass-man is so caught up in collectivist thought and meaningless activity that he cannot be saved. Only a select group of elite traditionalists preserving the traditional Weltanschauung can restore a transcendent order to the world after the fall of this era. An ascetic neoscholasticism is needed to preserve the tradition intact while this cycle comes to an end.This is the message of Julius Evola in _Revolt Against the Modern World_. In this book, Evola fully dispels the modern myth of progress and reveals it as nothing more than a cover for a decadent society. Evola spends the first part of this book and much of the second part expostulating a traditional world order based on the idea of immanence-transcendence, before it's break-up at the end of the Middle Ages. He explains how an occult band of knights, members of the warrior caste, preserved tradition in the form of chivalry, during this period. However, with the advent of modern times, this tradition has largely been lost to us. Evola develops a myth of man's origins in a Golden Age, a Hyperborean race at the pole. A conflict developed between North and South, and between "solar" and "lunar" forms of religion. This conflict was at the heart of medieval Catholicism, and was reflected in the growing separation between priest and ruler. Originally, Evola argues, the Church sanctified the monarchy (the emperor) by a special rite. However, when this practice ended it made possible conflicting national loyalties to split up the medieval picture. With the Protestant Reformation which produced a strong emphasis on individualism more damage was done to the traditional world. As such, the world of tradition was lost and covered up by a world based more and more on utilitarian, hedonist, and ultimately collectivist principles, especially as witnessed in the French and Russian revolutions. This is the grim state of affairs we find ourselves in today. (Evola leaves off with a view of Europe "enclosed in the pincers" of America and the Soviet state, with America becoming more and more collectivist in nature and thinking.) Man must return to the values which are transcendent if he ever is to create a meaningful life. And, this is precisely what is absent from today's empty, hollow society. The philosophies of radical individualism and collectivism, nationalism and communism, pervade every aspect of our existence. And, we have lost much. Only by a return to tradition can we hope to achieve a new existence with a newfound meaning. Julius Evola was a fascinating character with much of interest to the dreamer and the mystic. Unfortunately, he allied himself with fascism briefly; however this is not the true basis for his thought.
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27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
True "paradigm shattering" potential here..., July 3, 2003
Occasionally you will run across a text that is so difficult to categorize that most attempts to understand it within a pre-existing framework will come across as sophomoric. _Revolt Against The Modern World_ is such a work. However, difficulty in labeling does not mean that the book cannot be criticized. It's important to read this book with neither an air of detached superiority or to blindly swallow the concepts therein. You can learn a lot from this one.Evola was the chief proponent of a little-known philosophical doctrine known as Traditionalism. When reading _Revolt_, however, you don't ever get a definition of what Traditionalism actually _is_. Rather, Evola draws upon his encyclopedic knowledge of ancient history and mythology to show how Traditional societies manifested themselves - most effectively in ancient Indo-Aryan society and its four-tier caste system - in their taking for granted the existence of a divine order. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary here, and this book will appeal to anyone interested in history, anthropology, sociology, or esoterica. By refusing to define exactly how this divine order should manifest itself in the realm of the social, Evola pulls no punches. Rather, he shows how the Divine (taken for granted) _did_ manifest itself in the social. Traditional man, he says, was aware of the existence of the Divine and his social institutions and mode of life reflected this larger, grander element of human existence. By the end of the first half of the book he's shown so many examples of how such Traditional societies were ordered that it almost becomes a bit tiresome, but when examining such disparate groups - ancient Greeks, Incans, Chinese, and Indians - it's hard to not be convinced that they all shared some extraordinary commonalities. Extrapolating these commonalities will allow you to deduce a semblance of Divine order from which they emanate. To Evola's Traditional man, everything in his environment reflected a higher transcendtal order. As a corollary to that, modern "mass man" views nature, history, and his own self and actions as aberrations having no inherent purpose whatsoever. Modernism is not any sort of "progression" from a primitive supernatural worldview but rather a mindset only possible in a very ephemeral point of the four-stage cycle of Hindu cosmology (Kali Yuga) or the Ragnarok of Norse mythology. By refusing to apologize for its operating paradigm the writing is more brisk and refreshing, as it does not have to offer apologies to modernism or anti-spiritualism on every page. It does occasionally bog down into polemics; Evola takes stabs at all sorts of modern ailments (or his perception thereof) - feminism, egalitarianism, consumerism, and the like, but doesn't offer any sort of prescription for any of it. It's all a part of the cycles. Needless to say, this book isn't going to sit well with Marxists! However, it won't sit well with armchair fascists either, at least those with the brains to really understand what he's saying (if they even exist). Evola _is_ very careful, when making assertions about the correct role of women and men and races of people, to show how all talk of say, the proper role of the sexes is meaningless without a direct living experience of transcendental order on the part of all society memebers. This will undoubtedly strike a nerve with many of us, who have long felt that there is just something that isn't "right" about modern existence and do not feel the need to rationalize the existence of God. When understanding Evola's notion of races, for example, Evola clarifies how the "strictly biological" interpretation of races of men is limiting, a decadent product of modernity. He views a "race" of individuals more as a group that embodies a particular spirit or life force. In this sense, he echoes the "root race" concept that has been well expounded upon in esoteric literature, especially Theosophy. However, viewing everything as a Divine emanation is impossible for most modern men - even those with an open mind can probably not implicitly "understand" it. Keep this in mind when reading Evola. From a historical perspective, it's important to realize that at the time of his writing the appeal of fascist philosophy seemed to offer some sort of return to Traditional principles, but when one examines Evola's disenchantment with fascism, it becomes clear that he was certainly not a fascist. At the time of writing, radical egalitarianism in the form of Communism was a very real threat in terms of wiping out every notion of culture. Given this, it's no more surprising that some prominent intellectuals sided with Fascist movements. This is open to criticism, but think of how many prominent intellectuals were socialists or communists. History had not yet made it apparent that both of these movements were inherently just totalitarian. I don't believe that Evola's brief involvement with Mussolini invalidates his work; his change in status to that of an "enemy" by the fascist parties in Germany and Italy should attribute a degree of honesty to his work. By the time of this book's writing, Evola does not seem to have any political agenda. He does not believe that a return to Traditional principles is possible. Rather, he's just interested in showing you how it "is". Jose Ortega y Gasset's "The Revolt of the Masses" and Fromm's "Escape from Freedom" are good companions to this book, as they both illustrate the dangers of corruption of the natural, or Traditional, order by mass movements and lowest common denominatorism. Whether or not you think Evola's caste systems and kingships remain the best solution to these problems, however, will probably still be a lot to swallow. With that being said, you're not left with much after reading this book besides intellectual satiation. Like Oswald Spengler, Evola views "history" as the process of inexorable cyclical forces of waxing and waning. Truly, Traditional principles have a history of creating "successful" societies that Marxist ones do not, but a return to them is impossible for the time being. Whether the Kali Yuga prophecy plays out will remain to be seen, but at least you'll hit the ground running after reading this book.
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