Metaphysics of Power

Julius Evola

• Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781914208119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

' The nobility must awaken, or else resign itself to perish, and not even gloriously: to perish by corrosion and fatal submersion. To awaken - that means: to become once more, at any cost, a political class.'

Metaphysics of Power is a collection of Julius Evola's powerfully argued articles organised into areas key to Evola's thought: the State, Education, Family, Liberty & Duty, Monarchy, Empire, Modern Society, and Aristocracy.

Coursing through much of Evola's work represented here is the key notion of the four-caste system: king, warrior, merchant, and laborer; which is clearly explicated in Decline of the Idea of the State and often referred to in other articles. The theme - namely the deviation from this ancient and nearly universal tradition - is part of the bedrock of Evola's critique on why the modern state often fails.

Various articles in this work touch on sensitive themes and demonstrate Evola's nuanced approaches to issues such as divorce, the Catholic Church's understanding of marriage, and individualism, but also handle with humor educational approaches such as the Montessori School, feminism, bureaucracy, and Europe's modern nobility.

Most of these articles are translated here for the first time and offer the reader - in strong, erudite English matching Evola's strong, erudite Italian - a deeper dive into Evola's thoughts, philosophy, and opinions, while the tone of these articles ranges from patient and pedagogical to brutal and scathing. Metaphysics of Power represents a must-have for the seasoned disciple of Evola's philosophy, but is also a unique opportunity for the novice in traditionalist studies as it offers smaller, tighter explanations of Evola's views on key issues.

The State

1. On the Decline of the Idea of the State

If we are to study the process of decline which the idea of the State has suffered in recent times, and if we are to study this process, not in its exterior and consequential aspects, but rather in its deep causes and in its entire bearing, then we must take as our point of reference a general vision of history centred on the perception of a fundamental phenomenon: the phenomenon, that is, of the regression of the castes. This vision is important for its double characteristic of being at one and the same time current and traditional.

It is current insofar as it corresponds to a more or less precise sensation which is today heralded in a variety of almost contemporaneous ways in the writers of various nations. The doctrine of Pareto regarding the ‘circulation of the elites’ already contains this conception in ovo.¹ And while we ourselves alluded to it through specific reference to the ancient caste system in our book Pagan Imperialism, which was at once our battle cry,² it has been expounded in a more definitive and systematic form in France by René Guénon³ and in Germany (albeit with a number of extremistic exaggerations) by Berl.⁴ Finally, and most significantly, a similar conception has appeared today in a work animated by the ‘squadrista’ spirit, and has in that work furnished the premises necessary to denounce the ‘cowardice of the twentieth century’.⁵

But our argument has a second and more generic claim to currency, owing to the spiritual ‘climate’ which has come both philosophically and culturally to replace the ponderous positivistic myths of yesterday. As can easily be intuited, the notion of a regression of the castes has presuppositions strictly antithetical to those of the progressivistic and evolutionistic ideologies which the rationalistic-Jacobin mindset has introduced even into the sphere of science and historical methodology. This mindset has elevated to the level of an absolute truth that which is suitable, at bottom, at most to the situation of a parvenu: the idea that the higher derives from the lower, civilisation from barbarisms, man from beast, and so forth; until it issues finally in the myths of Marxist economy and the Sovietic evangelicals of ‘technological messianism’. In part under the impetus of certain tragic experiences, which have dispelled the mirages of an ingenuous optimism, in part on account of a true interior upheaval, such evolutionalistic superstitions, at least in their most one-sided and pretentious aspect, have been banished today from the most conscious and revolutionary forces. The possibility therefore arises of recognising a different, contrary conception of history, one which is new, but at the same time remote and ‘traditional’. The doctrine of the regression of the castes in its relationship with the idea of the decline of the State is surely one of the fundamental expressions of this conception of history.

The fact of the matter is that, in the place of the recent materialistic and ‘democratic’ myth of evolution, the greatest civilisations of the past uniformly recognised the right and the truth of the opposite conception, which we may analogically call ‘aristocratic’. This conception affirms the nobility of the origins, and it perceives in the course of recent times, rather than any kind of acquisition of truly superior values, an erosion, a corruption and a decline. But here, so as not to give the impression that we are passing from one kind of superficial partiality to another, we must also observe that in the traditional conceptions which we have mentioned the concept of involution almost always figures as an element in a much vaster ‘cyclical’ conception; and this conception, though in a rather amateurish form, and constrained by narrower and more hypothetical horizons, has today made its reappearance in the theories regarding the ascending auroral phases and the descending twilight phases of the ‘cycle’ of the various civilisations, as can be seen in the work of Spengler, Frobenius or Ligeti.

This observation is not without its importance for the intention of the present writing. Indeed, we do not at all intend here to tendentiously emphasise viewpoints which accidentally align with those of ‘sinister prophets’: we intend rather to objectively specify certain of the aspects of the history of politics, which become visible the moment one takes a higher point of view. And if by this route we will have occasion to note negative phenomena in the society and in the political formation of recent times, we do not intend to recognise in this fact a kind of destiny, so much as to identify the traits of that alternative which we must before all realistically and manfully recognise if we are to proceed to a possible and true reconstruction. Thus, our study will be divided into three parts.

First, we will consider the ‘traditional’ antecedents to the doctrine in question, which consist essentially in the ‘doctrine of the four ages’. We will then pass over to examine the schema from which the idea of the regression of the castes draws its specific sense, so as to identify this idea historically and to consider in all of its degrees and aspects the progressive fall of the idea of the State. Finally, we will offer considerations regarding the elements which the clarified conception offers us, both for generally comprehending the most characteristic politico-social phenomena of our times, and for determining the paths which are apt to carry us toward a better European future — toward the reconstruction of the idea of the State.

1. — The traditional sensation of an involutionary process realising itself in recent times — a process for which the most characteristic term is the Eddic epithet of Ragnarökkr (the obfuscation of the divine) — far from remaining vague and incorporeal, once constituted an organically articulated doctrine, which can be found a little in every part of the world with a wide and striking degree of uniformity: the doctrine of the four ages. A process of gradual spiritual decadence through four cycles or ‘generations’ — this was how the sense of history was traditionally conceived. The best-known form of this doctrine is that of the Greco-Roman tradition.

Hesiod speaks of the four ages which are characterised symbolically by four metals, gold, silver, bronze and iron, through which, from a life ‘similar to that of the gods’, humanity passed to social forms that were ever more dominated by impiety, by violence and by injustice.⁶ The Indo-Aryan tradition posits the same doctrine in the terms of four cycles, the last of which has the significant name of ‘dark age’ — kalî yuga. These cycles were accompanied with the image of the gradual failure, in each of them, of the four ‘feet’ or supports of the Bull, which symbolises dharma, or the traditional law of non-human origin, by which each being is allocated its right place in the social hierarchy defined by the castes.⁷ The Iranic conception is similar to the Indo-Aryan and Hellenic, and the same can be said for the Chaldaic conception. The same idea finds some echo in the Jewish tradition, albeit in a peculiar transposition, in the prophetism which speaks of a splendid statue, whose head is gold, whose chest and arms are silver, whose abdomen is copper and whose feet are iron and clay: a statue which in its different parts (and as we will see this division has a singular correspondence with that which determined, according to Vedic tradition, the four principal castes of primordial man) represents four ‘kingdoms’, one following upon another, beginning from the ‘gold’ of the ‘the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given sovereignty, power, strength, and glory’.⁸

This motif is not only reproduced in Egypt (with certain variants that it is needless to examine and explain here) but even across the ocean, in the ancient imperial Aztec traditions. The relation between the doctrine of the four ages — which to a certain extent is projected in myth or within the penumbras of the highest prehistory — and the doctrine of the regression of the castes and the related decline of the idea of the State can be established in two ways. First of all, by means of traditional man’s very conception of time and of the unfolding of events in time. For traditional man, time does not flow uniformly and indefinitely, but rather fragments into cycles or periods, each point of which has its own individuality, and all of which together constitute the organic completion of a whole. The specific chronological duration of a cycle might vary. Quantitatively unequal periods could be grouped together, given only that each of them had reproduced all the moments typical of a given cycle. On this basis, an analogical correspondence traditionally held between the greater cycles and the lesser, which permitted one to consider one and the same tempo, so to speak, on octaves of varying size.⁹ Effective correspondences thus hold between the rhythm ‘four’ as a figure in universal key for the doctrine of the four ages on the one hand, and the rhythm ‘four’ as a figure in a narrower, more concrete and historical sphere on the other, in relation to the progressive descent of political authority from one to the other of the four ancient castes. And the characteristic points in the first doctrine, which are presented as myths — which is to say superhistorically — can for this very reason introduce themselves into the sense of concrete and analogically corresponding historical upheavals.

The second justification for our bringing the two doctrines into relation lies in this: that in the hierarchy of the four principal castes, as it was traditionally conceived, we find fixed, so to speak, in immobile coexistence, as superimposed strata of the social whole, those values and forces which would gradually come to dominate in each of the four great periods, through the dynamics of a historical becoming, albeit a regressive one. We cannot venture here into an investigation which we have already undertaken in all due breadth elsewhere.¹⁰ We limit ourselves to observing that with respect to the highest caste, that of the stock of divine kings, and in the very concept of the function which these incarnated, there can be found recurrent expressions, symbols and figurations wheresoever this caste manifests, which always and uniformly correspond to those the myths refer to as the generations of the first cycle, of the golden age.

While we have already seen that in the Jewish tradition the first golden epoch stands in direct relation with the supreme concept of regality, there is a legendary relation between the god of that era and Janus in the classical; this is significant, because the latter stood symbolically for a function which was simultaneously regal and pontifical. In the Indo-Aryan tradition the golden age is that in which the regal function, wholly awakened, operates through truth and justice, while the dark age is that in which this function ‘sleeps’;¹¹ in the Egyptian tradition the first dynasty has the attributes of the solar and Osirified kings, ‘the lords of the two crowns’, conceived of as transcendent beings; and even in the traditions of Iranified Hellenism the sovereigns not rarely took on the symbolic insignia of Apollo-Mithras, understood as the solar king of ‘those in the golden age’. On the other hand, it would be easy to demonstrate that the last epochs, the dark age, or the iron age, or the age of the ‘wolf’, is represented directly or indirectly by the dominion of the ‘nether’ forces — the promiscuous forces tied to material and to work as to a dark destiny — ponos.¹² The lowest caste corresponded to this in the traditional hierarchy (‘the dark age’, it is explicitly said,¹³ is that age characterised by the advent of the power of the servant caste, which is to say, of the pure demos). Meanwhile, with regard to the intermediary epoch, whether it be the epoch of the ‘demigods’ as ‘heroes’ (Hellas) or that in which the king is characterised only by ‘energetic action’ (India), or in which Titanic forces appear in a state of rebellion (the Eddas, the Bible), we are referred more or less directly to the principle proper to the ‘warrior’ caste. Let this suffice so far as concerns the ‘traditional’ framework for that view of history which we will now proceed to consider in its essential traits.

2. — As our premise, we must of course clarify and justify that which we have called ‘traditional hierarchy’, as well as the very notion of caste itself. The fundamental idea is that of a State, not merely as an organism, but as a spiritualised organism, such as might by degrees lift the individual from a pre-personal naturalistic life into a supernatural and super-personal life, through a system of ‘participation’ and of subordinations such as might constantly guide every single class of beings and every form of activity back to a single central axis. We are dealing here with a politico-social hierarchy with an essentially spiritual foundation, in which each caste or class corresponds to a determinate typical form of activity and a clearly determined function in the whole.

This meaning took on peculiar relief in the Indo-Aryan conception, which, beyond the four principal castes, conceived of the higher castes rather than the servile as the ‘divine’ element of ‘those who are reborn’ — dvija — culminating in ‘those who are like to the sun’, as against the ‘demonic’ element — asurya — of the ‘dark’ beings — krshna.¹⁴ In this way, one of the modern authors we have already cited, Berl,¹⁵ takes his premise from a dynamic-antagonistic conception of traditional hierarchy, almost a battle between cosmos and chaos: the sacred aristocracy would incorporate the ‘divine’ into its function of Olympic order, and the mass would incorporate the ‘demonic’ (not in the moral Christian sense, but in the sense of its being a pure naturalistic element). Each tends to drag the other along with it, and each of the intermediate forms corresponds to a given mixture of the opposite elements. So far as the reason behind the quadripartition goes — with four principal castes — it proceeds from analogy with the human organism itself. Thus, for example, the four castes in the Vedic tradition¹⁶ are brought to correspond to four fundamental parts of the ‘body’ of primordial man — and everyone knows the use ...

Table of contents

• The State
• Education and the Family
• Liberty and Duty
• Monarchy
• Empire
• The Crisis of Modern Society
• Aristocracy
• Other Books Published by Arktos
• Notes