Look out honey, ’cause I’m using technology!
Eumaios, Evola, & Neville on Race

[1]

Frederic Remington, The Bronco Buster, 1895.

6,316 words

Gen. Turgidson: Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race.

Is ‘Short Time Preference’ Really Such a Problem? [2]” by Eumaios, apart from its own considerable merits, was particularly interesting for me — and I suppose some of my Constant Readers — due to his reduplication of a number of the most characteristic formulations of the midcentury Barbadian mystic Neville. [1] [3] That this echoing was no doubt unintentional makes it even more striking.

Eumaios’ thesis, if I grasp it rightly, is that the Right is wrong — factually or as a rhetorical strategy — in condemning or mocking the Left as a bunch of “utopian dreamers” who “refuse to face the facts,” as revealed in either scripture, history or science, depending on how paleo the critic is. [2] [4]

This strategy is wrong; in fact, it is the Leftist who knows that science itself, in the form of technology (from rubbing sticks together to genetic manipulation), can change “the facts” and thus, indeed, change the future.

The values and institutions the Conservative seeks to defend are themselves relative to a given level of technology. The traditional institution of monogamous, male/female marriage, for example, may, as the Conservative is wont to say, be “rooted in the facts of biology,” but if modern genetic technology changes those facts — there are other ways to conceive new citizens — does not the institution also change: i.e., cease to have value or purpose?

Conversely, if one wants to preserve and honor a given institution, one’s rationale cannot lie in mere facts, as these are — in theory, at least — subject to manipulation.

If, for instance, the Conservative argues that mixed racial adoption is to be deplored, because such parents will have no genetically based reason to raise such children well, then the Leftist who refuses to drop his ideal of a racially mixed society will simply propose technology be used to alter — in his eyes, “improve” — that genetic propensity. [3] [5]

The problem with the notion of the New Soviet Man wasn’t that it was “against human nature” (or, religiously, “against God’s plan”) but that the technology hadn’t been perfected yet.

Thus the Conservative is wrong to frame the issue as “What, given the rigidly structured and unchangeable structure of reality, can we expect from human society?”; the Leftist has the true and winning perspective: “Given what we decide to value, how can we manipulate reality into bringing it about?”

Eumaios says:

“The Left” do not believe they are denying or inverting reality. They think that reality is contingent on what humans are willing to accept, and that they are “making it better.” In their view, they are willing a different reality into existence because the current reality is neither necessary nor the most desirable. The thinking members of the Left are aware that building a new reality is a process, part of which involves “deconstructing” and inverting the present one. The process of transformation, however, rather than its initial phase of “deconstruction,” requires a focus and belief in the future reality that the Left wishes to bring into existence. Perhaps the better way to view the Left-wing relationship with reality, then, is as a suspension of present reality which, if suspended long enough, brings in a new set of norms that set the conditions of a new reality.

Thus, technology provides a way for the Left to literally impose their imagined realities onto the material and social substrates of our world. It is possible, for instance, for an entire society to pretend that a traditional reproductive family is the same thing as two females living together when reproduction can occur between those two females via artificial means, such as in-vitro insemination. . . .

We can deduce from [this and other examples] that the Left succeeds in its objectives by, in some sense, “denying” reality. However, the realities which they deny, such as the existence of two genders, are chosen in line with new technologies that can sustain the act of denial at least for so long as the technological change is itself sustained.

Where had I heard this before? Why in the teaching, oral and written, of Neville Goddard! As Neville says over and over:

The only fate governing your life is the fate determined by your own concepts, your own assumptions; for an assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact[4] [6]

A self-taught mystic whose charismatic, British-accented presence thrived on the then-cutting-edge audio-visual lecture circuit, the man calling himself “Neville” (like Cher or Madonna) lectured every week on either coast to overflow crowds and even had his own TV show. Neville was post-war middle-America’s own Alan Watts, only better; he distilled from Tradition something he modestly called “a simple method to change the future” and taught it to everyone for free.

Mitch Horowitz has conveniently provided us with an even briefer summary of this “simple method”:

To recap the formula: First, clarify a sincere and deeply felt desire. Second, enter a state of relaxed immobility, bordering on sleep. Third, enact a mental scene that contains the assumption and feeling of your wish fulfilled. Run the little drama over and over in your mind until you experience a sense of fulfillment. Then resume your life. Evidence of your achievement will unfold at the right moment in your outer experience. [5] [7]

If I may briefly expand on this: step one selects for deeply felt desires, not random whims or parlor tricks (“Guess the card!”), what William James would call living options (or what Eumaios describes as “chosen in line with new technologies that can sustain the act of denial at least for so long as the technological change is itself sustained”); this enables you to practice the third step, imagining a future situation so intensely that it attains the contours of reality, thus imposing it on the future (“requires a focus and belief in the future reality that the Left wishes to bring into existence”). [6] [8] The second step is the selection of appropriate conditions; Neville suggested the liminal periods before falling asleep or just after waking up (what science calls the “hypnagogic state”) although he also liked to do so in the afternoons after a couple of martinis.

This is essentially the Leftist’s “process of transformation,” with its “initial phase of deconstruction” and subsequent “focus and belief in the future reality that the Left wishes to bring into existence.”

There’s nothing I enjoy more than a good distinction that resolves a pesky ambiguity. In the light of Eumaios and Neville, we can say that the Left denies present reality, but vehemently affirms a new, future reality. The Left does this with technology; Neville has his own technology; the two are, as the Mediaeval philosophers would say, convertible.

I’d like to explore this a bit more, using this distinction to examine a recurrent conflict on the Right: race, or more specifically, Evola’s notion of “spiritual race [9].” Spiritual race is functionally the same as Neville’s “state of consciousness”; a realm of freedom from which “reality” can be transformed at will.

The conflict between Left and Right, as Eumaios outlines it, is essentially the same as the conflict between Spengler or Yockey and those (Revilo Oliver, for example) who denounce the very idea of a “spiritual” race which would supervene over any mere biological reality. Between the times of Spengler and Yockey, Evola had also entered into this combat, and a look at his battle over “zoological materialism” (as Trotsky called it) is instructive in this context. [7] [10]

Noting infuriates the contemporary Rightist more than Evola on race. A “rotten patriot,” [8] [11] perhaps a “bad hombre.” H. T. Hansen has usefully gathered a sample of Evola-hatred from the Italian fascisti:

In order to show how vehemently his opponents fought against Evola, probably in part to demote him from his “privileged” standing with Mussolini, a selection of his critics follows. We begin with the Jesuit publication Civilta Cattolica (XCII, vol. III, September 1941), which indicted Evola’s racism as an “abstruse and unscientific construct.” . . .

The other quotations are from the Bolletino del Centro Studi Evoliani, no. 18, Genoa, 1977, and were compiled by Professor Giovanni Conti. Giorgio Almirante, later longtime leader of the MSI (Italy’s “neofascist” party), says in his article “Che la diritta via era smarrita . . .” (Since the Straight Path Was Lost . . .; subtitle: “Against the ‘Lost’ Sheep of Anti-Biological Pseudo-Racism,” in La Difesa delta Razza, V, no. 13, April 5, 1942): “Our racism must be that of the blood that I feel within me and that I can compare to the blood of others. Our racism must be a racism of flesh and muscle . . . otherwise we will ultimately play into the hands of the bastards and Jews. . . . Therefore the ‘absolute spiritualists’ should convince themselves that this is not the moment to, as they say, ‘deepen’ our racism.”

Ugoberto Alfassio Grimaldi (at the time one of the exemplary personalities in the racial and Fascist areas; after the war, he became a deputy of the Communist party) wrote in his review of Evola’s Grundrisse der Faschistischen Rassenlehre (Civilta Fascista, IX, no. 4, February 1942, pp. 252–261): “After many efforts, Julius Evola’s racism finally ends up in a special form of anti-racism. . . . As Fascists we must refuse the validity of an ‘autonomous’ racial teaching, especially when the concept of race conceals a metaphysical view that did not originate in our cultural sphere. . . That is why the reader of Evola feels some discomfort that Fascism is dealt with only as something very distant — I might almost say finite and mortal — which is used as an ‘instrumentum regni’ for the empowerment of other principles having merely a coincidental connection to politics. Here, Fascism is not the goal, but only the means to an end.”

Also in Civilta Fascista (IX, no. 10, August 1942, pp. 647-652), the same Grimaldi writes the following in his article “Ali margini di una polemica sulla validita di un esoterismo razzista” (On the Margins of a Polemic about the Validity of a Racial Esotericism): ‘The reasons that Fascism is fighting against a certain brand of modern culture that includes the Hebrew element are only in small part identical with the reasons that esotericists like Evola are fighting a culture that does not correspond to the one fought by Fascism, not even in the purely racial area. . . . One can have no doubt that Evola is aware of Fascism’s weakness (as he represents it) in comparison to his esoteric world, after re-reading what Evola himself has declared in the biweekly La Torre (no. 5, April 1, 1930): ‘We are neither “Fascists” nor “anti-Fascists.”‘” Even Guido Landra, the extremely important director of the Racial Studies Department in the Ministry for National Culture, coeditor of the official periodical La Difesa della Razza (The Defense of the Race), and coauthor of the official 1938 Manifesto Razzista, attacks Evola vehemently. In his article “Razzismo biologico e scientismo” (Biological Racism and Scientism), in La Difesa della Razza, VI, no. 1, November 1942, pp. 9-11, aptly subtitled “For Science and Against the Melancholic Apostles of a Nebulous Spiritualism,” we read: “Those poor racists of the first hour who are guilty merely of having initiated the race campaign in Italy and of having remained loyal to the original as well as the official line, are now being accused of nothing less than Jacobinism and Bolshevism. The accusation — and this is painful to report — originates from a publication that can really be proud of a noble anti-Jewish tradition; and the accuser is the author Evola, who, while claiming to expatiate upon Professor Canella, attacks all those who remain loyal to the notion of biological racism. . . . If the expressions ‘biological’ and ‘scientific’ have a negative connotation for the spiritualists, we answer that for us it is a great honor to be called biological and scientific racists.”

In Vita Italiana (XXXI, no. 359, February 1943, p. 151 ff.) Landra adds: “And this is the weakest point in Evola’s teachings: that an Aryan can possess the soul of a Jew and vice versa. And that a Jew could therefore be discriminated against even though he possesses the soul of an Aryan is for us theoretically untenable. In practice, the assumption of such a principle would have terrifying consequences for racism, and ones that would exclusively benefit the Jews.” Landra, probably the highest official racial theoretician, makes his sharpest attack in his own publication La Difesa della Razza (VI, 1, November 5, ‘1942, p. 20), singling out the following for criticism: “The essays about the problem of race, ‘Due razze’ [Two Races] by Giulio Evola and ‘I nostri nemici’ [Our Foes] by Guido Cavalluci, that have appeared in a well-known monthly Diorama . . . and in which every realistic foundation of racism is doubted, even going so far as labeling anti-Semitism as a mere polemical view . . . [and] that article ‘The Misunderstanding of Scientific Racism’ by Evola, which is the most exemplary document and monument of the present campaign that has been unleashed against racism in Italy . . .” [9] [12]

[13]

You can buy James O’Meara’s book The Eldritch Evola here. [14]

If I may interrupt this operatic chorus of Italian outrage, I must point out how confused all this is, at least rhetorically. For Evola, zoological materialism is no more than Bolshevism, i.e., Leftist; while his critics accuse him of “a special form of anti-racism,” thus as if not Leftism at least Leftist-adjacent; Woke Evola! Yet as no less than Mussolini immediately recognized, this is no other than Plato’s tripartite classification of body, soul, and spirit, and his corresponding “division of the populace into three groups: the general masses, the warriors, and the wise ones.” [10] [15]

Back to the helpful Hansen:

In summarizing, we will let Giovanni Monastra have the final word (Anthropologie aristocratique et Racisme): “Evola’s ambition was to apply the traditional worldview as he understood it to a specific aspect of reality: the differences that can be found in humans, both collectively and individually.” [11] [16]

What is this “traditional worldview”?

Since it is the “race of the spirit” that is the most difficult to grasp, and since Evola himself does not always define it in the same way, we want to mention Robert Melchionda’s thesis that views Evola as “antiracist” par excellence (II volto di Dionisio, p. 208). The reasoning behind this thesis, which seems strange after all the foregoing arguments, is as follows: since someone’s race, in the usual sense of the word, is connected to the corresponding physical characteristics that cannot be changed at will, the word “race” really expresses the “unchangeable,” the “immutable.” In contrast, to Evola, it is the spirit and not the body that contains the primary racial characteristicsBut according to Evola, the spirit above all represents “absolute freedom” and rules the physical body. [12] [17] However, this “absolute freedom” also makes a change in the “spiritual race” possible and thus race has ceased to be the deciding, unchangeable factor. The reality is a “freedom of race” of a scope not even postulated by the “antiracists.” [13] [18]

As Evola writes in his fundamental work on racial theory:

In a cat or a thoroughbred horse the biological is the deciding element, and thus the racial observation can be restricted to this criterion. This, however, is no longer the case when dealing with humans, or at least with beings that are worthy of that name. Man is indeed a biological being, but also connected to forces and laws of a different kind, that are as real and effective as the biological realm and whose influence on the latter cannot be overlooked. Fascist racial doctrine therefore holds a purely biological view of race to be inadequate[14] [19]

Indeed. While Evola uses the traditional (and Traditional) doctrine of man’s tripartite nature to make racism irrelevant, we are today more familiar with Christians asserting the irrelevance of race, due to there being “neither Jew nor gentile” in Christ. Asked during his postwar trial if he was a fascist, Evola replied no, he was a “super-fascist,” meaning presumably that his support of fascism was contingent on how it measured up to his own higher principles. [15] [20] If asked today, are you woke, he might well reply: no, I am super-woke!

What would that mean — an absolute spiritual freedom that could make a change in spiritual race — and thus race in its most important sense — possible? As with so much of Evola’s earlier magickal writings, the best way to understand it is to transpose it into the work of the mid-century Neville Goddard.

As always, he has a charming story:

A few years ago in this city I was giving a series of lectures . . . and in that audience was a gentleman who sought an audience before the meeting. And we went across the street into the little park there, and he said to me that he had an insoluble problem. I said, “There is no such thing as an insoluble problem. “But”, he said, “you do not know my problem. It’s not a state of health, I assure you; look at the skin that I wear.”. I said, “What’s wrong with it; it looks lovely to me”. He said, “Look at the pigment of my skin. I, by the accident of birth, am now discriminated against. The opportunities for progress in this world are denied me just because of the accident of birth, that I was born a colored man. Opportunities for advancement in every field, neighborhoods that I would like to live in and raise a family I couldn’t move in, where I would like to open up a business I couldn’t move into that area.”

Then I told him my own personal experience, that I came to this country [as an immigrant as well]. Well, I didn’t have that problem but I was a foreigner in the midst of all Americans. I didn’t find it difficult. [16] [21] “Yet”, as he reminded me, “but that’s not my problem, Neville. Others have come here speaking with an accent, but they haven’t my skin, and I was born an American”.

Then I told him an experience of mine in New York City. If I were called upon to name a man that I would consider my teacher, I would name Abdullah. I studied with that gentleman for five years. He had the same color skin, the same pigment as this gentleman. . . .

Well, I told this gentleman exactly what Abdullah had taught me, that there was no cause outside of the arrangement of his own mind. If he was discriminated against, it was not because of the pigment of his skin, though he showed me signs as large as all outdoors denying him access to a certain area. The sign is there only because in the minds of some men such patterns are formed and they draw unto themselves what now they would condemn; that there is no power outside the mind of man to do anything to man, and he by the arrangement of his own mind, by consenting to these restrictions in his cradle and being conditioned slowly through his youth, waking into manhood believing himself set upon would have to be set upon, but “no man cometh unto me save I call him.” [17] [22] So then someone comes to condemn or to praise. They couldn’t come unless I call them. Not a man called Neville, but that secret being that is not called Neville. The secret being that is the sum total of all of my beliefs, all of the things that I consent to, that form a pattern of structure, that secret being draws unto itself things in harmony with itself. Well, that man went away and wrestled with himself. He couldn’t believe everything I told him, not that night, but last Sunday morning in the lobby, he came forward and we renewed the friendship. He took me next door to show me the fruit of this teaching.

He said, “Neville, it took me almost three years to really overcome that fixed idea that I, by the accident of birth, would be a secondary citizen, but I overcame it. Now here is my office on Wilshire Boulevard. . . . Neville, this year I will net a quarter of a million dollars”. Well in America that is still a fabulous sum of money. It would be staggering in any other part of the world, but even in fabulous America a man to net a quarter of a million is really up in the very highest of brackets. And that was the man that a few years ago told me the whole vast world was against him by reason of the accident of birth. He knows now he is what he is by virtue of the state of consciousness with which he is identified, and the choice is his to go back to the restrictions of his childhood when he believed the story or to continue in the freedom that he has found[18] [23]

Neville’s Method may not change physical race, but it can enable someone to change their consciousness — their spiritual race — from one that accepts limitations to one that expects to succeed, and thereby create conditions where race is no longer a hindrance.

For if a man is ever hindered it can only be the state of consciousness in which he abides that hinders him. Man is freed or constrained by reason of the state of mind in which he persists. [19] [24]

Neville even echoes Evola’s own language of “aristocrats of the soul” [20] [25] vs zoological materialism:

As far as I am concerned, I refuse to accept the aristocracy of any being in this world, other than the aristocracy of the Spirit. What other aristocracy? Give me the aristocracy of the Spirit, but don’t come to me with any physical descent. I’m not an animal. I’m not a horse, where you develop it by one horse after the other. I’m God! We are all God! [21] [26]

Now before the frothing begins, let’s note that Neville’s is by no means a “woke” position. [22] [27] The use of “negro” might be excused as being of the time (although this is increasingly not an option), but the main point is that this breathes the spirit of Booker T. Washington’s bootstraps, and Marcus Garvey’s Negro Improvement Society. This is not surprising, since Neville’s famous, and almost totally obscure, guru, Abdullah, was not only a “black Ethiopian rabbi,” but likely — though not definitively — a high official of Garvey’s organization in Harlem. [23] [28]

And Garvey’s ultimate goal became relocation: Back to Africa! Surely a slogan any White Nationalist would endorse.

Moreover, if Abdullah was an official of Garvey’s movement, his disappearance after five or so years teaching Neville is easily accounted for: he took up Emperor Haile Selassie’s offer of repatriation, and, as Horowitz speculates, the urban-bred musician and mystic likely died trying to homestead in the Ethiopian wilderness. Ironically, he may have otherwise perished when the whole project was rendered null, along with Ethiopia, by — Mussolini. [24] [29]

All this may sound like just another reason to steer clear of Evola and, really, all philosophers, to say nothing of New Age woo-woo, if we are to address the dire, practical needs of the time. Yet, while Evola’s notion — that is, the notion of the entire spiritual tradition of the East and West — of a “race of the spirit” sounds intolerably diaphanous, I should point out that, as Alan Watts said, most metaphysics is “rockily practical.” [25] [30]

For what is the spirit of the race other than what the techno-wizards like to call — transhumanism? In “Ethnocentrism, or How I Learned to Stop Caring and Abandon Eternally Unreciprocated Altruism [31],” one Ashley Messinger meditates on the sticky problem of Whites who, genetically programmed to be both altruistic and universalistic, keep trying to spread “open societies” around the world while inviting the world to live among them, despite the Others being equally genetically programed to ruthlessly exploit and destroy them; in other words, Eumaios’ Leftists. To the Right this is a knock-down, fact-based refutation; to the Left, an opportunity.

Herein lies a cautionary tale against the distinctly European tendency of embracing blind universalism. There is no coming future of global utilitarian welfarism, at least not one with internally coherent goals or loyalties, because for most of the peoples of this Earth, the only relevant loyalty is to their group, their moral community, their kith and kin — whatever that looks like. It need not be racial, although it usually is in part. Recent computer model data [32] have shown how ethnocentric orientation fares in competition with three alternative group strategies: humanitarianism (English liberals, effectively), egoism, and traitors (SJWs). The last of these is found to be the least effective strategy by far, which is why in the long run there is little reason to worry about traitorous progressive ideologues. Eventually they will learn the hard way. Ethnocentrism wins the day against humanitarianism too, by exploiting the generosity of humanitarians. This sheds light on how ethnocentrism evolved without invoking impossibilities such as group selection in humans, and how it is that this strategy seems to predominate, quietly, even in relatively humanitarian populations [33]. It also illustrates why calling immigration leftist or anti-tribal is such a farce. Far too many white people see it as such because they are humanitarians — optimised to believe that their group-blind, gene-blind preferences are completely generalisable.

There is no indication that moral preferences can ever transcend genetic conflict. If it could, an awful lot of things in human history would have taken a different course. Political preferences are certainly heritable, and although it may be impractical to seek twin-study data on ethical systems, I would be willing to bet that there is also a common genetic architecture to utilitarians, humanitarians, libertarians, and advocates of “effective altruism.” [34] One aspect of their shared phenotype is distinctly visible whenever large numbers of them congregate [35], as many have observed. Some even seem to understand, perhaps unconsciously, just how rarefied their values are and endorse global government as a solution. But would all the opportunities for abuse in such a system be worth it? Would anyone other than its own architects, presumably Westerners, consent to its rulership? Indeed, if these are the measures necessary to bring the world into value-alignmentwhy not push for genetic imperialism, i.e. diluting the phenotypic diversity of the human species through genetic engineering so as to render everyone effective clones of Will MacAskill and Diana Fleischman?

Don’t laugh. Some people actually take this seriously as a solution. Their profile is predictable: white, middle class, educated, and living in a country in which the problems that were not there before multiracialism are getting increasingly hard to ignore — although it is a relatively safe assumption that they live nowhere near it themselves. They understand that group differences, even in something as simple as IQ, are enough to cause resentment (that is why racial affirmative action exists) and advocate post-racialism via genetic enhancement. It sounds nice enough until you realise that it would give hostile aliens yet more reasons to emigrate to the West, with our finite resources, but there is no reciprocal allowance for whites to move into Africa and Asia and take them over. Furthermore, given that there is more to group conflict than IQ, [like say, spirit?] who is to say that this would ameliorate group tensions enough to be worth the risk? In the end, what we are talking about is a literal horror movie replacement scenario in which POC are converted into high-class whites who just happen to have brown bodies. [26] [36] How many would willingly subject themselves to this, and how many of those who rejected it would continue to fan the flames of ethnic conflict?

Indeed. But more to our point: what was it that the hard-nosed Fascist materialist sneered at as “the weakest point” in Evola’s teachings, which would have “terrifying consequences for racism”? “That an Aryan can possess the soul of a Jew and vice versa.” And what does today’s hard-nosed materialist confidently predict, with infinitely more scientific justification? “POC . . . converted into high-class whites who just happen to have brown bodies.”

Neville’s method — a variety of good old American New Thought — can transform a black immigrant into a phenomenally successful real estate developer: everything an IQ-fanatic or civic nationalist could want in a Good Citizen. If you don’t believe that, or Evola’s spiritual aristocracy, wait for genetic engineering to do the same thing. In the meantime, back to Eumaios:

[We] must not . . . become like them in allowing innovations in technology and technique to set the conditions for what humans mean to each other. We cannot let desirable actions, like “hard work,” undesirable actions like “criminal behavior,” or even functional attributes like IQ become the fundamental determinant of how peoples of a shared heritage relate to themselves and others. . . . It is remarkable that this remains such a struggle for the white Right, considering that the rest of humanity, of all political persuasions, demonstrate their willingness to treat people differently in response to visible marks of their European heritage.

Eumaios’ warning is clear: you can’t beat values with “facts.”

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Notes

[1] [40] Those unfamiliar with Neville will find him discussed in several of my essays here on Counter-Currents and republished with several others in my collection Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson & Other Populist Gurus (Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020).

[2] [41] Although he uses similar language, these are not quotes from Eumaios but my rendering of The Conservative’s rhetoric. Note that Traditionalists with a cyclical view of history fit in here as well: the process is in one direction, and irreversible; whatever stage you are in, you are stuck with.

[3] [42] Essentially, this was Huxley’s notion in Brave New World; B. F. Skinner later proposed the idea, in all seriousness, as in fact a positive Utopia in his Walden Two.

[4] [43] The Power of Awareness, published in 1952. This last phrase — “for an assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact” — has been attributed to many, usual a British Prime Minister like Churchill or Harold MacMillan. Frank Costello: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” — The Departed (Scorsese, 2006).

[5] [44] The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2019), Chapter Ten: “Mirror Man: The Centrality of Neville Goddard,” pp. 132-33. See my review, “Evola’s Other Club: Mitch Horowitz & the Self-Made Mystic,” here; the connection to Evola will be explored here as well.

[6] [45] Of course, this is only a brief consideration of Neville’s method; more extensive coverage can be found in the articles cited above, and in particular “Magick for Housewives: The (Not so) New (and Really Very Traditional) Thought of Neville Goddard,” which appeared in Aristokratia IV and is reprinted in Mysticism After Modernism. The key point here is that the vehemence of one’s fantasy scene is necessary to imprint it on the subconscious (“Feeling is the Secret” as Neville says), from whence all future “reality” proceeds; this corresponds to the intensity of Leftist beliefs, which has the same reality-changing effect. I’ve speculated that Trump’s surprising victory in 2016 was precisely due to the intensity of Leftist fantasies of “the coming fascism” combined with the Alt-Right meme war; see “Lord Kek Commands: A Look at the Origins of Meme Magick [46],” reprinted in op. cit.

[7] [47] “Because of his emphasis on the spiritual, his rejection of what Trotsky called “zoological materialism” was only natural.” H. T. Hansen, “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” published as the Introduction to the English edition of Men Among the Ruins (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2002), p. 74.

[8] [48] 

He too gave me a hearty welcome and the awkward comedy came to a beautiful climax. He was holding a newspaper to which he subscribed, an organ of the militarist and jingoist party, and after shaking hands he pointed to it and commented on a paragraph about a namesake of mine – a publicist called Haller, a bad fellow and a rotten patriot – who had been making fun of the Kaiser and expressing the view that his own country was no less responsible for the outbreak of war than the enemy nations. There was a man for you! The editor had given him his deserts and put him in the pillory. 

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf; quoted in my “Two Orders, Same Man: Evola, Hesse [49]”; reprinted in Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson & Other Populist Gurus.

[9] [50] Hansen, op. cit., pp. 78-79.

[10] [51] Hansen, p. 73. cf Greg Johnson, “Introduction to Plato’s Republic [52],” reprinted in From Plato to Postmodernism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019).

[11] [53] Hansen, p. 88.

[12] [54] “Spirit is Fate, and Fate is Spirit. The essence of Spirit, however, is Freedom.” M. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Freedom (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, [1985]), p. 2.

[13] [55] Hansen, pp. 87-88.

[14] [56] Hansen, op. cit., p. 71, citing Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre, p. 41.

[15] [57] Wikipedia, quoting Wolff, Elisabetta Cassini. “Evola’s interpretation of fascism and moral responsibility [58]“, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 50, Issue 4–5, 2016. pp. 478–494.

[16] [59] Neville’s Barbadian accent, though it charmed his audiences, was a handicap in dealing with “fellow” Brits, as he discovered when he met Aldous Huxley and dared to try to discuss Blake:

In a certain social world, if you pronounce a certain word differently you are cataloged as one who is not “in,” as it were, and Huxley would not listen to my visions because I did not speak as he thought everyone should . . . Had Aldous only listened to my message, rather than my English, I could have told him things beyond the wildest dreams of D. H. Lawrence. But I am a Colonial in his eyes and, like all Englishmen; the Colonials are looked down upon. If you don’t speak with the Oxford or Cambridge accent, you are a Colonial in their eyes and not one of the boys. I was amused today when I looked at my baptismal certificate. My father’s occupation was listed as a meat vendor. He had a butcher shop.”

Infinite Potential: The Greatest Works of Neville Goddard; introduced and edited by Mitch Horowitz (New York: St. Martin’s, 2019), reviewed here [60]. Using Neville’s methods, his father and older brother built, on that shop, what is today Goddard Enterprises [61], the largest conglomerate based in the Caribbean. Some butcher shop.

[17] [62] “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.” John 6:44.

[18] [63] Changing the Feeling of ‘I’,” 1953 [64].

[19] [65] “Live in the End [66],” 7/19/1968. Here Neville identifies the man — Jimmie Fuller — and adds this example of how race affected his business: 

And here is a story that will interest all of you; he said ‘I had some property to dispose of, I had certain things in investments for those who had money, and so I advertised it and a man called me on the wire. He saw the ad, and asked me if I was the gentlemen, so I told him I was the one who had the property. The first thing he said to me, “I don’t want any nigger property.” Jimmie said, “I didn’t answer, as if I hadn’t even heard the word. If he wants to be prejudiced, he may be prejudiced, that’s his right. He wants to be silly about it, that’s his right. He can spend; he need not invest. [The point of the story here is to invest one’s attention rather than merely spend it, just as Schopenhauer also advises] So I said, “It is perfectly all right, sir, I have all kinds of property, I have all kinds of things for your investment.” A week later he called me up and said, “Would you come and see me.” He said, “I went to see him. When I got out of my car his knees almost buckled, for he didn’t know a negro was coming to see him, and a negro walked up his stairs into his living room.” He said within a matter of minutes he purchased $37,000 worth of mine that I had to offer. He said the first $25,000 that he bought he simply bought that to buy back his face, and then the remaining $12,000 he bought that because it was a very good investment. Well, since that time this gentleman has spent tens of thousands of dollars with me and constantly calls me to thank me because they are such wonderful investments.”

[20] [67] Cf. Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul, trans. Jocelyn Godwin and Constance Fontana (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2003).

[21] [68] Op. cit.

[22] [69] Interestingly, Donald G. McNeil was recently canceled [70] by the New York Times both for using the “N-word” as Neville does in the story in the previous note, and for telling a high school student that “it’s frustrating, because Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to.” Neville wouldn’t stand a chance today.

[23] [71] Horowitz, op. cit.

[24] [72] While sure a “coincidence” on the material plane, there is a kind of spiritual synchronicity here. Mussolini rejected Evola’s idea of a “pagan imperium” in favor of a concordat with the Roman Catholic Church, rejected — after initial support — Evola’s racial theories, and like Hitler, closed down and persecuted any “occult” movements in Italy. Another interesting “coincidence”: Abdullah, if he was the chap Horowitz was chasing down, lived in an apartment in a building — the family mansion, in fact — owned by Henry Morgenthau, whose son was the FDR cabinet official who devised the Morgenthau Plan to exterminate the German people after the Second World War.

[25] [73] In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965 [74] (New York: Pantheon Books. 1972), p. 3.

[26] [75] I’ve explored the resemblance of Evola and Traditionalism in general to the horror genre, specifically the Lovecraft Mythos, in The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others: Traditionalist Meditations on Literature, Art, & Culture; ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014).