2,204 words 
The Italian thinker Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World (RMW) was published between the wars, in 1934. What was then the Great War, and obviously was not yet known as World War I, had been the most destructive ever and was supposed to be the end of all war. But another was inevitable as Evola was writing RMW, and the book’s tensions reflect its place in history. It could be seen as the final book in a trilogy which includes Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) and René Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (1927). These books influenced Evola, and he translated both into Italian.
Evola’s central thesis is partly historiographical and partly metaphysical, and it is that the modern world has lost touch with its traditionalist, spiritual past. This is not merely a conservative appeal to nostalgia, a yearning for the 1950s or the Edwardian era. Evola’s time-frame was far larger. But there is one advantage we moderns have over the pre-lapsarian, traditionalist, deeply spiritual age the passing of which Evola laments: “Almost every people retains the memory of a catastrophe that ended the previous cycle of mankind.”
We moderns have not just history but historiography. Those past ages who knew there had been a cycle-ending catastrophe didn’t know what it was, what had caused it, or how another might be avoided. They were children, with no real memories. This is the meaning of the scene in Plato’s Timaeus, in which Solon is lightly scolded by a priest for the fact that the Greeks had no written language for so long, and thus were themselves like children. We, at least, have been forewarned by history and its cycles and dramatic interludes. And a strong voice among those warning us is that of Evola.
What the Italian calls “chthonic”, or earth-based, religions have superseded pagan, spiritualistic belief-systems with disastrous results. With respect to history, it is the mythology of the ancient past to which Evola looks for enlightenment concerning what has been lost in our post-lapsarian age:
From the perspective that I adopt, what matters in history are all the mythological elements it has to offer, or all the myths that enter into its web, as integrations of the ‘meaning’ of history itself.
This echoes J. G. Frazer’s mythical quest in The Golden Bough, a wonderful book which Evola references in RMW. But the search for meaning is conditioned by the metaphysical for Evola, specifically concerning the role of the invisible world:
In traditional societies the ‘invisible’ was an element as real, if not more real, than the data provided by the physical senses. Every aspect of the individual and of the social life of the people belonging to these societies was influenced by this experience.
As for any reconnection with the pre-lapsarian age Evola sees in the revival of the classical world, he does not take the traditional route, which is via the Renaissance. This, he claims, is false historiography, and he suggests an alternative bridge between the modern and the traditionalist world:
The truth is that after the collapse of the ancient world, if there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins.
This is an important point. Perhaps we have been sold the Renaissance, with its wonderful statuary, art, and palazzi, as the fons et origo of our present civilization (such as it is) when we should have been looking further back in time. Philosophically speaking, the Anselms and Abelards and Augustines brought more life to linguistic philosophy than Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (who I admire very much) or Giordano Bruno, who Evola makes time to mock here. Evola finds the Renaissance overblown, and has no time for Humanism. It is linked far too closely to individualism, which in its turn is responsible for democracy. All these elements Evola finds responsible for our modern plight, or at least his, almost a century ago.
Traditional civilizations, Evola writes, differ from our decadent present by virtue of their conception of “supreme authority”. There was no political dimension to this regal sanction – this was a later and ruinous development – and the guarantor of authority was not “mere strength, violence, or natural and secular qualities such as intelligence, wisdom, physical courage… The roots of authority, on the contrary, always had a metaphysical character.”
There must, of course, be a point of mediation between the invisible and visible planes which provide the commerce for Evola’s Golden Age to prosper. Evola compiles a list of ancient and traditional societies whose rulers were sanctioned by the non-temporal, but performed the office of a bridge or pontifex between the gods and the people ruled by this emissary of the divine. Myth and ritual here are not outliers linked with some vague metaphysical realm, but part of the office of the ruler. Rulers are linked with the sun, the King of the Wood, and other natural and supernatural phenomena – again, this is similar territory to Frazer’s – but it is the realm of the invisible which provides the imprimatur of the ruler over the ruled. Such a society is profoundly anti-democratic.
Guénon influenced Evola by being critical both of democracy and individualism, and by introducing the concept of the Kali Yuga, the “Dark Age” or final civilizational cycle. This has only become darker in almost a century since RWM was published. Individualism is the delivery system for a will which would fragment and disassemble the sanctity of tradition, leading to the false Grail of democracy:
The ‘will,’ in the sense of an individualistic freedom, of those who own the land to divide their property, break it up, and separate it from the legacy of blood and the rigorous norms of the paternal right and primogeniture, truly represents one of the characteristic manifestations of the degeneration of the traditional spirit.
Individualism, by its very nature, tends away from the tribe, the cadre, the pack. Away, ultimately, from tradition, which is what unites us, or ought to if we are to live in healthy societies. This atomization can only lead to degeneration as the superior races are dying out before the ineluctable logic of individualism, which especially in the so-called contemporary “higher classes,” has caused people “to lose all desire to procreate”. So it is today among the white races.
Evola is equally dismissive of democracy, going as far as to smother it in its cradle:
Greek democracy, rather than a conquest of Greek civilization should be regarded as a victory of Asia Minor and of the Southern Hemisphere over the primordial Hellenic stocks that were too weak and scattered to react.
Evola’s attitude to democracy is entirely understandable. He was an aristocrat. Had he wished to do so before his death in 1974, he would have been eligible to become a full, “made” Mafia mobster, his family being traceable all the back to Sicily. (That might have made a good movie). Evola might also, therefore, be forgiven for a little special pleading concerning his own bloodline’s role in his analysis:
[T]he ethos of superiority over the world, of dominating calm and of imperturbability combined with readiness for absolute command, which has remained the characteristic of various aristocratic types even after the secularization of nobility, must be considered an echo of that element that was originally the regal, spiritual, and transcendent element.
As for the tribe which we now suspect dominates the world from the shadows, Evola sounds a note of caution. Even in the introduction to his own printing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Evola warned against the obsession with seeing “the Jew everywhere as deus ex machina”. It does not do to underestimate the power of the Jews, but it is also unhealthy to see their influence in every detail of life and become obsessive.
Evola was also an accomplished student of the occult (rather than an occultist). Much of the occult “works” through correspondences, and Evola’s occult training transfers itself easily to his mystical anthropology:
An essential feature of myth and symbol is that both are apt to convey multiple meanings, which must be separated in a clear-cut fashion and assigned methodically to different categories by means of adequate interpretations.
Deciphering the past is made doubly difficult if that past is itself written in cipher. The mystical nature of ritual and observance can thus be understood as an interpretation, and one which centered around the performance of the ceremony of initiation (such as the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, for example):
I wish to emphasize that in the world of Tradition, initiation in its highest forms was conceived as an intensely real operation that was capable of changing the ontological status of the individual and of grafting onto him certain forces of the world of Being, or of the overworld.
As for the difference and compatibility of men and women, just as today’s Left see the patriarchy everywhere, so Evola saw the matriarchy, and it does not bode well for a civilization:
The periods in which women have reached autonomy and preeminence almost always have coincided with epochs marked by manifest decadence in ancient civilizations.
And, as the scientistic took over at pace, the nature of time itself changed. Time is mechanized now, divided into units which actually make it quasi-spatial. Evola finds a different temporal calibration in the ancient world: “In many ways we can agree with Hubert-Mauss, who said that the ancient calendar marked the periodicity of a system of rites.”
As for the charges of racism and fascism made towards Evola, these are based on the naïve assumption that these are not desirable positions, which is not necessarily the case, depending on one’s ethnic perspective. The left often defends communism by claiming that it has yet to be correctly applied, and we have yet to experience the “right kind” of communism and its attendant benefits. Could the right not counter this in kind, and claim that we have yet to experience the “right kind” of fascism?
The right should never waste time defending this or that writer against a charge of racism. For us, it is not even a charge. “Racism” is simply leftist shorthand for the “race realism” we espouse. Evola was not, however, interested in race from a biological or genetic point of view:
Race, blood, hereditary purity of blood: these are merely ‘material’ factors. A civilization in the true, traditional sense of the word arises only when a supernatural and nonhuman force of a higher order—a force that corresponds to the ‘pontifical’ function, to the component of the rite, and to the principle of spirituality as the basis of a hierarchical differentiation of people—acts upon these factors.
Evola vigorously defends the various caste systems, as well as the principles of chivalry, which he sees as super-individualistic and therefore healthy, as well as instantiating the correct relationship between men and women. He also makes a point concerning caste which is acutely relevant to our cultural situation regarding race and the past:
If the modern world has disapproved of the ‘injustice’ of the caste system, it has stigmatized much more vibrantly those ancient civilizations that practiced slavery; recent times boast of having championed the principle of ‘human dignity.’ This too is mere rhetoric.
Evola reserves his ire, in the main, for the petty distractions of the modern West. Again, he was writing almost 100 years ago, and who can say what he would have made of modern fripperies? Sport, fashion, the press, jazz music, intoxication; Evola sees a fallen world, spiritually and, as a direct result, culturally:
[M]odern man needs these degraded and desecrated forms of action as if they were some kind of drug; he needs them to elude the sense of his inner emptiness, to be aware of himself, and to find in exasperated sensations the surrogate for the true meaning of life.
This degraded man seeks “elation and stupefaction” rather than experiences of spiritual worth.
Can we ever hope to return to Evola’s pre-lapsarian times? It is hard to imagine. For Evola, there is a too great a rift between modern man and his enlightened ancestors, a difference which:
…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.
Our philosophical position, degraded and weakened over centuries, now stands against us.
Revolt Against the Modern World is a dense yet eminently readable history of the decline of the religious spirit in the West, the creeping progress of the Kali Yuga. Philosophy, and epistemology, represent an essential failing in this decline, and Evola takes us back, not to some rude and bucolic epoch in which we can all dress up as Norsemen and cosplay our way back into spirituality, but an era which was as Heideggerian as it was religious: “The first era is essentially the era of Being, and hence of truth in a transcendent sense.”
Should you wish to revolt against the modern world, the revolution starts here.
27 comments
Loved this. Thank you.
Thank you. It was a pleasure to read.
Part of the Revolt Against the Modern World is in espousing Classical Music. There’s nothing quite like saying you’re an anti-Modernist, a Klan-adjacent, NS, without verbalizing it, than listening to a Beethoven piano sonata, a Haydn string quartet, a Mozart aria.
I just scanned through this article real quick, where is the jew? There is no mention of the jew, so any discussion about the spiritual decline of the white race is incomplete. 🐍
What you don’t get is that conservatives can often be wrong. Edmund Burke, in his famous reflections on the revolution in France, claimed that if the monarchical order was overthrown, money powers, such as Jews and money lenders with their tawdry practices, would take control of and corrupt society. With the benefit of experience and time, we can see that in fact white supremacists and Episcopalians now control society. So how wrong he was!
It’s amazing Peter, what the Western Man can achieve without any help from “the Jews.” Do Jews stand outside the church doors and tell people not to go in, do Jews tell the Normies not to login to Counter-Currents or forbid financially successful Westerners from supporting Counter-Currents? Certainly, organized Jewry may be against the Western way of life but if Western man doesn’t have what it takes to support our ancient way of life one can hardly blame the Jews.
“A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”
Burroughs(John, not William s 😉)
You have a point, in a world that is impartial, and disinterested your little quote would have validity. But we don’t live in a world that is impartial, and disinterested; we live in a world in which a malevolent group of (((people))) want us dead, and erased from history, whom will spare no expense, or effort in achieving that goal! 🐍
DarkPlato: May 22, 2025 “A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.” Burroughs(John, not William s )
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Never heard of Mr. Burroughs, but thank you, DP. According to his WikiJew bio he sounds to have been a Nature lover with “a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world.”
Though he died more than 100 years ago were he alive today, judging by the quote of his that you chose, would he be calling Critical Race Theorists (CRTs) failures for teaching impressionable White children that their ancestors were evil for their mistreatment of Blacks, Indians, Jews and Mestizos? That doesn’t sound to me like something he would say. The “guilt trip on Whitey” propaganda is anti-Nature.
It would be so very interesting to hear the historical perspectives of many of our great thinkers from the past about the things that are going on in America right now. Most of them were so silent on these topics. How many of them would be hack leftists up there spouting trans and critical race theory? I like to think that most of them would be writing for counter currents! Or national vanguard!
Sandy: May 22, 2025 It’s amazing Peter, what the Western Man can achieve without any help from “the Jews.” Do Jews stand outside the church doors and tell people not to go in, do Jews tell the Normies not to login to Counter-Currents or forbid financially successful Westerners from supporting Counter-Currents? Certainly, organized Jewry may be against the Western way of life ….
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Thank you, Sandy, for your comment about “the Jews.” Your scare quotes suggest skepticism or disdain for criticism of Jews? Yet you say “Certainly, organized Jewry may be against the Western way of life” …. Certainly or may, which is it?
I often refer to observations of an expert on the JQ, Dr. William Pierce, to make a point. In this case, to answer your silly question, Do Jews stand outside the church doors and tell people not to go in? I’m reminded of this excerpt from what Pierce told us 26 years ago in his talk “Authoritarianism and Oz” on nationalvanguard.org:
…One final thought today, just in case some of you believe that I have exaggerated in talking about the urgency of our situation or the animalistic and mechanical nature of many of our fellow citizens. There’s a television series called Oz which you ought to watch. It’s on Home Box Office, HBO, which is a subsidiary of Time-Warner, headed by that nice Jewish boy Gerald Levin. The executive producer of the Oz series itself is another nice Jewish boy, Barry Levinson. I don’t have access to HBO myself, but a friend recorded a few episodes and sent them to me. Like much of Jewish television, Oz is not very realistic, but it does provide a stark and graphic picture of where the Jews are pushing America, where they are pushing the lemmings. It is not at all subtle in telling us that homosexuals are sensitive and caring people; that Blacks are strong and intelligent; that Jews are noble, inoffensive, and long-suffering; that interracial sex is good and natural; and that racially conscious Whites are despicable and beastly.
This is a Jewish message aimed at the lemmings. It speaks to the lemmings directly from Mr. Levinson’s black heart. And there is no doubt that the message has the desired effect on its White-trash viewers. If it didn’t have good ratings, Gerald Levin wouldn’t bother to poison the airwaves with it. The Jews, of course, always have been pushing in the same direction. But Oz shows us how far they have moved in that direction. Such a television series would have been inconceivable 10 years ago — even five years ago. But today, with millions of mindless, trendy White kids in their backward baseball caps, singing the rap ditties they have been taught by other Jewish media bosses, trading basketball cards with their favorite Black sports heroes on them, Mr. Levin and Mr. Levinson have figured that they can get away with pushing a little further. And they are getting away with it.
So tune in to Oz. View a segment of it. Don’t let yourself be offended by the language or the gutter-level imagery. Study it. Think about its message. Think about what is in the Jewish minds of the people producing this filth. Think about what these Jews are aiming for. And remember, this is not some obscure, underground production viewed by only a few warped fans. This is mainstream America. This is Home Box Office. This is Time-Warner. The people who produce this filth are the biggest financial contributors to the Democratic Party. They are the Jews who got Bill Clinton elected twice. And the people who watch it and like it are the people who kept Bill Clinton’s popularity polls up during his impeachment. This is not some bad dream. This is real. This is what is happening today….
See more at the link above about how the electronic Jew pushes anti-White filth.
So, Sandy, the answer is no to your question, Do Jews stand outside the church doors and tell people not to go in? They don’t have to; their bought-and-paid-for televangelists encourage gullible, superstitious goyim to go to church, to worship their mythical Superspook Yahweh, and be sure to watch TV brain rot like OZ also.
“Certainly, organized Jewry may be against the Western way of life” …. Certainly or may, which is it?
Kevin MacDonald once wrote that the trend was already in motion when the Jews were released from the ghettos and they simply went with the trend and have done very well by it. We, on the other hand, have to look deeper. A fine example was the fabled British East India Company which conceived by the aristocracy passed into Jewish hands. Even better is the church. For centuries it was “let His blood be on our hands” but now they are our “elder brother.” How did that happen?
So, sure, the assorted Jewish cults hate our once Western way of life but by focusing on the Jews we are missing the bigger picture. While we want a country of our own, we forget that we once did have a country of our own but now we live in a Jewish culture. The question is when we get a country of our own again how will we keep it ours? So, Will, I believe that focusing on the Jews is a distraction to the real problem. Whatever that that may be.
”Kevin MacDonald once wrote that the trend was already in motion when the Jews were released from the ghettos and they simply went with the trend …”
I think I have an answer to your question. A few years back I read three books on the conspiracy question: The Trail of The Serpent, The Light Bearers of Darkness, and Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. In one of these books it was revealed that during the “Dark Ages” the Catholic Church fought an ongoing war with schools that taught Satan worship, and witchcraft. So the true cause of our decline was a visceral rejection of Christianity which has morphed into the degenerate trends we see today, and the Jews were involved in those schools of Satanism even before they were released from the ghettos. 🙃
Sandy: May 22, 2025 So, sure, the assorted Jewish cults hate our once Western way of life but by focusing on the Jews we are missing the bigger picture. While we want a country of our own, we forget that we once did have a country of our own but now we live in a Jewish culture. The question is when we get a country of our own again how will we keep it ours? So, Will, I believe that focusing on the Jews is a distraction to the real problem. Whatever that that may be.
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If you think we can look at your bigger picture without focusing on why we live in a Jewish culture, and how we got here, good luck with that, Sandy.
We’re not going to have an entire “country of our own” unless we begin small with like-minded, eligible Whites who have the will and determination to withdraw from the current Judaized culture and separate from Jews and other non-Whites and their influences; that includes separating from tens of millions of Whites who prefer to go along with the Jewish status quo rather than support serious White racial separatists.
The plan is not that complicated. See: “What is the National Alliance?” at nationalvanguard.org.
You are basically right! However, when a body is dying from a chronic disease, as well as being infested by parasite, before curing the disease he must first rid himself of the parasite.
Sorry to be saying too much irrelevant stuff, but I’ve often offered to buy free memberships for people on this website, simply to increase the fun of the community and the idea that I’m helping people like us, but I’ve never had any takers. What that tells me is that in general people are more afraid of association by name with this website than the money is any issue for them. Ask why this fear exists.
I wish you said that about three weeks ago before I mailed in my cheque. 🙂
Lord Shang would be the most deserving regular here off the top of my head.
Peter Quint: May 21, 2025 I just scanned through this article real quick, where is the jew? There is no mention of the jew, so any discussion about the spiritual decline of the white race is incomplete.
I haven’t read Evola’s Revolt, but will say that anyone who wrote about the spiritual decline of Whites in the 1930s and was against both democracy and individualism was certainly on the right track.
Peter, Jews are barely mentioned in this piece, saying once that Evola warned about “obsessiveness” on the JQ, But these words by Mr. Gullick caught my attention:
…Giordano Bruno, who Evola makes time to mock here.
Why would Evola mock Bruno? Historian Ted O’Keefe wrote the following while working for Dr. Pierce back in the 1970s:
[T]he philosopher [Bruno] was burned alive for heresy in 1600. Bruno’s courage in defying his executioners should serve as a beacon of inspiration to Whites to battle for their race’s truth today.
Bruno defied his inquisitors until his last breath and is a hero to White truth-tellers today, 425 years after being burned at the stake by them. Speaking of Jews, Bruno is quoted about the Tribe in this piece by Mr. O’Keefe: “Giordano Bruno: Visionary and Martyr” at nationalvanguard.org
There was one race for which Bruno reserved unmitigated disdain. He despised the Jews, referring to them as the “excrement of Egypt,” “a pestilent, leprous, and generally pernicious generation who deserve to be extinguished before they are born.”
What’s to be mocked about Giordana Bruno?
”What’s to be mocked about Giordana Bruno?”
Nothing! It makes you go hmmm? I stick to my thesis, it’s the jews, it’s the jews, it’s the jews! 🐍
Peter Quint, answers my question: May 22, 2025 ”What’s to be mocked about Giordana Bruno?”
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Nothing! It makes you go hmmm? I stick to my thesis, it’s the jews, it’s the jews, it’s the jews!
What’s that giant humming sound we’re hearing from awakening Whites?
Yes, Jews may be essential. But it’s not just the Jews.
🙂
If you’re looking for absolute ferocious naming, Rodzaevsky’s Testament of a Russian Fascist and Celine’s Trifles For a Massacre is a one-man war of annihilation against world jewry. Few in my collection can compete with such furious polemics.
As someone who may never get around to reading Evola but who remains curious, I appreciated this summary of some of Evola’s thought.
I had only read Notes on the Third Reich, and so I am fairly new to Evola, but I found Revolt fascinating. Another extension to my ever-expanding reading list!
Even if you’re not young, Evola’s Handbook For Right-Wing Youth is an excellent introduction by essays even though he’s stylistically not my favorite.
DarkPlato: May 22, 2025 It would be so very interesting to hear the historical perspectives of many of our great thinkers from the past about the things that are going on in America right now… I like to think that most of them would be writing for counter currents! Or national vanguard!
I’d like to think that also, DP. If you’re wondering what great thinkers from our past had to say about Jews, check out Eternal Strangers by Dr. Thomas Dalton:
Critical Views of Jews and Judaism Through the Ages
It is common knowledge that Jews have been disliked for centuries–sometimes loathed, sometimes hated. But why? The standard reply is that anti-Semitism is a “disease” that, for some strange reason, has afflicted non-Jews for ages. But this makes little sense. Nor can it be an “irrational” reaction. Such things must have real, physical causal factors.
Our best hope for understanding this recurrent ‘anti-Semitism’ is to study the history: to look at the actual words written by prominent critics of the Jews, in context, and with an eye to any common patterns that might emerge. Such a study reveals strikingly consistent observations: Jews are seen as pernicious, conniving, shifty liars; they harbor a deep-seated hatred of humanity; they are at once foolish and arrogant; they are socially disruptive and rebellious; they are ruthless exploiters and parasites; they are master criminals–the list goes on.
The persistence of such comments is remarkable and strongly suggests that the cause for such animosity resides in the Jews themselves–in their attitudes, their values, their ethnic traits and their beliefs. It is hard to come to any other conclusion than that Jews are inclined toward actions that trigger a revulsion in non-Jews. Jews have always been, and will always be, eternal strangers.
Given this fact, we have a difficult path forward. One lesson of history is that Jews will not change; if anything, they will become better at hiding their real motives and intents. Under such conditions, many great thinkers have come to the conclusion that Jews must be separated from the rest of humanity.
Eternal Strangers is a profoundly important book. It addresses the modern-day “Jewish problem” in all its depth–something which is arguably at the root of many of the world’s social, political and economic problems. The matter is urgent; we haven’t a moment to lose.
Available here, among 30-plus other titles from Dr. Dalton: “Thomas Dalton” at cosmotheistchurch.org
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