5,315 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
Here is where Hesse meets up with Evola: the two post-First World War writers share a number of themes, though what Evola would have called their “personal equation” gave them decidedly different interpretations. Demian, for example, treats of initiation, paganism, esoteric knowledge, and construction of elites, in ways comparable to Evola’s personal investigations with the UR group;[1] but apart from Hesse’s overall Jungian lens, his war-derived pacifism would have disgusted Evola. And his Buddha “is certainly not the one depicted by Hermann Hesse in his novel [Siddhartha].” (more…)