Quite cringe worthy, isn't it?
That aside, I remember hearing that Evola thought Heinrich Himmler was a stand up guy, or something of that variety. He much appreciated the mysticism of the SS.
What would you say are his more interesting ideas then? Because with all the blathering about "Lunar and Solar" and some of his attitudes towards women and sexual assault, I struggle to find much of value. Then again, I'm not a philosopher (quintessentially English in that regard).
The weird mystical Nazis were very much "his people", in that they were also advocating against Christianity, and basically wanted to unmake Christendom.
Evola's ideas are interesting in that he was often the first to notice certain things about the Classical world, whih are now widely accepted, but "out there" when he was writing about them. His insane-sounding references to "dark sexual powers" and "embracing the inister path of Dionysius", are -- hilariously --
quite true to actual Dionysian cultism! Insane frenzies, ritualistic castration, weird stuff with snakes, weirder stuff with psychedelics and induced near-death experiences... that's what they did in Antiquity, too. Evola, decades before more thorough modern findings confirmed it, had correctly interpreted what Ancient cultic practices were truly like.
He was also foundational to the perennialist way of thinking, which seeks the through-line found in schools of philosophy and faith (and mythology). A lot of comparative cultural studies owe an uncomfortable (and oft-hidden) debt to his work. They cite sources that cite sources that cite Evola, and they ignore the implication. When you look at his ideas on the "warrior spirit", his view of it is quite accurate to the conception of historical warriors. He really does compare what Knights and Mujahidin and Samurai have in common, and he gets closer to the essence of it than most.
Problem is: that essence is profoundly alien to us. The thing that makes medieaval Knights inspiring to us are
not the the things they have in common with other "warrior elites", but rather the distinctly Christian elements that mark them as
different from others. The true commonalities are deeply unpleasant to us. Evola, in turn, revels in exactly those attributes. He finds them more pure, more honest. True, perhaps. But also less human. It is a facet of the same cosmic 'honesty' that Lovecraft was also depicting. Taken in a diffrent direction, but still.
In this, Evola really was a pioneer. For too long, when writing about the ancient past, we had pretended as if these were people who saw the world as we do. As if they were lik Christians, just... before Christ. Evola showed us how false that notion was, by embodying all the alien aspect of an Unchristian world, and then having the temerity to exist in a Christian world!
When thinking of a Norseman raid on an English abbey, we might envision a scene of a monk praying in his final moments, as the invaders slaughter all around him, before at last killing him. To us, that monk is the 'protagonist', whose faith rewards him hereafter. To Evola, the Norseman is the hero: living the pure life of war, and culling the world of sheep.
I find the Christian view infinitely more attractive, but the Ancient would agree with Evola.
Vae victis. The way Evola tells it, that's the right way of things, and we've all gone terribly off-course. The way he tells it, he's the sane one, born in a world that's left sanity behind since the days of Constantine.
A matter of perspective, we might say.
