Evola - Pagan Imperialism

Pagan Imperialism
Julius Evola

The Primordial Nordic-Solar Tradition

We alluded to a primordial Nordic tradition. It is not a myth, it is our truth. Already in the most remote prehistory, where positivist superstition believed right up until yesterday in ape-like cave-dwellers, there existed a primordial, unified, and powerful civilisation, an echo of which still resounds as an eternal symbol in everything that the past has to offer us.

The Iranians speak of the Airyanem-Vaêjô, located in the most extreme North, and see in it the first creation of the "god of light", the origin of their lineage and also the seat of "splendour"—hvarenô—that mystical force typical of the Aryan race, and especially of their divine kings; they see there—symbolically—the "place" where the warrior religion of Zarathustra would have been revealed for the first time.

Similarly, the tradition of the Indo-Aryans knows the Shveta-dvîpa, the "Island of Splendour", also located in the far North, where Narâyâna, the one who "is the light" and "who stays above the waters", that is, above the causality of events, has his residence. It speaks also of the Uttarakura, a Nordic primordial race; by Nordic, what is meant is the solar path of the gods—deva-yâna—and the tern uttara includes the concept of all that is sublime, lofty, and superior&em;of what in the figurative sense can be called ârya, Aryan—according to the concept of "Nordic".

Again, the Achean-Dorian stocks are heirs of the legendary Nordic Hyperboreans: the most characteristic god and hero of this race—the solar Apollo, the annihilator of the serpent Python—would have come from here; Hercules—the ally of the Olympian gods against the giants, the annihilator of the Amazons and of elemental beings, the "fair conqueror", of whom many Greek and Roman kings later considered themselves, so to speak, as his avatars—would have carried the olive tree from here with whose branches the victors were crowned (Pindar).

But in Hellas, this Nordic theme is, moreover, mixed up with that of Thule, the mysterious Nordic land, which sometimes becomes the "Island of the Heroes" and the "Country of the Immortals", where the blond Rhadamanthus reigns, the "Island of the Sun"—Thule ultima a sole nomens habens—whose memory remained so alive that, convinced he had recognised it in Britain, Constantius Chlorus marched there with his legions, not so much for military glory as to reach the land "which is nearest to the sky and more sacred than every other region", in the sense of anticipating in this way his apotheosis as Caesar.

Often, in the Nordic-Germanic traditions, Asgard, the home of the Aesir and departed heroes, is superimposed over another divine residence of the same kind; and the Nordic kings, who were considered to be demigods and Aesir—semideos id est ansis—and brought their peoples victory with their mystical power of "fate", transferred the origin of their dynasty to that "divine" land.

In the Gaelic traditions, there is Avalon, from which originated the pure divine race of the Tuatha dé Danann, the heroic conquerors of prehistoric Ireland, among whom the hero Ogma corresponds precisely to the Dorian Hercules—Avalon, which, on the other hand, blends into Tir na mBeo, the "Land of the Living", the kingdom of Boadag, the "Victorious".

Even the Aztecs have their land of origin in the North—in Aztlan, which is also called the "White Land" or "Land of the Light", which they left under the leadership of a god-warrior, Huitzilopochtli: hence, the Toltech also claim, as seat of origin, Tlalocan, Tollan, or Tula, that, like the Greek Thule, is also the "Land of the Sun" and fuses into the "paradise" of the kings and heroes fallen on the battlefield.

These are only some of the concordant references, traceable in the most diverse traditions as the recollection of a primordial Nordic civilisation and fatherland in which, in a more precise way, a transcendent superhuman spirituality unites with the heroic, royal, and triumphal element: towards form victorious over chaos; towards super-humanity triumphant over all that is human and telluric; towards "solarity" as principal symbol of a transcendent virility, as ideal of a dignity which, in the order of spiritual forces, corresponds to the sovereign, the hero, the ruler, on the material plane. And, while the traces of tradition can be referred back along a road from the North to the South, from the West to the East, which the races preserving this spirit have travelled, the larger formations of Aryan peoples, in more recent times, testify, by the purer nature of their values and cults, their most characteristic deities and institutions, typical of this force and this civilisation, as well as to the struggle against inferior southern races, which are bound to the earth and to the spirits of the earth, to the “demonic” and irrational part of their being, to the promiscuous, the collective, the totemic, the chaotic, or the “titanic”.

On the other hand—and the preceding references already show it—history became metahistory: while the "Land of the Living", the "Fortress of the Heroes", the "Island of the Sun", contained on one hand the secret of the origin, on the other hand, they revealed the secret of the road towards rebirth, towards immortality, and towards super-human power: the road which can lead in large measure to traditional royal dignity. The historical factors thus became spiritual factors, the royal tradition became Tradition in the transcendent sense, and therefore something which stands above time yet is constantly present. Symbols, signs, and sagas tell us in underground ways of a unique Tradition, in order to show us a unique “orthodoxy”, where the correspondent pinnacles were always reached, where “solar” spirituality always towered over inferior forces.

Thus, in subsequent times already bound to the destiny of the obscuring of the "divine"—Ragnarok—among the peoples dissipated in their strengths and their leaders, the “Nordic” racial element, detaching itself from the “spiritual” realm to which it originally belonged, became a category, a general type of civilisation and of conduct toward the super-human, which can be found even where no memory exists of an ethnic correlation in the strict sense; a type which therefore can bring together their diverse civilisations when they reveal their spiritual formative force, in the same way as, within that primordial tradition, it influenced the lower elements and the multiplicity of matter.

This is why pagan Romanity must be considered as the last great creative act of the Nordic spirit, the last universal attempt, successful to a considerable extent over an entire cycle, to resurrect the forces of the world in the forms of a heroic, solar, and virile civilisation: a civilisation which was closed to mystical escapism; which was true to the aristocratic-Aryan type of the patres, the masters of lance and sacrifice; which was mysteriously confirmed by the Nordic insignia of the Wolf, the Eagle, and the Axe; which was alive above all in the Olympian-warrior cult of a Zeus and a Hercules, of an Apollo and a Mars, in the feeling of owing its greatness and its aeternitas to the divine; in action as rite and rite as action, in the crystal-clear and yet potent experience of the supernatural, which was acknowledged in the Empire itself and culminated in the symbol of Caesar as numen.

The fall of pagan Rome is the fall of the greatest traditional and solar bastion, and it is not difficult to recognise in the forces which mainly contributed to this fall, the same forces which paved the way for all the subsequent deviations and successive degenerations which have led to the current state of Europe.

In its frenetic crushing of every hierarchy, its exaltation of the weak, of the underprivileged, of those without birth and without tradition, its resentment against all strength, sufficiency, wisdom and aristocracy, and its intransigent and proselytising fanaticism, the Semitic wave, dark and barbaric, enemy of itself and of the world, was indeed a venom for the greatness of Rome, a galvanising substance for all the other Asiatic-Southern factors of decadence which then penetrated into the structures of Rome, and the greatest cause of the decline of the West.

In the Semitisation of the Greco-Roman and then the Nordic world, attributable to a large extent to Christianity, we have in fact the revolt of the lower strata of those races, by whose domination the Nordic-Aryans had attained their splendid civilisations. The spirit of Israel, which had already created the collective sense of “sin” and “expiation”, and which emerged mainly in the so-called “prophets” after the defeat and enslavement of the “chosen people”, burying the residues of the aristocratic spirit of the Pharisees, re-evoked the lower forces of Aegean-Pelasgian tellurism which the Achaean stocks had subdued. These can be equated to the castes of the shudras, the so-called "dark" caste—krshña—and the demonic caste—surya—above which the hierarchies of the three higher castes of the reborn—dvîja—up to the Brahmins and the king, understood as "a great deity under human form", had stood in India, as form over chaos. Lastly, the forces which myth hands down to us under the forms of the Nordic Rinthursi and the military formation of Gog and Magog, whose way Alexander the Great barred with a symbolic iron wall.

These forces worked spiritually, through primitive Christianity, to destroy the European spirit. At first, they concealed themselves within the lunar spirituality which took shape in the Catholic church, that is to say, a spirituality whose type is no longer the sacred king, the solar initiate, or the “hero”, but the saint or the priest who bows before God, whose ideal is no longer the warlike, sacral hierarchy and “glory” but fraternal community and caritas. Later, in the Reformation and in humanism, there reappears the original, anti-traditional, primitive, anarchist, dissolute nature of these forces. Then, through political revolutions, liberalism, and the emergence of collectivism, one cause produces another, and one fall follows another. In all the forms of modern society—and also in science, in law, in the illusory power of technology and the machine—the same spirit, paradoxical as it may seem, appears; the same levelling will, the will of the greatest number, the hatred for hierarchy, quality, and difference prevails; the collective and impersonal bondage born of mutual insufficiency, typical of the organisation of a race of slaves in revolt, grows stronger.

There is more. Semitic-Christian mysticism combined Orphic-Dionysian pathos (which, already for Dorian-Nordic Greece, constituted a deformation of the ancient Olympian cult) with the popular mysticism of Isis, born out of the decline of the solar Egyptian tradition. In the same way, the identical element of “passion” and excitement produced, by means of messianism and millennialism, the promiscuity of the imperial plebs—in contrast to the calm superiority of the Caesars, the simple greatness of the Homeric heroes, the purified spirituality and the autarchic ideal of the pagan “philosopher” and initiate. Here is also the root of every modern deviation, in the romantic, irrational sense which craves a bad infinitude. After its secularisation, this mysticism leads us to the myths of “activism”, of “Faustianism”, of the contemporary superstition of progress, the Semitic mysticism of the instincts, and of the “élan vital”, the exaltation of the “experience” and of “life”; in short, up to the divinisation of the wild, sub-personal, collective element of man, which today seems less restrained than ever before—so as to push individuals and peoples in a direction which is far from that which they themselves wish.

Before the fall, the other force raised itself up once more against the Judeo-Christian tide, almost to present a decisive alternative for the further course of the Western history of the spirit. It was the tradition of the Aryans of Iran, and arose in the form of the warrior cult of Mithra, the avatar of the ancient Aryan god of the luminous heaven, the "Lord of the Sun", the "Killer of the Bull", the hero with the torch and the axe, the symbol of the one reborn "through power", which a syncretic myth, no less significant for this, assimilates with the Hyperborean god of the golden age. But stronger forces impeded this “solar” possibility.

Then the last great reaction: the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The so-called “barbarians” were in reality races which were closely related to the Acheans, paleo-Iranians, paleo-Romans, and Nordic-Aryans in general, who had maintained themselves, so to speak, in a state of prehistoric purity. And if their emergence, in regard to the material aspect of the already Asianised and Semiticised Empire, seemed destructive, it still amounted, from a higher point of view, to a revitalising flow of heroic spirit, a galvanising contact with a force spiritually akin to that to which pagan Romanitas had originally owed its solar greatness. This is how the ancient Roman symbol rises again in the world, directly defended by the forces of the North.

The imperial, feudal, and universal civilisation of the Middle Ages, despite its purely nominal profession of Christian faith, must be appraised above all from this point of view. What is expressed through it is a Nordic-Roman spirituality; whose militia was the knights of chivalry; whose supra-political centre was the Imperial Ghibelline ideal; whose rite was the undertaking of the Crusades—much truer as the return to the pagan idea of the "mors triumphalis" than in its outer religious impulse. Its secret soul, opposed to Christianity and faithful to a higher and more ancient tradition, was what kept it alive, hidden in legends, myths, and warrior and chivalrous Orders, from the Templars to the Knights of the Grail and the Fedeli d’Amore.

After the fall of this medieval civilisation, after the destruction of this radiant European Spring in its first flowering, after the outburst of those forces which led to secularisation, particularism, and a disruptive humanitarianism, the paths to the final downfall were opened. The force of Tradition passed from the visible to the invisible realm and became an inheritance which was handed down in a secret chain from the few to the few. Even today some have a foreboding of it, in somewhat confused efforts, still tied to the human and to the material. They are those who, through an obscure instinct, as a mark of reaction, evoke the symbols of the Swastika, the Eagle, and the Axe. They are often unknown men, or men who blaze like tragic meteors such as Nietzsche, crushed under the weight of a truth too strong for them, which now awaits others who will know how to reassume it and impose it anew so that it rises up hard and cold against their enemies, in the great revolt, the great struggle: whether the West is proved right in its decline or rises up in a new dawn depends on it.