Evola on Evolutionism, Part I
In Which the Baron Dissects the Unassailable Origin Myth of the Modern Age
The eminent Italian Traditionalist Julius Evola is likely best known for his political essays and activities, his meditations on spiritual and metaphysical matters, his unsurpassed cogitations on magic and alchemy and the occult, and—perhaps most importantly of all—his trenchant criticisms of modernity.
But what is often overlooked are his contributions to what one might call “scientific” research…specifically, his critical analysis of the fields of evolutionism, ethnology, and anthropology in general. To be sure, his conclusions differ radically from mainstream scientism—but this is only to be expected from one who is deeply immersed in Traditionalist thought, and who has conned a great many of its spiritual lessons…lessons which invariably open forgotten doorways to new (or old, as the case may be) forms of thought and insight into the natural world.
Julius Evola was implacably hostile to the evolutionist fallacy in all its forms. Whether one calls it evolutionism, or Darwinism, or transformism, or any of a dozen other synonyms,1 Evola regarded this notion—as do all Traditionalists—as being deeply anti-metaphysical and obstinately materialistic.
Perhaps most obnoxious to him was the fact—inescapable from its internal logic—that evolutionism restricted and entombed mankind in the cloying world of matter, and provided no route of escape…despite attempts by certain occult groups, such as the Theosophists and Spiritualists among others, to incorporate the tenets of evolutionism with spiritual or metaphysical concepts.
These attempts were doomed to failure, for evolutionism does away with metaphysics altogether—and in its reductionist and materialistic schema, there is no place for the soul or spirit, or for the existence of higher faculties and powers or anything at all that might be considered “supranatural.” Incidentally, this is a great part—though only one part—of the reason why evolutionist theories and ideas are so inadequate to the task of explaining the natural world in its bewildering fullness: they simply ignore that which does not fit within their description of the world…and that part happens to be the most important part of all.
Anyhow, Evola’s objection to evolutionism was that it was downward looking—it has no conception of That Which is Above, and can only focus on That Which is Below. He related the historical appearance of evolutionism or Darwinian transformism to his theory of the Regression of the Castes, something which I intend to discuss in a future article; suffice that in Evola’s Traditionalist historiography, the annals of mankind have only ever recorded a civilizational regression through the traditional castes—the Brâhmanas, exercising spiritual authority; the Kshatriyas, exercising temporal power; the Vaishyas, the merchant or economic class; and the Shûdras, the servile caste.
Originally, in the Satya-Yuga (Kṛta-Yuga) or Golden Age of our Manvantara, we are told there were no castes save one—the Hamsa, which comprised all mankind and which race was exceedingly gifted, spiritually and metaphysically. In subsequent ages, the Hamsa was sundered into the separate castes, and each age represented a declension from that earliest, almost Edenic state, which may be equated with the Brâhmanas. Evola, quite naturally, given his aristocratic predilection, favored the Kshatriyas over the Brâhmanas, and regarded the Golden Age as one in which the Kshatriyas united spiritual authority and temporal power under their auspices…or, perhaps better, that they were warrior-priests, so to speak, in which the warrior element and ethos unquestionably predominated.
In any case, the study of history shows a falling away from the wise governance of the higher castes, first with the purely economic and anti-spiritual age of the Vaishyas, the age of mercantilism and capitalism, and then into the degraded rule of the Shûdras, the age of slave-governments, which is broadly consonant with our own. This is the mélange des castes whereof René Guénon speaks, analogous to the “Posthistoric Man” predicted by Roderick Seidenberg, when caste and hierarchy of any meaningful kind have disappeared, and all are mixed together in a noisome morass that is below even the lowest and most contemptible of the traditional castes.
Evolutionism, as Evola wisely recognized, is the ideal “scientific” theory and origin story for such a regressed and degraded civilization. For, characteristically, it seeks man’s origins not in what is highest, but in what is lowest; whereas earlier theogonies and anthropogonies claimed that men were descended from gods—or at the very least created by them—the anthropogony of our age has us climbing our way blindly and arduously out of the muck, over incalculable aeons, and refuses even to grant us the dignity of a divine and meaningful origin. Instead, we are but an accident, a happenstance, a fortuitous serendipity…an insignificant mischance, really, a spontaneous and unlooked-for configuration of matter that has neither rhyme nor reason.
And while there is neither poetry nor beauty in this vision of man’s creation, at least it dissolves the hierarchies and inequalities of the past—so odious to modern civilization—and situates all men, from king and pope to foot-soldier and washerwoman, on an equal footing…that is, somewhere in the primordial ooze with the animalcules and infusoria.
Evolutionism is, as Evola understood, “the profession of faith of the upstart,” the perfect credo for a civilization that rejects all transcendent origins and substitutes an origin from the inferior realms, and the ideal religion of the “self-made man:”
“There is not a dimension in which, in one form or another, the evolutionary myth has not succeeded in infiltrating with destructive consequences; the results have been the overthrow of every value, the suppression of all sense of truth, the elaboration and connecting together (as in an unbreakable magical circle) of the world inhabited by a deconsecrated and deluded mankind. In agreement with historicism, so-called post-Hegelian Idealism came to identify the essence of the ‘Absolute Spirit’ with its ‘becoming’ and its ‘self-creation’—this Spirit was no longer conceived as a Being that is, that dominates, and that possesses itself; the self-made man has almost become the new metaphysical model.”2
In other words, as Evola astutely notes, evolutionism is indeed a form of anti-metaphysical worship—the conceptualization of the Absolute not as Being, but as Becoming, and therefore the veneration of all change and flux and chaos. This is the perfect outcome for the agents of the Counter-Tradition: the transference of mankind’s religious gaze from the infinite and unchanging Pole to the changing, unstable, and material one; and the consequence of this is indeed the overturning and subversion of all values and all sense of the truth…which is precisely the world we currently inhabit.
Evola has more to say about evolutionism, in the context of its desacralization of the universe and human history:
“Although modern man until recently has viewed and celebrated the meaning of the history known to him as epitomizing progress and evolution, the truth as professed by traditional man is quite the opposite. In all the ancient testimonies of traditional humanity it is possible to find, in various forms, the idea of a regression or a fall: from originally higher states beings have stooped to states increasingly conditioned by human, mortal, and contingent elements…3
[…]
“…it is opportune to anticipate some general considerations, since the abovementioned view is in open contrast with the modern views concerning prehistory and the primordial world. To uphold with Tradition that in the beginning there were no animal-like cavemen, but rather ‘more-than-human’ beings, and that in ancient prehistory there was no ‘civilization’ but an ‘era of the gods;’ this to many people—who in one way or another believe in the gospel of Darwinism—amounts to pure and simple ‘mythology.’ Since I have not invented this mythology myself, however, critics still have to explain its existence, that is, the fact that according to the most ancient testimonies and writings there is no memory that may lend support to ‘evolutionism;’ what is found in them instead is the opposite, in other words, the recurrent idea of a better, brighter, and superhuman (‘divine’) past. These same testimonies also know very little about ‘animal origins;’ constant mention is made rather of the original relationship between men and deities; and a memory is kept alive of a primordial state of immorality together with the idea that the law of death appeared at one particular moment, almost as an unnatural fact or as an anathema. In two characteristic testimonies, the cause of the ‘fall’ was identified with the mixing of the ‘divine’ race with the human race, which was regarded as inferior; in some texts that ‘sin’ is compared to sodomy and to sexual mating with animals. On the one hand there is the biblical myth of the Ben Elohim, ‘the children of the gods,’ who mated with the ‘daughters of men,’ with the consequence that in the end, ‘all mortals led depraved lives on earth.’ On the other hand there is the Platonic myth of the inhabitants of Atlantis, conceived as the descendants and disciples of the gods, who lost the divine element and eventually allowed their human nature to become predominant because of their repeated intermingling with human beings. Tradition, in more recent eras, developed a variety of myths referring to races as bearers of civilization and to the struggles between divine races and animal, cyclopic, or demonic races. They are the Aesir against the Elementarwesen; the Olympians and the heroes against giants and monsters of the darkness, the water, and the earth. They are the Aryan deva fighting against the asura, ‘the enemies of the divine heroes;’ they are the Incas, the dominators who impose their solar laws on the aborigines who worshipped ‘Mother Earth;’ they are the Tuatha dé Danaan, who, according to Irish legends overcame the dreadful race of the Fomors; and so on. On this basis it can be argued that even though the traditional teaching retains the memory of the existence of stocks that could even correspond to the animalistic and inferior types described in the theory of evolution (this was the substratum predating the civilizations created by superior races), evolutionism mistakenly considers these animal-like stocks to be absolutely primordial, while they are so only relatively.”4
Finally, Evola strikes at the heart of the matter, and interprets evolutionism as the animating “creation myth” of our time:
“Every epoch has its own ‘myth’ through which it reflects a given collective climate. Today the aristocratic idea that mankind has higher origins, namely, a past of light and of spirit, has been replaced by the democratic idea of evolutionism, which derives the higher from the lower, man from animal, civilization from barbarism. This is not so much the ‘objective’ result of a free and conscious scientific inquiry, but rather one of the many reflections that the advent of the modern world, characterized by inferior social and spiritual strata and by man without traditions, has necessarily produced on the intellectual and cultural plane. Thus we should not delude ourselves: some ‘positive’ superstitions will always produce alibis to defend themselves. The acknowledgment of new horizons will be possible not through the discovery of new ‘findings,’ but rather through a new attitude toward these findings. Any attempt to validate even from a scientific perspective what the traditional dogmatic point of view upholds will generate results only among those who are already spiritually well disposed to accept this kind of knowledge.”5
That is a rather striking image that Evola concludes with: there is forthcoming no “scientific” validation of traditional data and historiography. Instead, the discoveries made today, in the Kali-Yuga, the twilight of our civilization and our cycle, must be re-evaluated by future generations employing the light of Tradition.
The question remains then—with what, if anything, would the Traditionalists replace evolutionist theories and conceptions of the development of life?
Fortunately, neither Evola—nor other Traditionalists for that matter—are silent on the subject…but a discussion of that topic will have to await the next article…
One can mention here such precursor “evolutionisms” as Lamarckism, Anaximandrian and Empedoclean theories on the origins of species, and even Lucretian evolutionism as presented in his De Rerum Natura.
Julius Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1969) [Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995) trans. Guido Stucco, pp. 333-4].
Ibid., pg. 177.
Ibid., pp. 178-9.
Ibid., pg. 183.