Evola on Evolutionism, Part II
In Which the Baron Posits a Traditionalist Understanding of the Origin of Species…
In the previous article, I discussed some of Julius Evola’s hostility to the concept of evolutionism…or Darwinism, or even “transformism,” if you prefer.
The evolutionist fallacy is, of course, the great and defining origin myth of our secular and materialist age. It is the sine qua non of scientism and technocracy; man, so the story goes, is but a sophisticated—even an extraordinarily sophisticated, it is often graciously conceded—molecular and cellular machine, derived through the directionless and unaided progression of a kind of scientific law, called “natural selection,” from a basic and unremarkable aggregate of non-living matter that spontaneously organized sometime in the unfathomably remote past, upon an earth as alien and inconceivable to us now as are the moons of Neptune, and in some mysterious fashion transcended the occult barrier between non-life and life.
This last aspect of the evolutionist origin story, for reasons that should be abundantly clear, is rather muddled and is very often elided over in the traditional Darwinist accounts. Various models and mechanisms for the origin of life have been put forward over the centuries, many of them quite ingenious; but none have been really any more clever than the somewhat baroque ideas of such Greek philosophers as Anaximander and Empedocles, which were formulated over two millennia ago.
In any case, such is the materialist or physicalist argument: man is a mechanism, a remarkable self-actuating machine that—along with the groaning and travailing entirety of life—bootstrapped itself up from below, from an inchoate chemical stew of matter on the palaeogean earth, over an unthinkable span of ages.
Julius Evola, and the Traditionalists in general, found this idea abhorrent and anathema to every higher ideal and nobler understanding of man and civilization and spirit. They contended, contrariwise, that man ascended not from that which was below him, but descended from that which was above him. In short, man has the blood of gods coursing through his veins.
At the end of the previous article, however, I posed the question: with what would the Traditionalists replace the pervasive evolutionism of our time. The answer, of course, is that they needn’t evolve any sort of replacement at all, since the traditions themselves provide the answers, if only we had the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Nevertheless, as we are in the last age, the Kali-Yuga, the crystallized age of matter and materialism—the Reign of Quantity as René Guénon would have it—we cannot ignore that much of human experience is constrained to the lowest, physical plane, and therefore demands some sort of explicative framework consonant with the human sensorium and mental horizon.
This is why the evolutionist fallacy has exerted such a fascination over the limited minds of our age—it has great, if false, explanatory power, and deals with things that are strictly on the material and non-spiritual level. In these degraded times, that is all that most men are enabled to comprehend, and so it appeals to instincts that have been stripped of all higher understanding.
It is for this reason that Evola, donning the pseudonym “Arvo” and writing in the monumental Introduction to Magic, penned the article “The ‘Origin of Species,’ According to Esotericism.” The article is remarkable for many reasons, not least for displaying Evola’s vast and thorough scientific erudition…which belies all those criticisms inveighed against the Traditionalists for being obscurantist or ignorant of scientific theories and methodologies.
Anyhow, Evola does not hide his merited contempt for the evolutionist fallacy:
“‘Evolution’ is a kind of fixation of the modern mind. It is a veritable ‘complex,’ which…controls the minds of many who think themselves devoted to the ‘scientific’ method and objective research. They need to realize something that applies to many other things: that certain possibilities of understanding, seeing, and verifying are the effect of a certain change of attitude, rather than the reverse, as rationalism believes.
“With regard to ‘evolution,’ one might be surprised, for example, by what has been said about the Hyperborean tradition. The idea that a great unitary civilization may have already existed in the interglacial and Paleolithic period, from which derive the fundamental symbols, the roots of language, and the writing of the oldest cultures—such an idea must seem revolutionary to modern opinions, which believe that they are settled once and for all on a positive basis. And it is not just a question of simple evolutionism in the history of civilization: it begins to affect other areas of science, which, in one form or another, hold on to the Darwinian hypothesis on the origin of species and the animal descent of man.”1
It is in this last passage that we get to the crux of the matter. We run up against the first intimations of those tired slogans “trust the science,” “follow the science,” “scientific consensus,” and “the science is settled,” that have become so nauseatingly incessant today. Evola correctly intuited, armed as he was with the wisdom of the Great Tradition, that evolutionism lay at the heart of the modern project, and that all of modern science ultimately bends the knee in one form or another to the evolutionist fallacy.
That is why the science must be settled—to question scientism’s evolutionist fulcrum is to risk upsetting the whole unstable mess.
As far as Evola’s interpretation of the mass of facts and evidence arraigned by evolutionists as witnesses to their belief, it is a matter, quite simply, of directionality:
“We know what an impressive wealth of facts Darwin and his school have gathered in the fields of morphology, embryology, paleontology and even geology. No one is thinking of denying these facts. What is debatable, and should be shown up as arbitrary or at least one-sided, is their interpretation, whereby these facts are used in Darwinism as proofs and support for the materialist concept of evolution. That said, I will proceed directly to the fundamental argument.
“Although one may have succeeded in identifying a continuity of forms and links, allowing for passage from one species to another right up to man, all that has done is to establish a line, while no one can say what direction it has taken. Thus, every fact adduced in support of evolutionism could be simultaneously adduced in support of the opposite thesis: an involutionist thesis, no more, no less. That the lower species should be the preceding degrees of the higher ones is no more true than that they are degenerative involutions of the latter. The presence of intermediate stages (even if they are stages of transition, and not crossbreedings or even sortings: another possibility that the evolutionists do not think of) you cannot tell from that alone what direction the process has taken.”2
Evola then goes on to explain a different interpretation of the fossil evidence of life, one that is informed more by the esoteric tradition.
For instance, there is the belief among anthropologists that so-called “primitive” peoples represent the earliest, inchoate stages of human evolutionary development. Now they might not any longer couch their beliefs in just so many words; naturally, to do so would be “triggering” to someone, and everyone these days is most anxious not to offend. Nevertheless, it is what they believe, whether they will admit it or not.
Evola rejects this interpretation entirely. Instead, he sees in them the tag-ends of previous humanities and long-forgotten civilizations, perhaps even those belonging to anterior cycles or Manvantaras; they are not “primitive” at all, but inhabit the opposite pole of the developmental spectrum: they are “degenerate,” not in a moral sense, but in the sense that they have exhausted their potentialities and slipped out of civilization and into the twilight of their racial existence.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Evola mentions that the mentality of these “undeveloped” peoples has not been demonstrated by anthropologists to be simply primitive or inchoate or inferior…rather, their mentality seems to be different and alien in a way that is difficult or impossible to quantify. Their way of thinking belongs to a different kind of humanity, from a very different cycle, and in the same way their form of civilization may very well have been so alien as to leave no impress upon their physical environment—or, at least, not in the same may that more recent human civilizations have.
This is a highly disturbing notion, and of course it is not something any modern anthropologist or student of history and evolution would even entertain, let alone admit. But it finds echoes in Theosophical historiography, for they too maintained that many of the so-called “savage” and “primitive” races were but the racial tag-ends of earlier advanced civilizations—Lemuria, for instance, or in some cases even Atlantis.
The same can be said for those near-human congeners that are frequently adduced as evidence for evolutionism; in Evola’s telling, they are not the antecessors of man, but rather offshoots, leavings, and castaways from the main human trunk:
“Going from primitive man back to the anthropoid and ape (assuming that one make the necessary leaps in order to reach the other animal forms over the transformists’ barriers), one can say the same; to the point that many animal species could be considered as degenerations or degradations of even more ancient nonanimal forms. Our point of view, to be precise, is that man does not derive from the animals, but if anything, there are various animal species that derive from man…
“The main obstacle to this point of view is the fact that man’s traces stop at a certain geological period, whereas those of prehistoric animals continue back to much earlier periods. But this very fact can be interpreted in different ways, by those able to bring a certain broadmindedness to the idea of transformations: the fact that the mineral traces of man are more recent may simply mean that man was the last to enter the process, under a certain involutionary aspect, by which such traces could persist as fossils, hence be discoverable.”
[…]
“I am not asking for a simple admission that man descended from heaven: it is enough to get over the concept of corporeality that I would not call ‘material’ so much as mineral; enough to think of the possibility of a body whose most physical element (which today is the bony system) was composed of a substance insusceptible to preservation through the process of fossilization. Then the fact that no traces exist in the most remote geological periods leaves one indifferent and able to entertain the existence of primordial human lineages (of which the anthropoid apes would be the first, degenerate materializations) coexisting with even more advanced forms of the involutive process, which would be represented by the earliest animals of prehistory. This concept has nothing intrinsically absurd about it. By analogy, every manifestation necessarily has an inverse character: that which is most primordial, most internal, most central, can only be the last to appear in the movement toward the external. And at the center and origin, according to esoteric teaching, stands Man himself.”3
In a note appended to the passage above, at the end of the sentence about man being the last to appear in the movement toward the external, Evola explains: “The same occurs in every finalistic process: the goal or end precedes as an idea all those conditions that are necessary to actuate it, and as a reality it appears last, after them.” This is, of course, a reference to the traditional notion, most famously expressed in Platonism, of the primacy of ideas over forms; it is also gleaned esoterically in Christ’s Parable of the Vineyard: “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen” (Matthew 20:16).
For many forms of life are called into existence, but only one is chosen; Man, the end of life, and the last to appear in the “evolutionary” sequence, is first in the world of ideas and is the teleological goal that informs the entire plan of the unfoldment of life in future ages.
And in the service of Evola’s thesis, I think it is worth quoting at some length the words of another eminent Traditionalist, Titus Burckhardt, who pondered these matters in his famous essay “Traditional Cosmology & The Modern World:”
“However paradoxical this may seem, the anatomical resemblance between man and the anthropoid apes is explainable precisely by the difference—not gradual, but essential—that separates man from all other animals. Since the anthropoid form is able to exist without that ‘central’ element that characterizes man—this ‘central’ element manifesting itself anatomically by his vertical position, amongst other things—the anthropoid form must exist; in other words, there cannot but be found, at the purely animal level, a form that realizes in its own way—that is to say, according to the laws of its own level—the very plan of the human anatomy; the ape is a prefiguration of man, not in the sense of an evolutive phase, but by virtue of the law that decrees that at every level of existence analogous possibilities will be found.
“A further question arises in the case of the fossils attributed to primitive men: did some of these skeletons belong to men we can look upon as being ancestors of men presently alive, or do they bear witness to a few groups that survived the cataclysm at the end of a terrestrial age, only to disappear in their turn before the beginning of our present humanity? Instead of primitive men, it might well be a case of degenerate men, who may or may not have existed alongside our real ancestors. We know that the folklore of most peoples speaks of giants or dwarfs who lived long ago, in remote countries; now, among these skeletons, several cases of gigantism are to be found.
“Finally, let it be recalled once more that the bodies of the most ancient men did not necessarily leave solid traces, either because their bodies were not yet at that point materialized or ‘solidified,’ or because the spiritual state of these men, along with the cosmic conditions of their time, rendered possible a resorption of the physical body into the subtle ‘body’ at the moment of death.”4
I will only say, by way of conclusion, that I cannot speak with any authority about these matters; I have my own ideas, however, and I am inclined to side with the Traditionalists.
Part of the reason is simply through the beliefs that I have formed through a life of studying these topics, and evolving (there is that damnable word again) from a materialist to a more spiritual and dignified understanding of life. For the empiricists out there, however, I will say only this: though you may scoff at this notion of “unsolidified” or “non-materialized” men, of species and races that leave no fossil traces because they are insusceptible of fossilization, I think you are naïve.
I have spoken to many scientists and researchers attached to the College of Seth—an irreproachably materialist and empiricist enterprise and society of individuals—and they have informed me, with an unmistakable look of bafflement, of certain peculiar fossil discoveries some of their number have made in remote parts of the world.
Most of these discoveries are withheld from the palaeontological literature, or are deliberately misconstrued as something other than what they manifestly are; in any case, these fossils hail from such places as the coastal shelf off the Franz Josef Islands in the Arctic, in some of the mountain massifs of the Transantarctic Mountains, or in places like Namibia, Australia, and Brazil.
The fossil traces are often as “delicate as a petrified sneeze,” and in many cases have been mistakenly attributed to the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna of the latest Precambrian or Proterozoic aeon. In simple terms, the trace fossils record the ghostly outlines of a life that left no mineral vestiges and produced only the most ephemeral of environmental impressions.
In most cases, the impressions can be attributed to no known form of life, but in many others, a similarity to known animal forms can be gleaned. This includes, in a few photographs of specimens that I have seen preserved in the museum collections of the College, clear evidence of a humanoid, if not indeed human, form of life.
Though the Collegians were confused and befuddled by these fossils, and were inclined—as is often their wont—to invoke increasingly more bizarre and outré theories of time travel and the like, I was not at all surprised. It was clear to me that these were the impressions of a not-yet-fully-materialized, unsolidified form of human life, just as Evola and Burckhardt intimated, from a remote and incognizably palaeogean age of the earth’s history.
The fossil impressions were accurately and unimpeachably dated at well over half a billion years old…
Julius Evola and the UR Group, Introduzione alla Magia, Volume Terzo (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1971). [Introduction to Magic, Volume III: Realizations of the Absolute Individual, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2021), pg. 210.]
Ibid., pg. 212.
Ibid., pp. 213-14.
Titus Burckhardt, Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science & Sacred Art (Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1987), pg. 42.