Revolt Against the Modern World - Retranslated

Julius Evola

Revolt against the Modern World - Chapter One


I.                   The Beginning

To understand both the Traditional world and its negation, modern civilization, it is necessary to depart from a fundamental point: the doctrine of two natures.
            There is a physical order and a metaphysical order. There is the mortal nature, and there is the nature of the immortals. There is the superior world of being and there is that of becoming. More generally, there is a visible and tangible world, and, before this, there is an invisible and intangible overworld, a beginning, and true life.
            Everywhere in the world of Tradition, in the East or West, in one way or another, this awareness has been present as an unwavering axis around which all the rest was ordered.
            I say awareness, and not theory. However hard it is for modern people to conceive, it is necessary to start from the idea that Traditional man knew of the reality of an order of being much greater than all that to which the word real corresponds today. Nowadays, reality is basically conceived of as only that which moves in the corporeal world in space and time. Of course, there are those who still admit something superior to the sensible – but when they do, it is always in reference to a hypothesis or scientific law, a speculative thought or religious dogma that they admit this something; in effect, they do not go beyond this limitation: practically, that is, as direct experience, whatever difference there may be in their “materialistic” or “spiritual” beliefs, the normal modern man forms his image of reality only in relation to the corporeal world.
            The true materialism to be called out in modern people is this one: their other materialisms, in the sense of philosophical or scientific opinions, are secondary phenomena. The first materialism is not an opinion, or a theory, but a given state proper to a human type whose experience only knows how to embrace corporeal things. Thus, the majority of contemporary intellectual revolts against “materialistic” views belong to vain reactions against the latest and peripheral effects of remote and deep causes established on quite another base than “theory”.
            Traditional man’s experience, as exists today in residual form amongst some so-called “primitive” populations, went far beyond any such limit. The invisible was present as something equally real, if not more real, than the data of his physical senses, and every aspect of life, whether individual or collective, took this into account.
            If what today is called reality was Traditionally nothing more than a species of a much wider genus, the invisible was nevertheless certainly not identified with the “supernatural”. To the notion of “nature” corresponded not just the world of bodies and visible forms which secularized modern science is concentrated itself on, but also, and essentially, a part of the same invisible reality. It was alive in the sense of an “nether” world, populated by dark and ambiguous forces of every kind – nature’s demonic soul, the essential substratum of its energy and all forms – which was opposed to superrational and sidereal brightness of a higher region. But, in addition, all that which is merely human was also included in “nature”, since this does not escape the same destiny of life and death, of impermanence, dependence and alternation which belong to the lower region. By definition, the order of “that which is” cannot but have to do with states and conditions that are human and temporal: “one thing is the race of men, another is that of the gods” – in so far as it be understood that this reference to the higher, otherworldly order might orient the purification and integration of the human into the non-human, which, as will be seen, constitutes the essence and goal of every truly traditional civilization.
            The world of being and the world of becoming – of things, of demons, and of men. What is more, every hypostatic representation – astral, mythological, theological, or religious – of these two regions brought traditional man back to two states, and served as a symbol to be solved in an inner experience or in the foreboding of an inner experience. Thus, in the Hindu tradition, and especially in Buddhism, the idea of samsara – the “current” which dominates and moves every form of the lower world – is strictly associated with a condition of life of blind desire, irrational identification. Equally, Hellenism personified in “nature” the eternal “deprivation” of that which, having its beginning and action outside itself, flows and flees indefinitely – ἀεὶ ρεοντα – and in its becoming, reveal a primordial and radical abandonment, a perennial limiting defect. “Matter” and becoming in such traditions express that which in a being is incoercible indetermination or dark necessity, impotence to take perfect shape, to possess itself of a law: the Greeks called it ἀναηκαîονand ἄπειρον, Orientals called it adharma. Scholasticism did not have an idea that was too dissimilar, recognizing in cupiditas and appetitusinnatus the root of all unredeemed nature. In one way or another, the man of Tradition discovered then in the experience of yearnful identification, which darkens and impairs being, the secret of that situation, of which incessant becoming and the perennial instability and contingence of the lower world appear as a comic-symbolic materialization.
            On the other hand, to belong to oneself and shape oneself, to have in oneself the principle of a life no longer dispersed, no longer dismayed looking here and there in search of another or others to complete or justify oneself, no longer broken by the need and irrational attempt towards the external and other – in a word, the experience of ascesis, which was felt to be the way to understand the other region, the world of the state of being, which was not physical, but metaphysical – of a “dreamless intellectual state”, and whose representations were traditionally solar symbols, heavenly regions, beings of light and fire, islands and mountain heights.
            Such are the “two natures”. Birth was of one or the other nature, and passage from one birth to another was also considered, which is why it was said that “A man is a mortal god; and god, an immortal man.”
            The traditional world knew these two great poles of existence and the ways that lead from one to the other. Beyond the world, in the totality of it forms visible or subterranean, human or subhuman, or demonic, it knew then an “overworld” – ὑπερκοσμία– the one “fallen” from the other, and the one the “liberation” of the other. It knew spirituality as that which is beyond life and death. It knew external existence, “living”, and nothing if not the drawing closer to the overworld, towards the “more than living”, if its highest end was not the participation in this and an active breaking of human binds. It knew how false every authority is, how unjust and violent every law, how vane and fleeting every institution is when that authority, those laws and institutions are not ordained towards the superior principle of Being – from above and towards the heights.
            The traditional world knew Divine Kingship. It knew the crossing: Initiation — the two great paths of approach: heroic Action and Contemplation — the mediation: the Rite and Loyalty — the great foundation: traditional Law, the Caste, — the earthly symbol: the Empire.
            These are the foundations of traditional hierarchy and civilization, thoroughly destroyed by the triumphant “humane” civilization of modern men.