Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (Italian: [ˈɛːvola]; 19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974), better known as Julius Evola, was an Italian far-right philosopher and writer. Evola regarded his values as traditionalist, aristocratic, martial and imperialist. An esoteric thinker in Fascist Italy, he also had ties to Nazi Germany. In the post-war era, he was an ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist and militant right.
Evola was born in Rome and served as an artillery officer in the First World War. He became an artist within the Dada movement, but gave up painting in his twenties; he said he considered suicide until he had a revelation while reading a Buddhist text. In the 1920s he delved into the occult; he wrote on Western esotericism and Eastern mysticism, developing his doctrine of "magical idealism". His writings blend various ideas of German idealism, Eastern doctrines, traditionalism and the Conservative Revolution of the interwar period. Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites. To counter this, Evola invoked a rebirth of the "world of Tradition". Tradition for Evola was not Christian—he did not believe in God—but rather an eternal supernatural knowledge with values of authority, hierarchy, order, discipline and obedience.
Evola advocated for the Italian racial laws, and became the leading Italian "racial philosopher". He mentioned having worked for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence agency of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS). He fled to Nazi Germany in 1943 when the Italian Fascist regime fell, but returned to Rome under the Italian Social Republic, a German puppet state, to organise a radical-right group. In 1945 in Vienna, a Soviet shell fragment permanently paralysed him from the waist down. On trial for glorifying fascism in 1951, Evola denied being a fascist, instead declaring himself "superfascista" (superfascist). Evola was acquitted on the first ruling, only to be convicted a few years later in the appeals phase, although his sentence could not be implemented because of a general amnesty that was active at the time.
Evola has been called the "chief ideologue" of the post-war Italian radical right, and his philosophy has been characterised as one of the most "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century". His writings contain misogyny, racism, antisemitism and attacks on Christianity and the Catholic Church. He continues to influence contemporary traditionalist and neo-fascist movements.
Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome to Sicilian parents on 19 May 1898. His family were devout Roman Catholics. Some earlier sources describe the family as belonging to the Sicilian nobility and refer to Evola as a baron. Recent scholarship, drawing on civil and family records, found no documentary basis for a hereditary baronial title. Evola regarded the details of his private and family life as largely irrelevant to his intellectual biography and disclosed comparatively little about them. He later used the name Julius; Rose states that he adopted it in homage to Ancient Rome.
Evola rebelled against his Catholic upbringing. He studied at the Istituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci in Rome and later pursued engineering, but did not complete a degree, subsequently saying that he wished to avoid "bourgeois academic recognition" and titles such as doctor or engineer. During adolescence he immersed himself in painting and literature, reading writers including Oscar Wilde and Gabriele d'Annunzio, and encountered the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Otto Weininger, Carlo Michelstaedter and Max Stirner. He was also influenced by the Florentine avant-garde milieu associated with Giovanni Papini and the journals Leonardo and Lacerba, which introduced him to contemporary European philosophy, literature and experimental art.
During the First World War, Evola served as an artillery officer in the Italian Army on the Asiago plateau. Although he had reservations about Italy fighting against Germany, whose discipline and hierarchy he admired, Evola volunteered in 1917 and briefly saw frontline service the following year.
Futurism, Dada and abstract art
During the war Evola entered the Roman Futurist milieu, particularly the circle of painters around Giacomo Balla. Literary scholar Luca Somigli traces Evola's artistic development from an engagement with the increasingly abstract tendency within Futurism towards a position that rejected the movement's continuing attachment to material and sensory experience. In an unpublished critical statement written in 1917, Evola distinguished an earlier, chaotic Futurist phase, represented especially by Umberto Boccioni and oriented towards the material world, from a more advanced phase associated with Balla and the expression of abstract and psychological forms. In 1919 he exhibited works at the Grande Esposizione Nazionale Futurista (Grand National Futurist Exhibition) at Palazzo Cova in Milan. By 1920, when his essay "L'arte come libertà e come egoismo" ("Art as Freedom and Egoism") appeared in Enrico Prampolini's journal Noi, Evola was presenting art as a means of overcoming the material, psychological and emotional conditions of ordinary experience.
Evola's documented association with Dada began in 1919. On 7 October he opened a correspondence with Tristan Tzara which continued into 1923; Scarabelli describes Evola as seeking from the outset to promote Dada in Italy not merely as another artistic tendency but as a wider intellectual and existential position. Evola subsequently participated in the international Dada network through paintings, poetry, theoretical writings, correspondence, exhibitions, lectures and performances. Somigli describes him as Dada's "most ardent proponent and insightful theorist in Italy" and characterises his activity between 1916 and 1922 as that of an active protagonist of the European avant-garde. Evola also contributed to journals including Bleu, Noi and Anton Giulio Bragaglia's Cronache d'Attualità.
In 1920 Evola held a solo exhibition at the Casa d'Arte Bragaglia in Rome and published Arte astratta (Abstract Art), a theoretical statement followed by ten poems, under the "Collection Dada" imprint. He divided his painting into two stages, idealismo sensoriale ("sensory idealism") and astrattismo mistico ("mystical abstraction"). Art historian Enrico Crispolti interpreted the first as Evola's development from the increasingly synthetic and non-figurative work of Balla, Fortunato Depero and Prampolini, and the second as an abstraction of explicitly spiritual and mystical origin. Works of the latter phase included a series titled Paesaggio interiore ("Inner Landscape"). Somigli notes that their organic forms bear affinities with the abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky as much as with Futurism.
Evola's poetry followed a comparable development. The poems later collected in Raâga Blanda, planned by 1920 but not published until 1969, move from late Symbolist and Futurist experiments towards abstract and asemantic Dada compositions. His most ambitious poem of this period, the French-language La Parole obscure du paysage intérieur: Poème à 4 voix (The Dark Word of the Inner Landscape: Poem for Four Voices, 1920), was published from a now-lost Italian original and belongs, according to Somigli, squarely to the "abstract mysticism" Evola associated with Dada practice.
Evola interpreted Dada less as a new artistic style than as the culmination of a process of artistic negation. In a lecture delivered at the Casa d'Arte Bragaglia on 30 April 1921, he described Futurism and Dada as opposing tendencies: the former as "absolute exteriority" and the latter as "absolute interiority". Somigli characterises Evola's abstract art as an initiatory movement towards absolute freedom through negation—not only of the external world but ultimately of the self which performs the negation—culminating in a condition bordering on the mystical. In Arte astratta, Evola similarly presented the work of Tzara and Hans Arp as having brought art to what he called its "spiritual solution", while arguing that contemporary Dada had not fully recognised the mystical implications of its own abolition of conventional categories and meaning.