page_title: Julius Evola
section_title: Post-War
hierarchical_section_title: Julius Evola / Post-War
caption_attribution_description: Čeština: Obálka českého vydání knihy Směrnice.English: Cover of the Czech translation of the Julius Evola’s book Orientamenti. (2015)
context_page_description: Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola, better known as Julius Evola, was an Italian philosopher, poet, painter, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, esotericist, and occultist. He has been described as a "fascist intellectual", a "radical traditionalist", "antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular", and as having been "the leading philosopher of Europe's neofascist movement".
  Evola is popular in fringe circles, largely because of his metaphysical, magical, and supernatural beliefs – including belief in ghosts, telepathy, and alchemy – and his traditionalism. He himself termed his philosophy "magical idealism". Many of Evola's theories and writings were centered on his hostility toward Christianity and his idiosyncratic mysticism, occultism, and esoteric religious studies, and this aspect of his work has influenced occultists and esotericists. Evola also justified male domination over women as part of a purely patriarchal society, an outlook stemming from his traditionalist views on gender, which demanded women stay in or revert to what he saw as their traditional gender roles, where they were completely subordinate to male authority.
context_section_description: About the alliance during WW2 between Allies and the Soviet Union, Evola wrote:
  The democratic powers repeated the error of those who think they can use the forces of subversion for their own ends without cost. They do not know that, by a fatal logic, when exponents of two different grades of subversion meet or cross paths, the one representing the more developed grade will take over in the end.
  The political model Evola selected after 1945 was neither Mussolini nor Hitler. Evola cited and encouraged the youth to read Plato (with reference in particular to The Republic), Dante (with reference in particular to De Monarchia), Joseph de Maistre, Donoso Cortés, Bismarck, Metternich, Gaetano Mosca, Pareto and Michels.
  After World War II, Evola continued his work in esotericism. He wrote a number of books and articles on sex magic and various other esoteric studies, including The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way (1949), Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex (1958), and Meditations on the Peaks: Mountain Climbing as Metaphor for the Spiritual Quest (1974). He also wrote his two explicitly political books Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (1953), Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (1961), and his autobiography, The Path of Cinnabar (1963). He also expanded upon critiques of American civilization and materialism, as well as increasing American influence in Europe, collected in the posthumous anthology Civiltà Americana.
  While trying to distance himself from Nazism, Evola wrote in 1955 that the Nuremberg trials were a farce. This indicates that despite being rejected by the SS before the War, he never stopped admiring their criminal activities.
  
  Evola's occult ontology exerted influence over post-war neo-fascism. In the post-war period, Evola's writing evoked interest among the neo-fascist right. After 1945, Evola was considered the most important Italian theoretician of the conservative revolutionary movement and the "chief ideologue" of Italy's post-war radical right. According to Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm, Evola's most significant post-war political texts are Orientamenti and Men Among the Ruins. In the opening phrase in the first edition of Men Among the Ruins Evola said: 
  Our adversaries would undoubtedly want us, in a Christian spirit, under the banner of progress or reform, having been struck on one cheek to turn the other. Our principle is different: “Do to others what they would like to do to you: but do it to them first.
  Orientamenti was a text against "national fascism"—instead, it advocated for a European Community modeled on the principles of the Waffen-SS. The Italian Neo-fascist group Ordine Nuovo adopted Orientamenti as a guide for action in postwar Italy. The European Liberation Front, who were affiliated with Francis Parker Yockey, called Evola "Italy's greatest living authoritarian philosopher" in the April 1951 issue of their publication Frontfighter.
  During the post-war period, Evola attempted to dissociate himself from totalitarianism, preferring the concept of the "organic" state, which he put forth in his text Men Among the Ruins. Evola sought to develop a strategy for the implementation of a "conservative revolution" in post World War II Europe. He rejected nationalism, advocating instead for a European Imperium, which could take various forms according to local conditions, but should be "organic, hierarchical, anti-democratic, and anti-individual." Evola endorsed Francis Parker Yockey's neo-fascist manifesto Imperium, but disagreed with it because he believed that Yockey had a "superficial" understanding of what was immediately possible. Evola believed that his conception of neo-fascist Europe could best be implemented by an elite of "superior" men who operated outside normal politics.
  In Men Among the Ruins, Evola defines the Fourth Estate as being the last stage in the cyclical development of the social elite, the first beginning with the monarchy. Expanding the concept in an essay in 1950, the Fou
caption: Julius Evola – Směrnice (2015), the Czech translation of his book Orientamenti (1950)
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