Paths of the Western Spirit: An Evolian Manifesto
There have been few epochs like today’s, in which it is so hard for the West to find an orientation that exactly suits its tradition. The situation is mainly due to an extraordinary option to which the West has limited itself.
On the one hand, we see in today’s West a world of achievements that have developed under the signs of clear vision (science) and precise action (technology)—but a world devoid of light. Its law is that of an uncentered movement, its limit is matter and the call of matter. On the other hand, there arises an impulse toward something higher—but an impulse that emerges in various forms of escapism and regression. Consequently, when the West affirms the active and realistic principle of its tradition, there is no spirit there; and when it aspires to the spirit, that principle is no longer present, giving way to its opposite. This takes the form either of humanitarian, christianizing, democratic, and universalist tendencies, or else of the neospiritualist currents often associated with irrationalism, the religion of the life force, or theories of the unconscious: a confused world in stark contradiction to the virile spirit of the West.
This state of affairs has given rise to a sort of dilemma. The first step is to understand it. But salvation could only come from eliminating that option altogether.
The spiritualist reaction to the materialism of the modern world certainly has its virtue, but not in its blanket rejection of some very disparate things, ignoring the fundamental principles that stand at the basis of the Western experience, despite their currently degraded and materialistic forms. The modern, realistic world is intensely Western in spirit. Admittedly, it has produced the Ahrimanic regime of the machine, of finance, of quantification, of the steel and concrete metropolis, devoid of any contact with transcendence and extinguishing any sense of the invisible and living forces of things. Yet throughout all this the Western soul has maintained a “style,” whose value is discernable if one can look beyond the purely material plane and its forms of realization.
It is the attitude of science, as experimental, positive, and methodical knowledge—instead of any instinctive intuitionism, any irrationalism, any tendence toward the indeterminate and the “mystical.”
It is the attitude of technology, as the exact knowledge of obligatory laws in the service of action, whereby given certain causes, certain effects follow that are predictable and determined without the intrusion of irrational and emotional elements.
Last it is the value of the personality, capable of an active initiative, aimed at autonomy.
An impulse is at work in these Western endeavors, albeit in very variable aspects and degrees, following these fundamental directions. The mistake has been in confusing them with the materialism of many of the results to which they have given rise. Thus, every reaction to materialism and every desire to overcome it has since been accompanied by a denial of the Western spirit, a gradual evasion of the Western law of realism, action, and personality. Hence today’s neospiritualism, even when it preserves something authentically spiritual, should always be considered as a danger and a degenerative element with respect to the deepest core of our tradition.
The forms of this spiritualism have developed considerably after the First and Second World Wars. There are the movements that adapt poorly understood Eastern doctrines to the worst Western prejudices; there is the morbid interest in problems of the subconscious (psychoanalysis), and worse yet, in mediumism and “parapsychology”; there is the path of “return” to the most decrepit Christianity, due to an inner alienation and capitulation; and the various aspects of a new cult of “Life,” more or less pantheistic and promiscuous. No matter how much these forms may differ from one another, they all have the same significance, reflecting a climate of escapism, impatience, and exhaustion. It is the soul of the West that is tottering and crumbling. It can only be glimpsed in the world shut off from below: behind the lords of mathematics, chaining and unchaining the forces of matter, the finance and industry that gives laws to nations and governments; the machines in which every day a purblind heroism hurls itself through sky and ocean.
The lack of any impulse whereby the living values on this plane can escape, reaffirm themselves, and integrate themselves into a higher order—the lack of such an impulse in the modern West is its bondage, the cause of its petrification and decadence. The Western tradition will not revive until a new civilization, no longer bewitched by material reality, asserts a style of clarity, of absolute action and true personality, beyond the “spiritualist” miasma and all those other forms of escapism and dissolution. And because of the analogy of such a style with the special significance we have given to the terms “magic” and the “magical vision of the world,” we can say this: it is through a magical epoch that the West will eventually be able to cut the knot of the “dark age”—the Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron. It will be no mere alteration: in an epoch of active realism, transcendent and intensely individual, the new traditional form that the West will make its own will arise from the spirit of its most ancient tradition: from the ancient Artic-Atlantic spirit, the light that descended from North to South, then passed from West to East, everywhere bearing the signs of a cosmic symbolism beside the legacy of heroic, active and conquering races.
We can name specific themes: beyond the world of the One, tis articulation in a plurality of gods and heroes, on upward and downward paths; “mortal immortals, immortal mortals,” in Heraclitean and Hermetic terms; an end to nostalgia, to pacifism and passivity, to looking up to the “Mothers”; an end to all cloudy intoxication, rejection of all confused ecstasy and subpersonal demonism; a sense of being and advancing, gazing straight ahead like one forging new paths and news passes, or who draws and defends new frontiers to his domain, where others fail or fall short. In a magical epoch, such meanings are reaffirmed through the very contact with the suprasensible. And for the West, we are basically speaking of themes recurring in one form or another throughout its history: of the spirit of world conquest by white Europe, and further back, through the epics of chivalry and crusade to the purest forms of its spirit: Roman and Aryo-Mediterranean, Doric-Achaean and Homeric; and earlier still, to the echoes of the primordial white seafarers and conquerors—those of the “strange great ships,” of the signs of the Ax and the “solar Man with uplifted arms”—coming down from their Artic homelands to the centers of the first traditional civilization of the West.
The problem is in seeing how far contacts can be renewed in this direction. Among the great shadows, on the shaky ground and beneath the Ahrimanic glare of the modern world, this must be the reference point for freeing the West without denaturing it. Beyond both materialistic activism and the “spiritualist” peril, this must be the direction for the corrective and life-giving action of those called to spiritual leadership, for the “defense of the West.”
—Julius Evola