Reading from pages 86-94 of Metaphysics of War, Arktos, 2011

Evola clearly believes that we are the remnant of a fallen race and that the highest form of heroism is found in the internal quest to return to that enlightened, transcendental state. This fascinating essay delineates the stages of our collective degeneration as viewed from various perspectives. He begins with our own, degraded, modern form of heroism, based on sacrifice and obedience, something of a Middle Eastern-modernist-slave corruption of Аrуаn heroism:

“From the material point of view this generic heroism might be sufficient for many contingencies, especially in the context of mere human herds.”

Evola continues expanding this very compressed concept by making comparative contextual observations which expand the concept beyond mere analogy, based on the basic outline of Аrуаn social structure of the earliest known hierarchal type, listed below, followed by the supporting moral perspectives:

-Spiritual

-Warrior

-Merchant

-Slave

-Mind

-Will

-Domination

-Function

-Supernatural

-Honor

-Prosperity

-Collectivism

Evola claims the Аrуаn element was concentrated in the two superior castes, with the lower classes formed of earlier peoples. This may not [in this reader’s opinion] point to a racial superiority beyond battlefield efficacy, as ancient societies practiced conquest by social decapitation resulting in a degeneration of the conquered race, which Evola describes as an involution. Each caste is essentially the agent of an ethos, embodying in their lifeway the “truths, values and ideals”. Thus the dominant caste of a civilization determines the nature of that society:

-Sacral [prehistoric]

-Monarchal [longest lived, 4,000 years]

-Oligarchical [shortest lived, 100 years]

-Conformist [socialist, fascist, communist]

This is a very much overlooked point of great importance, which was noted by Campbell as well in The Power of Myth, citing Salt Lake City as an example of a compressed cite were the theocracy, represented by the tallest building of its worldview, in the church, is then overshadowed by a statehouse of more grand proportions, and then by an office building raised by the ascendant merchant society, towering over all, and finally, at the point of moral collapse discussed by Evola, these edifices of values past reside in the center of a vast sprawl of “hive houses” occupied by a population lacking grace, honor or prosperity, serving only the function of grossly farmed collective life.

-Temple [sacral]

-Castle [honorable]

-City [municipal]

-Hive [“deconsecrated” city/suburbs]

-Ascetic or transcendental path

-Racial or ancestral glory

-Territorial or nationalistic allegiance

-Struggle against the previous principles

One sees here that religious fealty, racial identity and national allegiance all hinder one another in coexistent settings and that the final fallen form of humanity is dedicated to overturning whatever principles were in favor with the preceding generation, causing an acceleration of decline. In the final fallen from, in “the civilization of the slaves” race and territory are negated as the perpetual struggle supplants traditional spiritual and religious forms as a good and a church unto itself, achieving cultural erasure. Evola hints here that the attachment to territory or nation is a veiled remnant of racial consciousness, with one’s internal identity supplanted and coopted by an external sentimentality.

Furthermore, Evola goes on to demonstrate that the core aspects of the nationalistic, merchant-based, hierarchy of domination for its own sake is a necessary precursor to the slave state, for the core “bourgeois” values, “sentimentalism and economic interest,” expressed as “freedom and nation,” are fundamentally opposed concepts, therefore insincere and therefore ultimately serving as a veil for the induction of jingoistic humanity into idealistic moral automatons. As a brief cycle of sacred society birthed a long cycle of honor society, one might expect that the brief cycle of merchant society would birth a long cycle of slave society, except for the inherently volatile nature of the later, suggesting that the two combined might, in their morally disastrous way, be like a forest fire, a rejuvenating force.

Evola here, directly addresses the Jewish Question and clearly states that ignoring [that], “In the case of the Western Bourgeoisie these elements have been supplied by Hebraism,” is tantamount to delusion. However, with his focus on devolution by stages, he does not suggest, as do many or our current thinkers on the Right that such a degraded social state can only be achieved under Jewish influence, but rather that the fall of the monarchial order, itself a compromise between materialism and asceticism, naturally invites inferior social forms into the societal vacuum, in saying, “very usurpation has a degradation as its fatal consequence.”

In his measuring inner eye Evola sees that the fall from the highest, “immortal” path of the pure Аrуаn conception of war was somehow corrupted in the very dawn of ancient “Nordic” Europe [perhaps through conquest of and or coexistence with earlier indigenous forms of humanity] and falls thence to a second tier of heroic ideals which he terms “tragic heroism” as a reflection of some “Faustian” infusion of materialistic nature, lowering the “solar” or “Olympian” ideal to the earthly plain.

Evola closes with a Jovian rescension, invoking the ancient Roman devotio and triumph as mystical and religious rather than military and materialistic, which nevertheless, having taken ritual form, carry the seeds for their own dissolution. At the point at which Evola wrote this, fascism, capitalism and communism were all thirsting for war as if the adherents of each thought that they were fighting for something different. But if any of them had read this short essay and taken the time to break it down and apply it to their circumstance, they would have noted that none of the three monstrous societies battling for supremacy fought on a plane of action beyond the scope of the slave mind, and that neither the elder racial ideals of the fascists or the sentimentalities and greed of the capitalists would regain or maintain their pride of moral place, for the fighting of this tripartite machine war made of every man a slave and its very conduct, from propaganda, to nuclear annihilation, preordained the age of the mind slave in which humanity now sinks.

As a postscript, and a reminder to the reader that this essay deduction is part of the process of researching and illuminating the feminine influence on war, this reader would point out that Evola’s cycles of the fall from spiritual, to honorable, to managerial to collectivist societies follows the same exact trajectory as the great cycle of emasculation, from the serenity of the masculine, to the submission of the vanquished to the pining of the submissive feminine, to the worship of the civil body as eternally retarded child martyr god, documented in Incubus of Your Sacred Emasculation, which was the genesis of this project.