‘Instruments of Awakening’

Two Heroisms by Julius Evola, 20 November 1939

Evola casts aside the modernist argument that we are nothing but instinct and intellect.  He also rejects the Semitic [and hence Judeo-Christian-Islamic] view of a man as inherently corrupt, and sinful, with the human body a seat of evil which must be escaped and transcended.  He offers instead the ancient Aryan view that the body is the root of the transcendent tree, that the physicality of the flesh is the springboard which might propel man beyond instinct, beyond cunning, beyond ethics, into a state of “super-racial” being.

Rather than conniving, collectivizing and submitting, the heroic vision of “two heroisms” places the hero in the ascent, gives the opportunity of protean rather than submissive sacrifice, a means by which each hero who manages to pierce the higher reality not only transcends the sorrowful life of the body but elevates those aspects of the super-organism he is a part of—members of his race—as an extra-collective entity.

Evola postulates [and this interpreter disagrees with] the notion that totemic, animistic races of men, hunters and gatherers, are degenerate, fallen races—though still superior to the materialistic civilized collectives of the materialistic world.  This notion brings us to a third possibility as to the states of man.

The Semitic notion is that man is a deliberate creation of God, a domesticated creature of “The Garden” and that there was no elevation from the totemic to the domestic, but rather a fall from the domestic, as put forth in Genesis.  This same state of God-shaped domestication is at the right hand of the Gilgamesh-Enkidu myth, known as the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which man is a domestic creation of the gods, who seeks to attain godhood and is cursed to mortality.

The other notion, long-held by secularists and tribal peoples alike, is the left-handed aspect of that same legend, that of Enkidu, who was likewise god-made, but emerged himself from animal form toward enlightenment and eventual misery and death.

What Evola proposes is a combination of the The Fall myth and the Totemic, in that Man has fallen from a higher plane—not out of an earthly garden of enslavement—but from a heavenly, godlike state into enslavement and animism, that the man bound to the animal world through the shamanic traditions has retreated from the higher plane of life, just as the civilized materialist has been chained and barred from attaining the higher plane.

Evola has no more time for notions of man evolving along Darwinian lines from weasel to ape to man than any of the other spiritual traditions, be they animistic, submissive or transformative.   He reminds that the physical form and instincts of man, his capacity to battle his condition, arms him with the ability to surpass Gilgamesh and attain a higher state:

“…according to the usual mendacious theory of the inferior giving rise to the superior…”

Evola postulates “…a race of the spirit behind the race of body and blood in which the latter expresses the former in a more or less perfect manner according to the circumstances individuals, and often castes in which the race is articulated.”

“…often modern man has lost both the steadiness of instinct of the ‘races of nature’ and the superiority and metaphysical tension of the ‘super-race…’”

Evola clearly rates the animistic, totemic races as superior to the collectivistic, submissive races of modernity, but declares them degenerate nonetheless, while leaving open the possibility that members of either degenerate state might reanimate and become transcendent.

He has the knives out for the materialistic creature of civilization:

“…the ‘race of the bourgeois,’ of the petty conformist and right-thinking man, the ‘advanced’ spirit who invents a superiority for himself on the base of rhetoric, empty speculations and exquisite aestheticisms; the pacifist, the social climber, the neutralist humanitarian, all this half-extinguished material of which so significant a part of the modern world is made up, is actually a product of racial degeneration, the expression of the deep crisis of the Man of the West, all the more tragic as it is not even felt as such.”

So Evola presents modern man as one who has degenerated rather than fallen and primitive man as one who has retreated from the process of degeneration into a probable dead-end.

He recommends war as a possible vetting process for ascendant souls and sights Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as an example of the fruitlessness of sending the wrong human material into war and the defeatism that must ensue, when the deluded materialist is cast into that crucible. The man thrown into war from the modern sheep pen is only able to deal effectively with his situation as a beast [totemically, like the modern sniper] or as a hero [transcendently, like Ernst Junger].

“…the lion can arise from the sheep…Man reawakens and resumes contact with the deep forces of life and race from which he has become alienated…”

This is the function of war, in Evola’s understanding, it is “the amputation of the bourgeois excrescence…”

In other words, traumatic hardship in which dynamic agency is invited on the part of the male, might offer a propulsion into manhood and out of domesticity.

“Such culminations of heroic experience…demand the all aspects of war that have an ‘elemental’ destructive, we could almost say tulluric character…”

Evola goes on to describe the rejection of this by the materialist, modern, collective, petty ‘individual’ as a barring of the domesticated person from an opportunity to experience “inner triumphs.”

The two heroisms refer to a two-part awakening, first of the bestial aspect of the human, and second the of the heroic, the animal inside of us awakening to break the chains of our mental enslavement, freeing the submerged Higher Self to reengage with our consciousness to transcend the mechanistic barriers of the materialistic order of fearful docility and doleful complicity.

(c) 2017 James LaFond