by Greg Johnson
One might well ask, what’s in it for Arjuna? The answer is that this following of duty becomes a path by which he may triumph over his fears, his passions, his weaknesses—all those things that tie him to what is ephemeral. Following his duty becomes a way for Arjuna to rise above his lesser self and to connect with the divine. This is not mere piety or “love of God.” It is a way to tap into a superhuman source of power and wisdom. The result is that Arjuna becomes more than merely human.
In fact, Krishna puts Arjuna in a situation in which he must fight two wars. One, the “lesser” war is external—it is the one fought on the battlefield with swords and spears. The other, “greater” war is internal and is fought against the internal enemy: “passion, the animal thirst for life” (p. 52). Evola places a great deal of emphasis on this distinction. What Krishna really teaches Arjuna is that in order to fight the lesser war, he must fight the greater one. Really, unless one is able to conquer one’s weaknesses, nothing else may be accomplished. This opens up the possibility that there may be “warriors” who never fight in any conventional, “external” wars. These would be warriors of the spirit. Evola believes that one can be a true warrior without ever lifting a sword or a gun, by conquering the enemy within oneself. And he mentions initiatic cults, like Mithraism, which conceived of their members on the model of soldiers.
Nevertheless, the focus in Metaphysics of War is really on actual, physical combat as a means to spiritual transformation. Evola tells us that the warrior ceases to act as an ordinary person, and that a non-human force transfigures his action. The warrior who does not fear death becomes death itself. This is one of the major lessons imparted by Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. It is not just a matter of “waking up” or becoming tougher and harder (as it is in Jünger). Evola clearly suggests that there is a supernatural element involved, though his remarks are far from clear. He writes that “the one who experiences heroism spiritually is pervaded with a metaphysical tension, an impetus, whose object is ‘infinite,’ and which, therefore, will carry him perpetually forward, beyond the capacity of one who fights from necessity, fights as a trade, or is spurred by natural instincts or external suggestion” (p. 41). Elsewhere Evola states that when the “right intention” is present “then one has given birth to a force which will not be able to miss the supreme goal” (p. 48). Heroic experiences seem “to possess an almost magical effectiveness: they are inner triumphs which can determine even material victory and are a sort of evocation of divine forces intimately tied to ‘tradition’ and ‘the race of the spirit’ of a given stock” (p. 81).
The suggestion here is that the experience of combat, fought with the right intention, results in a kind of ecstasy (an “active ecstasy” as Evola says on p. 80). The Greek ekstasis literally means “standing outside onself.” In combat one is lifted out of one’s ordinary self and, more specifically, out of one’s concern with the mundane cares of life. One enters into a state where one ceases even to care about personal survival. It is at this point that one has ceased to identify with the “animal” elements in the human personality and has tapped into that part of us that seems to be a divine spark. This is not, however, an intellectual state or “realization.” Instead, it is a new state of being, which pervades the entire person. The ancient Germans called it wut and odhr. And from these two words derive two of the names of the chief Germanic god: Wotan and Odin. Odin is not, however, conceived simply as the god of war; he is also the god of wisdom and spiritual transformation. In this state of ecstasy, one feels oneself lifted above the merely human; one’s senses and reflexes become more acute, one’s movements more graceful, life suddenly comes into perspective and is seen as the transient affair that it really is, and one feels invincible, capable of accomplishing anything. (A dim simulacrum of this is experienced in athletic competition.) One has, in fact, become a god.
Evola ties this achievement of self-transformation through combat into a “general vision of life,” which he expresses in one of the most memorable metaphysical passages in this small volume:
[L]ike electrical bulbs too brightly lit, like circuits invested with too high a potential, human beings fall and die only because a power burns within them which transcends their finitude, which goes beyond everything they can do and want. This is why they develop, reach a peak, and then, as if overwhelmed by the wave which up to a given point had carried them forward, sink, dissolve, die and return to the unmanifest. But the one who does not fear death, the one who is able, so to speak, to assume the powers of death by becoming everything which it destroys, overwhelms and shatters—this one finally passes beyond limitation, he continues to remain upon the crest of the wave, he does not fall, and what is beyond life manifests itself within him. (p. 54)
Throughout Metaphysics of War, Evola describes the various virtues of the warrior. These are the characteristics one must have to be effective in battle, and receptive to the sort of experience Evola describes. Again, however, it is very clear that he believes that all those who follow a path of spiritual transformation are warriors. Evola describes the warrior as without any doubt or hesitation; as having a bearing that suggests he “comes from afar”; as holding a world-affirming outlook. The warrior takes pleasure in danger and in being put to the test. (The lesson here for all of us, Evola says, is to find the meaning in adversity, and to take hardships as calls upon our nobility.) The warrior regards as comrades only those he can respect; he has a passion for distance and order; he has the ability to subordinate his passions to principles. The warrior’s relations with others are direct, clear, and loyal. He carries himself with a dignity devoid of vanity, and loathes the trivial.
Above all, however, Evola emphasizes the importance of detachment:
detachment towards oneself, towards things, and towards persons, which should instill a calm, an incomparable certainty and even, as we have before stated, an indomitability. It is like simplifying oneself, divesting oneself in a state of waiting, with a firm, whole mind, with an awareness of something that exists beyond all existence. From this state the capacity will also be found of always being able to commence, as if ex nihilo, with a new and fresh mind, forgetting what has been and what has been lost, focusing only on what positively and creatively can still be done. (p. 137)
Evola offers us a vision of life as a member in a spiritual army. The standard, liberal view of the military is in effect that it is a necessary evil, and that the military and its values are not a suitable model for individual lives or societies. Evola argues instead that true civilization is conceived in heroic and “virile” terms. Readers of Evola’s other works will be familiar with his concept of “spiritual virility.” Mere physical virility is the element in man that he shares with other male animals. But this is not true or absolute manhood. True manhood is achieved in the spirit, in developing the sort of hardness, detachment, and perspective on life that is characteristic of the warrior. René Guénon (a major influence on Evola) called the modern age “the reign of quantity.” It is typical of our time that we have come to see manhood entirely in terms of quantities of various kinds: how many pounds one can bench press or squat; numbers of sexual partners; inches of height; inches of penis; the number of zeros in one’s bank balance; the number of cylinders in one’s engine, etc. Just as in Huxley’s Brave New World, our masters have striven to create a society without conflict; a “nice” and “tolerant” society. And women have invaded virtually every arena of competition that used to be exclusively male and ruined them for everyone. Under such circumstances, how is spiritual virility to develop? It is no surprise that our conception of virility is a purely physical and quantitative one. Evola evidently saw in fascism a means to awaken spiritual virility in the Italian male. He says that the starting point for fascist ethics is “scorn for the easy life” (p. 62).
Unlike other thinkers on the Right, Evola never was particularly interested in biological conceptions of race, because he believed that human nature as such was irreducible to biology
. He opposed reductionism, in short, and believed in a spiritual (i.e., non-material) component to our identity. Evola articulates his views on race in much greater detail elsewhere. Here he reminds us of his belief in a “super race” of the spirit: a race of men who are like-souled, and not necessarily like-bodied. Nevertheless, Evola realized the connection between the body and the spirit. He did not believe that all the (biological) races are equally fitted for achieving heroism. What Evola was most concerned to combat was a racialism that reduced heroism or mastery to simple membership in a race defined by certain biological characteristics. For Evola, heroism is really achieved in a step beyond the biological, and in mastery over it.
One will also find little in Evola that celebrates “the nation.” Evola’s ideal of heroism transcends national identity. This comes out most clearly in his discussion of the Crusades: “In fact, the man of the Crusades was able to rise, to fight, and to die for a purpose which, in its essence, was supra-political and supra-human, and to serve on a front defined no longer by what is particularistic, but rather by what is universal” (p. 40, italics in original). Having written this, however, Evola immediately realized that the powers that be might see this (correctly) as implying that it is the achievement of heroism as such that is important, not merely the achievement of heroism in service to one’s people. A further implication of this, of course, is that the hero is raised above his people. And so Evola writes in the next paragraph, “Naturally this must not be misunderstood to mean that the transcendent motive may be used as an excuse for the warrior to become indifferent, to forget the duties inherent in his belonging to a race and to a fatherland” (pp. 40–41). Evola is not really being disingenuous here. Taking a cue again from the Bhagavad-Gita, one can say that it is the performance of one’s duty to race and fatherland that is the path to liberation. But as the wise man once said, when the raft takes us to the other shore, we do not put it on our backs and carry on with it. As Rajayoga teaches, there is no god (and certainly no country) above an awakened man. Evola is a fundamentally a philosopher of the left hand path, not a conservative. This individualistic element in him is troublesome for many on the Right, and it is one of the primary reasons why he was unable to wholly reconcile himself to fascism.
Nine of these essays were written during the Second World War, and it is interesting to see how Evola situates his understanding of the conflict within his philosophy. In one essay written on the eve of the war, Evola states that:
If the next war is a “total war” it will mean also a “total test” of the surviving racial forces of the modern world. Without doubt, some will collapse, whereas others will awaken and arise. Nameless catastrophes could even be the hard but necessary price of heroic peaks and new liberations of primordial forces dulled through grey centuries. But such is the fatal condition for the creation of any new world—and it is a new world that we seek for the future. (p. 68)
It is doubtful that the war’s outcome either surprised or demoralized Evola. As noted earlier, he believed strongly in a cyclical view of history, and saw our age as a period of inevitable decline. It could not have surprised him that the combined forces of bourgeois and Bolshevik prevailed. In the final essay of in this volume, published five years after the end of the war, Evola reflects that “what is really required to defend ‘the West’” against the forces of barbarism “is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life” (p. 152).
Evola makes it clear that his position is not an unqualifiedly pessimistic one. The Kali Yuga is not the final age; history is cyclical, and a new and better age will follow this one. In each period, the stage is set for the next. The actions of those who resist this age set the stage for what is to come. Hence, though speaking and acting on behalf of truth may seem futile given the degradation that surrounds us, ultimately our resistance is part of the mechanism of the great cosmic wheel which will, in time, swing things back to truth and to Tradition. In the act of resisting, heroism is born in us and instantly we become creatures who no longer belong to this age, who “come from afar.” We become beacons pointing the way to the future, and simultaneously back to a glorious past. Evola writes that “a teaching peculiar to the ancient Indo-Germanic traditions was that precisely those who, in the dark age, in spite of all, resist, will be able to obtain fruits which those who lived in more favorable, less hard periods could seldom reach” (p. 61).
Metaphysics of War is required reading for all those interested in the Traditionalist movement. But it will be of special appeal to a certain sort of man, who scorns the easy life and seeks to give birth to something noble and heroic in himself.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right,
September 13, 2010
THE EPIC OF ARYA
AMANDA BRADLEY
_____________________
Abir Taha
The Epic of Arya:
In Search of the Sacred Light
Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2009
In Abir Taha’s philosophical novel, Arya is a goddess in human form. Born in the Kali Yuga, the darkest age of the world, she is a symbol of the divine spark (ātman) that resides in every human. As she struggles to overcome her humanity, especially her womanness, the reader also is given insight into the inner alchemical process that can make men into gods.
Arya meets several guides throughout her journey, and visits a number of cities that exemplify the greed, superficiality, and degeneracy that define the Kali Yuga. One village contains people who worship the moon—often considered an indication of a non-Traditional society that exalts the feminine principle over the masculine, and of people who follow the path of the ancestors rather than the solar path of the gods. Arya does find a kindred spirit—an old man who is a Sun worshiper. Through their conversation, she starts to feel that there is a secret group of beings who are awake, evoking similarities to the secret chiefs described in Karl von Eckartshausen’s The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, legends of the Great White Brotherhood, or Madame Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters.
Arya finds no receptive ears to her message of freedom, truth, and responsibility, and the rest of the Epic recounts Arya’s quest to find Hyperborea, where the Master Race was born.
She receives guidance from a prophet, who tries to convince her that the great Northern race no longer exists. Against his pleadings, she continues her quest, only to find he was correct. She comes across “a gloomy, overcrowded, noisy city teeming with people scurrying here and there in a chaotic manner, countless lonely atoms going their separate ways, impervious to the grey hell in which they were living” (p. 241). The city is called the pride and envy of the world, yet to Arya’s refined senses it contains only “the deafening sound of the chaos of the senses and the unbearable noise of greed” (p. 241).
After meeting several more characters, including a Chandala (an untouchable in the Hindu caste system) and a knight, she meets the King of the World, the ruler of the sacred land of Shambhala. He gives her the keys to overcome herself and find the long-lost kingdom: “Shambhala is only real to those who live the glorious Unity of Being, and it is only visible to those who see beyond what the blind human eyes see” (p. 342), echoing the words of Pindar in his Tenth Pythian Ode: “neither by ship nor on foot would you find / the marvelous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans.”
The ideas in Arya are the same as those found in the writings of Traditionalists, the New Right, and Western esotericism: aristocracy, the coming race, the overman, Hyperborea, Ultima Thule, and philosopher kings. Taha has written two books on similar themes—Nietzsche’s Coming God, or the Redemption of the Divine (Paris: Éditions Connaissances et Savoirs, 2005) and Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman—Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine (Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse, 2005).
In fact, the best way to approach Taha’s Epic is as another Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with the plot serving more as a means to express her Weltanschauung rather than a literary device.
Arya’s dialogues echo those of Zarathustra (Taha even uses the same “thus spoke” mantra), and of Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita. This novel of ideas is heartfelt, and it’s obvious that Taha is honest in the Preface when she says the story was written with her blood and tears, as the insights this “spiritual bible” contains are profound. Those familiar with Traditionalist doctrines may find that some sections are too repetitive, with concepts repeated several times in different words. Readers new to Traditionalist thought, however, will appreciate the emphasis on uncommon ideas like anti-egalitarianism and anti-modernity.
Because The Epic of Arya is about a goddess, women may find the story especially appealing as they will identify more with sections that deal with Arya’s struggles to overcome human love for divine. A few sections mention finding the goddess within, but these can apply equally to finding the god within, and true seekers of wisdom will see beyond such nuances to pearls of wisdom.
