‘Pagan Imperialism’: Evola’s Message to the Future

by James Kirkpatrick

James Kirkpatrick argues that the new edition of Pagan Imperialism is essential, as it restores the true depth and intensity of Julius Evola’s ideas, challenging readers to embrace boldness and heroism in confronting the civilizational crisis of our time.

This is James Kirkpatrick’s foreword to Pagan Imperialism (Arktos, 2024).

It’s impossible to exaggerate the need for this new edition of Pagan Imperialism.

Julius Evola has become a meme, a reaction .gif, an infographic, a cliché. The real meaning has been lost in the vibe. It’s a fate that the Baron would undoubtedly have regarded with horror (we can only imagine what he would have thought about social media.) Unfortunately, Pagan Imperialism itself has fallen into this model of caricature until recently. It is not helped by the imperfect, unprofessional, and sometimes amateurish excerpts and translations that have proliferated so far. A credible, official edition has been lacking for some time. Later in life, even Evola himself seemed to regard Pagan Imperialism as somehow tainted by youthful excess.

Yet youth is precisely the time for boldness, honesty, and heroism. The civilizational crisis Evola describes has only grown more acute in the years since. Julius Evola’s rise from obscure philosopher to online icon is not a problem but an opportunity for those who can understand his ideas. And the hour is late — as he puts it, “The noose tightens ever more around the few who are still capable of great disgust and great rebellion.”

Pagan Imperialism may not be what some readers are expecting. Certainly, anyone familiar with Revolt Against the Modern World will see some standard themes — the defense of the Ghibelline ideal of the Empire against the Church, the concept of the Northern tradition and lost homeland, the model of divine kingship and the call for leaders who are quite literally more than mere men. However, these ideas are not presented in the systematic way we see in Revolt, but are touched upon in near polemical form, a battle cry rather than a treatise. Those familiar with Evola may, like myself, find this even more engrossing, reminding us why we were drawn to the Baron to begin with.

Pagan Imperialism’s value is precisely in those things that the Baron may have felt that he expressed too forcefully in his youth. The roots of European decline so evident today are deep, and Evola confronts us without equivocation or false comfort. Though his ideas may seem extreme or even fringe, they have a strange relevance with even the passing discussion today.

For example, how often do you think about the Roman Empire? It’s precisely because men see it as an alternative to the decadent, longhoused, effeminate world of today that it still has relevance. It’s precisely because it is still subversive that academics and “experts” strive to deconstruct it or hasten to silence people from talking about it.

Evola puts into words what many have only half-understood:

The fall of pagan Rome marks the collapse of the greatest traditional and solar bulwark. The forces that primarily contributed to this fall are easy to recognize as those that paved the way for all subsequent deviations and degenerations, leading to the current state of Europe.

More than anything, Evola shows us that ideas are always taken to their logical conclusions. A reductio ad absurdum may be a clever rhetorical trick, but over a long enough timeline, it’s also an iron law of history. People will follow the logic of ideas, even if they lead to disasters, even if they lead to outcomes critics had predicted decades before and had been laughed at for doing so. This is especially true with religion, and in our own time, even more than his, the bill is coming due:

These forces, which acted spiritually in early Christianity, destroyed the European spirit. Then, on one side, as they softened, they defined the forms of a lunar spirituality in the Catholic Church, a spirituality whose type was no longer the sacral king, the solar initiate, or the ‘hero,’ but the saint, the priest who bows before God, whose ideal was no longer the warrior-sacral hierarchy and ‘glory,’ but the brotherly community and caritas. On the other side, in the Reformation and humanism, we see the original anti-traditional, primitive, anarchic, disintegrating nature of these same forces. Along the political revolutions, in liberalism, in the emergence of the collective, one cause generates another, and fall follows fall. In all forms of modern society — and also in science, law, the illusions of technology, and the power of machinery — the same spirit is revealed, the same leveling will triumphs, the will of numbers, the hatred of hierarchy, quality, and difference. The collective and impersonal bond, born of mutual insufficiency, strengthens, characteristic of the organization of a race of rebellious slaves.

Of course, men of the West may claim there’s a contradiction here. How can we stand for our civilization if Evola tells us our cathedrals and high tradition spring from a poisoned root? Anticipating the work of Dr. James Russell in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, Evola argues that “a compromise was reached.” With one of those gut punches that he delivers so effectively, he writes, “Christianity is one thing, Catholicism is another.”

He elaborates that “Christianity, as the Catholic Church, partly adopts forms of the pagan-Roman order: something extremely contradictory.” Yet it was this, the religion that triumphed in the West, that gave us the religious tradition of today, of Christendom, and even of the high Christianity we see in other denominations. However, the Reformation generally gave us back the quest for “primitive Christianity,” what Evola would concede is true Christianity with its “profound disdain for all worldly concerns” that would render not just the state, but society impossible.

However, traditionalist Catholics should not congratulate themselves. We see the rot deep within all denominations today. The intersectional and rainbow flags are ubiquitous in mainline denominations and have a major foothold in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. Even the most conservative denominations are under siege. Blasphemy against George Floyd is likely to receive more fury from church authorities than blasphemy against Christ. Even the Catholic Church, writes Evola, “finds itself in an inextricable predicament.”

What then is our solution? In this most forceful of his works, Evola urges onto the hardest and the most direct path. “We demand a decisive, unconditional, and complete return to the Nordic-pagan tradition. We reject all compromises, weaknesses, and indulgence towards anything stemming from the Semitic-Christian root that has contaminated our blood and intellect,” he said. “Without a return to such a tradition, there is no liberation, no true restoration, no conversion to the true values of spirit, power, hierarchy, and empire. This is an undeniable truth.”

Those looking for pagan lore about runes or sagas or pop-spiritual quests to “find yourself ” will be disappointed. Evola unites the Nordic Pagan and Roman Traditionalist traditions. It is a heroic, virile, and aristocratic view of life in which the higher justifies the lower, instead of the inverse system of values ruling us today. It is a call to domination and dominion.

However, no one should expect to be flattered that they are part of some master race due to mere biology. For Evola, a race’s value lies in its connection to a spiritual source of transcendental reality. Thus, before we can talk about “ruling” others, we must rule over our own lowest impulses. His ideal of the Emperor as Absolute Man doesn’t flow from the capacity for mere violence but from a self-possession and self-evident superiority. Nor can this be mere self-conceit or “self-esteem” — Evola repeatedly speaks of the superiority of knowledge rather than faith when it comes to spiritual practice. Spiritual enlightenment must bear fruits in this world, because there is no dualistic separation of the two realities. This too is a theme familiar to readers of Alain de Benoist and On Being A Pagan. Religion, personality, statecraft, power, capability — all of these in some sense reflect the same inner truth.

Evola’s stress on the personality and the individual may surprise those who are expecting praise for fascism or stern collectivism. It is precisely the personal nature of hierarchy and subordination that is to be valued, not bureaucracy. Even ideas are weapons to be mastered, with the personality that wields them being the crucial thing. We need to ensure that “what counts is not so much the idea itself, but rather the one who affirms it.” “It should no longer be the idea that gives value and power to the individual, but rather the individual who gives value, power, and justification to an idea,” he says. As we see postmodern politics and online culture once again giving rise to the Cult of Personality and the daily struggle to retain one’s character in a sea of media designed to break us down to our lowest impulses, Evola reemerges as a thoroughly relevant political philosopher equal to that of a James Burnham, Carl Schmitt, or Sam Francis.

But what does this mean for us in terms of concrete acts? Citing the universal idea of the Empire, the moments of true European martial unity as seen in the Crusades, or the transnational and almost sacral character of knighthood, Evola tells us a radical revolution against gold and capital is the inescapable premise of the true Imperium. A new elite must be cultivated, dedicated to a spiritual ideal — something approaching those other solar peaks he identifies, from the Ghibelline ideal of the Holy Roman Empire, to the Roman aristocracy, to the militant fraternity of Mithras. At a time when the states that rule us have so savagely turned against the nations they purportedly represent, this call to forge the seed of a new people, a new order, and a new imperium is more relevant than ever. In a way the cultural vandals of the 1960s could have never anticipated, Evola tells us that the personal really is political, because our struggle to make ourselves, our people, our comrades, and our movements into something higher, stronger, and grander is all part of one fight.

The Imperium to come will be built by unshakable comrades dedicated to the solar path that Evola describes in the most inflammatory of his works. It is a call to heroism, sacrifice, and power. It is an end to compromise. For the young and the young in spirit, let this work not just stir your blood but reawaken the divine spark within it. Every revolutionary movement is ultimately about the struggle to build a new aristocracy. In the 20^th century, now, and in the forever future, we are unlikely to find a better spiritual guide than the immortal Baron of Sicily.

Lynchburg, Virginia — August 11, 2024

Purchase the only authorized English translation of Pagan Imperialism here.