Julius Evola’s Eros and the Mysteries of Love argues that sexual union carries a significance far beyond biology or psychology. Writing from a perspective steeped in ancient and Eastern doctrines, Evola sets out to construct what he calls a “metaphysics of sex”—an inquiry into what the polarity between man and woman signifies absolutely, not merely what it produces. The book moves from a critique of modern sexology and psychoanalysis through an elaborate anatomy of erotic attraction, drawing on Hindu Tantrism, classical mystery cults, Kabbalistic and Sufi sources, and the symbolism of myth.
From Profane Love to Sacred Rites
Defining a Metaphysics of Sex
Evola opens by fixing what he means by “metaphysics”: both the search for first principles—here, what the sexes and their interaction signify absolutely—and, more literally, the science of what lies beyond the physical. This is not abstract speculation but what emerges from transpsychological and transphysiological experience, grounded in a doctrine of the manifold states of being and a non-dualist anthropology alive to subtle and transcendental modes of consciousness. He lines up precursors—Plato, the Renaissance mystics, Boehme, Franz von Baader, Schopenhauer, Weininger, Berdyaev, Klages—and waves aside modern sexology (anthropological, biological, sociological, eugenic, psychoanalytic) as indifferent to ultimate meanings, while writers on love from Stendhal to D. H. Lawrence stay trapped at the level of psychology and feeling. Scientists who study others rather than themselves err; only the lost sacred science supplies the references for eros’s real dimensions. He cites Barbusse on coitus forming “a manifold and monstrous being,” and Mauclair on love’s mystery being visible only to a tiny minority. Statistics he rejects outright, leaving such criteria “to the trivial methods of a Kinsey”; the exceptional case provides the norm ideally. The difficulties are real: prudish taboos, banal novels, squalid pornography, lovers’ reluctance to speak, and the reduced consciousness of ecstatic moments. Against psychoanalysis’s fixed “libido” and its degrading subpersonal inversion, he sets the book’s basic purpose. A second sphere covers traditions that recognized sex as sacred—Bacchus worship, Tantrism, holy prostitution, sacred marriages—with initiatory techniques for inducing ecstasy. The work, he admits, is little more than an outline, written under a fortuitous personal situation.
The Cult of Sex in a Decadent Age
Modern civilization, Evola argues, is obsessed with sex and woman—literature, theater, cinema, advertising—with the striptease as the epitome of Western decadence and media-made female types exerting worldwide collective influence. The worship is cerebral: chronic psychic excitement coexists with apparent chastity, a “depraved chastity” and autistic libido visible in exhibitionist modern women. He quotes Tolstoy to Gorki on the French and consumptives, then invokes the classical analogy of head, breast, and lower body to intellectual, spiritual-heroic, and nutritional-sexual life: today’s civilization idolizes the subpersonal, and “hunger and love will shape history.” The Hindu Kali Yuga doctrine—Kali as goddess of destruction, desire, and sex—frames the age, along with the Tantric “transmutation of poison into medicine,” though he holds no illusions about that prospect. The era’s feverish sexuality is bound up with gynocracy.
Against the Evolutionary Prejudice
One’s view of sex depends on one’s anthropology. Evola opposes sexology’s Darwinian-materialist legacy (citing H. L. Philp on “Natural Selection” capitalized like God) and psychoanalysis’s subpersonal basis. He adopts instead the traditional doctrine of involution: man is not derived from the ape by evolution; the ape derives from man by involution. He agrees with De Maistre that savage peoples are degenerating remains, and cites Kohlbrugge, Marconi, Dacque, Westenhofer, and Adloff against evolutionary dogma. Ontogenesis does not repeat phylogenesis but passes through eliminated possibilities. Animal sexuality is explained as the fall or regression of a non-biological impulse; the reproductive instinct and “survival of the species” are derivatives, not primary facts.
Love, Coitus, and the Illusion of Domestic Progress
He confines himself to sexual love centering in coitus. Stendhal’s fourfold distinction (passion-, aesthetic-, physical-, vanity-love) he finds peripheral; only passion-love deserves the name, per Bourget’s definition. He differs from positivists not over the physical or biological interpretation but over the root meaning of union. Ideal affinities are incomplete without physical attraction, the union of bodies, and “the trauma of coitus”—the terminus ad quem. Only actual union moves the deepest layers; the orgasm encompasses the transcendental, nonindividual dimension. Platonic love transcends only as spiritual disposition, not in an actual fission of being. Psychoanalysis earns credit for noting that tenderness and the like are often sublimations or infantile deviations. But the passage from sexual love to domestic affection is no progress—it is a minus, a sharp drop, a substitute and illusory solution for the need for ontological completeness. He cites Schiller (“Passion disappears; love must remain”) as a last resource.
Against the Religion of Instinct
Naturalistic sex religion, exemplified by D. H. Lawrence, draws his fire. He quotes Campion in Huxley’
Love, Anguish, and the Hunger for Eternity
Love carries anguish inside it from the start—the fear of falling from the heights it opens, the dread that everything may end. Even at its most intense the lover asks, anxiously, “Will you love me forever?” No love is so secure that it does not need an “always.” Reason knows the demand is absurd and illusory, yet the sentiment returns in every new attachment; Shelley’s passions are the textbook case. This longing marks a real moment in the gathering of experience, a reaching past the temporary, and it brings with it the strange familiarity of having always known the other—Melandro in Maeterlinck: “You are the image I always carried hidden within me.” Absurd if love were only procreative coitus, such facts make precise sense once sex is understood metaphysically.
Faithfulness and jealousy are not demanded by nature or species; the opposite would be natural, since attachment to one being restricts procreative freedom. But when a beloved woman sets at rest the need for self-confirmation and “being,” the creature’s existential privation lifts and he feels he possesses Life in himself. Betrayal then strikes the deepest existential nucleus, and the stronger the erotic magnetism, the heavier the blow—which explains how love turns to hate, how a man may destroy or kill the betrayer, nonsense for species-survival or ordinary psychology. The drive to possess wholly looks like ego pride and the will to power, but these are effects, not causes, of an inferiority complex that is transcendental—rooted in man’s inborn privation as a finite being, a mixture of being and nonbeing. Eros is the natural form by which he seeks to suspend that feeling; self-confirmation through erotic possession gives the illusion of “being,” and jealousy and sexual tyranny follow as peripheral transpositions. Such compensation only reinforces egotism, against eros’s highest capability of self-transcendence. In D’Annunzio’s Trionfo della morte, Giorgio Aurispa clings to possession to escape nothingness and suicide—”absolute certainty in the possession of another creature.”
Erotic experience today mixes two contradictory moments—the impulse to have worth by possessing and the tendency to abandon oneself in union—genetically connected, opposed only in finite forms. In integrated eros, exaltation prevails under the sign of the One, overcoming the antithesis: “I love you more than my life.” An Arab love spell is described: concentrating the will in the eyes, three cuts in the left arm, and the phrase “There is no god but God…”
The Crisis of Puberty
Dismay, fear, or anguish almost always accompanies the first signs of sex—foreboding of crisis and danger mingled with ignorance of desire. Dante: Ecce Deus fortior me… and Heu miser! Quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps! Jelaluddin Rumi: where love is roused, the ego, the obscure tyrant, dies. The pathology of puberty is telling: where the individual cannot overcome the crisis—hereditary deficiencies, innate weakness, psychic trauma—unhealthy symptoms arise, even madness, as in Kahlbaum’s hebephrenia. Two malfunctions are possible: too little energy introduced into the “circuits,” or a structural fault. Hysterical, epileptic, semicataleptic fits, melancholia alternating with exaltation, masturbatory derangement are effects. Mairet reports the afflicted feeling transported by an inner force independent of will, as if possessed. Halted intellectual development, hallucinations of sight or hearing in adolescence, and suicidal urges—a “passive” experience of the impulse toward transcendence, anticipating the sexuality-death complex—all appear; pathology enlarges physiology, and these upsets repeat on a smaller scale whenever one falls in love. Marro cites a youth feeling “a fluid going from his bowels up his back and reaching to his brain,” then struck by an urge to violent convulsive actions—relatable to a partial awakening of kundalini, which without adequate training may bring madness or death. Normal forms show stormy arousal of the emotional faculties.
Nonpathological manifestations reveal the superphysical aspect: strong arousal of religious feeling and mystic tendencies in puberty; spiritual crises and conversions occur mainly then, with incompleteness, anguish, unhealthy introspection, anxiety, disgust, insecurity—Starbuch wrote that theology takes youth’s tendencies and builds on them. An analogy exists between a favorable religious crisis and first happy love: William James on newness embellishing every object; Stendhal’s “Love-passion casts before the eyes of a man the whole of nature in its most sublime aspects… Everything is new; everything is alive and ‘inspiring'”; the song “Schön wie ein junger Frühling ist diese Welt”; the Arabic saying “‘ashiq tara,” said to have caused a Sufi’s enlightenment. The counterpart is emptiness when love is disappointed.
The Daemonic Female Principle
Evola begins by tracing a recurring traditional association between the female principle and seduction, and a daemonic element. The Kabbala derives the demonic from the female element; Chinese Taoism from the yin; Egyptian tradition personified the antisolar forces as mainly female, and Isis herself sometimes carried this character—as in the legend where she cunningly takes possession of Ra’s “name of power” to make him subject. This must be read ontologically, not morally: it concerns the natural partiality of the Shakti, the principle of “matter” and the “Waters,” in the dynamic and dramatic aspects of manifestation, in an everlasting emanation of almost Spinozan kind.
From this follows an esoteric teaching that amounts to a metaphysics of human sexuality. The female partiality toward the daemonic shows in the attempt to catch and absorb the principle of transcendental or magical manhood—what in the male reflects the Supernatural prior to the Dyad, what in nature is higher than nature and can “make the stream of the waters flow back on high” and break the cosmic bond. This is the meaning of virya in Buddhist terminology (root shared with Latin vir, “man”): manhood in a lofty transcendental sense, active in ascent and able to lead beyond becoming, beyond samsara, by “stopping the flow.” Through Tantric and hatha-yoga polyvalence, virya can also mean the male seed; man as such, by purushamatra sambandhibhih, holds the potential for supernatural self-completion. Female nature tends to enslave and absorb this principle in her Demeter or Aphrodite function—less on the material plane of procreation, flesh, and desire than on an occult level, where her essential daemonism and antagonistic function appear. She is oriented toward keeping the order Gnosticism called the “world of the Demiurge,” nature opposed to spirit. Hence the talk of a “draining death” from woman: to lose his virya while mingling with the female substance of desire means for man “being erased from the Book of Life”—a natural inexorableness of the female principle, a metaphysical “war of the sexes” beyond profane social relationships.
Meyrink emphasized these ideas, showing their drastic fulfillment in the ancient mysteries of Pontus under Isais, a variant of the Great Goddess. Similar meaning may be attributed to the mysteries of Rhea-Cybele, whose “holy orgy” reached an unmanning ecstatic intoxication, men in degenerate frenzy sacrificing their manhood by castration and wearing women’s clothes. In these and related cults—Hecate of Laguira, Astaroth, Astarte of Hieropolis, Artemis of Ephesus—priests were castrated or wore women’s clothes. In pre-Orphic Dionysus worship the female element prevailed; besides the public cult, mysteries excluded men (as in the early bacchanals at Rome), initiating only women. The Dionysiac woman exercised sovereignty over mere phallic manhood—exciting, accomplishing, absorbing it—equivalent to harming and breaking transcendental manhood, in keeping with eros’s ambivalence. Woman’s partiality for the daemonic appears in “lower” and “heavenly” forms alike, the latter involving a cosmic limit: though “woman” can give life, she shuts off access to what lies beyond life—as in the legend of a heavenly woman who helped and protected the Shaman yet sought to keep him alone in the seventh heaven, fighting his ascent, telling him life beyond was cut off and tempting him with heavenly food. In heroic legends, a woman’s love, more or less supernatural, is often more hindrance and peril than help.
Lesser and Greater Mysteries
Two kinds of mysteries must be distinguished: greater and lesser, or of Ammon and of Isis—names with no strict historical link to the ancient institutions so called, but morphological. The lesser mysteries, the mysteries of Isis, are the mysteries of the woman, aiming at the individual’s cosmic reintegration and union with the female substance, the life force, the substratum of manifestation; they may be bright or daemonic depending on their functional character. Daemonic forms occurred when the female principle was made absolute and activated antagonistically to the supercosmic; even when the Woman or Mother becomes the Divine Mother or Mother of God (ancient Aegean times; Isis with a baby; the Christian ianua coeli, Gate to Heaven), the limit remains. The great mysteries, the mysteries of Ammon, are linked to reascent, to the waters flowing back on high, to surpassing the cosmic level—under the sign of transcendental manhood, marking its gaining the upper hand.
The archetypal incest myth fits here: the woman functioning as “mother,” who gave the “Water of Life” and resurrection to the divided being (the “second birth” of the lesser mysteries)
The Hermaphrodite and the Fall in Christian Mysticism
The Kabbala had already read the biblical myth this way, and Leo the Hebrew tried to align Genesis with Plato’s Symposium. Christian writers from Boehme onward, working from the Bible alone, had to force disparate themes together. Genesis first calls the original being hermaphrodite, then treats the sexes as God’s work rather than sin’s effect—God finding it “not good for Adam to be alone”—and only afterward speaks of the Fall, for which it offers no sexual reason, since the command to multiply and the “one flesh” saying precede disobedience. Boehme, steeped in Hermetic and alchemical symbolism (Sulfur, Mercury, Niter, Salt), likely drew the hermaphrodite from Hermetism’s Rebis rather than the Kabbala. For him Adam’s slumber was the first Fall: the being misused freedom, “imagined” himself into nature, and the sexes followed as its outcome—though God gave Eve as a remedy, as Leo had taught that procreation replaced the divine contemplation man lost through sin. Wirz told how Adam, seeing animals couple, begat Eve as a magical image into which God breathed a spirit.
Sophia, the Virgin, and the Loss of the Hidden Wife
Behind this stands Sophia, the heavenly Virgin, the original being’s hidden bride—called the light of the fiery soul, the fiat of creation, almost a Shakti, the Water of Life. Like Lucifer, the primordial being wished to dominate her; she withdrew, leaving him dry and lightless. Even degraded, loving earthly women, he secretly hungered for that Virgin; Eve was only a substitute, her completion an illusion. Eden’s exile and the guarded Tree of Life symbolize the impossibility of reaching man’s goal through earthly union. The doctrine fed either puritanical dualism—renounce Eve to regain Sophia—or Marian rebirth, and Gichtel, nearest to esoterism, wrote of a starry body within the elemental one.
Eleusis and the Displaced Doctrine of Sexual Initiation
At Eleusis, after the wedding rite in darkness, a great light blazed and the hierophant thundered that the Great Goddess had borne the holy Son; the shown ear of corn tied to the hermaphrodite and his resurrection. What survived may be only a displacement onto the spiritual plane of an older Mediterranean doctrine of sexual initiation, reduced to a cult open to nearly all.
Tantra: Riding the Tiger
For technique one turns to Tantrism’s Left Hand, reserved for the “heroic” capable of overlooking dualities. In the Kali Yuga, the age of unleashed Shakti, the directive is “Ride the tiger”—grasp the dangerous force rather than flee it. The core principle: transform poison into medicine, use the forces of fall for freedom, join fruition with release. This demands preliminary initiation, a protective kula, and hard ascetic discipline—as with the Brothers of the Free Spirit, whose freedom came only after the severest trials. Tantrism’s archaic substrate includes orgiastic cults of Durga’s emanations, yakshini and dakini, subjugated by spells.
Taoist Secret Practices
Maspéro errs, Evola argues, in reading Taoism’s highest aim as breath and sex alone; “dissolving of the corpse” belongs with traditions of the resurrection body. Taoist practice may transmute the body toward dematerialization or extend life, as in The Secret of the Golden Flower—ambiguous, since oral formulas carry the essentials. Breathing methods recall kundalini: the breath held in the lower vermilion field, then raised to the head as fire. Sexual handbooks call union the “hidden way”: like riding a galloping horse with rotten reins, yet the knowledgeable take no harm—the Yellow Emperor lay with 1,200 women and became immortal. The technique is sworn to secrecy, passed by the Immortals mouth to mouth; without it, Ko Hong said, no drugs bring everlasting life.
Naglowska, Crowley, and the Orgiastic Path
Naglowska’s rites demand the man remain “dry until the end,” then sacrifice himself to the dazzling woman’s fulminating penetration—her “satanic pleasure” read as sahaja-sukha. Crowley, the “Great Beast 666,” made sex his vehicle of consecration, each act an “Opus,” polarity breeding savage magnetism, women and drugs opening consciousness to the gods. His secret OTO rituals remain unverifiable; his homosexual magic Evola suspects was inborn disposition, his companions lucid mediums. The technique most named was excess—pain or pleasure, sex or intoxication—pushed to exhaustion.
The Apparatus of Scholarship
The notes appended to the central chapters are not continuous argument but a workshop of citations, quarrels, and small clarifications. Evola draws on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, Schopenhauer, Crawley’s Mystic Rose, Wolfram’s Parzifal, and his own earlier books. Ficino appears repeatedly, especially the line that the lover craves “to make himself God instead of man,” and Barbusse’s lovers are said to have “stolen the fire of heaven, like Prometheus.” Plato is quoted for the claim that through Eros come divination, priestly sacrifice, initiation, enchantments, soothsaying, and magic.
Several notes sharpen distinctions. The Freudian primary process, with libido free and fluctuating, is set beside the secondary process, where charge fixes to a representation and resists detachment. Quick divorce and remarriage in modern monogamy are traced to the displaceability of eros in the superficial layers of a being, whereas older organic civilizations respected the deepest, most individuated layer and so secured stabler unions. Schopenhauer’s fallen leaves, taken from Homer, illustrate “temporal eternity” within the species, and Bachofen made this the basis of the chthonic, physicomaternal concept of ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Carpenter is corrected: procreation can be wholly separated from ecstatic union in coitus, so his view holds only for sexual magic. Ficino’s notion that love for epheboi is closer to Aphrodite Urania is answered with Alcibiades’ speech, while Plotinus calls homosexual loves shameful and abnormal. The Arab nazar ila-l-mord and the Prophet’s “I saw my Lord in the guise of a beardless youth” are cited, as are Stendhal on love-passion versus love of beauty and Bergson on individuality harboring its own enemy.
Eros, Power, and the Hermaphrodite
Chapter 3’s notes propose uniting Freud and Adler: eros embodies an impulse toward self-confirmation and individual reintegration, rooted in an unconscious “idea of power and of likeness to God,” which matches the hermaphrodite myth. The Vita nuova, Marro on puberty, Lawrence, Avalon’s The Serpent Power, William James, Eliade on shamanism, and the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad on the heart are marshalled. Plutarch’s Lycurgus is chosen because Spartan modesty could not be in question, girls displaying themselves naked. Madness from love potions in ancient Rome, said to have ended Lucullus and Lucretius, is attributed to too-sudden awakening of eros, comparable to hebephrenia. Wagner’s passion for Matilda of Wesendonk is said to have been sublimated in Tristan and Isolde. Wilhelm Reich’s deduction of the urge to destruction from repression of pleasure is rejected. Mauclair supplies the formula that love is the positive image of death, coitus being two people hurling themselves into death with the ability to return. The Kamasutra on biting, nails, and erotogenic-magnetic marks appears, as does the scandal of Mundus and Paulina, which led the Senate to close the temple of Isis under Tiberius.
Woman as Mother and Prostitute
The later notes turn to woman. Weininger holds that physical life and physical death, mysteriously united in coitus, are divided between woman as mother and woman as prostitute, and that prostitution appears only among humans—a fact tied to the “Shiva potentiality” of the pure lover type. A treatise ascribed to Albertus Magnus describes the coitus-loving woman by scanty or irregular menses, scarce milk, and a tendency to cruelty. Paracelsus distinguishes seed from sperm: the womb attracts the seed magnetically, rejects the sperm, keeps the seed. Ancient sayings hold woman’s sensuality eight times greater than man’s in the East, and Ovid’s “keener lust” in the West. Note 106 concerns abnormal control of the constrictor cunni and smooth fibers enabling automatic sucking; Tantric women train this through yoni-mudra, voluntary contraction strangling the lingam, and Ploss-Bartels cite women able to re-expel sperm. Lombroso-Ferrero and Krafft-Ebing are cited for spasmodic savage violence in women, Praz on romantic literature, D’Annunzio on woman’s limitless desire and an instinct older than the stars.
Reluctance, Surrender, and the Sita Ideal
Notes 115–122 discuss woman’
The Three Levels of Erotic Attraction
Evola’s central conceptual architecture rests on a tripartite anthropology. The outermost layer is the social individual—a construct, relatively arbitrary and unstable. Beneath it lies the profound being, the seat of inborn nature and individuation, where character and racial inheritance take shape. Deepest of all are elementary forces prior to individuation itself, and it is here that Evola locates the first root of sex. Sexual attraction operates differently at each level: at the deepest, all women become interchangeable because the force seeks only the pure complement; at the intermediate level, particular qualities of race, type, and character fix the choice, producing the illusion of the irreplaceable beloved; at the outer level, indetermination becomes excessive and the libertine seeks only pleasure. “Fatal passion” arises when the elementary force fixes itself entirely at the intermediate level—a configuration Evola notes is almost never happy, since it activates a charge beyond the individual.
This framework supports his rejection of several prevailing explanations. The pleasure-principle theory fails because in genuine eros the lover entertains the idea of pleasure as little as that of children; pleasure as ruling motive belongs to debauchery, a dissociation of what is normally unified. Hormonal explanations confuse conditions with causes. Freudian libido theory earns credit for recognizing the autonomous psychic nature of the impulse toward union, but errs in conceiving pleasure as merely the relief of tension. Throughout, Evola insists that sexual excitement is substantially psychic and primary, causing the physiological phenomena rather than resulting from them.
The War of the Sexes and the Two Mysteries
The book’s treatment of the female principle is its most distinctive and contentious strand. Drawing on the Hindu concept of Shakti as the source of desire and outward manifestation, Evola argues that woman embodies the principle of “matter” and “the Waters”—oriented toward maintaining the cosmic order, tending to absorb and enslave the transcendental principle in man. This is the meaning of the “draining death” he finds in myth and tradition: the loss of virya, manhood in its lofty sense, means being erased from the Book of Life. Yet Evola insists this must be understood ontologically rather than morally. The female principle’s partiality toward the daemonic operates in both “lower” and “heavenly” forms; even the Divine Mother, the Gate of Heaven, marks a limit.
From this follows his distinction between the lesser mysteries of Isis and the greater mysteries of Ammon. The lesser aim at cosmic reintegration, union with the female substance and life force; the greater concern reascent, the waters flowing back on high, the gaining of the upper hand by transcendental manhood. The archetypal incest myth—the son possessing the mother who gave him the Water of Life—encodes this passage from one regime to the other, from the phase of woman, Moon, and whiteness to the phase of Fire, Sun, and redness.
What the Book Leaves Behind
Evola’s synthesis belongs to a current of twentieth-century traditionalism that reads modernity as decline—the Hindu Kali Yuga in which the subpersonal is idolized and sexuality becomes a cerebral fever. His polemic against sexology, statistics, and what he calls the “trivial methods of a Kinsey” is of a piece with this diagnosis. The book’s value for readers today lies less in its conclusions than in the breadth of its comparative materials: the Tantric vamachara, the Kabbalistic nuptials of God and Shekhinah, the Chinese doctrine of royal unions ordered to the lunar cycle, Ibn Arabi’s contemplation of the divine in woman. Whether or not one accepts Evola’s metaphysics, the work documents a persistent intuition across cultures—that sexual union touches something the individual cannot contain, and that the traditions of the sacred marriage, holy prostitution, and initiatory defloration all testify to a knowledge the modern world has forgotten or repressed.
