Julius Evola’s Imperialismo Pagano belongs to the interwar genre of cultural polemic, written by an Italian thinker who became one of the twentieth century’s most unyielding critics of modernity. Composed in the 1920s, the book sets out to define what a true empire would require and to measure how far the contemporary West—Fascist Italy included—had fallen from that standard. Its form is a sustained argument: part historical diagnosis, part manifesto, part esoteric treatise, moving from a critique of Christianity and democracy to a vision of restored sacred hierarchy.
Evola’s central claim is stark. Empire, he argues, is not a matter of territory, industry, or military force. It is the inseparable synthesis of spirituality and political power—the effective presence of a hierarchy of meta-economic and meta-practical values that condition and dominate everything economic and practical. A body is not an organism unless a superior unity of soul pervades and dominates it; a state is not an empire unless a qualitatively superior principle of being holds it together. Everything else—the economic imperialism of modern nations, the administrative state, the bourgeois cult of gold and the machine—is a parody of the real thing.
The Decadence of the Political Idea
Evola opens by insisting that anyone who would revive the myth of Rome and the ideal of Empire must first reckon with how alien that ideal is to the entire culture of the modern West. The first condition of empire is an inseparable synthesis of spirituality and politicness, a hierarchy of meta-economic and meta-practical values governing everything economic and practical as means to an end. That synthesis demands absolute differentiation among men—some beings set apart from the multitude as a soul is set apart from the body’s matter. In Western society no trace of this survives. Political reality has become economic, administrative, police reality; differentiation gives way to leveling, personality to sociality and its impersonal law, quality to number, matter, gold, machine; the warrior to the soldier. The heroic and wisdom values by which castes of chiefs and seers once stood sovereign above servants and merchants have faded, supplanted by those who “believe” and “pray,” who stain everything with sentimentalism, humanitarianism, moralism, rhetoric. Whoever speaks of imperialism today speaks an irony: a purely economic, industrial, militarist, essentially bourgeois and inorganic thing, having nothing to do with the sacred, solar, living nature of ancient empires.
Seeking the deep roots of this debasement, Evola finds Christianity: the dark barbarian wave “enemy of itself and the world,” which in frenzied subversion of all hierarchy, exaltation of the weak and disinherited, rancor toward force and wisdom and aristocracy, and fanatical proselytizing from the Asiatic plague of Palestine, poisoned Rome’s greatness and caused the West’s political and spiritual decline. Christianity is not merely what survives as the Christian religion, a truncated stump. It passed through the Reformation to corrupt the blond Germanic barbarians, and it is in act today in liberalism and democratism, in the fruits of the French Revolution down to anarchism and Bolshevism, in the structure of Anglo-Saxon society, in science, law, and the illusion of power granted by technology. Everywhere the same leveling will of number, hatred of hierarchy and quality, and the collective impersonal bond of mutual insufficiency, fear, and prudence—fed by Christianity in a race of rebellious slaves. With the transcendentalism of its values, justified in awaiting a Kingdom “not of this earth,” Christianity broke the harmonious synthesis of spirituality and politicness, of royalty and priesthood, known to Rome, Egypt, Persia, and the ancient East. The current materialization of the political idea is the extreme consequence of that scission. Whoever says empire must simultaneously say anticristianism, paganism.
The Catholic Compromise
Taken in itself, in its subtle Bolshevism and indifference to worldly concerns, Jesus’s preaching could only make impossible not merely the State but society itself. When the animating spring—the declared imminent advent of the Kingdom—failed, the spirit and intransigence of the primitive teaching were betrayed, and as a “normalization” the Catholic Church arose as a compromise between immanence and transcendence, Christendom and paganism. Christianity is one thing, Catholicism another. Christianity as such is the anti-State, analogous to the French Revolution and the communist myth; Christianity as Catholic Church is but a contradictory shadow of paganism, reflecting a system that is paganism’s contradiction. In this contradiction lies the Church’s impotence to assume the heritage the Christian revolution corrupted: Roman imperiality and universality. The Church maintains dualism, upholding spiritual against material dominion—an untenable position. The Guelphs are coherent: they deny a lay state in itself and want the temporal unconditionally subordinated to papal power. But then what remains for the Church to call itself Christian, to claim descent from one who taught that worldly interests are vain and men equal servants of a God whose kingdom is not of this earth?
Against the Race of Servants
To the race of servants and Sons of the Father the text opposes a race of liberated beings who see God merely as the highest power, to be freely obeyed or virilely fought with head held high, without sentiment, abandonment, or prayer. Against dependence it sets sufficiency and Hellenic autarchy; against equality, difference, distance, hierarchy, aristocracy; against mystic-communist promiscuity, firm individuality; against love, happiness, compassion, peace, consolation, heroic contempt and the law of pure will and absolute action; against providence, the tragic conception in which man is alone among contingencies and must save himself. It demands erasing “sin” and “bad conscience,” assuming all responsibility, closing every escape, dominating the soul. No more brothers or Fathers, but men each enclosed in himself like worlds, rocks, peaks, clothed only in their own strength or weakness. Incommunicability must be willed out of absolute respect and non-contamination; forces recognized loyally and coldly, in a discipline inwardly inflamed yet outwardly rigid as steel—militarily, as in war. A state of absolute justice: no “infinite,” precise relations, order, cosmos, hierarchy, sense of castes, absolute individuation. Whoever wills the Empire must will all this.
Christianity and the democratic evil have rooted themselves in contemporary culture and in the mentality even of those who would be astonished to be called Christian or democratic. Not only society’s structure but the presuppositions of Western science, technique, and knowledge suffer the same evil. In science’s dualism, which sees only dead phenomena split from the powers of the “I,” lies the extreme consequence of the violent split between spirit and nature that Christianity affirmed against the living, organic, magical concept of nature the ancients held as a harmonious system of gods, intelligences, symbols, ritual gestures. Interior spiritual consciousness attributed to Wisdom was replaced by exterior, intellectual, discursive-scientific knowledge; organic sympathetic connection with things’ deep forces—magic, theurgy—was replaced by an extrinsic, indirect, violent relation: that of technique and the machine. Thus the Christian revolution contains the germ of mechanization and abstraction; democratism reappears in scientific knowledge’s formal character (true is only what all can recognize).
The Two Powers and the Initiate King
The union of spiritual and political power, Evola insists, is no rhetorical flourish, no superstitious deification of a man merely holding high office in a material hierarchy—the error of decadent theocracies. The synthesis he means is real: a self-transformation that sets certain beings as far from ordinary men as men suppose themselves from animals. He refuses the word “superman,” worn thin by misuse, and expects only a handful to understand him. He points to the rite of initiation, which in many ancient states—where dynasties of “divine blood” were lacking—confirmed the investiture of political power. The chief’s distance from other men is not moral, ideal, or religious but a different quality of being won through a substantial transformation of consciousness. This concrete superiority gives “spirituality” its meaning and stands as the center from which royalty’s dignity and function proceed—kings who were kings by a fire drawn from heaven, the hvarenó, which invested them, made them immortal, and testified itself through victory. Here is transcendent stability, sovereignty, the axis of hierarchy, fidelity, honor, and heroic action.
Organism Against Compound
The second chapter turns to the democratic error. The new State must rest on the organic idea, opposed to the mere compound—atomistic free elements held by an impersonal abstract bond, tied to no superior principle and grounded in no substantial difference among themselves. Imperial and liberal-democratic ideals differ exactly as organization differs from composition. Evola’s imperialism wants a universality and unity that is not the abstract unity of impersonal law or an unreal “collective will,” but one identified in a superior individual in whom the sense of the transcendent differentiates and articulates. It transcends nationalism: democratic supranationalism debases national reaffirmation by promiscuously associating it with many others, whereas Roman imperial supranationality is a national reaffirmation that sustains itself beyond itself in a synthesis superior both to itself and to the nations it subordinates.
Liberty and Empire
Strangely, the values underpinning this imperialism also appear as presuppositions of liberal democracy: liberty and independence sit at the heart of the best Aryan traditions. Noble once meant free; Rome’s first constitution rested on the patres, free as so many worlds within a world; Frederick II said he was king insofar as he was free. But the identity is verbal only, the spirit radically opposed. Liberalism affirms these values through a race of slaves that dares not think them to the bottom, illegitimately displacing them onto “society” and “humanity,” where they become errors. To will liberty is to will empire; liberty admits no compromise. Many free beings can only limit one another unless a law deep in each regulates them—but a law, even internal, remains law, transcending each individual’s conscious power. Hence the choice: diminish the demand and keep the many domesticated atomic liberties in reciprocal limitation, or hold it intransigently and create the being who becomes act in that which determines the law of social reality, free regarding a law that binds only others. Empire is a body made one in the dominant synthesis of a soul—a principle having its end in itself, using the body as instrument, as Aristotle has it. The chief is neither the masses’ representative nor an impersonal symbol of self-organization; the masses receive form only through this qualitatively different force, which subordinates their interest to vaster horizons and recognizes no one’s right to sanction a law that is just because it is his.
The Contradiction of Equality
Democratic equality contradicts the immortal principle of liberty: leveling possibilities, identical rights and duties, a law founded on quantity make liberty impossible. True liberty lives only in hierarchy, difference, and irreducible individual qualities, modeled on the ancient caste system, and only where fidelity, heroism, and sacrifice overturn the small values of material and political life. Democracy as self-government still divides rulers from governed, since the many’s will must concretize in particular persons chosen for recognized superior capacities—an anti-democratic factor repressed vainly through electionism and popular sanction. The superior discern and rank values; democracy remits judgment to the mass, least apt to judge, like letting the blind decide who sees best. This is the main cause of political reality’s degradation into the merely empirical and utilitarian. The objection that material well-being fosters higher development is debatable: the delights of Capua and opulence bred torpor, while suffering and living dangerously grew values. Democratism rests on a gratuitous optimism, ignoring the irrational psychology of masses—led by enthusiasm and suggestion, inconstant like a woman, following whoever seduces it best. The law of “progress” is a Western superstition born of Jacobin ideology; the “people” as one rational being is an optimistic myth invented by a race of servants unable to bear true chiefs.
Against the Absolute State
Evola prefers “the many” to “nation” or “humanity,” which reify abstractions: “man” beyond particular men is nothing, and nation, people, humanity are metaphors whose unity is verbal or a shifting equilibrium of colliding forces—like a waterfall that looks compact from afar but is infinite elements in ceaseless movement. All democratism is disguised liberalism and atomism. He then warns against idolatry of the State, specifically the neo-Hegelian absolute State. Hegel himself is not wholly to blame, but recent Italian interpretations make the State, not individuals—even chiefs—the real thing. This abstractism is worse than democratic abstractism: in democracy the “people” is a mask revealing real subjects, whereas here reality is devoured by an idea, chiefs reduced to instruments of impersonality. True imperialism recognizes one reality: the individual—a superior individual able to say “the State am I,” not the individual for the Empire. Hierarchy exists because there are chiefs, not chiefs because hierarchy. When the higher reality transmitted through elites declines and survives by inertia as empty organization, an empty throne, it turns against its own source—and this degeneration coincides with the genesis of “absolute State,” “Nation,” and recent rhetoric.
The Economic Prejudice and the Cult of Utility
Modern life, Evola argues, has lost every qualitative distinction because it measures everything by practical utility and sociality alone. The “economic prejudice” levels all differences: hierarchies built on gold and mechanical-economic power are not real hierarchies at all, since they all occupy a single plane and share a single quality. Beyond that plane other levels ought to exist—independent of it and superior to it—but today they do not, and contemporary societies invert the proper order. When the hypertrophy of this evil, through monstrous banking-industrial trusts, dares to call itself “imperialism,” he can only laugh. Against it he sets the demand for a radical revolution against gold, capital, the machine, interest, and the myth of work as the indispensable precondition of the true Imperium. The rebellious impulse lurking inside revolutionary ideologies is itself contaminated by the same evil: it sees only economic and social problems, seeking not liberation from the economic yoke in the name of metaeconomic and metaphysical values but merely a more egalitarian, “more socialist” arrangement of the same economic problem. Hence its distrust of the “intellectual” as a luxury, its plebeian intolerance, the temper of rebellious slaves—already visible, he claims, in the fall of ancient Romanity.
Two weapons are needed against this first root of the European evil. The first is to create an elite, to dig deep differences and new qualities into the undifferentiated substance of modern individuals, awakening an aristocracy, a race of lords and dominators. The second is a rebellion from the depths that moves the machine—that extrinsic, inorganic, automatic and violent dependence—breaks the economic-capitalist yoke, and mocks imposed work as a universal law. This liberation is achieved not by violence but by spontaneous recognition born of the sense of transcendent values, fidelity to one’s own mode of being, and consciousness of nature, dignity, and quality, reconstituting an organic, direct, effective hierarchy, freer and more iron-bound than any other.
The Return to Caste
The return to the caste system, in Evola’s account, is the return to a system of truth, justice, and “form.” Caste embodies the ideal of a community of activity, profession, blood, inheritance, laws, duties, and rights answering to pre-established typical modes of being; its precondition is the will to be what one is, silencing individualist and careerist whims. Here quantitative uniformity, centralization, and standardization are overcome, and a social hierarchy reflecting a hierarchy of modes of being can rise from material to spiritual, from formless to formed, from collective to universal and supraindividual. Ancient India shows this ideal most perfectly, and it is found in different forms across other civilizations up to the Nordic-Roman Middle Ages. The substrate is the healthy operosity of the inferior class, no longer anarchized by demagogic ideologies and directed by experts of exchange and traffic; beyond them the warrior nobility, recognizing value and end in war, heroism, glory, and triumph; beyond that the solar race of the spirit and Wisdom, those who “see” and “can”; and as culmination the ideal of the King of the World, the invisible Emperor whose force is occult, omnipotent, and unconditioned.
Science Against Wisdom
As power, depersonalized and socialized, became gold and capital, so wisdom became “concept” and “rationality”—the second root of the European evil. Western philosophy and positive science are essentially socialist, democratic, anti-hierarchical, proposing as “true” what must be universally recognized by anyone with a certain instruction. Like the majority criterion of political democratism, they presuppose equality and dominate by quantity over quality. Proclaiming individualist or relativist doctrines avails nothing when the very mode of proclaiming them adheres to these democratic, impersonal, collectivist presuppositions; an imperialism invoking popular recognition instead of imposing itself hierarchically from above would commit the same absurdity. Gold is indifferent to the quality of its possessors, and so is contemporary knowledge. Obedient to a will to equality, European knowledge turned toward what minimizes individual differentiation: physical experience or abstraction and verbal conventions. The socialization of knowledge produced its abstraction and an insuperable hiatus between knowing and being. In the West, thought is either an instrument describing the exterior, quantitative aspect of material things, or a creator of unrealities—reified words, empty logical schematisms, intellectual sport. Hence the unreality of the modern spirit: man is a shadow agitated among schemas and programs, ever more dependent on a science that adds abstractions to abstractions, enslaved to phenomenal laws never understood.
The problem of the empire is the problem par excellence, and the reciprocal indifference of the various forms of human activity is another symptom of European inorganicity. The hinges of imperial hierarchy must rest on knowledge: “those who know must govern,” as Plato said. But it would be ridiculous to identify such knowledge with technical competences, positive sciences, or philosophical speculation; it coincides with what was called Wisdom—aristocratic, individual, effective, substantial, organic, qualitative, against the democratic, social, universalist, abstract, leveling, quantitative knowledge of the “civilized.” Knowing, according to Wisdom, does not mean “thinking” but being the thing known: living it, realizing it inwardly. Only what results from direct or individual experience counts as knowledge.
Mechanical Power and the Dualist Rupture
The third European illusion is mechanical power arising from technological applications of profane science, universally mistaken for the triumph of Western civilization. The democratism underlying the ideal of science’s universality reflects the spirit of the new Judeo-Christian doctrine, though antecedents exist in the Socratic method and later Greek intellectualism—anticipations, following Nietzsche, of that spirit in which the universalist and egalitarian instance manifests most overwhelmingly. Greek culture instead reflects an aristocratic concept of knowledge, its main themes treated by the traditions of Wisdom: effective knowledge conditioned by a real process of purification and self-transformation, presided over by individual initiative or the traditional power of a rite. The passive attitude of the new doctrine’s followers, their intolerance for any autonomous discipline of the individual as a path toward effective spiritual experience, accounts for Christianity’s efficacy in producing the social, vulgarized, inorganic character of modern knowledge.
The Limits of Fascism and the Roman Imperium
Evola turns his closing argument to the movements of his own day, and his verdict on fascism is a measured disappointment. Caught up in concrete politics, fascism never builds a higher hierarchy grounded in purely spiritual values; its evocation of Roman symbols stays at the military level and never reaches the sacral Roman-pagan idea of the Imperium. Its State is essentially lay—political at best, ethical at a stretch. As a “pagan imperialist,” he nonetheless grants that fascism, whatever its contradictions, deserves credit for paying the Roman Church the tribute of recognizing its primacy as bearer of a supraterrestrial universal authority; better that than nothing. Should those limits ever be overcome, Italy could stand among the first peoples called to superior destinies.
Germany, the Swastika, and the Harzburg Front
Germany draws a parallel judgment. The swastika, Aryan-pagan sign of sun and flame, suits a Germanic rebirth, but the party’s name is unfortunate: neither “nationalism” nor “socialism” fits the noble Germanic tradition, and what Germany needs is a counterrevolution against democratic socialism. The reconstituted Harzburg Front pointed the right way—an anti-Marxist, anti-democratic rebellion of conservative and traditionalist elements. The socialist moment must not take primacy and reduce everything to a mass phenomenon around a leader’s momentary prestige. Demands for social justice have their reason, and rebellion against the capitalist oligarchy is a precondition for restoring a qualitative aristocratic order; but to stop there is to remain on Marxism’s own plane. Germany must stay faithful to its tradition of order, discipline, and aristocracy, rebuilding suprapolitical elements. The democratic republic is no transitional stage; dictatorship may be necessary in stormy circumstances but is never a true or sufficient solution—a question of regime type, not of persons. Monarchy as Empire offers a miniature image of an integral supranational European function and the healthiest base for tradition and a virile hierarchy founded on Aryan-feudal service and fidelity. Germany must also shed its defeatist-pacifist postwar literature and overcome the antithesis between professorial rationalism and irrationalist romanticism through a new transcendent realism of classical, suprarational, Doric spirit.
Anti-Judaism and the Two Eagles
Anti-Judaism is a further point for German healing, but radical anti-Judaism is possible only as simultaneous anti-Christianity; only on an Aryan-pagan spiritual basis can a universal antithesis to Judaism be established. Favoring the union of the Two Eagles—Roman and Germanic—is the first problem for the Europe of the future. Meanwhile inner action is required: realizing a state of spirit and a style of life approaching the traditional type, aided by the “invisible Chiefs” invoked at the beginning.
The Ghibelline Restoration Against Catholicism
The final section, “Restauración gibelina,” addresses Catholicism in general, distinguished from the Judeo-Christian whole. Its hierarchical apparatus, stability, and supraterrestrial values seduce many; some in Italy recently declared Rome a universal center only as Catholic Church, defending legitimism on Catholic foundations. This betrays the narrowness of the modern horizon: for one who possesses nothing else, Catholicism is at least something, offering a law of order, recognition of the supernatural, and a principle of universality. On order, Bolshevism too has a principle of order; the Church’s ideal is coordination, not hierarchy, indifferent to political forms provided subordination to the Church endures—a “socialism” of peoples under paternal vigilance. Whatever good the Church achieved derives from the Roman element, so a conscious return to Catholicism could only be a way to surpass it, referring directly to the precristian Roman tradition; Maurras’s valuation of the Church as principle of order moves in similar ideas. On divine right, the Church first affirmed natural-right doctrine—popular origin, the profane nature of royalty—against the Ghibelline “two suns” thesis and the Empire’s supernaturality, because integral divine right, as with the Hohenstaufen, left little room for its hegemonic aspirations; its later support of divine right is a further compromise. Gelasius’s claim that after Christ no man can be simultaneously king and priest is set against Aryan-pagan traditions; the Church’s “consecration” is now an empty symbol. Divine right must be understood concretely: a truly divinized being, testifying by person to an extrahuman nature, holds the true right to dominate.
Solar and Lunar Universality
Two fundamental attitudes exist: the solar, virile, affirmative sacral royal ideal, and the lunar, feminine, religious, passive priestly ideal. The priest serves and humbles himself before God; Judaism pushed this to masochistic extremes. The sacral king was himself divine in nature, of celestial stock, a free cosmic center. Since our purest racial tradition is solar, restoration will sooner or later clash with Catholicism as in the Ghibelline Middle Ages, unless Catholicism accepts its true hierarchical place. Were anticatholicism merely particularist, racist, nationalist-totemic, Evola would declare for Catholicism; but solar universality—imperial, hierarchical, culminating in royal divinity—stands against lunar universality—ecclesial, “socialist,” culminating in the priest as God’s servant. The Aryan, heir of sacred Caesars and royal sons of Thor and Odin, must choose the solar, answering the secret voice of blood.
The Church Within the Imperial Order
Within an imperial ecumenical civilization, the principle of inequality establishes different modes of relating to the divine. For the best minority there is the solar initiatic way—directly binding with the divine, transforming into it, possessing it as a living state. For the masses there is faith.
The book’s conceptual architecture rests on a series of sharp oppositions. Against the modern world’s leveling will—its worship of number, quantity, matter, and the impersonal collective—Evola sets the principle of hierarchy, difference, and what he calls the solar, virile individual. Against the Christian inheritance, which he reads as a poison from the Asiatic plague of Palestine, he sets the pagan Mediterranean tradition of Rome, Egypt, and Persia, where royalty and priesthood formed a single sacred synthesis. Against democracy, which he treats as a disguised liberalism and atomism, he sets the organic idea of the state, in which the chief is not the representative of the masses but a qualitatively different being through whom the masses receive order and form.
What makes the argument distinctive is the way Evola refuses the usual political categories. He attacks not only liberalism and socialism but also the “absolute State” of neo-Hegelian nationalism, which he considers worse than democratic abstraction because it devours the real individual in the name of an idea. He attacks the Catholic Church as a contradictory compromise, a “lunar” spirituality that cannot coherently claim descent from a teacher who said his kingdom was not of this world while exercising temporal dominion. He attacks the Ghibellines for wanting the Eagle subordinated to the Cross, and the Guelphs for denying a lay state altogether. The only coherent position, he insists, is the pagan one: an empire imbued with immanent spirituality that cannot tolerate any organization above itself, that strips every church of authority and posits itself as the true and only church.
The esoteric dimension is never far from the surface. Evola’s “spirituality” is not faith, devotion, or prayer but a real self-transformation that places certain beings at a distance from ordinary men as great as that between men and animals. He refers to the rite of initiation, to the Iranian hvarenó—the fire drawn from heaven that made kings immortal—to the distinction between the solar way of the gods and the telluric way of the ancestors. His hierarchy of castes—servants, merchants, warriors, and the solar race of those who “see” and “can”—culminates in the figure of the Cakravartl, the invisible Emperor whose force is occult and unconditioned. This is not a political program in any ordinary sense; it is a metaphysics of power dressed as a call to action.
What the Book Means
Read today, Imperialismo Pagano is a document of its moment and a provocation that outlives it. Its historical significance lies partly in its relationship to Italian Fascism: Evola wrote as a radical critic of the regime’s compromises, demanding a “counter-reformation” against the Catholic Church and warning that a state which abandons the spiritual field to the Church reduces itself to a mere temporal power. The book’s attack on the Lateran Accords and on Mussolini’s conciliation with the Vatican places it at the margins of official culture, even as its language of Romanità and imperial restoration echoes the regime’s rhetoric.
Its deeper significance is as a diagnosis of what Evola saw as the spiritual crisis of the West. The critique of science as democratic and leveling, the analysis of technology as an impersonal power indifferent to the quality of the one who wields it, the argument that gold and the machine reduce human relations to quantity—these themes would occupy him for the rest of his career. The book’s final movement, which turns from the political to the racial and the initiatic, reveals the direction his thought would take: away from any hope of collective renewal and toward the solitary figure of the differentiated individual who preserves, in himself, the lost heritage of a sacred order.
Whether one reads it as prophecy, pathology, or period piece, the book demands a response. Its refusal of compromise, its contempt for the comfortable pieties of modern politics, and its insistence that the question of empire is ultimately a question about the nature of the human being—these give it a force that mere reactionary nostalgia rarely achieves. Evola’s answer may repel, but the question he poses about the relationship between power and transcendence remains uncomfortably alive.
