Introduction to Magic, Volume II: The Path of Initiatic Wisdom gathers essays and commentaries by Julius Evola and the pseudonymous authors of the UR Group, translated by Joscelyn Godwin and published by Inner Traditions. It belongs to the literature of esotericism rather than to fiction or conventional philosophy: its chapters are practical and doctrinal instructions on magic, initiation, and the “Royal Art,” framed by editorial notes that argue with the contributors as often as they endorse them. The material comes from an Italian circle active in the 1920s and after, presented here with a foreword by Hans Thomas Hakl that traces the lineage of the groups behind it.
“The snow had cut me off from the world.”
The book’s central claim is that magic is not superstition but a discipline — a “dry way” of willed, technical self-transformation, distinct from the devotional “humid way” of the mystics — and that this discipline belongs to a single invariant initiatic tradition running from Pythagoras through Hermetism, alchemy, and Freemasonry to the present. The editors insist that this tradition is neither Eastern nor Christian in essence, and they spend considerable energy disputing those who would make it either.
From the Golden Verses to the Turba Philosophorum
The Volume Assembled
The second volume of Introduction to Magic arrives under the Inner Traditions imprint, translated by Joscelyn Godwin, with praise gathered from Hermann Hesse—who calls Evola “a dazzling and interesting, but very dangerous, author”—alongside Richard Smoley, the Los Angeles Times, Mark Stavish, Michael Moynihan, John Michell, and others. The contents announce Hans Thomas Hakl’s foreword, a survey of prehistory running through Giuliano Kremmerz and Arturo Reghini and their circles, recent research on the UR Group, and the groups inspired by it after 1930, then Evola’s introduction and eleven parts of chapters by pseudonymous authors—Pythagoras, Arvo, Ea, Abraxa, Iagla, Pietro Negri, Havismat, Oso, Luce, Nillus, Milarepa, Otakar Brezina, Breno, Zam, Taurulus, RUD.
Hakl’s Foreword: The Chain Behind the UR Group
Hakl observes that the first volume drew great interest and with it questions: what tradition did the group carry, what was its goal, who led it, why three years, what became of it? Renato del Ponte’s preface and later studies had illuminated the UR Group itself but not the strands before and after it. Hakl sets aside the Anthroposophical and Theosophical thread and the centuries before the eighteenth, since a derivation from Pythagoras through Neoplatonism and the Renaissance cannot be pinned down historically—without denying it. He starts with Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of San Severo (1710–1771), first regular Grand Master of Neapolitan Freemasonry, steeped in magical and alchemical experiment, excommunicated, dead mysteriously—probably poisoned by his own work. Massimo Introvigne holds that Cagliostro conferred on him secret degrees, the Arcana Arcanorum, containing an inner alchemy for a “glorious body,” hence immortality. In 1983 Clara Miccinelli found in a Naples house a locked chest holding di Sangro’s “Testament,” a medallion, prophecies, and objects; a temple rich in symbolism near his house, once his devotional site and laboratory, is now a museum. One line runs to the French Egyptian Rite of Misraim and Memphis; another to Baron Nicola Giuseppe Spedalieri, correspondent of Eliphas Lévi, to Giustiniano Lebano, and to Pasquale de Servis. Lebano (1832–1909) was a Grand Orient officer, member of the Garibaldi-united Egyptian Rites, active in the Theosophical Society; cholera killed his four sons, and his wife in a depressive crisis set fire to herself and destroyed many manuscripts. The elitist “Ottaviano” praised Lebano in a letter to the Kremmerzian Commentarium, disputing Kremmerz; Ottaviano likely concealed Leone Caetani, Prince of Teano (1869–1935). Some identify him as “Ekatlos,” author of “The ‘Great Track'” in the UR papers; others place Ekatlos as a woman follower of Kremmerz. Del Ponte explained Ekatlos’s aim: resurrecting the sacral Roman Empire in the twentieth century through daily rites meant to influence incipient Fascism and Mussolini—foiled when Mussolini signed the Lateran Accords instead of placing himself under the ancient gods. A woman participant had prophesied to him in 1919 that he would become Roman “Consul”; in 1923 she gave him a lictor’s bundle with an antique Etruscan ax mysteriously obtained. Caetani, the famous orientalist of the ten-volume Annals of Islam, had visited the Yezidis in 1894, sat as a Socialist deputy with easy access to Mussolini, and with Lebano and de Servis belonged to the “Egyptian Order,” the innermost circle descending from San Severo and Cagliostro; he influenced the Order, Kremmerz, and Kremmerz’s group Miriam.
Kremmerz and the Fraternity of Miriam
De Servis lived at Portici in the house of Kremmerz’s mother; Kremmerz (Ciro Formisano, 1861–1930) knew him from childhood and met Lebano and Caetani. Rich from stock speculation abroad, he published esoteric periodicals including Commentarium. By 1896 he had founded the Fr+ Tm+ di Miriam, the Therapeutic Magical Fraternity of Miriam—named for the Egyptian Isis priestesses—whose exclusive purpose was healing through magnetic processes with ritual prayers and calls to angels, ancient gods, and daimons, arising under the “
The Etymology of Saturn and the Golden Age
The argument turns to language, where the text finds a hidden concordance between Sanskrit and Latin. The Sanskrit satya is set beside the German Satyar, and Saeter-tag is read as the day of the true god, just as Donnerstag belongs to the thunder god. Latin sate-urnus, German saeter, and Etruscan satre are all said to name the true god, the most real one. The derivations from the sat of satya-yuga and from the kr of krta-yuga are held to correspond and verify each other: as the suffix ya joined to sat yields the golden age’s name, so Latin urnus joined to Sat yields Saturnus, king of that age. The doctrine of Saturn thus becomes the doctrine of sat, of being, confirming the link between archaic Latin tradition and the primordial tradition. Against the objection that sat stands isolated in ancient Italic, the text cites Acca, nurse of Romulus and mother of the first twelve Arval brothers, corresponding to Sanskrit okka, mother, and anna, food, surviving in anna perenna, the Roman food of immortality.
Kronos, the Betyl, and the Nabatean Agriculture
Greek Kronos is distinguished from Latin Saturnus, yet both ruled in the golden age and both connect etymologically to the two Sanskrit names for it, which gives deep rationale to their later Roman identification. Kronos is son of Uranos and Gea; this ancestry marks the twelve Titans, the cyclopes with their third, cyclical sight, and the Orphic initiates who boast their genealogy to drink at Mnemosyne’s spring and pass over Lethe. In Roman tradition Saturn, son of heaven and earth, does not die but suddenly vanishes, like Enoch and Elijah. Plutarch reports a legend that the dethroned Kronos sleeps on an island in the North seas, whence the sea north of Asia was called the glacial or Saturnian sea, tying Saturnus to the Hyperborean initiatic center. The text prefers not to call on Greece to prove Saturnus’s esoteric nature, and sets aside the planet, the days of the week, and lead in Hermetism. It does find interesting the attribution of agriculture’s teaching to Saturnus in the Nabatean Agriculture, whose scribe Qu-tami says the doctrines were taught by Saturnus to the Moon, which passed them to its idol and the idol to him. The agricultural character of archaic Italic Saturnus is called indisputable: grafting, manuring, the laetamen that gladdens the earth, and the scythe that purges weeds, prunes trees, and reaps. Festus says he presided over field culture; Macrobius makes the scythe the emblem of harvest. His occult character appears in the Musa Tacita of Numa, the goddess Muta of Tatius, and Angeronia of the Velabrum, finger to her lips. Piganiol notes that Italy’s earth goddesses are often goddesses of sailors too—Fortune holds a rudder, Venus protects ports.
Saturnia Tellus and the Altar
Virgil, the initiate poet, calls the earth magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, and the fields Saturnia arva. Arvum quod aratum necdum satum est is plowed soil; the root ar denotes working, and the plow opens the earth’s viscera and exposes clods to the sun. The deep connection between agriculture and cult arises because the archaic ara, the altar, first meant a place for sacred fire.
Rhythm and the Meeting of Tempos
Human consciousness is a rhythmic series developing within the larger rhythm of Reality, which cannot be perceived because one’s tempo differs. Living among the specters of the other, a correspondence may occur through a near-fatal event, Art, or Ritual, opening the eyes to absolute vision. Through inner refinement, subtle listening, Hermetic work, and a vigil of wisdom and patience, one prepares the state where rhythms meet. Symptoms include simultaneous thoughts—mind-reading, actually a volatile sympathetic power of thought as the ego’s chains loosen—telepathy, telesthesia, intuition, and alienations, finding oneself inside another person. Later these solutions of rhythm become less fortuitous, accompanied by fringe experiences of proximity and closure: clouds opening, a red glow of distant fire, a tram halting, a thought instantly occurring. Symbols—Three, Seven, Twelve—recur analogically, preparing circuits of unison. Tradition teaches that the Word freed from death becomes knowledge of Fire; smell becomes Wind; Eye becomes Sun; Ear becomes Space; Intellect becomes the Moon’s splendor; Blood and Sperm become Water.
Pain, Ecstasy, and the Threshold of Death
The argument about pain closes by suggesting that consciousness can stay active right up to death and merge with its power. Certain illnesses, the text observes, can produce moments of illumination; among so-called savage peoples suffering has been deliberately used as a road to ecstasy, in shamans and flagellants alike. Intense pain, joined to prayer, can open a passage beyond the ordinary self, and people who recover from mortal suffering—after an operation, say—sometimes show a luminous, almost nonhuman beauty, the trace of something greater they experienced only passively.
Animating the Subtle Centers
A long practical note follows on awakening the subtle centers. Success demands that thought, feeling, and action all be harmonized with the goal; otherwise whatever sporadic occult practice gains is lost in daily life. The text warns against a rigid dualism between inner life and sense-impressions, since the sense of the “I” arises from contrast with the non-I. External impressions must be actively taken rather than passively received, met with the declaration “I will it thus”—the difference between reacting and willing is enormous. Concentration fails because habitual passivity lets objects impose unwanted associations; a definite content is needed, since merely creating inner void yields inhibition and cerebral tension with no higher experience. Only after prolonged attention on a content can one drop it and realize the void. The centers have two faces, inward and outward, and modern brain-centered materialism has driven them near atrophy; their activity survives in mediums and involuntary clairvoyants, but only self-development gives mastery, whereas telepathy and precognition remain sporadic, from below, neither lucid nor volitional.
The First Three Centers
The first center sits at the pituitary gland, externally where nose meets forehead—once more external, as in Egyptian and Greek profiles, now internalized into the dent at the nose’s root. Spiritual perception becomes mirrorlike and inward, the reverse of the extroverted senses; this center grounds the I-sense, awakens the others, and starts the downward current. Its development requires reinforcing the I and a special memory of states of consciousness, and its awakening changes the body sense into a diffusion following the bloodstream rather than the nerves, bringing isolation and interiority—something that must arise spontaneously, never be sought. A golden rule: accept no inner experience lacking evidence as direct as sense-perception. The second center lies behind the larynx, where the theme shifts to “Light is Life—the Life of the Light is within me”; talking for its own sake is fatal, and mismatch between inner image and spoken word traumatizes it. Rhythmically active, it becomes a new organ sensitive to others’ thoughts, and it yields the mantric value of words and sounds. The third center is in the heart, where concentration modifies and slows the breath and the theme becomes “The Light is heat—The heat becomes Love in me”; it permits direct perception of others’ feelings given impersonality, and its fruits are serene courage and, higher, feeling that surpasses bodily limits.
The Lower Centers and the Dark World
The fourth center lies behind the stomach, the fifth at the solar plexus, the sixth between the kidneys, the seventh at the reproductive organs. Approaching the lower centers means meeting a dark, hostile world of planetary rhythms and primitive cosmic forces buried in the unconscious—source of mediumistic faculty and the lowest magic, but also of union with cosmic forces and high alchemy. The unprepared may lose themselves in illusions; only maturity of the first three centers guarantees safety. “The kingdom of heaven is for the patient and persevering”: knowing to wait and to dare are the two poles.
Kirillov and Initiation
A note examines Kirillov from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, denying any demonic taint and aiming to free his views from apocalyptic coloring to reveal esoteric intuitions. Kirillov’s thesis: man is unhappy because he fears exercising free will on the crucial point; life is given for fear and pain, a swindle; whoever conquers pain and fear will be a god. The author de-dramatizes: Kirillov’s God is the theistic, personal God, a projection of man’s emptiness and fear, and “God is necessary, therefore he must exist” expresses an existential exigence rather than magical inference.
Milarepa’s Songs
Verses attributed to Milarepa follow: a battle on a snowy peak between his cotton garment, the snow, and a tempest, won through magical heat awakened by contemplation, until he becomes insensitive to cold and warm winds and the demon masked as snow submits. The Song of Joy speaks of liberation of the heart, the dimensionless point as base of contemplation, and the disappearance of the contemplator in the contemplated; meditation’s illumination is like a rushing river, and staying awake at night to meditate would destroy higher consciousness.
The Law of Preservation and the Fall into Exteriority
Not everyone can live without work, as Belli wished; the individual is bound to the struggle for existence until death, and rarely until rebirth. The instinct of self-preservation will not be talked out of its demands by conscious reasoning. This inexorable law tyrannizes consciousness, binding it to the material plane and polarizing it toward the external world. Food, dangers, and enemies lie outside the organism, and the senses keep one perpetually aware of them. Dominated by self-preservation, attention fixes on the exterior, vigilant and ready to act, until living in sensible reality becomes second nature. Every attention brings a concomitant distraction: absorption in the outer world means distraction from the inner. Inner sensations pass unnoticed, spiritual deafness becomes normal, and consciousness ends by denying inner reality altogether. Physical life sharpens the senses and intelligence without developing spirituality; the supposed law of spiritual progress is not inherent in material life. The iron necessity of adaptation entails a waning spiritual sensitivity, veiled in the myth of the Fall. By the law of inertia, consciousness remains in that state unless a new force enters to balance or conquer the instinct of preservation—among them the will to preserve individual consciousness, an intelligent will distinct from the brutal instinct to preserve the organism. Vague aspirations cannot recover Ariadne’s thread; one must take stock and retrieve consciousness from slavery to instinct, ceasing to feel life sub specie exterioritatis. Creeds, morality, the omnibus of reincarnation, devotion, and hopes of grace are all useless here, and one meets incomprehension—many so-called spiritual people are infected with materialism and anthropomorphism.
The Disciples’ Materialism and the Resurrection
The typical example is Jesus’s disciples. His chief goal was the Gospel of the Kingdom; to the masses he spoke in parables “that seeing they might not see,” but with the disciples he tried to make the mystery understood. Those Levantines persisted in conceiving it materialistically, expecting a new political regime. Despite “the kingdom of God is within you,” they thought it should immediately appear as Jesus neared Jerusalem, and to the end they asked whether he would restore the kingdom to Israel. Their declaration that they were illiterates seems superfluous. A similar incomprehension concerned the resurrection. The Gospels speak of it vacillatingly—from (apo) the dead, more often with ex, and the resurrection of the dead—and Paul uses both indifferently. The gross popular Jewish idea of resurrection of the flesh emerges in Acts, the same process of materialization. Jesus made clear that resurrection is reserved only for the living, yet resurrection of the flesh ended by being extended to all, including the damned. Paul scolds devotees for being dull of hearing and states flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom; telling of his rapture to the third heaven, he cannot say whether in or out of the body, implicitly admitting one could go there bodily soon after Jesus’s death. Jesus’s invectives against the priests and Church of his time do not seem outdated.
Interiorization and the Initiatic Reversal
After recognizing the radical antithesis between physical and spiritual life, one must go in reverse: no longer resolving everyday life but confronting the immanent mystery of eternal life; the problem of existence must give way to the mystery of being. One must cease living sub specie exterioritatis and begin sub specie interioritatis. The beginning of initiatic life consists of interiorizing oneself: “Visita interiora terrae, rectificando invenies occultum lapidem veram medicinam.” In terms of above and below, the symbol says: stop descending, begin to climb, re-surgere. Initiatic symbols oppose to the human fall anastasis, egersis, the resurrection of the initiate; to human caducity, initiatic stability. A first perception of inner reality can flower spontaneously, but such experiences are rare and brief, escaping without being fixed. Equally transitory are results via the corrosive waters, which can cause troubles from shock, wear to the organism, or burning the Sulfur with excessive Fire.
Freedom, Necessity, and the Statistical Illusion
From the standpoint of the Absolute, the distinction between freedom and necessity has no reason to exist, though this is not a philosophy of God. Many esoteric traditions do not consider it profane to introduce freedom into the metaphysical world: Plotinus says of Being “as he willed to be so he is,” and an Eastern saying holds that “Nature is the law of the living; that of the Gods is play.” If the form of time depends on the human mode of consciousness, something intermediate is conceivable—perhaps Hinduism’s subtle time—allowing change and a certain freedom; without this, references to the action of the gods and to affecting things through magic lose all meaning. Laws of uniformity exist in vital and moral affairs, but one must avoid the positivist’s leap from simple constancy to necessity.
The Movement’s Own Library
The closing apparatus of the edition opens onto the living infrastructure of the tradition it has been describing. A note gathers the fundamental religious and philosophical works of the Roman Traditionalist movement: Renato del Ponte’s La religione dei Romani, which took a distinguished Italian nonfiction prize; the Sacra Limina pamphlet Sul problema di una Tradizione Romana nel tempo attuale; and the 1993 Manifesto del Movimento Tradizionalista Romana. In a very small edition the movement also issued the Memoranda et Agenda, which for the first time publicly disclosed its Latin rituals and a sacred calendar. For current developments the note points to Saturnia Tellus, the movement’s official website—an elaborate site that, somewhat incongruously, also books hotel accommodation for guests. A further citation sends readers to del Ponte’s survey of Roman pagan traditional currents in the Belgian journal Antaios.
Guthrie, Gichtel, and the Editorial Ledger
The translator’s notes account for the machinery of the volume. The English rendering of the Pythagorean Golden Verses is Guthrie’s, from Fideler’s Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, altered to fit the commentary, whose numbering was adjusted to the English verse lines; an omitted preliminary paragraph had referred to an Italian hexameter version made for UR by “Tikaipos” with the help of “Heniocos Aristos.” Notes marked “Trans.” belong to the translator; all others reproduce the original text, and bracketed passages, unless so marked, are Evola’s later additions to writings by others of the UR Group. Page references to the first volume point to the English edition published by Inner Traditions. On Gichtel, the Italian editions carried only a schematic drawing based on his first figure; the present edition restores the four original illustrations, described and interpreted in the text, while Gichtel’s third figure—a geometric design showing “The Wheel of the Birth of God’s Image in Man”—goes undiscussed. References to the Theoria Practica are keyed to the modern Wehr edition.
Melchizedek, Ambrosia, and the Two Waters
One note pauses over the mention of Melchizedek in a quoted passage, finding it especially interesting because esotericists know this enigmatic figure’s link to the authentically initiatic tradition, superior to the “religion of Abraham.” The “upper waters” carry the same symbolic value as ambrosia: Macrobius, in the Somnium Scipionis, reports the mystery doctrine of a higher, purer “matter” composing the gods, called ambrosia and drunk by them, while its lower, turbid nature is mortals’ drink, identified with Lethe, the draught of forgetfulness—the Oriental avidya, ignorance. The first water restores and makes whole the soul drawn out of the body and out of generation; the second only perpetuates thirst. Christ’s words to the Samaritan woman in John 4:13–14 use analogous symbolism.
The Guardian of the Threshold
The terror felt at the command to abandon one’s own I, once it is recognized as an error, is not unrelated to the “Guardian of the Threshold” of Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, whatever fantasies occultist circles have built around it. Gichtel speaks of a Cherub guarding the way to the interior tree of life in the world of fire; the soul must be pierced by this Cherub’s sword so as to “Surpass God and man” and reach Sophia. The blood dripping from the heart in figure 4 is that wound, which breaks the shell imprisoning the I. Technically, one might think of the “ignification of the astral light” in its relation to the blood system, as Abraxa discusses in the first volume. In Hermetism the Sea and the passage of the Waters appear distinctly in the Chymica Vannus of 1666: a man issues from the Forest of Mars—fixed sulfur, the element by which fire overcomes fire—and prepares to cross a river whose far side holds winged beings of the “air”; the same plate shows a sea with a ship bound for a secret shore, the “island,” with Mercury above and beneath him the Fountain of Bernardo Trevisano, which it is not too rash to relate to awakened kundalini. A final note records that the first volume, like the German edition, altered Ercole Quadrelli’s pseudonym from “Abraxa” to the standard form.
The Alchemical Endnotes
The remaining endnotes, numbered 25 through 78 and running through the notes for the later chapters, gloss the Hermetic symbolism of the practical texts. The “cleft”
What the Magician Must Become
The figure who emerges from these pages is not the occultist of popular imagination. Havismat’s commentaries draw the portrait with unusual severity: the true magician hides himself absolutely, discourages others from the practice, and refuses to let magic become a career or a spectacle. Magic “has no exit,” he writes; if it exits at all, it exits from itself, into the polar way. The editors push back where they think he overreaches — the Tao, they counter, is both outside and inside the theater — but they accept his central point that the work demands courage, persistence, and modesty, and that the modern world, having lost contact with elemental nature, makes the conditions of practice nearly inaccessible.
This is why the book spends so much time on preparation rather than on results. Leo’s notes on animating the subtle “centers” describe a slow, methodical discipline: receiving impressions actively rather than passively, separating sensory perception from inner states, refusing any experience that lacks the evidence of sense-perception. The centers have two faces, inward and outward, and modern brain-centered life has driven them toward atrophy; their activity survives in mediums and involuntary clairvoyants, but only deliberate self-development yields mastery. Knowing how to wait and how to dare are named as the two poles of the work.
The Argument with the Christians and the Theosophists
A running polemic gives the volume much of its edge. The editors quote a hostile description of ancient Rome as a “vile den” of brute force and dismantle it, noting that the word initia is itself Latin and that even Papus, a Christian Martinist, admitted the persistence of a pagan initiatic current of Pythagorean origin. Against the Theosophists and Anthroposophists they argue that the apparent conflict of East and West is a quarrel between two pseudo-initiatic propaganda organizations, since two orthodox traditions linked to a single hierarchy cannot genuinely conflict. They contest two propositions only: that Christianity is Western, and that the Western initiatic tradition is Christian.
The same independence shows in the treatment of sources. Gichtel, a Lutheran visionary with no regular link to any initiatic organization, is valued precisely because his Theosophia Practica agrees with traditional and oriental doctrine — proof, the editors say, that the initiatic corpus is invariant as to time and place. Alchemy is defended against both its chemical reduction and its moralizing reduction: modern chemistry is called a “monstrous excrescence,” a part separated from its whole, while the symbolic reading alone is judged as unilateral as the literal one. The symbol, the editors argue, trains the spirit to understand through seeing rather than thinking, and speaks only when one makes it speak in silence.
Why the Book Still Provokes
Hermann Hesse’s blurb calls Evola “a dazzling and interesting, but very dangerous, author,” and the volume does nothing to soften that verdict. Its politics are visible in the background Hakl reconstructs — the dream of resurrecting the sacral Roman Empire, the rites aimed at influencing Fascism, the rupture over the Lateran Accords — and its metaphysics are uncompromisingly elitist. Yet the book’s enduring provocation lies elsewhere: in its refusal to separate thought from practice. Every essay returns to the same demand, that knowledge be realized in the body and the soul or else remain theater. Whether or not one accepts the cosmology, the demand has a force that outlasts the doctrines built on it.
