Julius Evola’s Metaphysics of War gathers essays and shorter pieces of political and spiritual philosophy written in Italy between the world wars, presented here with a translator’s introduction and a later editor’s preface. The form is expository and polemical rather than narrative: arguments, aphorisms, and readings of history aimed at diagnosing what the author saw as the spiritual collapse of the West and prescribing a remedy. At the center sits the long essay Pagan Imperialism, first published in Italian in the late 1920s and revised in a German edition in the early 1930s, supplemented by appendices on Romanity, myth, and race.
“We are the generation without ties and without depth. Our depth is the abyss.”
The Case Against the Modern World
Evola’s central claim is that Europe has entered a final phase of decline, and that this decline is not primarily economic or political but metaphysical. The modern world, in his account, has inverted the proper order of things: it has replaced hierarchy with equality, quality with quantity, spiritual authority with the rule of merchants and newspapers, and the sacred sense of war with a merely military or patriotic activism. Against this he sets what he calls the Tradition—a primordial, solar, aristocratic order traced through Vedic India, ancient Persia, Rome, and the Nordic-Germanic peoples. The book’s argument is less a program than a summons: a call for a small elite to restore the values of hierarchy, empire, and sacred war, and to do so through inner transformation rather than political compromise.
The Translator’s Framing and the Book’s Postwar Roots
The volume opens with a Wolfgang Borchert epigraph about a generation “without ties… without God,” setting the tone for what follows. The translator then places Pagan Imperialism in the ferment of post-1918 Europe, alongside Spengler’s Decline of the West. Evola himself, looking back in The Path of Cinnabar, conceded the book mixed “a radical impulse” with “youthful excess” and a certain utopian blindness. Before writing it, his energies ran toward philosophy and spirituality rather than politics: he taught himself German to read the idealists, worked through Lao Tze’s Tao Te Ching, and approached Tantra Yoga through John Woodroffe. He was no activist and refused party membership; politics occupied only a corner of his interests. Where Mussolini courted the Catholic Church, Evola looked for Italy’s identity in ancient Roman paganity, and later thought “Roman Traditionality” a better title. The Italian edition of 1928 made little stir; a revised German version, Heidnischer Imperialismus (1933), found modest success within Moeller van den Bruck’s “Conservative Revolution.” The translator leans on that German text to settle ambiguities. It predates Nazi power and rejects biological determinism; criticism of Protestantism was softened, and Evola fused Romanity with the Nordic-Germanic tradition through the image of the “two eagles.” Three German-resonant themes run through it: Ghibellism, with the State supreme and the Church subservient; Nietzsche; and hierarchy in the Prussian key.
The Ecumene, the Middle Ages, and the Absolute Man
Evola’s Roman Empire stretched into Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa—not coextensive with Europe. He turned to the Middle Ages as the last great Aryan civilisation after the Vedic, Persian, and Roman ages, distinguishing Catholicism, which preserved Roman elements, from Christianity proper; in a 1967 interview he called Christianity’s spread its “greatest miracle” and its Christianisation superficial, with Roman survivals in the knightly orders, Thomism, Meister Eckhart, the Crusades, Dante, feudalism, and the guilds. On the war between Emperor and Pope, the Ghibellines backed the Emperor, the Guelphs the Pope. Against Guénon and Coomaraswamy, who put spiritual authority above political power, Evola asserted the reverse, following the god-Emperor ideal: the Emperor becomes the Absolute man, who—unlike Christianity’s God becoming man—becomes a god by transcending the human state, beyond good and evil, setting a law freely obeyed. Rushdoony is quoted on pagan divine kingship and Moloch worship as state worship.
Race as Spirit, Not Biology
Race belongs to man’s being but does not define him; Evola’s remark on blood separates human from animal heredity and calls “race fanatics” mistaken. He cared nothing for a “white race,” held Nordic, Mediterranean, and Slavic races apart, and treated race as a spiritual quality borne only by the highest representatives, never the masses. His categories are psychological and spiritual: “anti-Europe, anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity” are code words for bourgeois cosmopolitan Europe, secularising revolutionism, and communism and socialism—the degeneration of Europe, of Judaism, of Christianity. He read the Messiah idea as a return to a “Golden Age,” and a Transformazione del Regnum passage contrasts ancient Hebraic messianism, which shared Aryan traits, with its later degeneration.
European Decadence and the New Symbol
In “European Decadence,” the West faces upheaval or collapse. It has perverted rational order and lost the meaning of command and obedience, of Action and Contemplation, of hierarchy and spiritual power, of man-gods; nature has become opaque exteriority; wisdom gives way to the rhetoric of “philosophy” and “culture”; the State drowns in bourgeois misery. War willed in itself as a sacred path—Odin’s Valhalla, Islam’s jihad, the Aryan warrior beside the ascetic, the mors triumphalis—is unknown to modern “activists,” who know only soldiers. Europe has lost simplicity, centrality, life; “democratic evil and the Semitic poison” corrode it; no true leaders remain; it is an anodyne body with gold for blood, machines for flesh, newspapers for brains. The cause is the superstition of “Progress,” a fall beyond Roman imperiality, Doric Greece, and the Aryan primordial civilisations. Renewal, in “The New Symbol,” demands a new Middle Ages and “barbaric purity,” not compromise. Scattered men of ancient nobility must unite; whoever enters the temple must drive out the corrupters who monopolise “Spirit,” Good and Evil, Science, the Divine.
Race, Totemism, and the Solar Path
Evola opens this stretch by dismantling the notion that assigning each race a mystical soul or spirit refutes biological materialism. Totemic societies already do exactly that: the totem is the clan’s collective soul, and individuals experience themselves only as its incarnations, with scarcely any personality. Where that force stays diffuse and faceless—neither rulers nor ruled, members merely “placed together”—society sits at its lowest level, close to the animal kingdom. Though totems are masculine, these are telluric-matriarchal, non-Aryan formations, communistic in principle, corresponding to the “father’s path” in which the dead dissolve back into the blood of the race. Against this stands the solar path of the gods, the Nordic-Olympic road of those who become immortal and “go out in order not to return.”
True civilisation begins only when this totemic level is surpassed and a meta-biological, solar force manifests beyond blood, refining life and freeing it from animal mixture. Ethnic tradition then becomes merely a base verified by spiritual tradition; the spiritual must support the biological, never the reverse. Among traditional peoples from China to Rome, nobility rested not on having ancestors but on having divine ancestors, and rebirth—the dvija, “born again”—separated the Aryan from the shudra; the Manavadharmashastra declares that even a brahman without initiation differs in nothing from a shudra. Nietzsche’s weakness, Evola says, is his biological naturalism, which reduces the aristocratic idea to the “blond beast.”
Gobineau’s Glimmer and the Idea of the Leader
Gobineau holds only a glimmer of truth: racial decadence comes not from mixing but from decay of spirit, a failure of inner tension that corrupts a race at its hidden root. Return to race must therefore mean return to the spirit of race in the aristocratic, not totemic, sense. Here the Leader becomes central—the concrete expression of spirit as race and race as spirit, reawakening the divine elements sleeping in transformed blood. His authority is regal, not tyrannical, an action “through presence,” the wei wu wei of action-without-action. Any defence of blood that ignores this higher aspect—invoking nation, people, or collective, the pure law of blood and soil—collapses back into totemism; socialist and democratic ideologies lead nowhere else, as the Soviets illustrate, reviving barbaric collectivism under a Jewish inspiration. The aristocratic tradition of Leaders, not the nationalist idea of mere community of birth, must ground every doctrine of race.
The Roots of European Evil: Knowledge as Being
Turning to “The Roots of European Evil,” the argument insists that metaphysical reality is a matter of experience, not faith or abstraction. Beyond ordinary sensory experience lie forms reachable only through inner transformation—a finite eye and an absolute eye, not two separate worlds. Sacred science is not a knowing but a being; it cannot be taught from books or lectured in universities, and it carries an inviolable, aristocratic privilege. Against the modern taboo of communicability, Evola sets hierarchies within knowledge itself: many truths separated by impassable gulfs, and the maxim “We must not descend to them; they are obliged to raise themselves to us.” From this follows the right of the wise to govern, since knowledge is being, being is power, and power attracts the dignity of Imperium—against the reign of professors and “glasses without eyes.”
Against the Believers
Religion, in its narrowest modern sense, represents a greater usurpation still, seizing the sacred and imposing it as faith. Materialistic science and religion meet in identical renunciation: one believes only when one does not know. Evola claims, on a tradition older than Western faith and proved by acts of power and clairvoyance, the possibility of direct, methodical knowledge in the metaphysical field. Those who merely believe—the blind leading the blind—must be divested of authority and replaced by those who know, the god-men of the ancient traditions. Only this justifies the union of sacred and temporal power in a single hierarchy; otherwise intransigent imperialists are left with an empty religious outline, an anti-Aryan rhetoric of feminine, romantic escapism. What is needed is a transcendent, virile, Olympian positivism.
The Fog of the “Human”
The modern sense of life, the text continues, is plebeian. The ancient world elevated the individual toward God and knew heroes of divine blood; the Semiticised world reduced God to a human figure and replaced Olympian regions with apocalypses, hells, and predestination—no longer the aristocratic god of the legions, nor Thor with his hammer, nor Odin, host of heroes, but a patron of the wretched implored in self-annihilation. “Humanism”
The Eagle Above the Cross
Evola presses the Ghibelline claim to its limit: the Empire, as the incarnation of royal spirituality, must stand hierarchically above the Church. The Eagle outranks the Cross, the solar law of the Fathers outranks the lunar law of the Mothers—only on that condition does traditionalism become complete and justice and normality return. History, he argues, bears the legitimacy out. When the Aryan stocks of India split and met the adulterating southern races, the purohita—originally a priest dependent on the sacred king, joined to him as wife to husband and earth to heaven—hardened into the dominating Brahman caste. In China, ancient Rome and Hellas the rite was essentially the king’s privilege, the sacerdotal caste subordinate or identical with the aristocracy. Norwegian kings alone celebrated the rite; German priests, where they existed, lacked the supremacy and dignity of divine kings. Only at the end of Egypt’s twentieth dynasty did the sacerdotal caste seize power, producing the great priests of Thebes at the solar kings’ expense. For Christianity’s first three centuries the Catholic Church was an official organ dependent on the Empire, bishops in council remitting the sanction of their decisions to the prince in disciplinary and dogmatic matters. Merovingian and Carolingian kings received the pontiffs’ tribute of acknowledgment—the Melchizedek formula, “vos gens sancta estis”—and after Charlemagne received the Roman crowd, Leo III prostrated himself before him per ancient tradition, as the Liber Pontificalis records. The Cross has a positive function only when subordinated to the Eagle; otherwise the Church joins the anti-traditional, destructive, paralysing forces, lowering itself to the problematic Semitic-Christian factor that is a main cause of decadence—and whose enemies the anti-moderns must be.
The Imperial Myth and the Last Battle
The imperial myth’s main features are now recognisable, though Evola offers only a standpoint; its systematic development belongs to other writings. European civilisation must plan a radical upheaval or collapse. The plebeian superstition of development has vanished, and speaking of decline is no longer heresy. Some men return to the past so that new forces may arise for reconquest, and the appeal is justified because men exist who do not belong to this modern world yet are ready to fight it. The saga of the Ghibelline emperor awaiting awakening in the “mountain” for the last battle will come true when the hordes of Gog and Magog demolish the symbolic wall—those hordes being the demons of the collective and the socialist mass-man. Little is said of politics or social and economic reform, since revival that way is ridiculous, like medicating sick body parts when the blood is poisoned; only an order of values matters. The exaltation of danger and crisis contains impure, contradictory elements; contemporary movements contain many impure factors, but in a few something better may awaken. The path must be pointed out: return to solar spirituality, the living vision of the world, the virile and pagan ethos, and the imperial ideal as sacred inheritance of Nordic-Aryan blood—so that the forces of European revolt may burn and fracture the circle of the West’s dark age.
Against Keller’s Ethnopluralism
An appendix gathers essays expanding on Romanity, myth and race. Reviewing Hans Keller’s Das Reich der Völker in La Vita Italiana (September 1941), Evola sets out his own conception of the Volk‘s role, endorsing neither Keller’s naturalism nor the Volk as political vanguard or base. In the traditional perspective the Volk is lunar and passive, relying on spiritual and political hierarchy; Evola opposes nationalism grounded in ethnicity or race, rejecting neo-Nordicism in favour of Romanity. Keller approaches ethnopluralism—each people free to define and realise itself in its own enclave—and Evola rejects it on several grounds. First, Keller’s naturalistic starting point: for every Aryan civilisation the authority of law rested on its relationship to the supernatural, and lawgivers were held divine; Keller dismisses such claims as fantasies, projections of earthly leaders onto an imaginary plane. Any rightist movement must relate to a transcendental tradition, and neo-paganism’s pseudo-tradition would not qualify. Second, defining a Volk is itself problematic: Keller speaks of nations of destiny or becoming without specifying the destiny or goal, implying nations in lesser or greater states of becoming, the latter treating the former as minors and guiding them. Keller blamed “inorganicity and levelling” on the preceding religious Regnum; Evola rejects this, since ethnopluralism is itself deracinated, lacking the content or principles a supernatural Regnum would supply, and relations between ethnocentric conclaves remain ad hoc, relativistic, contingent.
The Nordic and Iranian Roots of Sacred Combat
Evola traces the medieval legend of the immortal emperor’s last battle back to ancient Nordic and Persian conceptions, though he dismisses Wagner’s rendering as “hazy, bombastic, characteristically Teutonic romanticism” that made the Nordic material unrecognisable. The Valkyries who choose the slain for Valhalla, he argues, are only a transcendental personification of forces within the warriors themselves—an exact counterpart to the Iranian Fravashi, depicted as women of light and stormy virgins of battle. These personify supernatural powers by which warriors faithful to the God of Light transfigure themselves and win bloody victories. Iranian tradition adds Mithra, “the warrior who never sleeps,” who leads his faithful Fravashi against the emissaries of the dark god until the coming of the Saoshyant, lord of a future kingdom of triumphant peace.
The Crusades as Heroic Ascesis
These Indo-European elements, the text claims, visibly shaped the Christianity that could adopt the motto vita est militia super terram and hold that the Kingdom of Heaven is taken by storm—a convergence that produced the medieval idea of the “Greater War.” The Crusades, on this reading, were neither economic determinism nor superstition nor simply Christian phenomena. The common claim that faith used chivalry inverts the truth: faith and the contingent aims of fighting the infidel and liberating the Holy Land were merely means letting the heroic spirit manifest itself in an ascesis distinct from the contemplative but no less fruitful. Most knights had only the vaguest theology; older myths resurfaced, the conquest of the Holy Land “beyond the sea” merging with the saga of the sacred city in the distant East where death does not exist. Kugler wrote that the struggle was for the Kingdom of Heaven, “a thing of God.” An old chronicler likened sacred war to a bath in the fire of purgatory before death; the fallen were gold tested three times and refined seven times. Bernard of Clairvaux praised the fortunate condition in which death is approached without fear. The Crusader was promised absolute glory and rest in paradise; Jerusalem appeared doubly, earthly and celestial. The Templars and Knights of Saint John supplied the greatest manpower—warriors weary of the world withdrawing into orders for absolute action. Urban VIII addressed chivalry as a supranational community ready to march wherever war broke out, its reward a celestial fief. Early defeats, initially surprising, revealed the higher aspect: clerics compared an unhappy Crusade to the misfortunes of virtue, made good only in another life—valuing heroic action independent of visible fruits, as an offering drawing immortalising glory. Particular faith and immediate purposes became mere fuel for a flame; what remained central was the sacred value of war. Crusaders found near-doubles in Arab orders, matching ethics, customs, sometimes symbols. Those who see the Crusades as extravagant episodes of a dark age miss that “religious fanaticism” was the visible sign of a sensitivity whose absence marks true barbarism. This does not excuse the warrior from duties to race and fatherland; the difference lies in the meaning according to which identical actions are lived. The sacred warrior is carried beyond one who fights from necessity or instinct, and stands spontaneously beyond particularism—as when princes and dukes of every land gathered in a first great European unity true to the Holy Roman Empire.
The Metaphysical Justification of War
Consciousness of the unreality of what one can lose—ephemeral life, the mortal body—joins the idea that spirit, absolute and transcendent, appears as a destructive force toward all that is limited. How can the warrior evoke spirit as an instrument of death and identify with it? The answer lies in the sacred texts: the God declares himself the strength of the strong devoid of passion, the original fragrance of the earth, the heat in fire, the life of all that lives, the prowess of all powerful men, finally revealing himself to Arjuna in the fearful form of lightning. Humans fall and die only because a power transcending their finitude burns within them; but one who does not fear death, able to assume the powers of death by becoming everything it destroys, passes beyond limitation and remains on the crest of the wave. Krishna, after the full revelation, tells Arjuna that all soldiers on both sides are already slain by his arrangement; Arjuna is but an instrument—rise, fight, win glory, conquer. The warrior ceases to act as a person; a non-human force transfigures his action, making it absolute and pure at its extreme. Life is a bow, the mind the arrow, the supreme spirit the target.
The Gita and the Warrior’s Path
The closing stretch of the main text turns to the Bhagavad-Gita, where Krishna commands Arjuna to fight for its own sake—beyond happiness or distress, gain or loss, victory or defeat—and assures him this incurs no sin. The god teaches the difference between the indestructible absolute spirit and the illusory corporeal elements. Grasping the metaphysical unreality of what can be lost, Arjuna experiences the divine as an irresistible absolute power before which any conditioned existence is mere negation. When the warrior himself negates every limited form in combat, acting in purity, he breaks the chains of the human, evokes the divine as the force that destroys the finite, draws it into himself, and finds illumination and liberation. A watchword from the same tradition runs: life like a bow, mind like the arrow, the supreme spirit the target. The Gita presents this as a primordial Aryan heritage of solar nature—given by the Sun to Manu, kept by a sacred dynasty of kings, lost over centuries, then revealed anew not to a priest but to Arjuna, a warrior noble.
The Soul as Demon and Valkyrie
Classical and Nordic traditions repeatedly figure the soul as demon, double, or genius, as Dionysian entities, as the goddess of death, and as a goddess of victory. The demon stands for a deep life-force ruling corporeal and animic events beyond ordinary consciousness, bound to the mystical powers of race and blood, akin to the lares who keep us alive, feed the body, and guide the soul. It relates to ordinary consciousness as the individuating principle—supra-individual, beyond birth and death—relates to the individuated principle destined to dissolve. The Valkyrie parallels the demon; as kynfylgja it is the mystical power of blood, like the Roman lares, and so too the Fravashi of the Aryo-Iranian tradition, the intimate power keeping a person alive, tied to stock powers and, like the Valkyries, a terrifying war goddess dispensing victory.
The Few Who Escape Dissolution
Indo-Europeans held a differentiated immortality: not all escape dissolution into the lemuric residuum of Hades or Niflheim. Immortality was the privilege of the few, specifically heroes, who live as demigods rather than shadows. This required transforming the individual “I” into the supra-individual individuating power. The abrupt passage from ordinary consciousness to that power brings a destructive crisis; if the demon bursts out in the individual, a living experience of death arises—hence the demon merges with the divinity of death, and the Nordic warrior sees his Valkyrie when dying or in mortal danger.
Asceticism and the Unleashing of Action
Religious asceticism works through mortification, renunciation, surrender to God—the mystical death, the dark night of the soul. The heroic tradition instead uses active impulse and a Dionysian unleashing of action: sacred dance at the lowest degree, sacred games higher, war highest. The Wildes Heer, the Furies, the Erynnyes symbolize this force; the Latin ludere, to play and to fight, suggests combat freeing one from individual limitation. The demon and lares correspond to Furies and Erynnyes and to Valkyries and Fravashi, the terrifying and omnipotent who storm and grant victory to the one who evokes them within himself. They finally become goddesses of victory: the triumph of the “I” over this power, marking the successful passage beyond the danger lurking behind Dionysian and heroic ecstasy—a spiritual, supra-personal state that makes of the two, one.
The Mystical Meaning of Victory
A correspondence joins the physical and metaphysical, the visible and invisible; spiritual realization was the secret spirit of warlike enterprises, concrete victory their crown. Victory is the outward sign of consecration and mystical rebirth; the Furies and death faced materially on the battlefield are contested spiritually within. Hence victory’s sacred meaning, the transfiguring power felt in the acclaimed chieftain, and the Roman triumph being more sacred than military. Valkyries guide the warrior’s soul to the sky; the Dorian Hercules receives from Nike the crown of Olympian immortality. Christian glory and aureoles are a faded heritage of this; the Aryo-Iranian hvareno, celestial fire, descends on kings and chiefs, rendering them immortal and testifying in victory, while the radiating royal crown symbolizes glory as solar fire. Light, solar splendour, glory, victory, and divine royalty are tightly conjoined as real potentialities.
Heroism as Inner Work
This tradition remains comprehensible if its outer contingent modalities are renounced, offering reference points beyond exhausted spirituality and the materialistic degeneration of action. Present tensions can only be resolved through combat; with the present war an age ends, and forces gain ground that abstract ideas, universalistic principles, or mere irrational myths cannot dominate or build a civilisation upon.
The Solar Elite and the Rejection of the Human
Running through the whole book is a single figure: the man who has overcome the merely human. Evola’s ideal ruler is not a representative of the masses but a being who has transformed his own consciousness, who commands because he is superior rather than being superior because he commands. This is the meaning he gives to the ancient idea of the god-Emperor, the Absolute Man who becomes divine by transcending the human state. The same figure recurs in his account of race, where true racial difference is not biological but spiritual—a “solar” quality carried by an elite and transmitted through initiation rather than blood alone. Evola is explicit that race fanatics who reduce everything to heredity are mistaken, and that the “human” as such—its sentimentalism, its humanism, its cult of feeling—must be overcome without mercy. What remains after that overcoming is a being who is hard, free, incommunicable, and capable of acting absolutely.
War as Sacred Path
The book’s title is not incidental. Evola’s argument about war is that the modern world has forgotten what war once meant. For the ancient Aryans, for the warriors of Vedic India, for the Norse who hoped to die in Odin’s Valhalla, war was a sacred path—a way of transcending the individual self and participating in a cosmic order. The mors triumphalis, the triumphant death, was a spiritual achievement. Modern “activists” and nationalists, in his view, know only the soldier and the battlefield; they have lost the metaphysical dimension that made war a rite. This is why the book insists that a true restoration cannot be built on politics alone. The exaltation of danger and crisis, the myths of nation and fatherland, even the symbols of the swastika and the fasces—all of these are, for Evola, provisional and impure unless they are reconnected to the solar tradition that gave them meaning.
The Ghibelline Ideal and the Two Powers
A substantial portion of the book is devoted to the medieval struggle between Emperor and Pope, and Evola’s reading of it is deliberately provocative. Against the Guelph position and against traditionalist thinkers like Guénon who placed spiritual authority above political power, he sides with the Ghibellines: the Emperor, not the Pope, is the true bearer of the sacred. The Empire, in his account, is not a political institution but a transcendent one, and the Church is legitimate only when it is subordinated to the Eagle—the Cross has a positive function only under the imperial sign. This is the “two eagles” theme: the Roman and the Nordic, the imperial and the Germanic, which he hoped to see reunited. The book’s final pages return to this image, invoking the saga of the Ghibelline emperor who sleeps in the mountain and will awaken for the last battle against the hordes of Gog and Magog—which Evola reads as the demons of the collective and the socialist mass-man.
A Book of Its Moment, and Against It
Metaphysics of War is a document of interwar European traditionalism, and its significance lies partly in what it reveals about that current of thought. Evola was not a political activist and declined party commitment; his political views, the translator notes, were a small part of his interests. The book’s Italian edition made little impact; the German edition found a small audience within the Conservative Revolutionary milieu. Its later reception has been shaped by its author’s association with fascist and later radical-right circles, and by the book’s own explicit calls for an “anti-Europe, anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity” rallying cry. For a reader today, the book is less a guide than a specimen: a sustained attempt to construct a sacred politics out of the ruins of tradition, and a reminder of how deeply the longing for hierarchy and cosmic order can be entangled with contempt for the modern world.
