Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World is a work of traditionalist philosophy and cultural criticism, first published in Italian in 1934 and translated into English by Guido Stucco. Its subtitle names its territory plainly: politics, religion, and social order of the Kali Yuga. Evola writes as a self-declared representative of the ksatriya, or warrior caste, and he builds his case not by argument from contemporary evidence but by assembling what he takes to be the universal forms of “Tradition”—the sacred order he believes underlay every premodern civilization from Vedic India to imperial Rome—and then measuring the modern world against that recovered standard. The book divides into two large movements: a morphological reconstruction of the traditional world, and a genealogy of how it fell.
Evola’s central claim is that the modern world is not the summit of human achievement but the terminal phase of a long degeneration, and that the only coherent response for anyone who sees this is revolt. He calls the idea of progress absurd, a plebeian ideology that falsifies history to justify itself, and insists that modern man is not an overcomer but something “decrepit, defeated, and crepuscular.” Against the merely historical study of civilizations he sets a “dualism of civilizations”: modern versus traditional as two universal types, two a priori categories, such that wherever a culture centers on time and becoming the modern attitude recurs, and wherever it centers on the supernatural the archaic one returns. This is the premise the whole book works from, and it is what the walk-through below traces in detail.
The Two Natures and the Case Against Progress
The book opens by declaring the idea of progress absurd. With its corollary of modern superiority, progress falsifies history, plants harmful myths, and claims sovereignty for a plebeian ideology. Against this stands the doctrine of the two natures: a physical order and a metaphysical one, a mortal nature and an immortal one, the superior realm of being and the inferior realm of becoming, a visible dimension and, prior to and beyond it, an invisible dimension that is the support, source, and true life of the former. Evola traces the malaise of the West past consumerism and technocracy to remote causes corroding the higher values of Tradition found in the myths and sacred literature of the Indo-Europeans. Agreeing with Hindu philosophers that history moves in vast cycles, he places the present in the Kali Yuga, the age of dissolution, and concludes that revolt is the only logical response for anyone opposing the materialism and ritualized meaninglessness of twentieth-century life.
The Argument of the Foreword
Evola asks the reader to leave the deceptive circle of the present and acquire new eyes and new ears, recovering pre-modern meanings as an absolute reference point and a line of resistance. What matters is the few who ride the wave, remain firm, and endure silently as stone guests, constructing a pole that transmits the sensation of truth. His thesis is the decadent nature of the modern world, demonstrated against the universal civilization on whose ruins modernity arose. Modern man, he insists, is decrepit, defeated, and crepuscular, not an overcomer. The plurality of civilizations is insufficient; he asserts a dualism of civilizations, modern against traditional, an ideal and morphological opposition beyond mere history. Decadence first appeared between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C., presaging the Dark Age; a second phase came with the fall of Rome and the advent of Christianity; a third with the twilight of the feudal-imperial Middle Ages, decisive at humanism and the Reformation. Traditional civilizations are marked by contact with metaphysical reality, giving time a mythological form based on rhythm and space rather than chronology. On method, he dismisses the historical science of religion as ignorance in the best of cases, though conceding scholars yield useful raw material. Myth, legend, and epic acquire superior validity; legendary Rome speaks clearer than historical Rome. Tradition begins where one attains a superindividual, nonhuman perspective, and traditional truths are learned only by remembering. He invokes the principle of correspondence and generalized induction as approximations of spiritual intuition, hoping to aid a real revolt of the spirit.
The Beginning: Being and Becoming
The fundamental doctrine of the two natures was an unshakable axis East and West. Modern man’s materialism is experiential: reality confined to physical bodies, with even spiritual beliefs resting on hypothesis or dogma. Traditional man’s experience extended beyond; the invisible was as real as sensory data. Nature traditionally included a dark netherworld of ambiguous forces and everything merely human, subject to birth and death. The race of men is one thing, the race of the gods quite another; only the nonhuman dimension was the essence and goal of traditional civilization. Becoming appears as samsara, as the Greek adynaton and apeiron, as Scholastic cupiditas. Asceticism, mastery and self-discipline, leads to the world of being, figured in solar symbols and beings of light. A man is a mortal god, and a god is an immortal man. Every authority and institution is fraudulent unless ordained to Being.
Regality, the Center, and Stability
Traditional civilization features beings embodying a power from above. The pontifex, builder of bridges, connects natural and supernatural and is identified with the king. The ziggurat, the plan of Persian capitals, and the cakravartin’s palace express the cosmic order in hierarchy and dependence on an unmoved center, spatially the king’s throne. Indian initiation rites using the mandala dramatize ascent from profane space to a sacred center; crowning with a tiara marks whoever reaches that center as king, now above the forces of inferior nature. Stability has a double dimension, inner state and flowing energy, central to the Vedic royal consecration formula: remain steady like a mountain, still like sky and earth. Peace and justice attach to regality—Dante’s imperator pacificus, the pax romana et augusta—an inner, positive peace not divorced from the triumphal element. The cakravartin is Lord of Peace, of the Law, and of Justice; Melchizedek, king of Salem, means king of justice, and tradition upholds his royal priesthood over Abraham’s.
Dharma, Law, and the State
Justice is dharma, the proper nature of a being, ordering every function according to svadharma; Plato’s justice likewise has each fulfilling his own nature’s function.
Initiation, Regality, and the Priestly Claim
The passage links planetary influences to the Platonic seven “wheels of destiny,” which the initiate must overcome by climbing to the symbolic region of the fixed stars—states of the pure world of being. This corresponds to the passage from the Lesser to the Greater Mysteries and the old distinction between lunar-telluric rite and solar-Olympian rite. Welcomed by kings and highest dignitaries, the initiate walks into an illuminated temple to contact the divine, is reminded of a king’s duties, receives robes and insignia, and sits on the throne.
In Egypt the rite of regal initiation had three moments: purification; reception of the supernatural fluid symbolized by the crown (uraeus) or double crown, called the “great sorceress,” establishing at the king’s right and left the gods of eternity and stability; and the “ascent” to the temple representing the otherworld and the “embrace” of the solar god—the definitive consecration sanctioning a new immortalizing birth, by which the Egyptian king appeared as “son” of that god. The Eleusinian rite is called one of the most complete rites of regal initiation, each symbol corresponding to an inner experience. Initiation in its highest forms was conceived as an intensely real operation capable of changing the individual’s ontological status and grafting onto him forces of the world of Being. The title rex at Eleusis testified to an acquired supernatural dimension; that it no longer accompanied effective political authority was due to the decadence of ancient Hellas. Hadrian and Antoninus received the title “king” only after initiation at Eleusis. The quality bestowed by initiation is distinct from human merit; all human virtues combined could not produce it, nor could human sin affect it—echoed in the Catholic view that priestly dignity cannot be effaced by moral sin, remaining an indoles indelebilis. Ancient China distinguished those naturally endowed with knowledge and virtue from those achieving them by disciplining themselves and returning to the rites; the discipline suitable to the latter, equivalent to initiation, was only a means to creating the “superior man” who could legitimately assume the supreme hierarchical function by virtue of a mysterious real power inherent in him.
The distinctive feature of kingship is more evident in consecration than initiation: only the special investiture turning the already crowned Teutonic prince into the romanorum rex bestows the authority of leader of the Holy Roman Empire. Plato wrote that in Egypt no king may rule without belonging to the priestly class. Plutarch wrote that “A king chosen from among the warriors instantly became a priest and shared in the philosophy that is hidden for the most part in myths and stories.” The same was true for the Parsis; because the Persian Great Kings were elevated to the dignity of “magi” at enthronement, Iran did not experience conflicts between royalty and priesthood during the better period of its tradition. Traditionally, while those initiated were kings, the opposite was also true: initiation and the priestly function were often considered a prerogative of kings and aristocratic castes. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the goddess restricted to the four Eleusinian princes and their descendants “the celebration of the cult and the knowledge of sacred orgies,” by virtue of which “at death one does not incur the same fate as others.” Ancient Rome long struggled against plebeian prevarication, insisting that priests of the higher collegia and especially the consuls be chosen only from patrician families; the need for unitary authority was affirmed together with the instinctive acknowledgment that such authority has a stronger foundation where the race of the blood and the race of the spirit converge.
The passage then examines kings raised to superindividual dignity not through initiation but through investiture or consecration mediated by a priestly caste—typical of more recent historical times. The primordial theocracies did not derive authority from a church or priestly caste. The Nordic kings were kings immediately by divine origin, and like the kings of the Doric-Achaean period, the only celebrants of sacrificial actions. In China the emperor received his mandate directly “from heaven.” Until recently in Japan, the enthronement ritual took place within the emperor’s individual spiritual experience, establishing contact with the influences of the regal tradition without an officiating clergy. Even in Greece and Rome the priestly collegia did not “make” kings through their rites but limited themselves to divinatory science to ascertain whether the appointed person “was found pleasing to the gods”—acknowledgment, not investiture, as in the ancient Scottish tradition concerning the so-called Stone of Destiny.
Sacred Space and the Logic of Orientation
Traditional space was never homogeneous. Geomancy, the rites of orientation, and the art of siting cathedrals all obeyed a law of analogies that bound the visible to the cosmic and invisible. Just as one moment of sacred time differed from another by the ritual act it demanded, so no place resembled another: some rites required caves, others mountain peaks. This produced a real sacred geography—holy lands, consecrated cities, centres of spiritual influence—and temple and city foundations were preceded by rites and governed by rhythm and analogy, never by convenience. The space of the rite was living and magnetic, where every gesture and word became a decree of the Invisible.
Myth as Hyperrealism
Against the modern notion that ancient man merely embellished nature with fables, the text sets traditional hyperrealism against modern humanism. Traditional man felt genuine presences—numina—in peaks, woods, and rivers; his imagination, freer of the senses, translated subtle perceptions into plastic forms, as a dream turns the pressure of blankets into a falling rock. Gods, demons, and elementals were symbolic dramatizations of real though unconscious relations with a higher reality. Myths, including historical ones, integrate sensible data with the sacred element of space and time; where a myth fails to match the historical record, it is history, not the myth, that falls short—a thought Hegel approached with his talk of nature’s impotence.
The Fluidity of the I and the Not-I
The border between the I and the not-I, now rigid, was originally fluid. Incursions of the not-I into the I explain the perils of the soul—possession and obsession—and the rituals devised to confirm the I’s sovereignty; incursions of the I into the not-I underlie efficacious magic. Modern man, boasting of enlightenment, believes himself safe from these dangers, but they return disguised as the collective unconscious, irrational currents, and ideologies, with consequences worse than before.
Blood, Soil, and the Two Aspects of Land
Between man and his land there once stood a living psychic bond: a region had its own individuality. Doctrinally this has a naturalistic side—tellurism, totemism, the collective law of blood and soil, where the individual dissolves into the stock—and a supernaturalistic side, a patrician blood purified from above. The first preserves an organic sense of one’s own land that modern nationalism has turned to rhetoric.
The Four Ages and the Fall
Opening the second part, Evola turns from morphology to the dynamic unfolding of traditional and antitraditional forces in history, seeking the dominating factor in each civilisation. The doctrine of the four ages—Hesiod’s metals, the Hindu yugas with the bull of dharma losing a hoof per age, Persian, Chaldean, Daniel’s statue, the Aztec suns—uniformly teaches regression, not progress. Darwinism errs: ancient testimonies know a divine past and a fall through the mixing of the divine race with the inferior one, the Ben Elohim and the daughters of men, Atlantis losing its divine element. Primitive stocks are only relatively primordial; miscegenation does not breed superiors. De Maistre is enlisted: the savage’s “natural” state is the last stage of brutishness, and primordial science came from above, guarded in temples. Each epoch has its myth; evolutionism is the democratic myth of the modern world’s inferior strata.
The Golden Age and the Mystery of the West
The first era conforms wholly to the traditional spirit—polarity, solarity, height, glory—the age of Being and transcendent truth, of Satya Yuga and Saturn. The memory of a lost northern or Atlantic centre survives as myth: Manu and Yama, Yima, Minos; the Garden of the Hesperides beyond Ocean, sought by Heracles under Atlas’s guidance; the western path of Zeus from Kronos’s fortress to Olympus; the Egyptian Horus’s companions and the cry “To the West!”; Avalon, Tlapallan, Enoch’s western refuge. The Flood’s disappearance of the sacred land means the centre passed into the invisible; the sunken land’s counterpart is the subterranean people, and only a change of state opens its doors. The West then becomes a second, degenerative phase: dualism, transcendence gone underground, supernature as the goal of initiation—solar rather than polar symbolism.
North and South, and the Titanic Upheaval
The Atlantic cycle alters polar symbolism; the Hyperborean stage is Olympian, Apollonian, the sun itself rather than Helios, marked by the swastika and the centred circle. After the Golden Age, six basic types of civilisation arose. Hesiod’s second race refused the gods, opened to telluric forces, and hardened into the Bronze Age of violence—the Nephilim, the Eddic age of battle-axes and wolves, the Flood sent to quench the threatening fire.
Judaism as Dissolution
The argument turns first to the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., when Israel’s military collapse was read by its prophets as punishment for sin, with Jehovah expected to restore power once expiation was complete. When that restoration failed to arrive, the expectation curdled into apocalyptic messianism—a vision of a Savior redeeming Israel—and the traditional element hardened into ritual formalism, increasingly abstract and cut off from life. The Chaldean priestly sciences are proposed as the channel linking later Judaism’s abstract thought and mathematical bent to Spinoza and even modern formal physics, where the Jewish component is strong. The resulting human type upholds values he cannot realize, grows utopian and frustrated before any positive order or authority, and becomes a permanent source of disorder. A second strain of the Jewish soul rejoices wherever it finds those values illusory and redemption failed—an alibi for the original guilt motif, acting disaggregatingly as Judaism secularized and spread through the West. A footnote holds that Israel was originally not a race but a people, a case of tradition creating a race of the soul.
Prophetism and the Demon of Restlessness
The crisis brought the loss of anything pure and virile in the ancient cult of Jehovah and the warrior Messiah. Jeremiah and Isaiah voice a rebellious spirituality that disdains the hieratic and ritual element—the meaning of Hebrew prophetism, akin to ecstatic cults of inferior castes. The “seer” gave way to the man obsessed by the spirit of God; the proud confidence of being God’s people yielded to the pathos of the “servants of the Eternal.” Ancient traditions make Typhon, demon opposed to the solar God, father of the Hebrews, and Gnostic authors called the Hebrew god one of Typhon’s creatures—a demonic spirit of restlessness and latent revolt that, once separated from the Law, acted on the Jewish substratum more violently than on other peoples, making it a hotbed of unconscious negative influence in the Iron Age’s last phases. A footnote contrasts the possessed nabi with the Olympian roeh.
Islam and the Law of the Sword
Islam, arising among Semitic races, overcame those negative motifs. Its center, like priestly Judaism’s, was Law and Tradition as formative force, but the Arab stocks supplied purer material shaped by a warrior spirit. The shariah is divine law; the Koran is God’s uncreated word existing in heaven ab eterno. Islam claims independence from Judaism and Christianity, grounds itself in the pre-Islamic Kaaba, and in esoteric tradition points to al-Khadir, superior to and predating the biblical prophets. It rejects the incarnation, retains only an attenuated fall of Adam without original sin, and dismisses the Redeemer and priestly mediation; every Muslim answers directly to God through the Law. Its early asceticism was action—jihad, holy war—through which, not preaching, it expanded prodigiously, forging the umma, a race of the spirit.
The Crepuscular Greece and the Roman Miracle
Greek objectivism rested on traditional wisdom; once that support collapsed, thought became a reason unto itself, ending in modern Rationalism and Kant. Hellas’s humanistic upheaval brought a hypertrophic, profane development of arts and letters—degeneration beside the strength of the origins. The peak lies in the Greek Middle Ages: epos, ethos, Olympian spirituality. The philosophical Greece admired by moderns was crepuscular, and Cato voiced the old Roman contempt for the new breed of philosophers. Rome itself is the last great reaction against the crisis of traditional civilizations—a new principle that suddenly subjugated the heterogeneous Italic peninsula, its source never named. Behind its greatness the author sees the heroic Aryan-Western forces, an Aryan element struggling against the forces of the South.
The Demetrian Substratum
Italic civilizations carried telluric, Aphrodistic strains: the cult of the Goddess, the Sabine Fortuna, a lunar calendar, feminine figures like Mater Matuta and Diana, and myths of masculine subordination to the feminine principle—Mars and Flora, Numa and Egeria—echoing the Etruscan Tanaquil. Traces of matriarchy survive in filiation through the mother’s name and in cities named after women; burial and cremation mark overlapping Uranian and Demetrian strata. Roman maternal sacredness betrays the gynaecocratic component subordinated to paternal right, while Vesta and Bona Dea show Southern influence on the fire and earth cults.
Christianity as a Southern Force
Christian morality shows Southern, non-Aryan influence: equality proclaimed in the name of a god rather than a goddess changes little, for the belief in human equality opposes the heroic ideal of personality formed within hierarchy, and the mystical body of Christ carried a regressive influence Catholicism could not fully overcome.
The Counterfeit Conquest of Time
Modern activity does not lift man toward the superindividual; it drags him toward the subindividual, opening the shaking personality to irrational and collective incursions. A frantic element recalls ancient Dionysism, but on a lower and darker plane, since every reference to the sacred has vanished and only human circuits absorb the evoked forces. The spiritual overcoming of time gives way to its counterfeit: the mechanical, illusory conquest produced by speed, immediacy, and simultaneity—the demand to “live” as the media say. Whoever sees the part of himself not contingent on time beholds the stream of becoming at a glance, like a man climbing a tower to survey what others meet only in succession; whoever immerses himself in becoming knows only excitement, vertigo, convulsive acceleration, excess. This precipitation disrupts duration, destroys intervals, abolishes distances, and ends in a real disintegration of inner unity. Contemporaries treat being and stability as akin to death; their spirit feeds on sensation and dynamism, becoming the vehicle for darker forces.
The Return of the Southern Gynaecocracy
Beyond the faded certainties of the superworld, rationalist constructions, technological devastation, and modern “culture,” the modern myths of action herald a last phase: a “Luciferian,” theophobic individualism overcome, and new unrestrainable powers dragging along machines and spent beings who raised titanic temples and opened the earth’s ways. The modern world returns to the themes of the ancient Southern gynaecocratic civilizations. Socialism and communism appear as materialized, technological revivals of the telluric principle of equality and promiscuity in Mother Earth; virility is reduced to its physical and phallic components as under Aphrodistic gynaecocracy; the plebeian Motherland of the French Revolution and nationalist ideologies is a feminine totemism; democratic kings and heads of state, stripped of autonomy, mark the loss of fatherly sovereignty and the return to the Mother, the demos. Hetaerism and Amazonism surface in family disintegration, modern sensuality, the turbid quest for women and immediate gratification, and the masculinization of woman. Dionysus’ mask is identified with ceaseless activity and the philosophy of becoming—a revival, mutatis mutandis, of the ancient Mediterranean civilization of decadence in its lowest forms, lacking the sacred and any equivalent of chaste, calm Demetrian possibility. The symptoms are dark evocations of mediumistic, spiritualistic, and neotheosophical currents exalting the subconscious with a pantheistic, materialistic mysticism, epidemic especially in Anglo-Saxon countries and wherever Protestantism secularized the religious ideal.
The Regression of the Castes
A law governs this decline: power shifts from sacred leaders to warrior aristocracy, to merchants, to serfs. In the West, divine royalty belongs to a mythical past; the Ghibelline ideal of the Holy Roman Empire is the last echo of the highest tradition. Authority descended to warriors—military leaders, lords of temporal justice, absolute sovereigns; regality of blood replaced regality of spirit, and “divine right” became an empty formula. With the dissolution of the medieval ecumene, fides became warrior loyalty and honor—the age of the great European monarchies. Then aristocracies decayed and monarchies became useless institutions subject to the “will of the nation” (“The king reigns but he does not rule”); parliamentary republics and capitalist oligarchies shifted power to the mercantile class—kings of coal, oil, and iron replacing kings of blood and spirit. Antiquity knew this sporadically, as in the “aristocracy of wealth” at Rome and in Greece; later came communal rebellion and mercantile power. The “rights of the Third Estate” in France was the decisive stage, followed by bourgeois revolutions using liberal and democratic ideologies: the era of the social contract, utilitarian and economic bonds, gold as power, plutocracy replacing aristocracy, the banker replacing the warrior. Money trafficking and interest, once confined to ghettos, invaded civilization; per Sombart, in the promised land of Protestant puritanism, Americanism, capitalism, and the “distilled Jewish spirit” coexist. Modern secularized Judaism saw ways to world domination open; Marx is quoted from the Deutsche-französische Jahrbücher: Judaism’s mundane principles are practical necessity and self-advantage, its god is money, and as money became world power the Jew emancipated himself and the Christian people became Jewish. The codification of interest-bearing loans is called the foundation of banking, high finance, and pure economy spreading like cancer—the “age of the merchants.”
The doctrine of the two natures is the axis on which everything else turns. Evola distinguishes a physical order from a metaphysical one, a mortal nature from an immortal one, the realm of “being” from the realm of “becoming”—and he insists the invisible dimension is not a hypothesis or a dogma but the very support and source of the visible. Traditional man, on this account, experienced the invisible as directly as he experienced bodies; modern man’s materialism is experiential rather than philosophical, a narrowing of what counts as real. From this root Evola derives his account of authority: every law, institution, and ruler is fraudulent unless ordained to Being. The king is pontifex, builder of the bridge between natural and supernatural; the state has a transcendent meaning not inferior to the Church’s claims; justice is dharma, the primordial legislation that assigns each being its own function. The symbols he reads—the ziggurat as “link between heaven and earth,” the cakravartin as Lord of Peace and Lord of the Law, Melchizedek as king of justice and peace—all express the same idea: hierarchy is real only when it descends from above.
What makes the book more than a catalogue of archaic symbols is Evola’s account of how the fall happened. He works with the doctrine of the four ages—Hesiod’s metals, the Hindu yugas with the bull of dharma losing one hoof per age, Daniel’s statue, the Aztec suns—and reads it as a literal regression from higher states rather than a metaphor for progress. The “fall” he attributes to the mixing of the divine race with an inferior one, the biblical Ben Elohim mating with the daughters of men, Plato’s descendants of the gods losing the divine element through intermingling. Myths of war between gods and monsters—the Aesir against the elemental powers, the Olympians against the giants, the deva against the asura—become records of the primordial human principle defeating its own animalistic potentialities. From there the decline proceeds in stages: the eighth to sixth centuries B.C., the fall of Rome and the advent of Christianity, the twilight of the feudal-imperial Middle Ages, and finally humanism, the Reformation, and the modern world. The regression of the castes is the social signature of this process, as spiritual authority gives way to warrior power, warrior power to wealth, and wealth to the masses.
Evola’s method deserves attention because it is inseparable from his argument. He dismisses the “historical science” of religion as ignorance in the best of cases, conceding only that scholars supply raw material. Myth, legend, and epic, denied historical value by modern scholarship, acquire for him a superior validity: legendary Rome speaks more clearly than historical Rome, and Charlemagne’s sagas more than the chronicles. He calls this the “traditional method”—the principle of correspondence and a generalized induction he likens to spiritual intuition—and he defends it against charges of arbitrariness by arguing that tradition begins precisely where one attains a superindividual, nonhuman perspective. The reader who rejects the method will reject the conclusions; Evola knows this and says so, telling the apologists of the “concrete” to go ahead and fill the pit.
The book’s cast of concepts is large, but several carry the weight. Chivalry is one: Evola reads the knight as an “armed priest,” the Templars as initiates who rejected the exoteric cross for a higher spirituality, and the Grail as a myth of the “regal religion” pointing to a supreme polar center rather than to the Church. Asceticism is another: he distinguishes the pariah below caste from the ascetic above it, and he reads early Buddhism as a virile, aristocratic path of awakening rather than mystical escapism—the Buddha belonged to the warrior nobility, and nirvana is the cessation of restlessness, not annihilation. His treatment of sacred games makes the circus and the Olympian contests into magical operations, the victory of the Uranian over the infernal renewed in ritual. And his account of the sexes, of property and blood and soil, of slavery as the crystallization of the pole of work against the pole of action, all serve the same end: to show that what modernity takes for liberation is in each case a fall into a lower mode of being.
The book’s significance lies less in its conclusions than in the completeness of its refusal. Evola offers no reform program, no gradualist remedy; he addresses the “few who ride the wave,” the “stone guests” who remain firm and endure silently, and he hopes only to transmit the sensation of truth and perhaps spark a liberating crisis. That posture—metaphysical revolt without political blueprint—helps explain the book’s strange afterlife: its author’s adoption by right-wing and some left-wing groups against his own intentions, the controversy that has followed his name, and the persistent interest in a thinker who claimed to write from the standpoint of a caste that no longer exists. Whether one reads it as diagnosis, as symptom, or as both, Revolt Against the Modern World remains one of the most uncompromising statements of the traditionalist position, and its closing vision of the end of the cycle is offered not as prophecy but as the logical terminus of a process the author believes he has traced from the beginning.
