Julius Evola’s The Yoga of Power is a study of Tantrism and Shaktism — the Hindu movements that treat the world as power rather than illusion — written by an Italian esotericist and translated into English by Guido Stucco. Evola works from the Tantric texts themselves, chiefly as presented in the writings of Sir John Woodroffe, and builds an argument rather than a narrative: the book is a sustained essay in comparative metaphysics and initiatory practice, first published in Italian in the late 1960s. Its subject is the Vamachara, the “Way of the Left Hand,” and the claim that in the present dark age the path of action, not contemplation, is the one still open.
“The mantra offers a body of power to the individual will.”
From the Tantras to the Left Hand
The Book and Its Author
The 1992 Inner Traditions edition, translated by Guido Stucco, presents itself as the first English rendering of a work on Tantrism and Shaktism—Hindu movements that prize action and mastery over hidden bodily energies. Its focus falls on the Vamachara, the “Way of the Left Hand,” which turns passions and Nature’s power against the senses themselves. In the Kali Yuga, the aspirant must transform destructive forces rather than dismiss the world as illusion; the methods range from awakening the serpent power to initiatory sexual magic and mantras. Julius Evola (1898–1974) appears as a renegade scholar of European esotericism. The Italian original, Lo Yoga Della Potenza, was published in Rome in 1968, and the contents run from the Tantras’ origin through Shakti, the tattvas, the three human types, the Virgin, secret ritual, orgies and sexual magic, the occult body, chakras, and the diamond-thunderbolt body, with appendices on Bardo and Shaktism.
Stucco’s introduction sketches a life: birth in Rome to a noble Sicilian family, engineering studies, early enthusiasm for Wilde, Nietzsche, and Weininger, service as a mountain artillery officer in the First World War, dadaism, drug experiments, and a near-suicide at twenty-three credited to the Majjhima-Nikaya. It follows his philosophical works, La Tradizione ermetica, his racism and tripartite anthropology of body, soul, and spirit, the spinal wound taken in Vienna in 1945, and his death in 1974. His Tantric turn came through Decio Calvari and John Woodroffe, and he broke with René Guenon over the claim that in the Kali Yuga only the path of action remains.
The Fifth Veda and the Tiger
Tantrism rises around the fifth century A.D., spreading through Hinduism and into Buddhist Vajrayana. Tantra and Agama mean “what has proceeded,” and the Tantras claim the rank of a “fifth Veda” fitted to the doctrine of the four yugas—earlier teachings no longer suit the Kali Yuga. The movement reacts against hollow ritualism, bare speculation, and mortifying asceticism, opposing these with practice, sadhana. The quoted texts stress power over argument, the union of Purusha and Prakrti, and results proven like medicine through siddhis. Two features define the age: mankind is bound to the body, and dharma wavers while Kali is awake—hence “riding the tiger” and Left-Hand practice. Tantrism shifts the goal from “liberation” to “freedom,” joining enjoyment to ascesis; the world is power, not maya. Shaktism’s archaic roots link Kali and Durga to Mediterranean goddesses—Demeter Melaina, Cybele, the black Madonnas—while the divine couple opposes the unchanging god to the energizing goddess. Shakti derives from shak, “power.”
Shakti as Metaphysical Principle
The Kashmir school reformulated the tattva theory of Sankhya and the other darshanas into a synthesis underpinning Tantric yoga. Shakti sheds her maternal, gynocratic features and becomes the primordial metaphysical principle, close to Upanishadic and Mahayana thought but activistic in emphasis. Shaktism and Tantrism fostered magical practices bordering on witchcraft, reviving pre-Indo-European substratum rituals and raising them to a higher plane. The goddesses split into luminous figures—Parvati, Uma, Lakshmi, Gauri—and frightful ones—Kali, Durga, Bhairavi, Camunda—though a single goddess may take either aspect. The bright goddesses fed popular devotional movements sharing Tantrism’s impatience with ritualism and speculation, giving the Goddess a status akin to the “Mother of God” in Christian devotion; the properly Tantric goddesses are the Shaktis of the Left Hand, chiefly Kali and Durga, binding Tantrism to Shaivism. Shiva lacks Vedic origins; Rudra, “Lord of Thunder,” eased his reception. As Nataraja his dance is the rhythm of creation and destruction, and in Tantra he is paired with a terrifying Shakti. Within the trimurti, the Right Hand Way falls under Brahma and Vishnu, the Left Hand under Shiva.
Sadhana, Mantra, and the Word of Power
Tantric speculation is a metaphysics of shakti, the “active brahman,” joined to sadhana for self-realization and magic. Mantras grew from a metaphysics of the word into “word of power,” so Tantrism was sometimes called Mantrayana. It connects strictly to yoga, especially hatha—”violent,” not “physical”
The Architecture of Manifestation
Evola lays out the Tantric map of the body and cosmos as a single hierarchy. The physical elements are only the outermost plane of the tanmatras and the five great elements, and this plane corresponds to earth—the fifth element, understood as extreme condensation, the point where shakti has fully objectified and externalized herself. Earth is thus the principle of everything that appears to the senses in waking life. What we touch as ether, air, fire, and water in ordinary contact with nature are not those elements at all but their symbolic manifestations; the “great elements” themselves can be experienced supernaturally, and extrasensory powers arise only when manas withdraws from the sense organs. To know water means leaving sensory perception behind and ascending a level—the svadhishthana-chakra, the center immediately following earth.
The ten indriyas divide into five cognitive faculties (ears, skin, eyes, tongue, nose, ordered from hearing to smell) and five conative ones (excretion, reproduction, grasping, locomotion, speech). The word means “pertaining to Indra”—powers through which manas, together with ahamkara, carves out the form and destiny of an individual existence. The five mahabhutas and five tanmatras fall into two corresponding groups of five, and these correspondences hold the system together, which matters for any science of subtle reactions, evocations, and awakenings. Unfolding runs inside out: objects depend on organs, organs on the inner organ of buddhi, ahamkara, and manas, which depends on the spiritual principle—the chariot-wheel simile—while prana is identified with prajnatman, though empirically the subject is the bhuta-atman.
Kundalini and the Triple Body
When Shakti reaches prithivi she stops, becomes fixed, identifies with the “other,” and loses herself; the action of manifestation is worn out. She becomes kundalini, “wrapped up,” asleep at the earth-chakra, a serpent in three coils—the gunas—around Shiva’s phallus. The gunas differentiate nature: inorganic power under tamas, organic life as a partially liberated Shaktic form, rajas as movement, sattva as pure light manifest with humankind. Humans are Shakti as conscious active power (spirit) and unconscious passive power (body), and the individual unconscious corresponds to the macrocosm—cosmic forces locked in the unconscious became hatha yoga’s cornerstone. Sankhya’s triple body comprises the causal body, the subtle body (with its mind-body and vital body), and the dense soma. The vital body resembles Aristotle’s entelechy but is not merely explicative; prana appears luminous as tejas. The five vayus—prana, apana, vyana, samana, udana—work in opposition and equilibrium, and the pranic body relates to Shakti as the “philosophers’ woman.” The subtle body seats samskara and vasana, which explain why a jiva knows this world rather than another. Evola treats reincarnation cautiously: the series must stop in an original act of self-determination, continuity residing in the pranic plane and buddhi-tattva, with samskaras picked up through election or coalescence with the samsaric current. The Tantras, he insists, are practical manuals, not philosophy: knowledge without the power of sadhana is useless.
The Hero, the Animal, and the Razor’s Edge
Left-Hand Tantrism distinguishes the pashu, the ordinary person of animal nature, from the vira, the adept, and the kaula. For the siddha, antinomy, the destruction of bonds, and adharma itself are means and discipline. What destroys the pashu, sending him down the hierarchy of beings, the vira orients upward, freeing himself from bonds. The elementary Shaktic nature underlying dharma is activated against dharma; adharma becomes ritualistic and transcendental catharsis, unveiling an original reality in which good and evil, human and divine, high and low lose meaning—an abyssal depth capable of devouring Ishvara himself, entered without being overwhelmed. The cardinal principle is never to separate oneself from the powers of the descending path; the kaula assumes them and raises them to the intensity at which they consume themselves. This is Indrabhuti’s teaching, kept secret and communicated only to initiates: the yogin obtains liberation through the same actions that would keep any other man in hell for ages unending.
The risk is plain. The aspirant is a snake made to climb a hollow bamboo: he must escape at the top or fall. The texts speak of deviations and malfunctioning instruments; one who has obtained human birth yet does not transcend the human condition is like a suicide, and the path is as hard as walking a razor’s edge or riding a wild tiger.
The Ishmaelite Parallel and the Limits of License
Evola reaches for a Western analogue to the Tantric hierarchy: the medieval Islamic order of the Ishmaelites, seven graded levels of initiation. At the summit the guiding maxim echoed the viras and kaulas—nothing exists, everything is permitted—yet candidates first endured lower degrees of unconditional obedience so absolute that the supreme leader might demand a man’s life without reason. The chronicles record such a test when the order’s head, Sheik al-Gabir, met the count of Champagne during the Crusades. The lesson is pointed: release from bondage is not permission to unleash one’s samsaric nature under cover of initiatory pretext. Purifying the passions through the passions is another matter entirely. That the deepest impulses stay governed is shown by the care given to the karmic body, which gathers every element assumed as samskara from prenatal currents; its absolute purification demands that the will be severed from that body and made autonomous.
Chod and the Courage to Be Devoured
Buddhist Tantrism supplies a non-yogic instrument: chod, Tibetan for “to cut off”—specifically, cutting the bond of the karmic body. The rite belongs to ceremonial magic and works with dark, demonic factors; it demands indomitable courage. Having shed all hope and fear, the practitioner evokes elemental forces and orders them to devour the now-superfluous samsaric body, so the samsaric I is released, the debt paid, conditioning overcome, leaving only the nucleus of the I and sheer power. After the magical sacrifice comes knowledge of the void, and the consumption of the karmic legacy ends; one then sees that sacrifice itself was a bond bred of ignorance, since nothing is to be abandoned and no one stands by to receive anything back—nothing truly exists as other. Pure inner contemplation can sometimes replace the ritual evocation. Whoever begins these rites must pass through them unaided, and the texts never cease warning of a triple danger: illness, derangement, death.
The Paralysis of the Purified Will
Pursued through these Left-Hand Tantric means, icchashuddhi—purification of the will—arrives at a critical threshold where ordinary motivations fall away and the practitioner stands paralyzed, without support. Only self-determined strength carries him across, together with the pure principle of the Virgin, figured as control over maya-shakti, the centrifugal energy of desire and samsara. Evola cites the Bhagavad-Gita, where Krishna offers himself as example to Arjuna: creation is complete in him, yet he still acts, dominating his own nature. So the vira may count himself sui securus, certain of himself and of invulnerability in every experience of the Tantric Way.
The Names of Power
The eighth chapter opens on evocation. Popular Tantrism gave itself to devotional cult and worship of the goddess Shakti; higher Tantrism practiced contemplation of her, shakti-dhyana, in two phases governed by two sayings that take Upanishadic formulas and substitute Shakti for brahman: “Everything is Shakti” and “I am this Shakti.” The first phase interiorizes and realizes the Shaktic worldview—no mere speculation, but an initiation into a magical-symbolic perception wherein nature, light, space, time, causes and effects differ qualitatively from those of the contemporary human environment. Historically the change was not only in subjective thought but in the fundamental categories of objective experience: maya’s veil thickened, the hiatus between I and not-I widened. Two consequences followed—the universe perceived as pure outwardness, and the loss of the existential foundation of the older sacred worldview; modern science built its theories on that lifeless exteriority. Shakti-dhyana aims to recover the primordial living perception. Its first phase rests on correspondence, every phenomenon linked to an immaterial power or devata; the second on identity, those phenomena being those very powers. In sadhana the apprentice moves from foreboding of supersensible presences to psychic perception, ritambhara, gradually stripped of external elements until formless roots—hence emptiness, shunya—are perceived. Ceremonial and theurgic evocations may break through the silent outwardness violently, though briefly; dhyana, ripening into samyama, works through a graphic symbol (yantra, mandala), a formula (mantra), a mudra, or a deity. Yantras and mandalas are not abstractions but signaturae rerum, tied to forms powers assume on subtle and causal planes; mudra may name the ritual postures of the gods, whose gesture carries revelatory force once understood.
The Fiery Centre and the Heart
The Manipura region, at the navel, is pictured as a place of combustion: a god smeared with the ashes of what fire has consumed, attended by the three-headed Lakini with her thunderbolt and sword. The liquid desire of the previous centre is here burned into an all-pervading shining substance, and the affective forces gathered round it are anger, fear, violence, pride, and the ordinary man’s hunger. At the heart sits Anahata, twelve-petalled and dark grey like smoke, the six-pointed star of two balanced triangles, mantra YAM. The Upanishads place the atman in the heart’s deepest recess, and the Tantric imagery sets inside the hexagram an inverted triangle holding Shiva’s golden linga, with the hamsah below it—the superpersonal I, “a still flame in a windless place.” Its emotional register runs from hope and devotion to anxiety, doubt, and remorse.
The Throat, the Command Wheel, and the Minor Centres
Vishuddha, at the larynx, is bright white, sixteen-petalled, ruled by the androgynous Sadashiva, half snow and half gold, whose name points to an extrasamsaric condition; here the atma sees itself in everything and dominates past, present, and future. Ajna, at the eyebrow level, is the “command wheel,” a dazzling white blaze with two petals and the mantra AUM, where the frontal eye acts as a thunderbolt and grants a transcendent, “cyclopic” vision; above its triangle a moon and bindu open onto a space “shining with the splendor of countless suns,” the threshold of the pure tattvas. Two minor centres flank it: Manas-chakra, tied to imagination and dream, whose improper unfolding breeds hallucination and chaotic clairvoyance, and the poorly described Soma-chakra above it.
Breathing, Retention, and the Signs of Perfection
The pranayama chapter sets out breathing to a progressive rhythm—inhale, retention, exhale in the ratio t, 4t, 2t—alternating nostrils while reciting a mantra, at dawn, noon, evening, and midnight. The long retention fuses prana and apana and generates magic heat; the breath must be tamed gradually, “as a wild beast,” or it will kill the apprentice, and beginners may suffer chills and swooning. Kumbhaka, the texts say, is not won by extreme effort alone but is “the normal state of the spirit.” Perfection shows in a smooth body, eloquent speech, inner sounds, clear shining eyes, freedom from illness, concentrated semen, and purified digestive fire.
Isolation, the Chain of Teachers, and the Serpent
Awakening kundalini demands a hermitage or deserted place, a mountain or island, and avoidance of all company; the gods love secrecy, and the yogi must tell no one but his guru what he does or achieves. He keeps a healthy diet, vegetarianism strongly encouraged, practices sexual abstinence, and sits facing north. Before each exercise he imagines his teacher above his head, and above him the whole initiatory chain stretching to heaven, the line turning to light and merging with the “original teacher.” He then thinks his body an empty, transparent shell and visualizes the three arteries—pingala, ida, sushumna—while the motionless Shiva, scepter in hand and wrapped in Shakti as in a fiery dress, embodies the power at work. One exercise has him visualize the “occult bride” as a beautiful woman arousing strong desire, then absorb her into himself. Hatha yoga separates simple retention from the prolonged “great retention,” mahakevala-kumbhaka, repeated four times daily.
The Diamond Body and the Siddhis
Union with Shakti transforms the body’s function rather than abolishing it: the I rises to the metaphysical plane and rules the elements, and the body becomes one “of freedom” rather than “in bonds”—the siddha-kaya, the mayavi-rupa, the Tibetan rainbow body, the Egyptian sahu that “stands up” and does not fall. The siddha-yogin is svecchakari, beyond karma, sin, virtue, heaven, and rebirth; Tantric metaphysics grants moral laws no intrinsic validity, and the yogin loses the instincts that would make a pashu abuse his powers. Chakra awakenings bring command over the elements, and the siddha surpasses Brahma, Vishnu, and Hari-Hara; he cannot lie. Such powers prove realization but become dangers when they breed dependency.
The Conclusion and the Science of Death
Evola closes by rejecting the picture of India as purely otherworldly; Tantrism, whose password is the unity of sadhana and bhoga, is “distinctly Western,”
The New Life as Initiatory Text
The argument turns to Dante’s New Life, reading it as a record of contact with a supersensuous reality rather than a courtly romance. Dante describes the apparition of the “glorious lady of my mind,” whom bystanders called Beatrice only because they had no other name for what they could not understand. The experience marks the beginning of a radical transformation. The vital spirit in the heart’s secret chamber—glossed as the atman, which the Upanishads place in the same seat as the jivatma—trembles so violently that it shows in his least pulses and speaks: “Behold a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me.” What is announced is the awakening of the inner ruler, the lord on the throne. The animal spirit, the vital principle, marvels that bliss has appeared; the natural spirit, identified with samsaric nature, weeps because it will henceforth be hindered and will no longer govern the Worshiper of Love. From that moment, Dante says, Love held lordship over his soul.
The Woman, the Fire, and the Tantric Parallel
The “woman” here belongs to knowledge of the heart and to something all aflame, like the center of a magic, life-giving fire—which helps explain the title The New Life. The sleeping woman wrapped in crimson drapery is a highly symbolic figure, equatable with the “Woman” in the bloodstream who leads the Tantric divya to claim no need for external women. The initiatory experience of the Worshipers of Love, of analogous Western movements, and of the Shaktic adept rests on the same points: love induces a deep crisis and awakens a power that almost kills the subject, activating a superior hidden principle; the woman generates a new being and a new hierarchy of powers—salvation and the principle of a new life.
How these plans were carried out in practice is hard to fix. Likely an evocation of and contact with the subtle, supersensuous plane occurred, though a real woman may have facilitated it. As in certain Tantric practices, states may have been induced in which exasperated desire, spiritualized by inhibiting every material discharge, consumed itself by flowing into a superior experience—hence talk of the “mystery” of medieval platonic love. The Tantric ritual offers a further parallel: a man spends nights in the same room with his appointed Shakti through three phases without possessing her, a preliminary subtle intercourse. Among knights dedicated to the cult of the Woman, the ultimate trial, asag, was spending a night in bed with the woman wholly naked without sexual act—not for chastity but to increase desire.
The Endnotes: Sources and Correspondences
The endnotes gather citations and commentary chapter by chapter. Rama Prasad’s Nature’s Inner Forces is cited on psychic and extrasensory experience, and the Corpus hermeticum on contemplating not through the eyes but through the intellectual energy of the sensory powers. The Svetasvatara-Upanishad is quoted on the soul in the nine-gated city of the body, seeing without eye and hearing without ear. Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia is cited on air, prana, as the body of the sensitive spirit’s life and the need to vivify it. The Chandogya-Upanishad compares creatures who pass daily into the brahma-loka in deep sleep without finding it to those who walk over hidden gold unknowingly. The Maitri-Upanishad is quoted on the heat of Brahma as bodily warmth hidden in the ether of the heart, and Evola notes how hard it is in such texts to separate preliminary practice from higher realization. The Hatha-Yoga-Pradipika is cited on kumbhaka until the body is suffused with prana, then exhaling through the left nostril; a gradual shift is described through concentration on an immaterial spot in the middle of the head, then near the larynx, then the heart. Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan Yoga appears. The Chandogya-Upanishad is quoted on atman as the bridge over which neither day, night, old age, death, sorrow, nor good or evil deeds cross, where the blind become not blind and night appears as day; the Svetasvatara-Upanishad adds that with no darkness there is no day or night. Agrippa is cited on sacred numbers represented through gestures indicating inexpressible names not to be spoken aloud. Hatha yoga is said to give control over normally involuntary muscles and excretory organs, also exhibited in Tantric sexual practices—men reabsorbing spilled semen, women contracting vaginal muscles to immobilize the organ. Yogins are said to transmit magical immobility to their clothes, which stiffen even in strong wind.
Shiva, Shakti, and the World as Power
The metaphysical core of the book is the reformulation of maya. Evola grants that the world may be illusion from the standpoint of brahman or of the siddha who has overcome the human condition, but not from that of finite consciousness, for whom the world is indisputable. Pressed to its extreme, Vedantic maya would deny the individual any possibility of rising toward the principle, since such a rise presupposes continuity rather than a hiatus between non-being and being. Tantrism therefore thinks brahman as “active brahman,” as Shakti — primordial, abyssal energy that has shed its feminine and maternal traits and become “one without a second,” the root of every finite existence, “supreme of the supreme.” Her manifestation is not the necessary emanation of Spinoza’s godhead but free, unbounded, and therefore figured as play, lila; the dancing god Nataraja passes over to the goddess. Evola reads this as the meeting of the pre-Aryan great mother with Aryan Upanishadic speculation, and he pairs it with Sankhya’s purusha and prakriti, whose mere proximity — like the unmoved mover’s effect on matter — sets the gunas in motion and produces the fallen condition of avidya.
The Stakes of the Left-Hand Path
The book’s most distinctive and most troubling argument concerns the pashu, the vira, and the kaula. For the ordinary person, adharma is simply destruction; for the hero and the adept, breaking bonds and acting against dharma become discipline and catharsis, unveiling an original reality in which good and evil, human and divine, lose their meaning. The yogin, as the Jnanasiddhi has it, obtains liberation through the very actions that would keep any other man in hell for ages. Evola insists on the danger: the aspirant is a snake driven up a hollow bamboo who must escape at the top or fall; the path is as hard as walking a razor’s edge or riding a wild tiger. He is equally insistent that this is not Nietzsche’s superman or Stirner’s anarchic individual. Tantrism does not empower human nature but cauterizes it, consuming the individualistic I. The Gita supplies the model: Krishna urges Arjuna to fight and kill, detached from victory and defeat, and reveals a dimension of the godhead that acts destructively — the same terrifying aspect found in Shiva and in the Tantric Kali. For the siddha, yoga and bhoga, liberation and enjoyment, are no longer exclusive; he may pass through every experience because he is beyond dharma and karma alike.
The Serpent, the Body, and the Word
Evola’s technical chapters treat initiation, visualization, mantra, and the subtle body as one connected science. Initiation is the implant of a superindividual principle — “without a Shakti, Shiva is inactive” — transmitted through words of power and the tat tvam asi whispered in ritual, though the texts’ insistence on a guru reflects contingent circumstances as much as necessity, and at the peak the kaula is guru unto himself. Visualization is imagination raised to the pitch of physical sight, a lens focusing the sun’s rays until flame; drugs and intoxicants play only an auxiliary role, and the aim is the opposite of becoming victim to one’s own imagination. Mantra works both as pratyahara and as intrinsic power, the vajra-vak, the diamond-thunderbolt of the living word, commanding the hierarchy of vibrations down to matter. The body of the book is the “occult corporeity”: the chakras as repetitions of the tattva hierarchy, kundalini asleep at the earth-chakra, the five vayus, the subtle body that seats the samskaras. Evola is scathing about Western misreadings — hatha yoga is not physical culture, and psychoanalysis, which reifies the unconscious as insurmountable, inverts the truth, since yoga’s unconscious may be resolved into superconsciousness.
What the Book Leaves Behind
The Yoga of Power belongs to a specific mid-century moment, when Woodroffe’s translations and Eliade’s comparative studies first gave European readers access to Tantric material, and when a certain kind of traditionalist writer wanted to rescue it from the reputation of “the worst kind of black magic.” Evola’s method is openly not that of academic orientalism: he reads between the lines, draws on personal experience and comparison with other esoteric traditions, and treats the Tantras as a synthesis that completes earlier teachings. The result is a book that is learned, tendentious, and deliberately uncomfortable — a portrait of Tantrism as an aristocratic and perilous discipline for the few, written by a man who believed the age demanded nothing less. Readers come to it less for neutral exposition than for a coherent, internally rigorous account of what the Left-Hand path claims to be, and for the questions it raises about power, renunciation, and the cost of crossing the human condition.
