Month: May 2024

I found myself this evening looking at a Substack by one Marco Visconti, where I discovered there’s apparently been some controversy over the Inner Traditions company publishing the work of Julius Evola. Which, it should be said, they’ve been doing since at least the 1990s, so I’m not sure why the fuss now (or a few months ago, at any rate), but there it is, and here‘s IT’s justification for them doing so:

He was an elitist. He was against democracy, the religions of Abraham, and Egalitarianism—in short, against modern belief systems. His views start with Plato, whose dialogues he absorbed as a young man along with copious philosophic readings in Latin, French, and German. Evola can be debated and criticized, which has been done extensively by scholars, journalists, and philosophers. However, his importance as a philosopher of the Traditional worldview cannot be denied.
To read Evola requires a depth of knowledge and appreciation for other cultures, languages, philosophies, the esoteric, and world history that is not readily present today. In fact, the controversy around Evola’s work perfectly illustrates why Evola revolted against the modern world.
We at Inner Traditions do not agree with all of Evola’s ideas. Further, Evola’s ideas developed from his earliest days as a Dadaist through his defense and promotion of the ideas of Tradition. We publish Evola because he is one of the most significant esoteric philosophers of the twentieth century and has left us a very important oeuvre.

Marco Visconti is having none of this, and his piece further points to this piece by Sam Block who is having even less of it:

Why, then, do people consider this rubbish to be some sort of grand luminary? I mean, I can guess: the man was an egotistical, hyperfascist, woman-hating, violent abuser of not just other human beings but of human dignity itself.  He was barely even an armchair magician (who literally failed at becoming anything more) and was more interested in romanticizing his own ahistorical, easily-wrecked notion of “tradition” that acclaimed the superiority of white men more than anything and anyone else, and such a view is replete throughout all his writings.  As a result of that and his sick self-aggrandizing desire to get people riled up in the usual ways bigotry likes to do, his influence continues to dominate in neo-fascist occult circles and in modern far-right political circles as well.  The sooner everyone drops his shit and leaves him to be swallowed by the sands of time in favor of literally anyone better (and it’s genuinely easy to find anyone better, and I do mean anyone), the better off we’ll all be.

For myself, I’ve actually had reservations about Inner Traditions for a lot longer than this, dating back to when I read Otto Rahn‘s books, which they published, in 2009. (I remember the year cos I was partway through Lucifer’s Court when the stroke happened and I wound up finishing it after getting home again.) Rahn was one of the stranger figures of Nazi Germany—he’s been called the real-life Indiana Jones—though I gather he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about Nazism as such; he got recommended to Himmler by Karl Maria Wiligut (an even stranger individual) based on his first book Crusade Against the Grail, and Himmler basically funded research for the second, Lucifer’s Court.

This latter volume contained a small detail highlighted by translator Christopher Jones, namely a frankly anti-semitic quote about Europe being cleansed of “Jewish mythology”. The importance of this line is that it’s apparently actually by Arthur Schopenhauer, not Rahn, and that it was inserted by the latter’s editor for reasons best known only to himself; Jones observes that it’s not actually in Rahn’s manuscript. For reasons best known only to himself, though, Jones chose to leave it in his translation. I mean… textual fidelity is a noble aim, but you acknowledged that was an excrescence on Rahn’s original text. There was no reason to include this overtly Nazi-supporting statement.

So I’ve viewed Inner Traditions with some suspicion ever since, especially after I discovered they were publishing Evola as well; they have some interesting titles in their catalogue but, to be honest, I have misgivings about paying for them so I obtain them through *cough* dubious electronic means. My only direct acquaintance with Evola is The Doctrine of Awakening, which I found quite tedious and don’t recall finishing, but I knew of him via Joscelyn Godwin’s book Arktos. The latter is a remarkable book on a remarkable subject, which Wiki sums up as “discuss[ing] pseudoscientific theories about surviving Nazi elements in Antarctica” and a lot more weirder stuff than that; a fascinating book full of right-wing lunacy that I never got the feeling Godwin was in any way sympathetic to.

Godwin is also Inner Traditions’ Evola translator. Oh.

Godwin also wrote this article about him. Oy. New Dawn was a dubious enough venue for this defence of Evola, but it had originally appeared many years earlier in a journal called TYR, which was frankly even more dubious. Whether or not the latter was specifically pro-fascist or neo-Nazi as such, the people involved with it undeniably leaned that way; editor Joshua Buckley was part of an actual neo-Nazi organisation, another editor Collin Cleary is now part of the avowedly white nationalist Counter-Currents Publishing, and editor number three, Michael Moynihan… well. Contributors included people like Stephen McNallen (white supremacist), Alain de Benoist (all-round fascist shit), Nigel Pennick (unfamiliar with, but apparently yikes-some), and Stephen Flowers (questionable at best, presently associated with Arcana Europa who publish several of the aforementioned, including all four issues of TYR. And a volume of interviews with “Edred” co-edited by Moynihan and neo-Nazi Ian Read. It gets whiter and whiter, eh…)

And, of course, Joscelyn Godwin. I don’t know if he’s the white nationalist I’ve seen him accused of being, but he’s clearly moved in murky circles. I loved Arktos. I dislike the thought that Godwin was, even then, more in tune with the cranks he wrote about in that book… or, perhaps worse, became more so after writing about them. Anyway, he was supposed to provide Inner Traditions with a defence of them publishing Evola, but for whatever reason didn’t, forcing them to publish that kind of cringing statement themselves… as for me, for some reason back in 2018 I attempted a reading program of prominent right-wing authors cos I thought having some direct acquaintance of their actual work might be useful and Evola was on the list, but I only got as far as The Camp of the Saints (which you may recall me describing as “evil” recently) before I already couldn’t stomach any more. I may yet read Revolt Against the Modern World, though, cos I do still have that. Unpaid for, of course.