In the belly of Saturn
| Autor | Antonio Carlos Gonçalves Filho |
| Ocupação do Autor | Aluno de doutorado no programa de pós-graduação em Direito, na Universidade Federal do Paraná (PPGHIS/UFPR) (área de concentração: direitos humanos e democracia; linha de pesquisa: cidadania e inclusão social), em Curitiba |
| Páginas | 422-445 |
422 • CAPÍTULO 15
I
n the belly of Saturn
IN THE BELLY OF SATURN
EN EL VIENTRE DE SATURNO
Antonio Carl os Gonçalves Filho123
Abstract: is work discusses within the camp of study of
State of exception and authoritarian political practices, the percep-
tion of “time” as understood by fascist thinker Julius Evola. e re-
search was conducted by studying texts written by Evola himself,
while also reading other works with the intent of understand and
deconstruct the author views on the subject of time. As a result of
this research, is possible to understand Evola´s theory on time, and,
more broadly speaking, the understanding of time of fascist thinking
itself, as self-destructive. But, at the same time, the narratives build
around Evola´s perceptions reveal the power of emotional meaning
within the political eld. ese narratives give emotional signican-
ce to Evola´s theories that grow beyond any rational understanding
of the end results brought by his perception. Evola didn´t build his
perception of time to function in any rational sense, but to be emo-
tionally resonant. e focus on building radical emotional truths
around political discourse is a method that can be explore as a di-
rect response to the fascist use of the same methods. Being able to
understand such practices may be not only useful, but, incredibly
necessary in order to counter authoritarian discourse.
1 Aluno de doutorado no programa de pós-graduação em Direito, na Universidade Federal do Paraná (PPGHIS/UFPR) (área de
concentração: direitos humanos e democracia; linha de pesquisa: cidadania e inclusão social), em Curitiba.
e-mail: antonio.carloslho@hotmail.com
2 Trata-se de trabalho completo para ser publicado nos Anais do IV Congresso Internacional de Direito Constitucional e Filosoa
Política
3 Essa pesquisa, outrossim, também se apensa na projeção de minha tese de doutoramento, sob orientação da profª. Dra. Vera
Karam de Chueiri.
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •423
Keywords: Time, fascism, narrative.
Resumen: Este trabajo discute dentro del campo de estudio
del Estado de excepción y las prácticas políticas autoritarias, la per-
cepción del “tiempo” tal como la entiende el pensador fascista Julius
Evola. La investigación se realizó mediante el estudio de textos es-
critos por el propio Evola, al mismo tiempo que fueron leídos otros
trabajos con la intención de comprender y deconstruir los puntos
de vista del autor sobre el tema del tiempo. Como resultado de esta
investigación, es posible entender la teoría de Evola quanto el tiempo
y, en términos más generales, la comprensión del tiempo del pensa-
miento fascista en sí mismo, como autodestructivo. Pero, al mismo
tiempo, las narrativas construidas alrededor de las percepciones de
Evola revelan el poder del signicado emocional dentro del campo
político. Estas narraciones dan un signicado emocional a las teorías
de Evola que crecen más allá de cualquier comprensión racional de
los resultados nales traídos por por su percepción. Evola no cons-
truyó su percepción del tiempo para funcionar en ningún sentido
racional, sino para ser emocionalmente resonante. El enfoque en la
construcción de verdades emocionales radicales en torno al discur-
so político es un método que puede explorarse como una respuesta
directa al uso fascista de los mismos métodos. Ser capaz de com-
prender tales prácticas puede ser no solo útil, sino increíblemente
necesario para contrarrestar el discurso autoritario.
Palabras clave: Tiempo, fascismo, narrativa.
Prelude
In 1819, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya purchased a
place known as “House of the Deaf Man” (Quinta del Sordo)4. Iro-
nically enough, at the time he moved to said residence he was alre-
ady nearly deaf himself5. Within the walls of that house, the painter
4 LUBOW, Arthur. e Secret of the Black Paintings. Disponível em:
cret-of-the-black-paintings.html>. Acesso em: 28-11- 2019.
5 d, ibidem.
424 • CAPÍTULO 15
created a series of 14 haunting paintings that were later called the
“Black Paintings” (Pinturas negras)6. One of them depicts a parti-
cularly iconic scene: an old man with large, insane eyes, holding a
smaller, beheaded corpse. He holds it so tightly, that you can notice
the tips of his ngers being of a lighter color than the rest of his
body, so strong his grip on the carcass. e old man is much larger
than the dead body, like he is a giant holding a normal human, or an
adult grabbing a child. e man had just nish eating the head of the
corpse and is devouring one of its arms.
is painting is known as “Saturn Devouring His Son” (Sa-
turno devorando a su hijo). Art historian Fred Licht considers this
painting to be ‘’essential to our understanding of the human condi-
tion in modern times’’ as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is to our
grasp of the 16th century7.
ere is plenty to discuss regarding this very image. Saturn,
of course, is the roman name for Chronos, the titan who embodies
time8. e devouring time. e image of Goya’s painting is striking
and could lead to plenty of dierent interpretations and studies. For
the purposes of this article, I will invoke the image of this painting
to symbolize a very specic kind of devouring time, the one repre-
sented by the fascist perspective of time. To this end, this article will
rst get into further detail about a general notion of what is fascism
and how a fascist perspective of time would look like.
Aer this initial moment, the article will discuss the pers-
pective of time of a particularly inuential fascist thinker, Julius Evo-
la. e goal here is to acquire a deeper understanding not only of
Evola’s conception of time, but where such interpretation would ul-
timately lead. Finally, the last chapters of the article will be centered
around the narrative that
Evola created to justify his views, and how this can help us
understand the importance of emotional narratives to give content
and meaning to concepts.
By staring at the ideas and concepts defended by people like
Evola, one must ask: is there anything there that can help us move
away from the belly of Saturn?
6 d, ibidem.
7 d, ibidem.
8 https://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanKronos.html
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •425
1. The ghoul ate the doorstep
Ghouls is a mythical creature known for violating graves
and devouring the dead. e being hunt for what was preserved
from the past and devour it in order to sustain itself, to continue its
own existence and survive and thrive beyond is own time. e ghoul
is, in other word, a being that devours the time that pass, in order to
continue his existence in the time that remains.
“Why discussing about ghouls?”, you may ask. Well, in a
certain way, fascist “philosophy” (I will explain my hesitation soon
enough) also heavily depends on the act of “devouring time”, eating
the past and regurgitate something else in return. e fascist unders-
tanding of time is a fundamental point for the continuous existence
of this “ideology” (again, I will clarify this hesitation) for many de-
cades. In fact, Umberto Eco very directly point out the perspective
of time, the notion of tradition to be rst feature of what he calls “the
ur- fascist” or “the eternal fascist”;
e rst feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Tra-
ditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only
was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought aer
the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic
era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Medi-
terranean basin, people of dierent religions (most of them
indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started drea-
ming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history.
is revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had
remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgot-
ten languages – in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes,
in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.
is new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not
only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of dierent
forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tole-
rate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a
silver of wisdom, and
whenever they seem to say dierent or incompatible things
426 • CAPÍTULO 15
it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same
primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning.
Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we
can only keep interpreting its obscure message.9
In other words, “time” is understood as “tradition”, with the
idea that “truth” is not something to be found or search for, rather,
is an ancient knowledge, a vision granted to a chosen people that is
beyond all questioning or doubt. Is far more than simple “reality”, it
is an almost divine, or explicitly divine, certainty, a gospel or sorts.
e irony, however, is that the past which those traditions are based
on don´t have to necessarily based around any historical vision of
the past. Like author Jason Stanley had point it out in his book How
Fascism Works, the past adored by fascist movements is something
closer to an idea of the past, an idealization. Stanley explain that this
worshipped past depends heavily on either sanitize, or at out erase
the inconvenient aspects of its own historical past10. e narrative of
the past presented by the fascist speech is inherently nationalist but
needs to turn the history of said nation into something glorious and
wonderous, that holds an already perfect way of live that just need to
be reached once again11. So, the past adored by fascist, and the tradi-
tions supported by them, is structured by an emotional and mythic al
view, and not by what we could call “the modern rational thought”.
In fact, the apparent contradictions and, sometimes, bluntly obvious
historical mistakes and oen conspiratorial narratives that are heard
within fascist speeches are not a bug, but a feature, they are neces-
sary to create the narrative that lead fascist groups into action;
Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s
sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken befo-
re, or without, any previous reection. inking is a form
of emasculation. erefore culture is suspect insofar as it is
9 ECO, Umberto. Ur-Fascism. Disponível em: . Acesso em: 08-07-
2019
10 STANLEY, Jason. Como Funciona o Fascismo. Porto Alegre/RS: L&PM, 2019. p. 29-30
11 Id, ibidem. p. 30.
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •427
identied with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectu-
al world has always been a symptom of Ur- Fascism, from
Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I
reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as
“degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “eete snobs,” “univer-
sities are a nest of reds.” e ocial Fascist intellectuals were
mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal
intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.12
Is by those terms that fascist followers understand time, by
looking at the past, but a version of the past that ts with perfection
their understanding of how the past should be, of how their version
of history must have happened. is is the reason why I hesitate on
calling fascism a “philosophy”, because a lot of what can be dened
as characteristics of fascism don`t relay, or in fact, at out condemn
any attempt to “pursue” the truth. “Truth” is already presented, one
just need to accept it.
To get a bit deeper into this mindset, perhaps we should be-
come something of a ghoul ourselves, digging deep into the grave of
a fascist writer, in order to keep this very text alive. Perhaps the most
eective way to understand this perspective of time, is by examining
the way this concept was dened by a quite inuential fascist writer,
one whose views still reverberate in the speech of many nationalist
and neo-conservative movements. A man whose echo can still be
quite well heard.
Let´s talk about Julius Evola.
2. The phantom at the street
Talking about Julius Evola can be both frustrating and darkly
funny. Frustrating because of the lengths in which is possible to see
his speech being re-appropriate by, for example, the american alt-
-right, whose members have openly acknowledged Evola13. Darkly
funny, because that had been a very conscious eort to sanitize the
views of a man who never seem to take much eort to hide the natu-
12 ECO, Acesso em: 08-07-2019.
13 HOROWITZ, Jason. Steve Bannon Cited Italian inker Who Inspired Fascists. Disponível em:
428 • CAPÍTULO 15
re of his beliefs. A fascinating example of that is in the introduction
of Evola´s book Revolt Against e Modern Word, written by H. T.
Hansen. In this brief text, titled A Short Introduction to Julius Evola,
Hansen attempt to so certain views of Evola, with a good example
being the anti-Semitism in his texts. Hansen argues that Evola could
not be call an anti-Semite, even thought he had written an introduc-
tion to an edition to Protocols of e Elders of Zion14 (the infamous
forged document that creates a conspiracy in which a cabal of Jewish
leaders planned to take over the world) in that same document he
stated that “We must say at once that in this matter we personally
cannot follow a certain fanatical anti-Semitism, especially that which
sees the Jews everywhere as deus ex machina and by which one nally
leads oneself into a kind of trap.”15
Amusingly, Hansen ignores a large part of Evola´s text, par-
ticularly when he states that the veracity or not of the document is
irrelevant because it “speaks truth” of both the state of the modern
word and “the Jews”:
us, the problem of ‘authenticity’ brings us back again to
that of ‘veracity’. As far as ‘authenticity’ is concerned, the ou-
tcome of the trial of Berne is, as we have explained, negative
: the prosecution did not succeed in proving that the ‘Pro-
tocols’ were false. But, legally, the defence is not required to
prove the authenticity of an impugned document ; it is up
to the prosecution to prove its falsity. But since, despite all
the eorts of Judaism - the concerted testimonies, the thesis
of ‘plagiarism’, the tendentious documents provided by the
Soviets, the manoeuvres which succeeded in rendering all
the documents of the defence inadmissible (at least, in the
court of rst instance), an extremely one-sided assessor’s re-
port by Loosli, a notorious philo-Semite, and so on - they
did not succeed in proving this falsity, the eld is clear, and
the question of ‘authenticity’ is liquidated, that is to say, it is
once again subordinate to a double test of superior character,
which is, let us repeat again : 1) the proof by the facts ; 2) the
14 HANSEN, H.T. A Short Introduction to Julius Evola. In: Revolt Against e Modern World. Rochester/Vermont: Inner Tra-
dition International, 1995. p. xx.
15 EVOLA, Julius. Preface to “e Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Disponível em:
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •429
proof by the nature of the Jewish spirit.16
He goes on to say that “jewish culture” exists to “tendentiou-
sly exalt what is inferior in man, to spread a sort of terror, calculated
to favour self-abandonment to obscure forces and to pave the way
for occult inuences of the sort described in the ‘Protocols’”17 and
that is “the true meaning of cultural Judaism”. It requires an impres-
sive amount of denial, or bad faith, to read this text and ignores the
glaring anti-Semitic views expressed in its context, or to ignore the
haunting call to action made by Evola in his conclusion;
e ‘Protocols’ conclude : “But it is too late for them” - i.e.,
for us. Our view is the opposite of this. At the present time,
forces are leaping everywhere to the reconquest, because the
destiny to which Europe seemed condemned may be averted.
ese forces must be completely conscious of the tasks and
principles which inexibly determine their action, and must
have the courage to be radical, rstly on the spiritual plane,
and to reject all compromise, to prepare the conditions of the
formation of an international traditional front, and continue
in this direction until the conict “of such a nature that the
world has never known its like” nds them united in a single
robust, unshakeable, irresistible block. 18
Evola was an anti-semite and was very much a fascist, one
whose writings and names don’t carry the same historical baggage
as, for example Adolf Hitler, or Heinrich Himmler, and who can
more comfortably be understood as a “traditionalist”. One that is
still referenced and named in nationalist and neo-reactionary mo-
vements to this day. Is, indeed, a quite pertinent choice as far as the
understanding of fascism is concerned.
With that in mind, let’s investigate what the phantom has to
say about time.
16 Id, ibidem.
17 Id, ibidem.
18 EVOLA. Acesso em: 08-07-2019.
430 • CAPÍTULO 15
3. Moloch in the city
In his book Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola makes it
very clear that he does not consider the distinctions between what he
calls the “modern world” with what he denes as a “the traditional
world” to be purely chronological. In fact, he believes to be a deep
spiritual separation between modern men and what he refers to as
“traditional men”, to the point that the two models of societies he
envisioned, may as well be separated realities.
Evola is very direct over his feelings toward those two “worl-
ds”. While explaining when the “modern world” took its rst steps
he points out a period “between the eighth and the sixth centuries
B.C., as can be concluded from the sporadic and characteristic alte-
rations in the forms of the social and spiritual life of many peoples
that occurred during this time”19. He denes this time period as the
moment when “the rst forces of decadence began to be tangibly
manifested”20. e authors wordings are rarely subtle in their inten-
tions, modernity is framed as degenerate and rotten in its very core,
understanding that going “beyond” the modern world, is the only
way to comprehend its “true meaning”21. e author was openly
anti-egalitarian and anti-rationalist, understanding the democratic
ideology that proclaimed all human beings equalin dignity to be “ei-
ther an abstract and ctitious concept, or the nal stage in a process
of degeneration, dissolution and collapse”22.
According to Evola, the opposition between the modern un-
derstanding of historical times and “mythological times” is qualita-
tive and substantial, with the author acknowledging the experience
of time of “traditional men” as “superior23”. According to Evola, the
“traditional men” had a “supertemporal sense of time and in this
sensation lives every form of this world”24. In this perspective, the
“traditional civilizations” had a contact with a “metaphysical reality
that bestows upon the experience of time in a dierent ‘mythologi-
cal’ form based on rhythm and space rather than chronological or-
19 EVOLA, Julius. Revolt Against e Modern World. Rochester/Vermont: Inner Tradition International, 1995.p. xxxi.
20 Id, ibidem.
21 Id, ibidem.
22 EVOLA, Julius. e Path of Cinnabar: An Intellectual Autobiography. Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009. p. 170
23 EVOLA, 1995. p. xxxii
24 Id, ibidem.
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •431
der”25. erefore, Evola understands that the “traditional men” were
characterized by “the feeling of what is beyond time”26. To Evola, the
modern rationality is existentially disgusting, a set of made up ru-
les that only separate humanity to certainties that were already pre-
sent the mythological times. Times of legend, the ancient structured
traditions of the family, the submissive role of women, all of those
factors were timeless assertions of a higher reality, one that could
not be conceived, let alone understood, by the “degenerate modern
mentality”, and such attempts would be comparable to a monkey at-
tempting to understand the thoughts of a god. Or, in the words of
the author himself:
Having lost that contact by being caught in the illusion of a
pure owing, a pure escaping, a yearning that pushes one’s
goal further and further away, and being caught in a process
that cannot and does not intend to be satised in any achie-
vement as it is consumed in terms of “history” and “beco-
ming”—this is indeed one of the fundamental characteristics
of the modem world and the limit that separates two eras,
not only in a historical sense but most of all in an ideal, me-
taphysical, and morphological sense27.
e use of the word “history” in itself shows Evola´s rejec-
tion of the modern comprehension of time, in its chronological “ra-
tional” sense, but perhaps more telling is his use of the word “beco-
ming”. e notion of changing, transforming and searching, instead
of simply being, existing within a grander sense of existence. What´s
fascinating in all of this is that Evola
not only creates this clear duality between “traditional” and
“modern” he also makes as if those are the two conceivable appro-
aches of human society that could possibly exists, that constantly
repeats each other in the feud of time;
erefore, the fact that civilizations of the traditional type
are found in the past becomes merely accidental: the mo-
dem world and the traditional world may be regarded as two
25 Id, ibidem.
26 Id, ibidem.
27 Id, ibidem.
432 • CAPÍTULO 15
universal types and as two a priori categories of civilization.
Nevertheless, that accidental circumstance allows us to state
with good reason that wherever a civilization is manifested
that has as its center and substance the temporal element,
there we will nd a resurgence, in a more or less dierent
form, of the same attitudes, values, and forces that have de-
ned the modem era in the specic sense of the term; and
that wherever a civilization is manifested that has as its cen-
ter and substance the supernatural element, there we will
nd a resurgence, in more or less dierent forms, of the same
meanings, values, and forces that have dened archaic types
of civilization. is should clarify the meaning of what I have
called the “dualism of civilization” in relation to the terms
employed (“modem” and “traditional”) and also prevent
any misunderstandings concerning the “traditionalism” that
I advocate. “ese did not just happen once, but they have
always been”…28
ere is something grandiose about this, these two models
of reality, one degenerate and decadent, and the other ideal and real,
facing each other through eternity. e scope is epic in an almost
Homerian sense, something that could be notice in the already men-
tion introduction that Evola wrote to e Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, there, the narrative of the ancient cabal of Jews ready to execute
their Iluminati-esque scheme to rule the planet turns the rise of the
modern world into a conscious eort made by ill-intended enemies
who seek to corrupt the beauty and purity of the “traditional world”;
e positive part, which we have traced in the ‘Protocols’, is
that from which we have shown how, in all the destructive
processes of the modern world, there is something which did
not happen ‘by chance’, something which shows a ‘plan’ and
the presence of hidden forces. We have already talked about
the rôle which the Jew has played therein, and we think that
it is wrong to conclude that everything he has done, he has
done with the ideal of the spiritual empire, as described in
the ‘Protocols’, in view. And even if this were not the case, for
us who are not Jewish, the result would be the same, for we
dispute Israel’s right to consider itself as the ‘chosen people’
and to claim an Empire which would imply the submission
28 EVOLA, 1995. p. xxxii xxxiii
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •433
of all the other races. We are in no way willing to grant abso-
lution for this crime. We know all the greatness of our former
imperial, aristocratic and spiritual Europe, and we know that
that greatness was destroyed. We fought against the forces
which caused that destruction, and we know what rôle the
Jews played then, and play now, within it, and we know that
they can be found necessarily, today, in all the most virulent
centres of international revolution.29
So, the tension between modernity and tradition and the cy-
cle between those two perspectives is not even natural, is a struggle
in which a hated adversary attempts to pervert what´s natural and
truthful. erefore, the ght against such threats is heroic, and those
who are willing to enter in this battle are virtuous, as long as their
side is in order to resurrect the “imperial, aristocratic and spiritual
Europe” of old. e struggle is unavoidable, and victory is essential.
In those terms, time represent something that should be reclaim, the
very concept of time must be reestablished to is traditional reality
and be wiped out of its degeneration, brought by modern thought.
One of the most interesting aspects concerning Evola´s
views is how the conict seems so immediate and urgent. In a sense,
the moment, the time to react is always now, and, by making the
threat not only economic or political, but also spiritual, the need to
act is forever urgent. Aer all by turning the decadence brought by
modern thought a rotting of the spirit, the chances of “xing” this
situation, of “cleaning” the society by bringing back the beautiful
and lost traditional world is, at the same time, an immediate and
necessary action, but also a seemingly impossible goal to reach. How
do we truly clean the rotten modern world if we are already part of
it? More than that, since Evola understand that the coming of the
modern world was not a process of historical change, but a conspi-
ratorial action committed by a corrupted force, in other words, an
“enemy”, then who is this adversary? is “Sheitan”? Well, one thing
is certain, unlike, say, the nazi party, who put “the Jews” as the main
enemy to be fought, Evola goes one step beyond, he understand “the
Jews” as simply another face of a seemingly higher power, an almost
29 EVOLA. Acesso em: 08-07-2019.
434 • CAPÍTULO 15
abstract force of corruption,
Besides, the ‘Protocols’ oen speak imprecisely about Ju-
daism and Freemasonry, so that one reads “Judeo-Masonic
conspiracy”, “our divided Free-Masonry”, and at the bottom
of the rst edition : “signed by the representatives of Sion
of the 33rd degree”. Since the theory that Freemasonry is
exclusively a creation and instrument of Judaism is, for va-
rious reasons, untenable - see our ‘e relations between
Freemasonry and Judaism’, in Vita Italiana, June 1937, where
we show that the judaisation of Freemasonry occurred essen-
tially in the eighteenth century - it follows that it is necessary
to refer to a much larger network of corrupting occult forces,
which we are even inclined to believe is not purely human.30
e enemy is ethereal, maybe unhuman, is a large network
of corrupt forces, “they”, “the enemy” have less to do with some fa-
thomable threat, such as other nations or other cultures, and are
closer in concept with Sauron, the Shadow in the East, or Cthulhu,
e Great Dreamer, mythological forces that could not be debated or
reasoned with, Leviathans to be faced in a battle beyond time.
Such an attitude results in a scenario in which anyone can be
potentially one with the “enemy”. Evola have oer an understanding
of “the enemy” that perfectly ts into his overall perspective on so-
ciety, creating a adversary that is broad enough to turn every single
opposition into part of a larger existential threat.
With all that in mind, there is something that must be ques-
tioned regarding Evola´s perspectives, a lingering doubt regarding
that man´s “philosophy”, in this epic tale of struggle against the mo-
dern world, what´s the ultimate endgame? What Evola´s teachin-
gs ultimately lead? e reason to make such questionings is a very
simple one: by Evola´s own admission, his perspective of traditional
times is not guided by a modern historical perception of the past.
Rather, he is guided by a purely mythological view of what the tradi-
tional times look like. Even the historical examples that he brings up
are very specic traditions of widely dierent cultures, either ancient
Nordics of old China, never getting to deep into what made those
cultures unique from each other and only pointing out what they
30 EVOLA. Acesso em: 08-07-2019.
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •435
may have had in common, in order to serve his larger narrative of
a lost traditional world. And the truly brilliant aspect of his logic is
that if one point it out any error or lost nuance in Evola´s picture of
the ancient past, he can simply write o as an ignorant and dege-
nerate “modern” narrative, a bandage that tries to obscure our eyes
from the truth.
Greatness and meaning are forever things that need to be
reclaimed something stolen that must be found, and for that to ha-
ppened, one must be willing to destroy the thieves. e single most
remarkable thing about such views, is that Julius Evola´s only true
base of how things were supposed to be is his own narrative, a my-
thology that he believes must be willed into reality. Such views create
a world, a reality, in which we should forever look into a reection
of a past and bring back traditional world that was truly real, a re-
turn of the never was. In this sense, is almost the opposite of what
philosopher Giorgio Agamben explained in his essay e Time that
Remains when he made reference to the concept of the tornada. In
this sense a poem is dened by Agamben as “an organism or a tem-
poral machine that, from the start, strains towards its end”31. For the
sake of avoiding a lesser description of Agamben’s ideas, I shall use
his exact words:
What is peculiar to the sestina is that the status of the repe-
atedend words changes, in the sense that the return of ho-
mophony asin typically rhymed poems, the nal syllables is
replaced by thereappearance of the six end words in the six
stanzas, in a complex but equally regulated order. At the end,
the tornada recapitulates the end words by dispersing them
within its three lines.
(…)
It is not that there is another time, corning from who-knows-
-where, that would substitute for chronological time; to the
contrary, what we have is the same time that organizes it-
31 AGANBEM, Giorgio. e Time at Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford University Press: Stan-
ford/California, 2005. p. 79.
436 • CAPÍTULO 15
self through its own somewhat hidden internal pulsation, in
order to make place for the time of the poem. en, at the
very end, when the movement of cruciform retrogradation is
fullled and the poem seems condemned to repeat itself, the
tornada returns to and recapitulates the rhyming end words
in a new sequence, simultaneously exposing their singularity
along with their secret connectedness.32
Agamben uses a concept of poetry in order to build the con-
cept of his understanding of time. But Agamben connects his com-
prehension of time directly with the notion of change, in fact, as far
as the author understands, the presence of change, of the tornada,
is a fundamental aspect of the time that remains. By contrast, the
conception of time in Julius Evola is more similar to another term,
not of poetry, but of music. e term I’m referring to is the ritornello,
dened by Bohumil Med as a signal that determines the repetition of
a musical excerpt33. e sign of the ritornello, implies, therefore, re-
petition, signies the necessity to return to a previously played point
in the music sheet. However, the music played by Evola has a quite
glaring issue, the repetition is not of the musical excerpt itself, but
of a very specic memory of it. e music is demanded, forced, be
played as if the idea of the excerpt and the actual content are one
of the same, and is demanded from not only the musicians, but the
audience itself, that they simply accept this version of the music as
the correct one. As if the music was always meant to sound like that.
Pointing out that the actual sheet has a dierent, even if ever so sli-
ghtly, content than what was being play is to betray the very meaning
of the music, despite that fact that a ritornello applied like this would
obviously lack harmony. For all those paying attention, the music
has clearly been broken.
e quest proposed by Evola is fascinating exactly becau-
se promises an endgame that seem to be palpable, but, in truth, is
about as impossible as the Atlantean myths of an “pure arian” race
which he so rmly believed. But him, and many of he´s followers,
believe that the return this “lost time” is an attainable goal, and that,
ultimately, is what makes his goals so inherently corrosive. e jour-
ney back to the “traditional world” can be understood as destructive
32 Id, ibidem. p. 82.
33 MED, Bohumil. Te oria da Música. Ed: 4. Brasília, DF: Musimed, 1996. p. 237.
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •437
by its very nature. One can argue that the battle for the “traditional
world” is not so dierent from the terrifying Moloch described by
Allen Ginsberg in his poem Howl, a beast kept alive by the very cre-
atures it devours;
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their
skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing
in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless!
Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!34
One could argue that the very quest for Evola´s traditional
world, is but a long path towards the belly of the beast.
4. In the belly of saturn
So far, we have discussed the perspective of “time” within
the ideas of Julius Evola without entering to deeply into how the
world dreamt by him would look like. Words like “tradition” and the
awkward amalgamation of dierent cultures made by Evola exist in
order to justify a very specic version of a traditional world. A narra-
tive. So even when we take aside the issues within the very structure
of time defended bola, is important to go into further detail over
what exactly the “glorious past” he seeks to bring into reality truly
amounts to.
So, which narrative did Evola defended in his work, one
which, as previously demonstrated, was understood by the author
as an unquestionable, absolute truth? ere is plenty to discuss in
this regard, I could, for instance, spend a remarkable amount of time
exposing on Evola´s beliefs on “Hyperborea”, essentially a land were
a spiritually superior race of “transcendent gold and blond” people
34 GINSBERG, Allen. Howl. Disponível em: tps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl>. Acesso em: 05-12-2019
438 • CAPÍTULO 15
(essentially, a “super-white race”) which were meant to exist in the
region near the north pole35. e location of this region, inciden-
tally, would also be where “the god of the Golden Age”, Kronos, lies
asleep36. e land of the “superior race”, in other words, would be
located exactly where the embodiment of time itself rest, a time´s
past, a once was that should be “reclaim”, and, at the same time, gi-
ves a mythological justication to white supremacy. e “divine” and
“traditional” just so happens to be embody and represented by the
white and the masculine. Since the “traditional world” is a self-evi-
dent truth that cannot be questioned or debated, that makes the role
of superiority of the white and the male to be an absolute.
e blatant racism in Evola’s writing is about as commonpla-
ce as his open misogyny. In this text I had made reference to what
Evola calls “the traditional man” and his role within the “traditional
world”. e use of the world “man” is not neutral, Evola very clearly
puts the male sex in a higher order within his narrative. ere is
quite a lot to cover in that regard, however the best way to sum up
his views on womanhood can be perfectly sum up with the following
quotes:
is occurs when the feminine principle, whose force is cen-
trifugal, does not turn to eeting objects but rather to a “vi-
rile” stability in which she nds a limit to her “restlessness.”
Stability is then transmitted to the feminine principle to the
point of intimately transguring all of its possibilities. What
occurs in these terms is a synthesis in a positive sense. What
is needed therefore is a radical “conversion” of the feminine
principle to the opposite principle; moreover, it is absolutely
necessary for the masculine principle to remain wholly it-
self. en, according to metaphysical symbols, the female
becomes the “bride” and also the “power” or instrumental
generating force that receives the primordial principle of the
immobile male activity and form: as in the doctrine of Sakti,
which can also be found in Aristotelianism and in Neoplato-
nism, though expressed in dierent terms, I have mentioned
the Tantric-Tibetan representations that are very signicant
in this regard, in which the male “bearer-of-
35 EVOLA, 1995. p. 190.
36 Id, ibidem, p. 193.
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •439
the-scepter” is immobile, cold, and substantiated with light
while the substance of Sakti, which envelops it and uses it as
its axis, is a ickering ame.37
And, nally;
A woman realizes herself as such and even rises to the same
level reached by a man as warrior and ascetic only as lover
and mother. ese are bipartitions of the same ideal strain;
just as there is an active heroism, there is also a passive he-
roism; there is a heroism of absolute annation and a he-
roism of absolute dedication.38
ose two examples are enough, I believe, to show exactly
how the “traditional world” idealized by Evola would look like. In
the traditional world, entire groups are spiritually bound to truly
unchangeable destinies, one were the heroic and the divine can only
belong to the male and the white respectively. at’s the endgame
of the traditional world, the imagined moment in time in which he
intended to forever try to return. e cycle in which he would lead
his followers deeper and deeper into the belly of Saturn.
As frustrating as can be following Evola’s beliefs from a pro-
gressive or democratic perspective, I argue that there is something
to be learned from his body of work. In particular, a fundamental
reason of why his perspectives managed to survive the tests of time.
Evola’s theories had little to no basis on reality, but he had something
fundamental that allow his echo to be heard decades aer his dea-
th. He could build a compelling narrative. Evola’s strong rejection of
rational thought is followed by an alternative that is as irrational as
it is epic, in both scope and supposed weight. In order words, Evola
was skilled in building an emotional narrative, that overlaps logic or
reason. And is hard to argue that such narratives, are not eective,
specially to those who are willing to listen.
A narrative construction like this allows for a very unique
emotional overlap, one that can guide masses into action. I argue that
37 EVOLA, 1995., p. 158.
38 Id, ibidem, 1995. p. 159.
440 • CAPÍTULO 15
this understanding of emotional narrative and emotional truths is,
in a way, a fundamental tool, because can be used to give something
powerful and central to any political project. is narrative give me-
aning.
I am far from the rst person to criticize the sanitized politi-
cal discourse oered by liberal politics. Chantal Moue had oered
a quite powerful argument that one of the greatest failures of liberal
democracy is the attempt of acting as if society and politics can live
within a neutral ground, something that Moue refers to as the post-
-political, that is, a scenario in which neoliberal globalization is seen
as a fate to be accepted, and where political questioning is reduced to
the simple study technical issues to be dealt by experts39. More to it,
Moue had argue that the rise of right-wing populist is due to the fact
that such groups are oen the only ones who seek to mobilize pas-
sions and create a collective form of identication40. Moue do not
believe that such narratives can be dealt with by the neutral appro-
ach of liberal democracies, instead, she defends the construction of
a collective, a “people”, resulted from the mobilization of common
defense of equality, and social justice, that will be possible to combat
the xenophobic discourse promoted by right-wing populism41.
What Moue is arguing, essentially, is the need to create a
narrative, something that will engage people to democratic values in
a way that goes beyond the rational acceptance of liberal democracy
and of politics as a politically neutral ground. Such an approach is
interesting because recognizes the need of a narrative to give support
to a political belief. Under that point of view, the rewards oered
by Evola’s writings start to become more understandable, his con-
ceptions of time, and the endless void in which it leads those who
attempt to bring back the traditional world, is ll with emotional
signicance. In this sense, the eort of authors like Chantal Moue
in understanding the appeal of right-populism and her goals of buil-
ding a narrative with a similar emotional weight than the ones oe-
red by right-wing populists is, in a way, the most eective response
to the ideology build it by Evola and by many groups that follows
very similar narratives that those defended by him (some even being
39 MOUFFE, Chantal. For a Le Wing Populism. Brooklyn/NW: Verso, 2018.
40 MOUFFE, Chantal. e End of Politics and the Challenge of Right-Wing Populism. In: PANIZZA,
Francisco. Populism and e Mirror of Democracy. Brooklyn/NW: Verso, 2005.
41 MOUFFE, 2018.
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •441
directly inspired by the author).
e quest for the traditional world is meaningless, the time
of eternal conict dreamt by Evola is self-destructive. But it is enga-
ging, and it managed to give meaning to mundane lives in a way that
is both fascinating and horrifying. If there is any lesson I could take
away from reading and learning about Julius Evola is that the right
narrative can lead endless crowds to happily march into an abyss,
willingly allowing Saturn to devour their esh, as they seek to bring
a return to something that was never there. ere is something to be
afraid of by a narrative like this, but there is also a lesson. Because
facing a belief based around such principles with a mask of neutra-
lity or reason can only lead to failure. Perhaps there is an inherent
need in these emotional truths, perhaps other values can be given as
much weight and meaning. Perhaps a dierent perception of time
can be sold with the same degree of importance that the doomed
time defended by Evola.
Perhaps the best response to a horror story, is not simply
taking away its mysticism. Is by telling a dierent story.
Conclusions
Societies are built on stories. at much was said by more
than enough over time in many dierent ways, by many dierent
people, from Joseph Campell to Benedict Anderson. One can look
at stories such as Romulus and Remos or the Arthurian legends to
see how much fantastic stories can be of extreme relevance to the
building of a nation, of a people, of a “us”. In a sense, Julius Evola
was another builder of stories, someone who attempted to unite a
group of people through a collective mythology. e tr uth, the drop
of honey that allows his poison to be swallow, is that this sense of
belonging, this larger story is necessary. e act of given content,
meaning to our place in society, in a nation, in time itself, is essential.
is requirement of meaning is so powerful that Benedict Anderson
had understood the birth of nationalism to be a way of lling the
hole le by religion in a post-enlightenment world42. ere is this
search, in other words, for a meaningful narrative, something that
42 ANDERSON, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London/UK: Verso,
Ed. 2. 2006. p. 10 – 11.
442 • CAPÍTULO 15
goes beyond the passive acceptance of a particular order or system as
“good”, or “necessary”. Evola knew quite well how to build a narrative
lled with meaning, an awful, backwards meaning, but a meaning
regardless. e kind that can make people willingly walk the long
path to the stomach of an old, insane, broken time. Not so dierent
from the monstrous Saturn imagined by Goya.
However, the acceptance of the need for a narrative can very
well serve a dierent purpose. e fact that stories, emotional tru-
ths, can have such hold over entire groups and communities, me-
ans that other values, other ideas, can be presented as meaningful
and important. e act of nding sense in narrative doesn´t need in
any way be the exclusive territory of people like Evola. at’s why I
brought into the text the gure of Chantal Moue, her propositions
are strongly based around the notion of not denying, but embracing
this need for passion within the political discourse, while defending
values that would certainly make the phantom of Evola jump out of
his monocle43.
I would like to present Julius Evola as a challenge, a worst-
-case scenario for where the rise of far-right ideas could ultimately
lead us. His narrative is packet with hate, intolerance and inequality,
along with the certainty that this is simply how the world was always
supposed to work. ere is a space to emotionally engaging narrati-
ves that can oer a better meaning, a better path.
ere are roads that can lead us out of the belly of Saturn.
We just need to build them.
43 MOUFFE, Chantal. Centrist politics will not defeat Boris Johnson’s rightwing populism. Disponível em:
26-11/2019.
ANTONIO CARLOS GONÇALVES FILHO •443
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