|
Julius Evola, Tendency of Sensorial Idealism, 1916
Evola - formless to formed
There is more to explore e.g. Julius Evola’s case for ‘formed individuality’ and its relationship to Theosis. Also, how does Massimo Scaligero’s relationship to Anthroposophy determine, if at all, the direction of his movement to or from oneness.
An essay by Roberto Bacci* moves us forward on the path to dealing with these issues. Bacci examines the essay Maschera e volto dello spiritualismo contemporaneo (1932) (Mask and face of contemporary spiritualism) which was Julius Evola’s criticism of Theosophism and its dissident offshoot Rudolf Steiner’s Anthropositivism amongst others.
Bacci discusses how Evola advocated the idea of consciousness as ‘one’ in the sense that it is unique and specific, the result of a process of individuation; meanwhile he censured Theosophy because it promoted a model of 'oneness' in the sense of a collective entity, resulting from levelling the differences into a homogeneous totality.
According to Evola, Theosophy correctly sets as a goal for the individual the achievement of an ‘independent self-consciousness,’ but then it gets side-tracked by the anti-aristocratic notion of ‘social collective progress’ – a spiritual evolution across the ages involving all human beings indiscriminately – and ends up promoting an ideal of unity understood as immanence of the ‘One Life’ in every being.
Though Evola never said it in so many words, he must have recognised that in its obsession with oneness, theosophy served as a ‘spiritual’ arm of globalism and its two faces, financial and Marxist.
In Maschera e volto dello spiritualismo contemporaneo Evola made the case for the ‘One Life’ being the point of departure and not the arrival in the transmutation of consciousness. The ‘One Life’ is the ‘undifferentiated substrate’, the forest out of which the individual carves out its own clearing of ‘formed individuality’; it is not – as the Theosophists misunderstood it – a final state of perfection in which distinct individuals dissolve themselves, losing their identity in a pantheistic fusion with the Whole.
The Theosophist cosmography of ultimate Oneness draws upon Platonism, Lurianic Kabbalah and Spinozism. Any sign of individual specificity is erased. In opposition to this view, Evola exalted an ascetic-alchemical teaching which aimed at refining the inner core of individuality as a grain of pure gold. Transmutation – stated Evola – must always proceed from ‘formless universality’ to ‘formed individuality’ and not the other way around.
It is the latter offering of transmutation with which I agree in my book Child of Encounter, in which I condemn the whole of the accepted western philosophico-literary canon as being malignly influenced by Lurianic Kabbalah and Spinozism into promoting pathways to undifferentiated Oneness.
*In pulling together the above working notes, I am indebted to Roberto Bacci and his essay Transmutation and Homogenization of Consciousness in Italian Esotericism during the Fascist Period: Mario Manlio Rossi’s Spaccio dei Maghi and Julius Evola’s Maschera e Volto dello Spiritualismo Contemporaneo.
© John Dunn.
|
