Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism

5. The Yoga of Power: Sex Magic, Tantra, and Fascism in Twentieth-Century Europe

5 The Yoga of Power Sex Magic, Tantra, and Fascism in Twentieth-Century Europe Sex is the “greatest magical force in nature”; an impulse acts in it which suggests the mystery of the One, even when almost everything in the relationship between man and woman deteriorates into animal embraces and is exhausted . . . in a faded idealizing sentimentality . . . . The metaphysics of sex survives in the very cases where, in looking at wretched mankind and the vulgarity of infinite lives of infinite races—endless masks . . . of the Absolute Man seeking the Absolute Woman . . . —it is hard to overcome a feeling of disgust and revolt. julius evola, Metafisica del sesso (The Metaphysics of Sex) The superior and even transcendent dimensions of sex, known by the world of Tradition in multiple forms, have been lost. . . . The world of Tradition effectively knows a sexual sacrum and a magic of sex. What constantly transpires in countless symbols and customs from all parts of the world is the acknowledgment of sex as a creative and primordial force, rather than as a generative power. julius evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Revolt against the Modern World) It might seem at first surprising that the modern literature on sexual magic—so much of which centers around a powerful ideal of social and political liberation —should also be connected to a movement typically associated in most contemporary American minds with political oppression and lack of freedom—namely, fascism. In fact, one of the most influential twentieth-century authors on Tantra and the spiritual aspects of sexuality was Baron Julius Evola, who would also emerge as one of the most influential figures in European fascism from the 1920s to the present. Evola himself was never officially a member of the Fascist Party—he was in fact quite critical of Mussolini in certain respects—and many recent scholars have bent over backward to try to distance him from fascism altogether, arguing that he was instead primarily an extreme “Traditionalist,” in the spiritual sense of the term.1 However, Evola was clearly a powerful force in the intellectual development of fascism and is still widely read by neo-fascist groups 140 in Europe today. Indeed, he has been described variously as “Italy’s leading racial philosopher and the chief ideologue of the country’s terrorist radical right”2 and “the most important thinker of the right radical Neo-Fascist revisionists.”3 In addition to his political work,however,Evola was extremely interested in Tantra and the spiritual aspects of sexuality, writing several major works on the subject such as Yoga della potenza (TheYoga of Power) and Metafisica del sesso (The Metaphysics of Sex). Indeed, he saw in the radical, transgressive practices of Tantra the most extreme, even violent techniques most needed in this most extreme and violent period in modern history.Even now, his works on the topic are regularly republished and widely read in esoteric, occultist, and neo-pagan circles throughout Europe and the United States. This chapter will look closely at Baron Evola’s early life and writings in the context of fascism and other movements in early-twentieth-century Europe . As I hope to show, Evola found (or at least thought he had found) in Tantra and magic the most powerful solution to the ills of modern Western civilization, which he saw as corrupt, degenerate, and nearing its own selfdestruction . As Marshall Berman observes, many intellectuals of the early twentieth century were experiencing an acute sense of loss, displacement, and dislocation amid the radical transformations of modern Europe. With the rapid new technological innovations, the breakdown of old agrarian culture in the face of urbanization, and the waning power of religious authority in the face of modern science, it seemed to many that “all that is solid was melting into air”;“This atmosphere . . . of agitation and turbulence,psyThe Yoga of Power / 141 Figure 13. Julius Evola. chic dizziness and drunkenness, expansion of experiential possibilities and destruction of moral boundaries and personal bonds, self-enlargement and self-derangement is the atmosphere in which modern sensibility is born.”4 Like Benito Mussolini and many Italian intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, Evola was particularly concerned with the issues of national strength and “virility.” For Evola,modern Italy—indeed,all of modernWestern culture— was in a state of degeneration, owing in large part to the misunderstanding and abuse of sexuality. In the Eastern traditions...