Claudio Mutti, “Evola’s Diplomatic Activities in Vienna, Prague, Bucharest and Berlin” (1996)

‘L’activité diplomatique d’Evola à Vienne, Prague, Bucarest et Berlin,’ Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes, 24 (1996). Italian original, Pagine Libere (March 1996). PDF of this version here; original here.

Some time in 1938, at a date unknown to us, the Ahnenerbe brought to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler a secret report on the activities of the Baron Evola that ended with the following injunction: ‘Keep him from exercising any influence in the future on leaders and functionaries of the Party and the State; survey his propagandistic activities in neighbouring countries’ (see the document published by B. Zoratto in L’Italia settimanale [9 February 1994] titled ‘Fermate Evola, firmate SS’) [See also H. T. Hansen, introduction to Julius Evola, Revolt against the Modern World (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), p. xviii.]. Moreover, we can concur with Piero Di Vona, who shows, in his Evola, Guénon, De Giorgio (Barzano, 1993), that the relationship between Evola and the Third Reich was ‘very complicated and obscure.’ Nevertheless, from the fact that Evola was suspected of being able to ‘influence’ ‘structures as difficult to penetrate as the Party and State of National-Socialist Germany,’ Prof. Giorgio Galli quite rightly deduces, in his preface to Marco Fraquelli’s Il filosofo proibito (Milan, 1994), that Evola ‘did in fact pursue political projects of an elitist type, not lacking in operative potentialities.’

André Breton, Surrealism and René Guénon

A little on André Breton, Surrealism and René Guénon from Patrick Lepetit, “Surréalisme et ésotérisme,” Mélusine (23 February 2020). Breton cites Guénon favourably in “Du surréalisme en ses oeuvres vives,” Manifestes du surréalisme (Gallimard, 1979), pp. 187–8, n. 1. For an English version, see Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, transl. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (U. Michigan Press), p. 304.

After the Second World War, a whole group of discreet surrealists, among them Bernard Roger, René Alleau, Roger Van Hecke, Guy-René Doumayrou, Elie-Charles Flamand and Jean Palou belonged, under the leadership of another medical man, Dr. Hunwald, to the Thebah Lodge of the Grande Loge de France, which had briefly been the lodge of René Guénon. All of them except Jean Palou—who, passing from the Grand Loge to the Grand Orient via the Grande Loge Nationale Française, saw a glittering career, and would go on to found lodges and chapters in the Shah’s Iran, before dying prematurely—remained members until the end. Regarding René Guénon, a French esotericist who needs no introduction, it should be known that, in 1925, Breton, who admired him as did Artaud and Queneau, sent Pierre Naville to suggest that he join the surrealist movement; which the author of The Crisis of the Modern World refused, considering it the perfect expression of that counter-initiation that he condemned in all European esoteric societies. Still, in 1953, in an article entitled “René Guénon jugé par le surréalisme,” and though there is no longer any doubt as to the reactionary nature of Guénonian thought, Breton said:

Aleksandr Dugin, “Evola’s Conservative Revolution in Metaphysics” (1994)

My provisional translation of Dugin’s 1994 address to the Fondazione Julius Evola. These fifteen pithy theses expose the bare bones of Dugin’s reading of Evola. Dugin’s political preoccupations at the time are present in the emphasis on Evola’s “metaphysical leftism” and the possibility of an at once spiritual and political “third way” (as in terza posizione, etc.). Printed in Orion 9 (1994) in Italian. This translation was made from a French version in Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes 6 (1994).

Of Dugin’s trip to the West, the editor of N.S.E. reports that

In June of this year, Aleksandr Dugin visited France, Spain and Italy. Accosted by the police at the moment of his landing in Paris, Aleksandr Dugin was interrogated for three hours by the boorish rozzers, and was made to hand over issues of his journal, Elementy (so that he was subjected to censorship!), thereby depriving a number of official French institutions (the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, etc.), who had requested review copies, of these texts! Does the police have the right to prohibit researchers from accessing documentation? In Italy, he was received triumphantly at the Institute of International Relations in Milan, by General Jean at the Italian Ministry of National Defence, and by numerous cultural organisations. Our readers will appreciate the difference between a country governed by regular politicians, and a country governed by uncultured thugs, by boors and by scoundrels.