The Light - and Shade - of Asia

Why it's not always peace and love when East meets West...

On 25 November 1970, the great Japanese novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima arrived for an appointment with the commandant of the Tokyo barracks of the Japan Self-Defence Forces, Eastern Command. With the help of four others who joined him on his visit, Mishima tied the commandant to a chair and then strode out onto his balcony to pour vitriol on post-war Japan.

A crowd of bewildered recruits below heard Mishima effectively call for a coup d’état, accusing his countrymen of chasing economic prosperity while “forgetting the principles of the nation, losing their native spirit, pursuing the trivial without correcting the essential [and] leading themselves into spiritual emptiness”.

The reaction among most Japanese to Mishima’s speech and subsequent ritual suicide — he plunged a samurai sword into his belly back in the commandant’s office, before one of his comrades beheaded him — was one of mystification and sadness.

Others, both in Japan and around the world, found that Mishima’s message resonated. Among them was the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, by this point in his early seventies. Disappointed by the demise, 25 years earlier, of what he regarded as the “miracle” of Japan’s fascist theocracy, Evola saw in Mishima’s final act a courageous call for his country to awaken from the prosperous slumber into which it had been cast by the United States, first as post-war occupier and then as partner in an uneven alliance.

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Yukio Mishima, dressed in a militia uniform, speaking at a Japan Self-Defence Forces barracks in Tokyo, 25 November 1970

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Born in Rome in 1898, Julius Evola looked to Asia on and off across the course of his life for inspiration in helping to rescue the Western world from its malaise. In this, he was not unusual. Any number of Romantics, from Goethe through to Coleridge, found in Indian drama and philosophy a depth and vitality that Europe appeared to have lost. And from the second half of the 1800s, Japan became a source of inspiration: its people and landscape, paintings and woodblock prints, calligraphy and kimono, Zen Buddhism and tea ceremony.

But where much of this interest was focused on spiritual and aesthetic renewal, Evola’s engagement with Asia was defined by the intertwining of the spiritual with the political. And where the personal politics of many Western enthusiasts for Zen or India’s Vedanta philosophy skewed towards the progressive, particularly in the post-war era, Evola was a leading thinker of the far-Right, whose ideas inspired figures within Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (albeit to a lesser extent than he would have liked) and later many others around the post-war world.

To an extent often overlooked amid the peace-and-love associations of “the East”, from the Beatles through to contemporary yoga and mindfulness, Asian ideas and practices have been used to buttress Western ideologies with elitism, racism and conflict at their core.

Much depended on what a given commentator thought was wrong or lacking in Western life in the first place. Where many a 20th-century critic of the modern West focused on the recent past, and on the damage done by industrial capitalism to European scenery and souls, in countries such as Germany and Italy one could find writers reaching back further: beyond what they regarded as the disaster of Europe’s Christianisation and into the realms of Nordic myth, ancient German folklore and Imperial Rome. They managed to combine these interests with investigations into the occult and Eastern thought, as additional sources of inspiration in battling modernity and recovering lost values and human capabilities.

In Germany, an emerging theme in the country’s search for its cultural and racial roots was a peaceful, bucolic past, full of life, from which Germans had since become alienated. In fairytales collected and published by the Grimm brothers, Wilhelm and Jacob, German peasant life was depicted as happy and wholesome yet constantly under threat from violent interlopers: witches, vampires and demons.

India became woven into this tapestry as a pastoral paradise — German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder lauded “gentle Hindus [who] nourish themselves with the most innocent of foods, milk, rice, the fruits of the trees, the healthy herbs which their motherland dispenses” — and as one of the supposed homes, long ago, of an Aryan civilisation from which Germans could rightly claim descent. In the hands of Nazi ideologues, all this congealed into the drama of an Aryan race in the here-and-now, pitting itself against decadent, vampiric Slavs and Jews.   

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Frontispiece and title page from an 1819 edition of the Brothers Grimm, Kinder und Häusmarchen [Children’s and Household Tales]

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In Italy, Evola’s particular sense of Western decline was shaped by his aristocratic Sicilian background and his experience, as a young man, of a yearning to transcend the emptiness of everyday life. He volunteered for the army in 1917 and briefly saw active service before turning to Dadaist painting and poetry after the war. He studied engineering at university but did not complete his degree — on the basis, he claimed, that academia’s bourgeois conventions were not for him.   

Having rejected his Catholic upbringing, Evola tasted something of the transcendence he sought via hallucinogens, magic and what he understood of Buddhism and Taoism. His reading of Buddhist scripture helped him through a period of feeling suicidal in 1922. And in the teachings of Lao Tzu, Evola found the path to becoming what he called an “Absolute Individual.” This was a state, he wrote, of “magical, luminous impassability,” in which a person becomes strong, purposeful and free from material and cultural constraints. 

The French philosopher René Guénon helped to give shape to Evola’s ideas, through his reading of global history as shot through with cosmic purpose. Guénon claimed that primal truths about the “Absolute”, from which the rest of reality emanates, had been transmitted down the ages via initiates within the world’s religious traditions.

Those truths had been lost in the modern West, he argued, because of an over-emphasis on materialism, reason and progress. They could still be found in places like India, however, in particular the Vedanta school of philosophy, which was also much beloved of German Romantics including Herder and Goethe. Guénon hoped to see a new elite of spiritual intellectuals trained in primal truths via “Oriental doctrines”, going on to restore the West as a civilisation centred around the sacred.

Guénon’s ideas and programme came to be called “Traditionalism”, from the Latin tradere, suggesting something — in this case wisdom and a particular way of being in the world — that is “handed down” from one generation to the next. Evola became an important voice in the movement, but unlike Guénon his vision of a future spiritual elite – comprised of Aryan-Germans and Romans – owed a great deal to Nietzsche’s ideal of the Übermensch (superman).

Evola believed that hierarchy within humanity is part of the order of the cosmos. It takes physical, racial and social forms, but its roots lie in the spiritual realm. Some — himself included — are born into a spiritual elite, and must use a variety of demanding spiritual and physical disciplines to progress in wisdom and move ever closer to the Absolute.

Europe’s tragedy in recent centuries, for Evola, was the steady undermining of this cosmic hierarchy. Power had been passed to ever-lower levels: from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie and latterly to the masses via an expansion of the democratic franchise. He held Christianity largely responsible. Imperial Rome had been a far closer reflection than Christendom of the true cosmic order.

The rise of Christianity, with what Evola called its “proletarian spirituality”, marked a victory for the forces of disintegration and disorder. Evola found this expressed so well in the Hindu idea that we are living at the lowest point in the cosmic cycle of time – Kali Yuga, or Dark Age – that he included the term in the title of perhaps his best-known work: Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion and Social Order in the Kali Yuga (1934).

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Julius Evola, pictured in the early 1940s

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Evola’s radical elitism shaped the inspiration that he drew from Buddhism. From the late-19^th century onwards, Western writers had conjured the historical Buddha variously as a Victorian gentleman, an Asian Christ, a gifted psychologist and a trailblazing democrat who rejected India’s caste system. Evola, by contrast, emphasised the Buddha’s noble origins as a member of the kshatriya (warrior) caste. It was from this noble birth, claimed Evola, that the Buddha — or “Prince Siddhatta”, as he refers to him in The Doctrine of Awakening (1943) — drew the strength required to engage in the asceticism that led to his enlightenment.

The Buddha’s accomplishments were also, for Evola, a matter of “blood and spirit”. He regarded Buddhism as an Aryan doctrine, an expression of the genius of the “ancient Aryo-Mediterranean world” whose stand-out figures included Plato and the Roman Stoics. He also had great admiration for Zen. Here, for Evola, was a path characterised by serious individual effort, master-disciple transmission and strong links with Japan’s “warrior nobility”. Across long centuries, the samurai had been able to impart their vigour and imprint their values upon an entire people.

Unfortunately, thought Evola, Zen had been introduced to the West by teachers, including D.T. Suzuki, who were too keen to connect it to modern Western thought and preoccupations. The result was a concern with psychology over spiritual realities — self-improvement over transcendence and the awakening of the Absolute Individual — and with the misguidedly egalitarian notion that enlightenment is available to all.

In the end, Evola failed to sell either Italy’s Fascists or Germany’s Nazis on the Traditionalist project, not least because the deep elitism within Traditionalism made it an awkward partner for populist ultra-nationalism. He remained influential, however, in the post-war world. After a series of attempted bombings by Italian neo-fascists in 1949-50, some of them with links to Evola, he was arrested and charged under new laws against glorifying Fascism and promoting the revival of the Fascist Party. 

At his trial in 1951, Evola denied any links to Mussolini’s Fascist Party (he never joined it), but said that if one defined fascism in terms of being against democracy then Dante Alighieri would stand condemned and Evola himself could be regarded as a ‘superfascist.’  

Evola was acquitted, but questions remained over whether he bore responsibility for terrorist attacks inspired by his ideas, when so many of Italy’s neo-fascists praised his writings and visited him at his apartment in Rome. Those questions became particularly pressing during and after Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’: a period running from 1969 to 1988 during which extremists on the Left and Right mounted thousands of attacks and killed more than 400 people.

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Police clash with the far-Left in Rome, 1977

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The recent European elections have become a focal point for fears that disaffected young men seeking radical change – much the same demographic as the neo-fascists nurtured by Evola in his final years – are helping to drive a surge in support for hard Right or far-Right parties. They differ on some things: economic libertarians versus protectionists, pro-vs anti-Putin. But on migration and culture-war issues, they have much in common and plenty that they might draw from Evola’s thinking on tradition, race, the threat of social collapse posed by modernity, and politics not as technocratic tinkering but as a grand salvation project – witness the frequency with which the need to ‘save’ a country or Europe as a whole is now invoked in political rhetoric).

Fans of the softer, more recessive side of Asia’s influence on the modern West should not get too comfortable at this point. The appeal of Asian ideas and practices to Evola in many ways resembled their attractions for Beats, hippies and contemporary practitioners of mindfulness, yoga and wellness more generally.

They offer, we have been told, an enhanced clarity of seeing, beyond our tarnished cultures and ailing institutions. They promise to take a person beyond the mere accumulation of yet more knowledge, and instead to transform them — mind, body and spirit.

It would be a stretch to say that yoga risks turning you into a fascist. But take a look at how wellness shows up on social media — exalting strength, suppleness, focus, vigour, stoic calm and a sense of superiority — and suddenly here, too, the darker sides of the 20th century don’t seem quite so far away.

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A version of this essay first appeared in UnHerd.

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Image credits:

Yukio Mishima speaking in November 1970: About Japan (fair use).

Grimm’s fairytales, 1819: History Today (fair use).

Julius Evola: Public Domain.

Police clash with the far-Left: The Guardian (fair use).