This is the first of several posts about the various races of the spirit described by Julius Evola: The Solar Race. Evola owes his typology of spirits of the race to J J Bachofen‘s study of Mother Right, although with a creative misreading of the text, Evola extracts a deeper meaning from it.
Bachofen delineated a historical process of cultures from haeterism to matriarchy, culminating in patriarchy, which he admitted was
the highest calling, the sublimation of earthly existence to the purity of the divine father principle.
Bachofen traces the patriarchal system in the ancient world to Athens and to the Roman Imperium. In them, there was Solarity.
As we have seen, however, Evola rejects any notion of “progress” in history. Rather he sees a degeneration. Certain ancient peoples were feminine in nature, and hence endured various matriarchal systems as described by Bachofen. On the other hand, the Hyperborean, or Nordic, peoples, were originally masculine, or equivalently Solar. Subsequent racial degeneration has led to the situation of the present era.
Although Evola gives us a very brief outline, he entire oeuvre is dedicated to the description of the Solar race. Fire and Ice are the paradoxically conjoined symbols of the Solar qualities. The Solar beings are described by Evola as being in this world, but not of it: they feel themselves as strangers in a strange land. Only ignorance or a waking “sleep” keep them bound to specific modes of being in the world. Gnosis, or awakening, what Guenon calls the Supreme Identity, liberates them from attachment to the world. Evola claims that such doctrines of awakening can only apply to the Solar race; attempts to extend such ideas as universal can lead only to misunderstandings.
This series, we hope, should make clear that the problem of the modern world is not a problem of thinking but rather of being. The error of the intellectual type is the belief that thinking the correct thoughts will somehow rectify things. Hence, there is incessant chatter and debate, which, apart from a few random conversions, always ends up in aporia.
The fundamental thing that matters is a change in the level of being.
Text
The doctrine of the third degree of race must fundamentally limit its researches to the sphere of influence of a given race of the spirit and of its primordial tradition, following its developments, mutations (paravariations), and also distortions in the cycle that coincide with them and in which they act and react in the confrontation with the influences of different races or new environmental conditions. Once research is circumscribed that way, we arrive at a more limited concept of race, corresponding to that of the various differentiations or articulations of the primary element of such a cycle. Along the same lines, we cannot of course conceive of an atomic separation of the various “races of the spirit”: their differences do not exclude relationships of descent or even of different hierarchical rank.
We previously sketched out the typology of races of the spirit, as far as it concerns the specific human cycle of the hyperborean race, in the second part of our work Revolt against the Modern World (with special regard to the properly traditional and spiritual aspect), and in the selection of the writings of J. J. Bachofen, and in a re-interpretation of them in a racial sense, included in the volume we edited under the title La razza solare. For a fuller treatment, the reader is therefore referred back to these two works. Here we will give only a brief schematic synthesis, necessarily lacking any justifying elements.
The solar or Olympic-solar race, corresponding to the hyperborean lineage and tradition, is to be considered superior and anterior to all the others in the cycle in question. It has as characteristic a type of “natural supernaturalism”; spirit and power, calm dominance, and readiness for precise and absolute action, a sense of “centrality” and of “firmness”, and in its exterior effects, that virtue to which the ancients attributed a “numinous” quality (from numen), as superiority that imposes itself directly and irresistibly, that awakens simultaneously both fear and admiration, are marks of this “race of the spirit”, by means of which it is naturally predestined to command and, at the limit, to the regal function. Fire and ice are united in it as in the ambiguous symbols of the original Nordic homeland and of the cycle in which it is eminently and primordially manifested: ice, as transcendence and inaccessibility; fire, as the specifically radiant solar quality of the men who give life, who awaken life, and generate light, but always from a supreme distance and almost with indifference, like the wake of a boat, not through enthusiasm, inclination, or human concern.
The ancient symbol of gold has always had connections with this form of spirituality. In the political forms of the origins, it acted as the substrate to sacred, or divine, regality, i.e., to the union of the two powers, of the regal and priestly function, the latter understood in a higher sense that will soon be made clear. The symbolic designations of the “divine” or “celestial” race must refer to the absence of the dualistic sentiment in relations to supernatural reality, something that however is quite distinct from everything that is immanence or Promethean arrogance in the modern sense: it is not about men who believe they are gods, but of the type of men who naturally, through a not yet dim memory of origins and a condition of soul and body that do not cripple such a memory, feel they do not properly belong to the terrestrial race, to the extent of believing themselves men only by accident, or through “ignorance”, or “sleep”. The two terms vidya and avidya of the ancient Indo-Aryan teaching, that mean respectively “knowledge” (of the “supreme identity”) and “ignorance” (that leads to the self-identification with one of the forms or modes of being of the conditioned world), are to be understood exactly in this context. When these terms are attributed to a different human condition and a different race of the spirit, that is, when turned into “philosophical” terms, they lose all meaning and give rise to misunderstandings of various types.
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