evola_as_he_is <evola_as_he_is@...> wrote:
This dense informative review of those two monographs are most
welcome. Since you don't refer to the views of its author on Evola,
we take it that you also consider them as "blank".
Those two monographs are seperate pieces to the one containing Evola. I don't have this book available as a PDF file.
It isn't that I find Urban's piece on Evola 'blank' it's just that I don't find it informative enough - a bit too simplistic and needing a bit more research perhaps.
'Highlights' below ;)
Hugh. B. Urban - Tantra – Sex, Secrecy, Potlitics, and Power in the Study of Religion (
: California Press, 2003) University ofCalifornia
(Selections, p 166- 178)
- Heinrich Zimmer, Julius Evola, and Mircea Eliade. These three have had a formative impact on the fields of Indology (in the case of Zimmer), esotericism and right-wing politics (Evola), and comparative religions (Eliade). And all three felt a strong attraction to Tantra, a tradition that they defined as the culmination of all Indian thought: the most radical form of spirituality and the archaic heart of
. India
But why this special preoccupation with the sexy, steamy world of Tantra among the most influential scholars of religions? As I will argue, each of these three regarded Tantra as the ideal religion for the modern era. In what they described as this modern “age of darkness,” they felt an intense sense of dislocation and longing for an idyllic traditional past.
Still more strikingly, Zimmer, Eliade, and Evola all saw Tantra as the most transgressive and violent path to the sacred – beyond good and evil, in violation of conventional law.
To this day, Evola remains one of the most enigmatic, poorly understood, and yet influential figures in the scholarship and politics of modern
Europe .
Along with many other enigmatic aspect’s of Evola’s life, his role in shaping the modern image of Tantra remains largely unexplored.
Advocating a Nietzschean will to power, Evola’s foremost imperative was tu diventare Dio, “you must become God.”
Given that we live in the darkest, antitraditional age, the only solution for us is to turn to the extreme and violent spiritual means. There can be no going back, no retreat from the modern world into the premodern past. Rather, our only hope is to “ride the tiger,” as it were – to accept, embrace, and harness the most destructive impulses in human nature as they have now been unleashed by modernity, turning them into the service of liberation. This, for Evola, is the essence of the Tantric path: to grab the snake by the throat and to transform his poison into ambrosia, to embrace the forces of violence and lust and transmute them into forces of freedom and transcendence.
‘The…teachings…that would have been viable in the first age…are no longer fit for people living in the following ages, especially in the last age, the dark age…Mankind in these later ages may find knowledge…not in the Vedas, but rather in the Tantras…Only Tantric practices based on shakti…are efficacious in our contemporary age.
During the Kali Yuga…the traditional law is wavering, reduced to a shadow of its former self…during the last age, elementary, infernal and abyssal forces are untrammeled. The immediate task consists in facing and absorbing these forces, in taking the risk of riding the tiger…or to transforming the poison to medicine.’
This, in Evola’s reading, is the essence of the Tantric path, the path of the virile hero who dares to transgress the laws that bind other human beings. To the tântrika, there is no good or evil, for he has realized “the relativity of all moral precepts”. To him, all “passions lose their impure character once they become absolute”; and henceforth, “the siddha can do as he pleases, while remaining spiritually invulnerable.” For Evola’s tântrika hero, even hedonistic excess is by no means an obstacle on the path to spiritual transformation, but is its necessary condition: “A siddha is one who…can do anything he wants…he is beyond both dharma and karma.”
As such, Tantra is for Evola not a radically “Eastern”, other form of spirituality. Rather, in contrast to the effeminate Christian religion – which has been infected by Eastern dualism and quietism – Tantra represents the most authentically Occidental form of spirituality, in the original, pre-Christian, pagan sense of the term. For it unites the Western mastery of material nature and power with the Eastern sense of spirit and transcendence:
“Tantrism in its spirit…should be considered distinctly Western. It is more conspicuously Western than Christian soteriology, which proclaims an ideal of salvation from a world that is looked as a vale of tears…The password of Tantrism is…unity of spiritual discipline and enjoyment of the world’.
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