This article by Julius Evola was published in February 1939 issue of La Vita Italiana. Duke Colonna di Cesaro was both an Anthroposophist and an adherent of “Roman Neopaganism”. Evola had had a long relationship with the Duke, dating back to their participation in the Ur and Krur groups. While they both sought to understand the “third dimension” of history, their approaches ultimately differed. The Duke distanced himself from Evola’s Pagan Imperialism in the book, The Mystery of the Origins of Rome.

At one point, the Duke proposed to Mussolini to make Anthroposophy the spiritual alternative for Italy. The early attempt fell on deaf ears, but during the time of the Salo republic, Mussolini was given Steiner’s book “The essential points of the social question with respect to the needs of life in the present and in the future.” His response allegedly was, “[this book was the] answer I have been looking for all my life”.

On various occasions, in this very journal, we insisted on the necessity of a radical revision of the methods and criteria by which history is made, in the order of common teaching and of that culture that claims to be, and it alone, “serious”. We showed that history, packaged in such environments, understands only the two dimensions of the surface and leaves itself completely devoid of the third dimension, that of depth, where the essential meanings and the truly determining causes of so many events are concealed. Finally, we indicated the inherent absurdity, today, in insisting so much on the Roman tradition, on its symbols, on its vision of life and, at the same time, in continuing to consider the world of Roman antiquity with the usual views that lack erudition, archaeology, philology, or criticism.

As things stand, we were brought to consider with interest, and almost with avidity, the most recent, powerful work of Duke Colonna di Cesaro [Giovanni Antonio Colonna di Cesaro, Il Mistero delle origini di Roma (The mystery of the origins of Rome), 1939] since from the first pages a different spiritual and let us even say initiatic scheme is announced for the study of the origins of Rome and the meaning that the rise of this fateful city had in the history of the world. Nevertheless, after the first moment of immediate interest, at the point of deepening the central thesis of the book, we were struck by a perplexity, derived from the thinking of a peculiar juncture of motives, about which it will not be useless here to say something, at the end of a clarification of the methods and otherwise of the dangers peculiar to an investigation in the depths of history, since it is that, as we have already said, we ourselves hope for.

The work of Cesaro constitutes a valid and living contribution along the line on which the most valuable representatives of the new Italian culture should be fought, in all of its introductory part, in which the truly adequate criteria of every exploration of the origins are made precise. Cesaro justly blamed the error lay in consisting to examine ancient history through the eyes of modern man instead of seeking to adapt to the same ways of feeling and seeing characteristic of the subjects of that history. Therefore, it also consisted in considering as valid and positive only those documents that were encountered in the rationalistic, positivist, and contemporary secular spirit and in judging as irrelevant, fantastic, and inconsistent everything that, in ancient traditions, is symbol, myth, legend, or allegory. Even here the center of traditional consciousness fell to the knowledge proper to the great, the wise men, and ancient priests, i.e., “to those who, in modern terms, could be called the directing classes of remote antiquity”. On such a path, Cesaro, coming to so much through a broad and acute critical examination, defines the possibility and the necessity of integrating the order of the usual historical researches with a research following new interpretative methods with a spiritualist, initiatic, and metaphysical character. The process examining the origins, myths, symbols, and legends produced not impracticable, fantastic processes, but rather of fantastic processes brought about by something spiritually real and positive.

Whether purely under dramatized form, they actually and truly represent the history of the beginnings of a nation, but the history not of events brought about materially on the earth, but rather of spiritual processes that have brought to birth, amidst other peoples, a new and different people through culture and civilization: history, so to speak, of its prenatal period, of its “mystery”.

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