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This is the final installment of the fourth chapter of Part IV of Sintesi di dottrina della razza. Here Evola makes absolutely clear the difference between the Ancient Pagans and the neopagans.

First of all, what characterised the non-Christian world of the Aryan type in all its normal forms, was not the superstitious divinization of nature, but, on the contrary, a symbolic understanding of it, by virtue of which — as we have often emphasized — every thing and every event appeared as the sensible manifestation of a supra-sensible world. The pagan understanding of the world and of man had an essentially symbolic-sacred character. In the specific case of the forces of blood and folk, instead of polytheistic superstition, it is about the very precise knowledge of the super-biological elements, from above, of them, from which still today a race of the third level [i.e., race of the spirit] would have much to learn. We have already pointed out the precise racial contents of the family cults and Roman people.

Here we see that the ancients did not attempt to deify or personalize natural forces; rather, they regard the natural world as the reflection of the supernatural. This explains how they could regard omens as indications from the super-world. The works on family and Roman cults are from Defesa della razza and are in the queue to be translated.

In the second [sic, should be third] place, the pagan way of life was absolutely not that of a mindless “innocence”, nor a naturalistic license, even if certain forms were obviously degenerate. It already knew a healthy dualism, which is even reflected in general religious or metaphysical conceptions. For example, in the dualism of the Aryans of ancient Iran, already discussed and familiar to all; the Doric-Aryan antithesis between the “two natures”, between the world of becoming and the “super-world”, or the Ario-Nordic one between the race of the Aesir and the “elementary world” [Ettins]; and lastly the Indo-Aryan contrast between samsara, the “flow of forms”, and mukti, “liberation” and so on.

The Hollywood portrayal of the pagans as sensuous hedonists, obsessed with drinking mead or “shagging a wench”, is unfortunately the image held by many today. Rather, they experienced life as a struggle, a Holy War, between those very sensuous elements and the higher world.

In connection with that, the striving for a supernatural freedom, i.e., for the metaphysical fulfillment of the personality, was common to all the great Aryan and pre-Christian civilizations, which knew all the “mysteries” and “initiations”. In this regard, we already pointed out that the significance of the “mysteries” was often the regaining of the “primordial state”, the spirituality characteristic of the solar, Hyperborean races, on the foundation of a tradition and a knowledge that were concealed through secrecy and exclusivity from the contaminations of an already corrupted environment. Furthermore, we also saw that, in the Orient, the so-called “Aryan” quality was already associated with a “second birth” conditional on initiation.

Gornahoor has already pointed out the initiations of the Ancient City. The mysteries were handed down, so any direct written records are sparse. Evola points out that the goal of initiation was the recovery of the primordial state of the original Hyperboreans.

As to the naturalistic innocence as the “pagan” cult of the body, it is a fairy-tale and not even found among savages, despite the already mentioned undifferentiated inner state from the “race of nature”. Among them, life is constrained and constricted though a forest of taboos in a way that is often more rigid than the morality of the so-called “positive religions”. And what, for the few who look at things in a superficial way, would have been the peak of such an “innocence”, namely the classical ideal, there was no cult of the body. It was not within, but beyond the dualism between body and spirit. As already stated, it was instead the classic ideal of a spirit made so dominant by molding, under certain favorable historical conditions, body and soul entirely in its own image, and by realizing therefore a perfect harmony between the container and the contents.

This fairy tale dies hard and received an impetus from the incompetent and “gamed” anthropologist Margaret Mead. Here, Evola recalls the Traditional teaching on spirit, soul, and body which was known to the Ancients. The spirit strives to form his soul and body against the forces of nature, to make a perfect vehicle for himself.

In the fourth place, a superparticularistic drive is found everywhere in the “pagan” world, in the ascending cycles of the superior races of the Nordic-Ario stock; a calling to empire manifested itself. Such a calling often had a metaphysical development, and appeared as the natural consequence of the extension of the ancient sacred concept of the State and as the form in which the victorious presence of the “super-world” sought to realize itself in the world of becoming.

As Gornahoor pointed out, city-states could merge or form an alliance only if a higher unity could be found that encompassed the already existent hierarchical cults of family, clan, tribe, and city. Thus we see the drive for Empire, which was not merely an historical accident, but was the development of metaphysical principle: the drive to incorporate all lower forms into a higher unity. The necessary end result of this process should be obvious, even if Evola himself couldn’t see it.

In this respect we might recall the old Iranian concept of Empire and of the “king of kings”, with its associated doctrine of the hvareno (the “celestial glory” brought by the conquerors), and the Indo-Aryan tradition of the “universal lord” [“Lord/king of the world” in Guenon] or chakravarti, etc., right up to the reflection of such meanings in the “solar” aspects of the Roman Empire. That had its sacred content, systematically disregarded or maligned not only by Christianity, but also by “positive” research. The Imperial Roman cult signified, in reality, the unifying hierarchical culmination of a pantheon, which was a series of particular cults, conditioned by blood and soil, of the non-Roman peoples, cults that were certainly respected provided they kept within their normal boundaries. As for the “pagan” unity of the two powers, spiritual and temporal, far from signifying their confusion, it implied the supreme right that, in conformity to the tradition of the “solar race”, the spiritual authority has and must have at the center of every normal State. Thus, it was something other than the “statolatry” or the emancipation, “sovereignty”, and “totalitarianism” of a state of the secular type. To multiply rectifications of the sort, in a spirit of pure objectivity, there would be an embarrassment of choices.

Evola here alludes to the Traditional teaching of the Lord of the World, which was reflected in the Priest-King of the Ancient City. He rightly emphasizes that spiritual authority is at the heart of every State. This implicitly rules out the totalitarian movements of the first half of last century, and explicitly the development of the secular state. So, it is hard not to see this as a call to a theocratic empire. As we shall see, the idea of Empire did not end with the collapse of the ancient Roman Empire. It was kept alive in the Hermetic Tradition, as we see in the comments of Valentin Tomberg on the shadow of the Emperor over Europe, and the necessity for a “Supreme Pontiff” to rule over the Septentrion Empire. (This latter concept is not new, but was on the contrary revealed 150 years ago by the Hermetist Fabre d’Olivet.)