⇐ Part I
Part III ⇒

It seems to me that Guido De Giorgio and Julius Evola agree on the role of the Warrior caste, with some fundamental disagreements. The first obviously is that Evola fails to understand the relationship of the warrior caste to the priestly class. The second is more difficult to express. Evola is “cold”, i.e., for him, the warrior is cold and detached. We could say that for De Giorgio, the warrior is hot: he loves, he is devoted, he is faithful. For Evola, the warrior fights as it is in his nature. For De Giorgio, too, it is in his nature, but he fights for his family, his land, his Temple, his lord. We can note here how the notion of bhakti yoga has been sentimentalized and the understanding of devotion trivialized. There is something else, more subtle, to consider, but since it is not part of De Giorgio’s purpose, I’ll save it for another time.

The Small War acquires a deep ascetic significance and imposes on the caste, only to which it is reserved, not slight surpassings that have, as we said, love and devotion for its foundation. The Warrior is guided by his love for the Divine Principle that is close to him, almost accessible and even distinct, in which he centers himself when the heroic peak happens and the confluence of Rhythms generates the supreme passion, that of dedication to God of the carnage: then a super-action of the normal human faculties operates, that adapt, raising himself in the highest development of the consuming fire and the Warrior becomes the great sacrificer, the victimarius, and the baptism of blood is a catharsis that renews him, freeing him with his violence from human brutality, redeeming him as in a purifying basin [Ex 30:18] that cleanses horror with piety at every death. Piety in fact pushes him to sacrifice of himself and of the enemies in each one of which he catches sight of his own effigy; in the clash of a fight, he seeks to beat back the resurgent duality, the terrible “thou”, the shadow of himself, the eye that looks askance at him, the hand and the arm that threaten him, the love in which his own love is mirrored, the “other” who blocks his vision of the Supreme Unity. He kills and gets killed in the name of God, in the name of God he defends his lord and his land since his weapons are blessed and he is invested just as his lord is, and his country is the place fixed by God for the conquest of heaven, the support, the base of his ascension, and he must defend it in order to keep God’s law in the world, as long as the enemy does not deprive him of God by snatching his land, home, temple. His caste is the guardian of sovereign power in which the virtues are combined, that when entirely followed, lead man to the Edenic fruition, restoring his eternal and original country to him, whose necessary starting point is this land. The king and the country are made sacred by the radiant vision of divine Glory since in loving it, the warrior loves God, and in protecting it, he defends God’s possession.

Note that the realization by means of warrior ascesis is always indirect, while the priestly ascesis is direct or final: the former is accomplished through the world of Rhythms, the latter in the Silence, the former remains in duality, the latter reaching unity from non-duality. This difference is essential and eliminates whatever arbitrary reduction that would subvert the traditional order. The warrior caste obeys its own law that is justified only through a higher law which, originating in the divine, extends it. In fact, if the Primordial Tradition is taken as the starting point, the castes are reduced to just one, that of the Priests, nor is it put there for others because in this stage only the contemplative way exists which excludes any action: there is no caste in reality in the Primordial Tradition in which human unity is realized in its most absolute expression. The King here is the high priest and one can speak of regality only in the sense of cognitive absoluteness. But in successive traditional forms, the distribution of human possibilities is necessarily carried out, because we are already in a greater state of decadence and complexity through which life assumes a internal and external double aspect; in this stage, the priestly class assumes an absolute position that puts it back in the Primordial Tradition, that of the Warriors is internal in respect to the purely exterior Workers but, considering the whole tradition in its triple aspect of Silence, Rhythm, and Forms which correspond to the Priests, Warriors, and Workers, the second caste occupies an intermediate position of equilibrium between the two extremes and serves to maintain the traditional unity because its attribute is power.

Representing the traditional boundary circularly like a fortified city, we will say that the center, the Temple, corresponds to the priestly caste, the periphery, i.e., the ramparts, to the Warrior Caste, while the workers remain in the middle. Considering such relationship, the Warrior caste occupies the most dangerous place in the traditional defense, the one most exposed and, if one understands the value of this depiction in relation with what has been said, the Warriors are the lords of Rhythms and the art that is most appropriate to them is Magic.

Whoever is capable of reflection will understand without difficulty how, this caste living in the paroxysm of action, must necessarily be involved in the wave of hidden forces that are unleashed especially when the rhythm of the active life is intense, so that the warrior ascesis has as its principle goal the knowledge of the world of Rhythms, of the laws that govern it, and the defense from the traps of the field of shadows. That appears more clearly to those who consider with attention life and the work of the great conquerors where one easily sees how materially infinitesimal elements have engendered inevitable imbalances. What is true for every man is doubly so for the Warriors who live intensely in order to confront the most terrible enemies, those who are invisibly close to us and of which the visible enemies represent a type of material duplicate.

Speaking of this caste we implicitly asserted the necessity of war, but not less implicitly we asserted the need that it is uniquely entrusted to the true and proper Warriors that they have the legitimate use of it. Now as one does not become a priest, so one does not become a warrior, and the contamination of castes has unfortunately produced the current degradation since, with democratic leveling, introductions of every type have taken place, distorting the traditional order and engendering the fall of a truly civil society. A return to normality worked with discernment, progression, and measure would permit the restoration of the sole and true hierarchy in the attributions of caste conformed to the nature of man, to his possibilities, and to the effective development of his more specifically productive activities.

The warrior is the ascetic of the active life and hits discipline is purely interior: whoever cannot kill himself will never be able to kill or, better said, in killing he will profane life and death because his cause is not holy. Now a man kills himself by his own hand or with the sanctified arm in a way that the enemy is visible and close, otherwise a true assassination is accomplished and not an act of purification. If war, as we said, is justified only as the symbol of the Great War, it is inconceivable that the battle be not focused, faithful, open, frontal, because only by knowing oneself can one dominate himself and only in seeing his own enemy can he be surpassed without the battle and the carnage having the bestial character of the battle and anonymous, unholy, and sacrilegious carnage. If one is capable of developing all the aspects of the question when placed in its true light, one understands that war must be made by warriors and not by the entire democratically leveled people and violently carried back in great conflicts to the state of savage desperation: it follows from it that war must be normally conducted man to man and, in its most typical expression, brought back to the preliminary dispute, to the duel.

We said that the Warrior caste is founded on a dualistic base that the Latin term duellum, the ancient form of bellum, expresses with perfect obviousness: war is the expression of this fundamental duality of which love and hate—the latter reducible, if you reflect on it well, to love—represent two extremes: in the event a traditional restoration is produced, which is difficult but not impossible, and which, in every way, only modern devirilization can gravely obstruct with its two most typical expressions, pessimism and skepticism, war should be led back to its fixed normalizing function, i.e., to exist permanently for the single caste of the Warriors. The duel that so called civil society of the West, barbarous in reality, repudiated with satanic thoughtlessness while they turn current conflicts into a hellish game of machines that work the foolish and most ungodly destruction, would be the essential condition of the return to normality in case it was led back to its natural, spontaneous, i.e., effective, form and not to that modern parody that stands to the duel as the courtier stands to the knight.

If normal arms were only in the hands of the Warriors, the duel would take back its traditional value and would constitute the customary standard training of the caste, developing the sense of honor that has now faded in the heart of men. The duel with cold weapons [arma bianca] is the most noble, the purest, the highest expression of the warrior caste because it establishes a reciprocity of force, honor, and love in two men confronting each other, who are saved by killing each other and sanctify themselves by being killed. One observes that duality remains before and after: before life against life, after life in the face of death. And this duality is precisely the permanent indication of the warrior caste and is the basis of its purpose. War in a traditional society is the amplification of the duel, but other factors intervene: family, country, lord. It should have led back to normality, limited to the only caste that can do it without involving entire peoples, working that chaos that compromises the very existence of a civilization. Brought back to clarity, to the brutality of the ancient wars, although circumscribed and delimited, it should be, if not permanent at least frequent, giving in that way the acceleration necessary to the rhythm of life that makes it deeper and more fertile for revelation.

Modern wars—and for us, this “modernity” lasts for centuries—are the products of the democratic degeneration that has leveled humanity substituting for the Warrior caste a fictitious hierarchy in times of peace, even chaotic in times of conflict when every citizen must become what he never was, i.e., a soldier. The soldier obeys external discipline while the warrior obeys the inner: the warrior is always a warrior, the soldier can occasionally become a warrior through force, not by choice or by natural inclination. But there is a more important consideration. The Warrior is the refusal of sentimentality and among the ancients it did not exist: only modern degeneration has created through the monstrosity of democratic conflicts the romanticism of war, because in these conflicts in which all the people participate, there are only mediocre warriors, while the mass is constituted by a type of human gelatin that trembles with pathetic oscillations at every twisting that violates his nature. Instead, war reduced to lesser proportions, but with a more intense and more frequent rhythm, because it is entrusted only to men and not to machines, to Warriors and not to other castes, would be an indispensable element of a full and fecund life if led back to the traditional type, i.e., sanctified by the rectitude of causes that would give rise to it. Its delimitation would constitute a permanent and normal base of the activity to paralyze by no means all the people, but to intensify the rhythm of the active life with a continual contribution of strong and decisive reflexes.