This essay originally appeared in the Introduction to Magic, volume 3. This is the first of multiple parts. It was published under the name “Avro”, which I believe to be Julius Evola.
Part 2 ⇒

The reader will not fail to notice that in one particular point among others, the esoteric teachings have a distinctly counter-current character: this is in regards to “evolution”.

Evolution is a type of obsession of the modern mind. It is a true psychological complex that, in the middle of the “logic of the subsoil” about which Iagla [Evola] wrote (Vol 2, ch 2), directs the minds of many of those who presume that they were using the “scientific method” and objective research. Here it would be necessary to be convinced of what is also of value for many other things: or else that certain possibilities of understanding, seeing, and controlling are the effect of a certain change of attitude: and not vice versa, as rationalism would like.

Regarding evolution, it could, for example, have caused surprise about what we said about the Hyperborean tradition. In effect, the idea that previously in the interglacial and paleolithic period, a great unitary civilization existed, to which the fundamental symbols, the roots of language, and the graphism are related to the oldest cultures — a similar idea must arise as revolutionary in respect to modern opinions, which are believed to have been proved once and for all on a positive basis. And it is not only a question of simple evolutionism in the history of civilization: even parts of science begin to be touched where, in one form or another, the Darwinian hypothesis on the origins of the species and on the descent of man from animals is current even now.

So the problem must be confronted as a whole. We will therefore mention what the esoteric teaching say about it, without going into details that could take me rather far: beyond the extent it can be usefully discussed in this journal.

Although not stopping myself here, I have to emphasize first of all that in the same field of profane science today it is no longer about the evolutionism that Darwin announced in his time. The Darwinian hypotheses, ever since, has undergone numerous criticisms, and real difficulties, previously not seen, have compelled it to be modified.

Where it is especially shown to be weak, is in its attempt to deduce the variety of the species from an almost automatic play of material conditions of the environment, of natural selection, and of inherited transmission of acquired characteristics. The vitalistic point of view, which asserts precedence and an excess of vital energy over all the conditions, must instead acquire a greater significance. Bergson is among those who have come into play in strictly scientific terrains against Darwinian evolutionism, showing through its insufficiencies that have left the field free for the hypothesis of an evolutionism of a no longer bio-materialistic, but of a creative, character.

The same biologists after all recognized how much the variety of species resists the attempt of that simple and linear deduction, the one from the other, that Darwin conjectured; they were led to admit “quasi-jumps” from some species to others, so that the hypothesis most in vogue today is that of De Vries, who appeals to unpredictable and essential internal mutations precisely to explain those jumps within the scheme of evolutionism.

This, nevertheless, is one hypothesis like any other, which is of interest only for the difficulty that it calls attention to, and that in a great part exists even after the introduction of enigmatic concept of mutation. I note in passing that the difficulty finds an exact comparison in what physics has recently chanced upon, when, with the theory of quanta (Planck) and the principle of indeterminism (Heisenberg), it has had to stop in the face of finite quantities of “action”, without being able to explain, and without being able to point out a continuous process that leads from one to the other.

Moreover, since the evolutionistic hypothesis continues to be in force in biology as far as it has been modified and revised, it is necessary to examine its general foundations. We know the impressive bounty of facts Darwin and his school have gathered in the field of morphology, embryology, paleontology, and even geology. No one would consider denying these facts. What there is to discuss, and to indicate as arbitrary or, at least, as one-sided, is in the interpretation, through which in Darwinism these facts become proofs to support the materialist evolutionistic concept. Without postponing any longer, I will go directly to the fundamental argument.

When they had just succeeded in establishing a continuity of forms and rings, permitting the passage from one species to another, up to man, with that, one line remains simply established, and no one tells us in what direction it has traversed. Hence, a priori, every fact adopted to uphold evolutionism could be simultaneously adopted to sustain the opposite thesis: the involutionistic thesis: neither more nor less. As true that the lower species are the levels preceding the higher—it is as true that they are instead degenerative involutions of the latter. The presence of intermediate stages (when they are also transitional stages)—and not from crossbreeding or from selection: other possibilities that the evolutionists don’t consider) cannot tell me, by themselves, in what direction the march happened.

That is the fundamental point. Let’s now see what can be added to it.

Let us begin with the peoples called backward from the point of view of their mentality and their civilization. Who tells us that they represent the primitive states of present humanity rather than involutive forms and residues of an even older humanity? The fact that the backward peoples are more likely to disappear than to “evolve”, should make us reflect. Besides, one must consider that an even more ancient humanity could have been different, as much from not leaving traces where forms of civilization closer to us were successful and superimposed: from leaving instead traces of them precisely in their degenerating origins, but only of the same trunk. Modern ethnological studies on presumed “primitives” have ascertained in them not a lower level of the same mentality, but rather of another mentality, another civilization. From them, through integration, one can reach back to an even older humanity. Modern explorers of prehistory, like Frobenius and Wirth, for example, have followed this method.