Julius Evola

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was born in Rome on 19 May 1898, served as an artillery officer in the First World War, and briefly moved through Dada before abandoning painting in his twenties - he later said he'd considered suicide until a Buddhist text pulled him back. Through the 1920s he built a system he called "magical idealism," blending German philosophy, Eastern mysticism, and the belief that mankind had fallen into the Kali Yuga, a dark age only reversible through aristocratic Tradition: hierarchy, obedience, order, no God. He became the leading architect of Italy's racial laws, worked for the SS intelligence arm, fled to Nazi Germany when Fascism collapsed in 1943, then returned under the puppet Social Republic to organise a radical cell. A Soviet shell in Vienna in 1945 left him paralysed from the waist down. Tried for glorifying fascism in 1951, he denied the label and declared himself "superfascist" - the historian Elisabetta Cassina Wolff wrote that it remains unclear whether he meant above or beyond - and was acquitted, then convicted years later on a second charge. He died in Rome on 11 June 1974, three decades spent in a chair, still writing the te