Evola was born in Rome. He served as an artillery officer in the First World War. He became a Dada artist but gave up painting in his twenties. He said he considered suicide until he had a revelation while reading a Buddhist text.[9] In the 1920s he delved into the occult; he wrote on Western esotericism and of Eastern mysticism, developing his doctrine of "magical idealism".
Evola purportedly went through a "spiritual crisis" through the intolerance of civilian life and his need to "transcend the emptiness" of normal human activity. He experimented with hallucinogenics and magic, which, he wrote, almost brought him to madness.[43] In 1922, at 23 years old, he considered suicide, he wrote in The Cinnabar Path. He said he avoided suicide thanks to a revelation he had while reading an early Buddhist text that dealt with shedding all forms of identity other than absolute transcendence.[49][9][40] Evola would later publish the text The Doctrine of Awakening, which he regarded as a repayment of his debt to Buddhism.[53] By this time his interests led him into spiritual, transcendental, and "supra-rational" studies. He began reading various esoteric texts and gradually delved deeper into the occult, alchemy, magic, and Oriental studies, particularly Tibetan Tantric yoga.[54] Historian Richard H. Drake wrote that Evola's alienation from contemporary values resembled that of other Lost Generation intellectuals who came of age in World War I, but took an uncompromising, eccentric and reactionary form.[55]
Cambridge Library Collection - Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge: Transcendental Magic : Its Doctr
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The mysterious first initiator into these sacred doctrines was known as Toth and later to the Greeks by his more familiar name of Hermes. Hermes-Toth is a generic name that designates a man, a caste, and a god at the same time. As a man, Hermes-Toth is the originator of a powerful system of magic and its first initiator; as a caste, he represents the priesthood, the repository of ancient wisdom; as a god, Hermes becomes Mercury for the Greeks, the god who delivers messages to mortals from the Olympiad and the god who initiates mortals into transcendent mysteries. Later, the Greek disciples of this secret tradition would call him Hermes Trismegistus (three times great), and he would be credited for originating the material contained in 42 books of esoteric science.
19th century esotericism is seen by some as completely secularised. Alchemy, magic, astrology and other elements of traditional esotericism had been thoroughly integrated with aspects of modern culture, including the search for causal laws, evolutionism, psychology and the study of religions. It reached its clearest form in the ideas of Helena Blavatsky, a Russian medium who founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Olcott in New York in 1875. The Society aimed to fuse elements of Eastern and Western traditions in an evolutionary type of spiritualism. It had three main aims:
Hermeticism: philosophical and religious practices and speculations linked to the writings in the Corpus Hermeticum, and the Alexandrian texts attributed to the mythical Hermes Trismegistos. When they first became known during the Renaissance, they were thought to reveal pre-Christian doctrines, but later studies showed they dated from the first century of the christian era.100 Alexandrian hermeticism is a major resource for modern esotericism, and the two have much in common: eclecticism, a refutation of ontological dualism, an affirmation of the positive and symbolic character of the universe, the idea of the fall and later restoration of mankind. Hermetic speculation has strengthened belief in an ancient fundamental tradition or a so-called philosophia perennis falsely considered as common to all religious traditions. The high and ceremonial forms of magic developed from Renaissance Hermeticism. 2ff7e9595c