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In the Revolt, Evola sets himself the task of uncovering what is meant by Tradition, as opposed to the ‘modern world’ of the title. His methodology differs radically from most historians in two fundamental ways: first, in his perrenialist or universalist conception of Tradition, and second, in his treatment of myth as ‘truer’ than historical fact. Let us deal with each of these in turn. His perennialism is deeply influenced by René Guénon,[31]who maintained that Tradition exists independently of any culture, as aPlatonic ideal:Evola believed in the existence of an Absolute Being existing in stillness and power in a higher eternal spiritual realm, and that all other beings are no more than imperfect expressions ofthis single Absolute. In that sense, one of the major intellectual sources he relied on was neo-platonism, but he believed, as did others such as Guénon, that these ideas were part of the common heritage of humanity, and were not the prerogative of individual cultures or communities. He believed therefore tha this principles are a universal and eternal philosophy, of which particular cultural expressions are no more than historically limited enactments; though the principles are eternal, the expressions in history are perennial. Hence the philosophy, in its better known, more influential and more optimistic guise, is usually referred to not as Traditionalism but as Perennialism.[32]Whatever differences we see in the particularities of any given traditional culture are only cosmetic, local manifestations; in their basic orientations,Evola maintains, one can discern essentially the same metaphysical Absolute Truth lying beyond the material plane.
‘Tradition is a timeless, sacred and transcendent source of values that are unchanging, an expression of an absolute being that exists outside time, that ancient societies understood intuitively and by whose values they lived their everyday lives in all its aspects.’[33] This corresponds to the same notion we have already encountered in our other authors: the spirit of Vico’s Ages of Gods andHeroes, Carlyle’s ‘poetic’ age (particularly his ‘Everlasting Yea’), Gobineau’s ‘chivalric’ race, Adams’s Age of Fear, Spengler’s Spring period, Sorokin’s ‘ideational’ phase, and Toynbee’s universal ‘higherreligions’—although, as we shall see, some of Evola’s emphases differ.We will return to these shortly, but for now it is important to grasp that for Evola ‘Tradition’ means an orientation ‘upwards’, towards themetaphysical Transcendent, which leads meaningfully to the ‘differentiated’ hierarchical life, a world of distinction and quality, in juxtaposition to the‘profane’ materialist world which can comprehend only matter and reduces life downwards in a flattening democratic utilitarianism which understandsonly quantity—in Guénon’s useful phrase ‘the reign of quantity’.[34]

It should not be difficult to see that, whatever their other differences, all our authors thus far from Vico to Toynbee agreed in spirit with this diagnosis,even if they used different words to express the same idea. But Evola maintained that you could see this phenomenon in every traditional culture,whatever their differences, and thus advanced his analysis by makingcomparisons across different cultures, traditions, mythologies, andreligions. Thus, it is not uncommon for a typical Evola passage to rangefrom Ancient Egypt to Ancient Persia to Ancient Greece to Ancient Rome to Hindu teachings to Buddhist teachings to Native American myths to talesof the Norse Gods and so on. The Revolt contains a bewildering kaleidoscope of comparative analyses—he called this his ‘traditional method’.[35] He also wrote, avowedly, only for a select elite, and therefore expects on the part of his reader esoteric knowledge that frankly everyone who reads it today, beyond perhaps a handful of experts in the world (Iconfess, I am not one of them!), will lack.

The second key methodological feature of the Revolt is Evola’s ‘morphology’, which is his assertion that ‘what matters in history are all the mythological elements it has to offer ... the Rome of legends speaks clearer words than the historical Rome.’ To the modern positivistic or scientistic mind, this might at first appear to be total madness. How could myths and legends that are objectively false, which is to say have no basis in empirical
and historical evidence, be ‘truer’ than the observed facts of what happened? Evola argues that when the methods of profane modern‘science’ are applied to the world of Tradition ‘the results are almost always distortions that destroy the spirit, limit and alter the subject matter, and lead into blind alleys of alibis created by the prejudices of the modern mentalityas it defends and asserts itself in every domain.’[36]

Evola’s ‘history is an investigation of myth, for it is in the world of mythology both that the universal principles of history can be identified and that the unending conflict of superior transcendent forces of good and evil can be most clearly seen.’[37] It is also a way ‘to enchant readers with the magical world ofhuman prehistory’.[38]Thus, we understand both the methodology and the orientation of Evola: any steps towards the self-actualisation in the transcendent and are cognition by cultural institutions of the true nature of The Absolute leadtowards Tradition, any steps away from that and towards profanematerialism lead towards modernity. This provides the frame for his theory of history, which is utterly opposed to the theory of Progress and to Social Darwinism, which was popular in the nineteenth century following classical liberal thinkers such as Herbert Spencer.[39] In Evola, ‘the “myth of progress”—is replaced by a sense of irreversible decadence. Evola’s belief was that the world, after thousands of years of decay, stood at the brink of a ravine.’[40] His view is based squarely on Hesiod’s four ages, with parallelsto the Hindu Yuga Cycle and the four ages of the Ancient Persian Zoroastrian cycle, as outlined in Chapter 1. History has a cyclical and downwards trajectory. In Evola’s thought, this takes the shape of two interrelated concepts: ‘The Doctrine of the Castes’(not to be confused with ‘The Regression of the Castes’, which I will come to discuss) and ‘The Doctrine of the Four Ages’.[41] In the Golden Age, society was hierarchically ordered and spiritually orientated ‘upwards’ in a Great Chain of Being from a divine ruler who united the role of warrior and priest in his body and centred the society on transcendent faith. The Four Castes—workers, bourgeoisie, warrior, and spiritual authority—‘were arranged in a hierarchy that corresponded to the hierarchy of the functions within a living organism’, each part harmoniously carrying out its allottedrole, with the spiritual authority above the warriors, who were, in turn, above the bourgeoisie, who were, in turn, above the workers.[42] The Golden Age was maintained by a solar spirituality symbolised by light as glory and embodied in regality. This degenerates into a Silver Age in which thewarrior-priest has transformed into a merely priestly class: ‘the Silver Age corresponds to a priestly and feminine rather than regal and virile type of spirituality: I have called it lunar spirituality.’ However, they come to be replaced by a more brutal warrior caste, who reassert masculine virtues andrule through an honour system privileging concepts such as loyalty andduty. This is the Bronze Age. However, it differs from the Golden Age insomuch as this masculine caste lacks the truly radiant transcendence ofthe original warrior-priest, he is ‘the mere warrior’ and is characterised by ‘pride, violence, war’.[43] ‘This Man was no longer pure spirit and he eventually rebelled against the lunar symbolism by either affirming himself or by pursuing violent conquest’; he was ‘merciless’.[44]

Eventually, in the ‘twilight of the gods’, the primordial connection to the divine is finallysevered and so begins the Iron Age or Kali Yuga. In what is, perhaps, shocking for practically any modern reader of the Revolt to understand, the entirety of the cycle outlined above takes place some time before the eighth century BC, which is to say that the entirety of modern history plays out within the Kali Yuga, with only the echoes of Tradition left in degenerated or bastardised forms for most of what we know of history. The Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages play out entirely within the realm of myths and legends, themselves faintly remembered glimpses of a long-lost past. What I have described can be difficult to grasp until one comes to realise that, for Evola, the Kali Yuga itself has its own internal cycle of degeneration wherein the echoes of Tradition become ever fainter and more severed from the dim glow of the Golden Age captured in myth. And this is the true meaning of the ‘Regression of the Castes’, wherein within the Kali Yuga each of the four castes—spiritual authority, warrior, bourgeoisie, and proletariat—is overthrown by the one directly below it. There is, therefore ,a second cycle ‘within’ the grander Yuga cycle through which the last vestiges of the social order disintegrate, although this takes a long time (i.e.for all the ‘profane’ history that we know to the present). There have been attempts to give precise timelines, most notably by Joscelyn Godwin in summary of the work of Gaston Georgel, a follower of Guénon. This reveals one large over-arching cycle, then a smaller cycle within the Iron Age itself, and a yet smaller ‘mini-cycle’ for modern times. For the over-arching cycle, The Golden Age is said to have started in 62,770 BC, the Silver Age in 36,850 BC, the Bronze Age in 7,410 BC, and the Iron Age in 4450 BC which is set to end in 2030 AD. However, within the Iron Age are four phases which each correspond to the Four Ages as ‘reflections’ or ‘echoes’. The Golden Age within the Kali Yuga lasted from 4450 BC to 1858 BC, the Silver Age from 1858 BC to 86 AD, the Bronze Age from 214 BC to 1382, and the Iron Age from 1382 to 2030. But then this ‘Iron Age within the Kali Yuga’ has its own reflective Four Ages, it is a ‘mini-cycle’: its Golden Age lasts from 1310 to 1598, its Silver Age from 1598 to 1814, its Bronze Age from 1814 to 1958, and its Iron Age from 1958 to 2030. Georgel posits still a further miniature set of Four Ages within the ‘mini’ Iron Age within the smaller Iron Age of the over-arching Kali Yuga: Golden (1958–87), Silver (1987–2009), Bronze (2009–23), Iron (2023–30).