21

The Decline of Superior Races

The modern world is far from being threatened by the danger of underpopulation; the cry of alarm some political leaders have launched in the past with the absurd slogan “there is power in numbers,” is totally unfounded. The truth is that we are facing an opposite danger: the constant and untrammeled increase of population in purely quantitative terms. The deterioration of the population affects only those stocks that should be considered the bearers of the forces that preside over the demos and the world of the masses and that contribute to any authentic human greatness. When I criticized the racist worldview I mentioned that occult power when present, alive, and at work constitutes the principle of a superior generation that reacts on the world of quantity by bestowing upon it a form and quality. In this regard, one can say that the superior Western races have been agonizing for many centuries and that the increasing growth in world population has the same meaning as the swarming of worms on a decomposing organism or as the spreading of cancerous cells: cancer is an uncontrolled hypertrophy of a plasma that devours the normal, differentiated structures of an organism after subtracting itself from the organism’s regulating laws. This is the scenario facing the modern world: the regression and the decline of fecundating (in the higher sense of the term) forces and the forces that bear forms parallels the unlimited proliferation of “matter,” of what is formless, of the masses.

This phenomenon must be related to what I have mentioned in the previous chapter concerning the sexes and concerning the relationship between men and women in this day and age, since they affect the issue of procreation and its meaning. If it is true that the modern world seems destined not to know any longer what the absolute woman and the absolute man are all about, and if in this world the sexualization is incomplete, that is, limited to the corporeal plane—then it must seem natural that the superior and even transcendent dimensions of sex, known by the world of Tradition in multiple forms, have been lost, and that this loss may affect the regimen of sexual unions and the possibilities offered by them either as a pure erotic experience or in view of a procreation that may not exhaust itself in a simple, opaque biological event.

The world of Tradition effectively knew a sexual sacrum and a magic of sex. What constantly transpires in countless symbols and customs from all parts of the world is the acknowledgment of sex as a creative and primordial force, rather than as a generative power.

In the woman, abyssal powers of passion and light, of danger and disintegration, were evoked.^[1] The chthonic power—namely, the Earth—lived in her while Heaven lived in man. Everything that is experienced by ordinary men in the form of peri-pheral sensations and passional and corporeal impulses was assumed in an organic and conscious way. Generation was decreed^[2] and the being who was generated was willed as the “child of duty,” namely, as one who must undertake and nourish the supernatural element of his stock and the liberation of the ancestor, and who must receive and pass on to future generations strength, life, and stability. Today, all this has become an inane fancy; men, instead of being in control of sex are controlled by it and wander about like drunkards without having the least clue as to what takes place in the course of their embraces, and without seeing the guiding principle acting behind their quest for pleasure or behind their own passions. Without people being aware of any of this, beyond and often against their own will, what comes into existence as a result of their intercourse is a new being who will have no spiritual continuity and, as in the case of the most recent generations, even without the pale residue constituted by bourgeois affective bonds.

This being the case, it is no wonder the superior races are dying out before the ineluctible logic of individualism, which especially in the so-called contemporary “higher classes,” has caused people to lose all desire to procreate. Not to mention all the other degenerative factors connected to a mechanized and urbanized social life and especially to a civilization that no longer respects the healthy and creative limitations constituted by the castes and by the traditions of blood lineage. Thus proliferation is concentrated in the lower social classes and in the inferior races where the animal-like impulse is stronger than any rational calculation and consideration. The unavoidable effects are a reversed selection and the ascent and the onslaught of inferior elements against which the “race” of the superior castes and people, now exhausted and defeated, can do very little as a spiritually dominating element.

Though today people talk more frequently about “population control” in view of the catastrophic effects of the demographical phenomenon that I have compared to a cancer, this still does not address the essential issue, since a differentiated and qualitative criterion does not come into play at all. But those who oppose population control on the basis of traditionalist and pseudomoralistic ideas, which nowadays amount to mere prejudices, are guilty of an even greater obtuseness. If what really matters is the greatness and the might of a stock, it is useless to be concerned about the material quality of fatherhood unless an equal concern for its spiritual dimension is present as well in the sense of superior interests, of the correct relationship between the sex s, and above all, of what is really meant by virility— of what it still signifies on a plane that is not merely naturalistic.

After exposing the decadence of modern woman, we must not forget that man is mostly responsible for such a decadence. Just like the plebeian masses would have never been able to make their way into all the domains of social life and of civilization if real kings and real aristocrats would have been in power, likewise, in a society run by real men, woman would never have yearned for or even been capable of taking the path she is following today. The periods in which women have reached autonomy and preeminence almost always have coincided with epochs marked by manifest decadence in ancient civilizations. Thus, the best and most authentic reaction against feminism and against every other female aberration should not be aimed at women as such, but at men instead. It should not be expected of women that they return to what they really are and thus reestablish the necessary inner and outer conditions for a reintegration of a superior race, when men themselves retain only the semblance of true virility.

If all efforts to reawaken the spiritual dimension of sexuality fail, and if the form of virility is not separated from what has become an amorphous and promiscuous spiritual substance, then everything is in vain. The virility that is physical, phallic, muscular, and animal is lifeless and does not contain any creative germ in the superior sense. Phallic man deceives himself by thinking that he dominates; the truth is that he is passive and is always susceptible to the subtler power of women and to the feminine principle.^[3] The differentiation of the sexes is authentic and absolute only in the spirit.

In all superior types of Tradition, man has always been considered the bearer of the lineage of the Uranian, solar principle; this principle transcends the mere “blood” principle, which is lost as soon as it converges into the feminine lineage. Its development is favored by the fertile ground represented by a pure woman belonging to a higher caste, but in any event, it always remains the qualifying principle that bestows a form and that orders the feminine generating substance.^[4] This principle is related to the same supernatural element, to the power that can “make the current ascend upward” and of which “victory,” “fortune,” and prosperity of a particular stock are usually the consequences. Hence the symbolical association (which did not have an obscene, but rather a real and deep meaning), typical of ancient traditional forms,^[5] of the male organ with ideas of resurrection, asceticism, and energies that confer the highest powers. As an echo of superior meanings found even among savage populations, we find expressed in clear terms the idea that only the initiate is a true male, and that initiation marks in an eminent way one’s entrance into virility; this means that prior to initiation, the individuals, notwithstanding their physical appearance, “have not yet turned into men,” and even if they are old they belong to the same group of children and women and are deprived of all the privileges of the clan’s virile elites. When the superbiological element that is the center and the measure of true virility is lost, people can call themselves men, but in reality they are just eunuchs and their paternity simply reflects the quality of animals who, blinded by instinct, procreate randomly other animals, who in turn are mere vestiges of existence.

If the expired civilization is propped up so as to make it look alive, and if men are treated like rabbits or stallions, their unions being carefully and rationally planned, let no one be fooled; what they will generate will either be a civilization of very beautiful animals destined to work, or, if the individualistic and utilitarian element predominates, a stronger law will lead the races toward the path of regression or extinction according to the same inexorability of the law of entropy and the degradation of energy. What will then be registered by future historians is only one of the several aspects of the “decline of the West” that are today very much in evidence. By way of introduction to the second part of this work, let me make a final point that is directly related to what I have previously mentioned concerning the relationships between spiritual virility and devotional religiosity. From these last considerations what has emerged is that what in the West goes by the name of “religion” truly corresponds to an essentially “feminine” orientation. The relationship with the supernatural, conceived in a personalized form (theism) as dedication, devotion, and inner renunciation of one’s own will before the divine hypostasis presents the typical traits of the path on which a feminine nature may realize itself.

Moreover and, generally speaking, if the feminine element corresponds to the naturalistic element, then it is easy to see why in the world of Tradition the inferior castes and races (in which the naturalistic element was more predominant than in those castes and races governed by the power of aristocratic rituals and divine heritage) benefitted from the participation in a higher order precisely through relationships of a “religious” type. Thus, even “religion” could have a place and exercise its function within the whole hierarchy, though subordinated and relative to higher forms of spiritual realization such as initiation and the various types of higher asceticism.

Following the mixing of the castes or of analogous social bodies and the coming to power of the inferior social strata and races, it was unavoidable that their spirit triumphed even in this regard; that any relationship-with the supernatural would be conceived exclusively in terms of “religion”; that any other higher form came under suspicion and was even stigmatized as sacrilegious and demonic. This feminization of spirituality was already foreshadowed in ancient times. Wherever it prevailed, it determined the first alteration of the primordial tradition in the races.

The object of the considerations I will articulate in the second part of my work is to analyze this process of decadence together with all those processes that have led to the collapse of primordial humanity; through these the genesis and face of the “modern world” will become manifest.

Footnotes

1. J. Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love, especially chapters 5 (“Sacred Ceremonies and Evocations”) and 6 (“Sex in the Realm of Initiations and Magic”).

2. In the Upaniṣads there are some expressions that describe sexual intercourse: “With power and glory I give you glory.” Also: ‘This man (ama) am I; that woman (sa), thou! That woman thou, this man am I. I am the heaven; thou the earth! Come, let us two together clasp! Together let us semen mix, a male, a son for to procure.” (Bṛhad-āraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6.4.8; 6.4.20–22.)

3. J. Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love.

4. “Of the seed and the womb, the seed is said to be more important, for the offspring of all living beings are marked by the mark of the seed. Whatsoever sort of seed is sown in a field prepared at the right season, precisely that sort of seed grows in it, manifesting its own particular qualities.” The Laws of Manu, 9.35–36. On this basis the caste system even practiced hypergamy: the man from a higher caste was allowed to marry women of lower castes, no matter how high his caste was (The Laws of Manu, 3.13). It is possible to find among savage populations the idea of the duality of the blood and the spirit that is passed on exclusively through the male lineage.

5. In the Hindu tradition the male semen is often called vīzya, a term that in texts describing ascetical practices (especially Buddhist) is also used to designate that “upward-streaming” force that has the power of spiritually renewing all the human faculties. As a sign of distinction Śaivite ascetics and yogis carry the phallus emblem around their necks. The reason why in places like Lydia, Phrygia, and Etruria tombs were ornate with phalli or with statues of an ithyphallic form was to express the association between the virile force and the power of resurrection. Likewise, in ancient Hellenism. the ithyphallic Hermes represented the resurrected primordial man “who did, does, and will stand” through the various phases of the manifestation (Hippolytus, Philosophumena, 5.8.14). An echo of this reverberates in an ancient Roman superstition that regarded the phallus as an amulet capable of warding off fascinations and nefarious influences.