40. Modernism

Decadence

“Although their targets did not entirely overlap,” explains Eli Valley, “Hitler directly drew from portions of Nordau’s work in Mein Kampf, while eliding the source.”[1] The main work that gave rise to theories of decadence was the work Degeneration (1892) by Max Nordau—a co-founder of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) together with Herzl, and president or vice president of several Zionist congresses—and which was adopted by nationalists who presented their brand of nationalism as a cure.[2] Roger Griffin, the noted scholar of fascism, describes the ideology as having three core components: “(i) the rebirth myth, (ii) populist ultra-nationalism, and (iii) the myth of decadence.”[3] Although considered to have first emerged in France in the 1880s, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Hegel have also been considered as influential in the development of fascism. The ideological roots of fascism have also been traced to Social Darwinism, Wagnerian aesthetics, Arthur de Gobineau’s racialist anthropology, Oswald Spengler and his The Decline of Western Civilization.

The main work that gave rise to decadence theories was Nordau’s Degeneration.[4] The book deals with numerous case studies of various artists, writers and thinkers, including Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, but its basic premise remains that society and human beings themselves are degenerating, and this degeneration is both reflected in and influenced by art. In the in the opening pages, Nordau establishes the cultural phenomenon of fin de siècle, but he then develops the viewpoint of a physician and identifies what he sees as an illness in the entire artistic and literary avant-garde, “contempt for the traditional views of custom and morality.” Nordau compared the modern artist to a criminal:

 

It never occurs to us to permit the criminal by organic disposition to “expand” his individuality in crime, a as little can it be expected of us to permit the degenerate artist to expand his individuality in immoral works of art. The artist who complacently represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the criminal who actually commits it.[5]

 

As indicated by Griffin, while fascism has tended to be seen incorrectly as opposed to modernism, there was a significant interplay between the two. Many of the intellectual sources of modernism, Griffin points out, are not normally associated with the movement. The Futurists, Expressionists, Dadaists, Sorelians, and radical aesthetes from Van Gogh, Rilke, Stravinsky, D’Annunzio to Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Wyndham Lewis, and Ernst Jünger, all shared with fascism a pessimism about the state of the modern world.[6] Instead, Griffin suggests that modernism must be expanded to embrace not just experimentalism in literature, art, and architecture, but to radical or revolutionary politics. The common denominator, Griffin explains, is:

 

…that in different ways the projects and movements in question aimed to put to an end to what Spengler portrayed as ‘the decline of the West,’ reverse what Max Weber called the ‘disenchantment’ of modern society, resolve what Sigmund Freud described as ‘the discontents’ of civilization, satisfy modern man’s (and woman’s) search for a ‘soul’ explored by Carl Jung, and remedy what Heidegger interpreted as a loss of ‘being at home in the world”.[7]

 

Mark Antliff, in Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939, investigated the central role that theories of the visual arts and creativity played in the development of fascism in France, and its formative influence on the history of avant-garde art. Included in this trend were the European Symbolists, a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. One of Symbolism’s most colorful promoters in Paris was art and literary critic Joséphin Péladan, who founded the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (OKR+C) with Papus, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and Stanislas de Guaita.[8] “I believe in the Ideal, in Tradition, in Hierarchy,” Péladan declared, reflecting the ideals of fascism. Max Nordau, in his book, Degeneration, shows a soft spot for Péladan, declaring that “the conscious factor in him knows that [mysticism] is all nonsense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the unconscious life to do as it pleases.”[9]

The idea of supra-rational knowledge, omnipresent in the work of Papus’ leading pupil, Réne Guénon (1886 – 1951), inspired avant-garde artistic circles who sought to go beyond rational thought, in particular the surrealist movement.[10] Guénon took on an “anti-Masonic” stance because he was opposed to the rationalist orientation of the fraternity, which became a constant feature of his career and strategy, which Marie-France James, one of the best Catholic critics of Guénon, described as a “clearly Gnostic-Masonic objective, with all the with all the hallmarks of a rehabilitation and propaganda operation.”[11] Guénon met Papus and was initiated into the Martinist Order in 1907, becoming “Superior Unknown.” He contributed to the occultist magazine Le Voile d’Isis founded by Papus in 1890. He was also initiated into the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm in 1907, and was raised to the third degree of Master Mason of Freemasonry. Guénon was also a close friend of Charles Barlet (a.k.a. Albert Faucheux), a member of the Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement, from whom he received numerous documents from his master, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, and from the H.B.of L, for which he was the representative for France.[12]

In 1908, Guénon was secretary at the International Masonic Congress held in Paris organized by Papus, where he met Léonce Fabre des Essarts who, under the pseudonym of Synésius, succeeded Jules Doinel as leader of the Gnostic Church, and which became the official church of the Martinist Order, as l'Église Gnostique Universelle (“Universal Gnostic Church”). Guénon joined the church, became a Gnostic bishop, and wrote many articles under the pseudonym Palingenius between 1909 and 1912 in the magazine La Gnose. With Victor Blanchard, a member of Papus’ Supreme Council, he also founded a short-lived Order of the Temple, which would later drive a wedge between him and Papus.[13]

Guénon was received in 1912 into the Thébah (“arch” in Hebrew) Masonic lodge, that was created in 1901 by Symbolists for the purpose of spiritual research, esotericism or the Kabbalah. Thébah belonged to the Grande Loge de France, which in 1894 became independent of the Supreme Council of France, once governed by Adolphe Crémieux, head of the Alliance Israelite Universelle and also Grand Master of the Rite of Misraïm. Its first Venerable Master was Pierre Deulin (1973 – 1912), the brother-in-law of Papus. Deulin was also secretary of the Revue cosmique, organ of the Cosmic Movement created by Max Théon. The secretary of the OKR+C, Oswald Wirth, contributed to the rewriting of several high grades of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite with Albert Lantoine, at the request of the Grand Commander of the Supreme Council René Raymond, himself the founder of Thébah and a member of the Cosmic Movement.[14]

 

Action Française

Guénon, who would become an important intellectual inspiration to much of the political right, had been involved with Action Française and its founder Charles Maurras (1868 – 1952).[15] The movement Action Française and the journal were founded as a nationalist reaction against the intervention of left-wing intellectuals on the Dreyfus Affair. Henri Vaugeois (1864 – 1916) and Maurice Pujo (1872 – 1955), the original founding members of Action Française, had belonged to l’Union pour l’Action Morale (“Union for Moral Action”), founded in 1893 by Paul Desjardins (1859 – 1940), a French professor, journalist and Synarchist.[16] The Union split during the Dreyfus affair, giving rise to L’Union pour la Vérité (“Union for Truth”), led by Paul Desjardins, a supporter of Dreyfus, and the Action Française being established by Vaugeois and Pujo in 1889.[17]

Under Maurras Action française became a political movement that was monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary and anti-Semitic. Also associated with Maurras and his Action Française was French revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel (1847 – 1922), one of the key activists who greatly influenced fascism. Action Française also attracted figures like Maurice Barrès (1862 – 1923), a staunch Wagernite and one of the founding members of revived Martinist Order along with Papus. Barrès was also a friend of Stanislas de Guaita and Claude Debussy, one of the founding members of revived Martinist Order along with Papus. Barrès was the first to coin the term “national socialism” in 1898, an idea which then quickly spread throughout Europe.

French composer Claude Debussy (1862 –1918), who was greatly influenced by the Symbolist poetic movement, was a member of the OKR+C and one of the founding members of revived Martinist Order along with Papus, and a purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Debussy made Victor Hugo’s acquaintance and subsequently he set a number of Hugo’s works to music. Debussy associated with the symbolist playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, whose Pelleas et Melisande, he turned into a world-famous opera. In his early twenties, Jean Cocteau became associated with Proust, Gide and Maurice Barrès as well. He was also a close friend of Victor Hugo’s great-grandson, Jean, with whom he participated in explorations of spiritualism and the occult. In 1926, Cocteau designed the set for a production of the opera Pelleas et Melisande because, according to one commentator, he was “unable to resist linking his name for all time to that of Claude Debussy.”[18]

Barrès was a close associate of Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863 – 1938), who was a friend of Stefan George and Grand Master of the Scottish Rite Great Lodge of Italy, which in 1908 had separated from the Grand Orient of Italy.[19] Like Barrès, d’Annunzio was also a great admirer of Wagner. When Wagner died, in Venice in 1883, d’Annunzio was among the pallbearers. Il fuoco (“The Flame”), d’Annunzio’s 1900 novel, which tells a story inspired by his relationship with the actress Eleonora Duse, novel contains expositions of many of his theories about drama, largely inspired by Nietzsche and Wagner. After World War I, d’Annunzio settled permanently in Wagner’s former villa on Lake Garda, given to him by Wagner’s family. D’Annunzio swore to die heroically like “his beloved Siegfried.” Mussolini also greatly admired Wagner, though he considered him quite un-German.[20]

Angered by the proposed handing over of the city of Fiume, whose population was mostly Italian, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, d’Annunzio led the seizure of the city and then declared Fiume an independent state, the Italian Regency of Carnaro. As the de facto dictator of Fiume, d’Annunzio maintained control over what has been described as a “new and dangerously potent politics of spectacle,” which was imitated by Mussolini.[21] D’Annunzio has been described as the John the Baptist of Italian fascism, as virtually the entire ritual of fascism was invented by him during his occupation of Fiume. The flag of the Regence of Carnaro, also known as the Endeavor of Fiume, featured the Ouroboros, the Gnostic symbol of a snake biting its own tail, and the seven stars of the Ursa Major.

D’Annunzio occupied a prominent place in Italian literature and later political life, often referred to under the epithets Il Vate (“the Poet”) or Il Profeta (“the Prophet”). One of D’Annunzio’s most important novels, scandalous in its day, is Il fuoco (“The Flame of Life”) of 1900, in which he portrays himself as the Nietzschean Superman Stelio Effrena, in a fictionalized version of his love affair with Eleonora Duse. He collaborated with Debussy on a musical play Le martyre de Saint Sébastien (“The Martyrdom of St Sebastian”), from 1911, written for the Russian-Jewish dancer and actress Ida Rubinstein. The Vatican reacted by placing all of his works in the Index of Forbidden Books. Rubinstein made her debut in 1908 in a single private performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, in which she stripped nude for the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Mussolini’s concept of the New Man was inspired by Futurism, founded by Filippo Marinetti (1876 – 1944), who in 1916, linked with D’Annunzio, and together they had helped push Italy into war with the central powers.  As well as Sorel, with whom Marinetti would remain in close contact, Futurism was also influenced by Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès.[22] One of the central features of the Futurist movement was the glorification of modernity, which he called “modernolatry,” based on the belief that technology had fundamentally improved the capacity of human beings. Futurism aimed to accomplish a comprehensive “revolution,” not only in different forms of art, such as literature, theatre and music, but also in politics, fashion, cuisine, mathematics, and in every possible aspect of life.[23] On February 20, 1909, across the front page of the French right-wing magazine Le Figaro, a publication which had been subsidized by Pyotr Rachkovsky, the head of the Okhrana in Paris,[24] Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto, which proclaimed that that “Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.” For Marinetti, the war was “the most beautiful futurist poem that has seen the light of day.”[25]

 

Modern Art

Through the association Marinetti with the Symbolists, Futurism prepared the ground for the modernist revolution of the early twentieth century. The Cubism of Picasso and Braque, along with the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky, German Expressionism and the Futurist movement of Marinetti, are considered to be a hallmark of modernism. More than any other person, it was Gertrude Stein, who coordinated the avant-garde art movement. Stein began to accept and define her pseudo-masculinity through the ideas of “Jewish self-hater” Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1906).[26] Weininger considered Jewish men effeminate and women as incapable of selfhood and genius, except for lesbians who may approximate masculinity. A close friend of Bertrand Russell, Stein started her career under the tutelage of William James at Harvard University.[27] In her Paris salon, Stein entertained nightly a circle frequented by the painters Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, Diego Rivera, the American writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the composers Maurice Ravel, Stravinsky, Erik Satie and many, many others. Their private collection, assembled from 1904 to 1913, soon had a worldwide reputation. Their acquisitions included works by Gauguin, Cézanne, Delacroix, Matisse, Picasso, Paul Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.

The pagan-themed ballet Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, a close friend to Aldous Huxley and W.H. Auden, has been heralded as the birth of modernism.[28] As suggested by its subtitle “Pictures of Pagan Russia,” the theme for Stravinsky’s opera is the pagan worship of the dying-god, whose resurrection was traditionally celebrated on Easter. In the opera, Stravinsky dared to associate the rite with human sacrifice. When the ballet was first performed at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in 1913, the controversial nature of the music and choreography caused a riot in the audience. The concept for the controversial ballet the Rite of Spring was developed by his friend Nicholas Roerich, another important member of the Theosophical Society and also a friend of H. G. Wells.

Many in these circles were connected with the Theosophical Society and intersected with the Golden Dawn, which included, among others, Yeats, Maude Gonne, Constance Lloyd (the wife of Oscar Wilde), Arthur Edward Waite and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Shaw’s mistress, Florence Farr, had been a member of the Golden Dawn, as well as a friend of Masonic scholar Arthur Edward Waite. These personalities were often also members of, or further intersected with, the Theosophical Society, which included D.H. Lawrence, as well as William Butler Yeats, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Dame Jane Goodall, Thomas Edison, Piet Mondrian, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Gustav Mahler. “I got everything from the ‘Secret Doctrine’ (Blavatsky),” Mondrian wrote, in 1918.[29]

Gurdjieff also worked closely with Thomas de Hartmann (1884 – 1956), a friend of Kandinsky and Rainer Maria Rilke, who were friends of Karl Wolfskehl of the George-Kreis. Even before 1910, Kandinsky studied the Theosophical books of Blavatsky, Besant and Leadbeater, Rudolf Steiner, and Schuré, a close friend of Richard Wagner. In 1912, he wrote in his main theoretical work Über das Geistige in der Kunst (“On the Spiritual in Art” on the importance of Theosophy “for his art. In his treatise, Kandinsky stated that Blavatsky began “one of the greatest spiritual movements which unites a great number of people and which also has established a material form of this spiritual phenomenon in the Theosophical Society.”[30] Arnold Schoenberg, a friend of Kandinsky, agreed with much of what he wrote in the book.[31]

 

Monte Verità

Martin Buber, along with Frieda and D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and Alma Mahler, the wife of composer and Theosophical Society member Gustav Mahler, were members of the sexual cult of Dr. Otto Gross, who was Freud’s as well as Jung’s student. [32]  As a bohemian drug user from youth, as well as an advocate of free love, Gross is sometimes credited as a founding father of twentieth century counterculture. While working as a ship’s doctor in 1900, he became addicted to cocaine, and remained an addict for the rest of his life. He entered a clinic for it several times but did not succeed in becoming clean. Gross was involved in a number of scandalous affairs and illegitimate children. He had an affair with Frieda Weekly, who later eloped with D.H. Lawrence, with whom she would spend the rest of her life.[33] Years later, Jung recalled that Gross “mainly hung out with artists, writers, political dreamers, and degenerates of any description, and in the swamps of Ascona he celebrated miserable and cruel orgies.”[34] About his relationship with Gross, Jung wrote to Freud that “I have learnt an unspeakable amount of marital wisdom, for until now I had a totally inadequate idea of my polygamous components despite all self-analysis.”[35]

Gross was the dominant influence in the area of Ascona, Switzerland, originally a resort area for members of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy cult. In 1889, OTO founder and List Society member Franz Hartmann established, together with Alfredo Pioda and Countess Constance Wachtmeister, the close friend of Blavatsky, a theosophical monastery at Ascona. There, Hartmann published his periodical Lotusblüten (“Lotus Blossoms”), which was the first German publication to use the theosophical swastika on its cover. In 1900, Henri Oedenkoven and Ida Hofmann founded Monte Verità (The Mountain of Truth), a utopian commune near Ascona, which became a sort of early New Age haven of bohemianism and the occult, featuring experimentation in surrealism, paganism, feminism, pacifism, nudism, psychoanalysis and alternative healing.

The OTO had its only female lodge at Ascona. In 1916, Theodor Reuss moved to Basel, Switzerland where he established an “Anational Grand Lodge and Mystic Temple” of the OTO and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light at Monte Verità. In 1917, Reuss organized the Sun Festival (“Sonnenfest”), a conference there covering many themes, including societies without nationalism, women’s rights, mystic freemasonry, and dance as art, ritual and religion. Performing at the festival was Mary Wigman (1886 – 1973) was a German dancer and choreographer considered one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance.[36] Wigman was a student of Carl Jung and OTO member Rudolf von Laban (1879 – 1958), known as the “Founding Father of the Expressionist Dance” in Germany.[37] In 1923, one of Wigman’s students, Helene Hanke, married Hildebrand Gurlitt, the “quarter-Jew” who would come to be among the several art dealers part of the Nazi looting operation.[38] In 1934, Laban was promoted to director of the Deutsche Tanzbühne, in Nazi Germany. He directed major festivals of dance under the funding of Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry from 1934-1936. Laban wrote during this time that “we want to dedicate our means of expression and the articulation of our power to the service of the great tasks of our Volk. With unswerving clarity our Führer points the way.”[39]

 

Dada 

Monte Verità was significant for the development of both the Cabaret Voltaire and the European avant-garde and anti-art movement known as Dada.[40] Dada was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Living across the street from the Cabaret Voltaire were Lenin, Karl Radek and Gregory Zinoviev who were busy planning the Bolshevik Revolution.[41] Though the cabaret was to be the birthplace of the Dada movement, it featured artists from every sector of the avant-garde, including Marinetti, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Max Ernst. On July 28, 1916, Hugo Ball read out the Dada Manifesto, and also published a journal with the same name, which featured work from Guillaume Apollinaire and had a cover designed by Taeuber-Arp.

Dada grew out of an already vibrant artistic tradition in Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, that was transported to Switzerland when a group of Jewish modernist artists—Tristan Tzara, Marcel and Iuliu Janco, Arthur Segal, and others—settled in Zurich. Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963), born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, was best known for being one of the founders and central figures of the movement. According to Menachem Wecker, the works of the Jewish Dadaists represented “not only the aesthetic responses of individuals opposed to the absurdity of war and fascism” but, invoking the well-worn light unto the nations theme, insists that they brought a “particularly Jewish perspective to the insistence on justice and what is now called tikkun olam.”[42]

Norman Finkelstein links the Dada founded by Tzara to the influence of the Sabbateans’ and Frankists’ notion of “redemption through sin.”[43] In recent years, researchers such as Tom Sandqvist, Milly Heyd, Haim Finkelstein, and Marius Hentea, have given new emphasis on the Jewishness of the Romanian contributors to Dada.[44] In his book Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, Tom Sandqvist points out that Tzara’s Hasidic and Kabbalistic influences of his youth were evident in his art.[45] Tzara’s hometown Moinesti is, in Andrei Codrescu’s opinion, “the center of the modern world, not only because of Tristan Tzara’s invention of Dada, but because its Jews were among the first Zionists, and Moinesti itself was the starting point of a famous exodus of its people on foot from here to the land of dreams, E’retz-Israel.”[46]

According to the Jewish American poet Jerome Rothenberg, there are “definite historical linkages between the transgressions of messianism and the transgressions of the avant-garde.”[47] Rothenberg refers to these heresies as “libertarian movements,” and connects them to Jewish receptivity to the forces of secularization and modernity, leading in turn to the “critical role of Jews and ex-Jews in revolutionary politics (Marx, Trotsky etc.) and avant-garde poetics (Tzara, Kafka, Stein etc.).”[48] Milly Heyd endorses Rothenberg’s thesis, observing that “Tzara uses terminology that is part and parcel of Judaic thinking and yet subjects these very concepts to his nihilistic attack.”[49] Tzara declared that, “Dada is using all its strength to establish the idiotic everywhere. Doing it deliberately. And is constantly tending towards idiocy itself… The new artist protests; he no longer paints (this is only a symbolic and illusory reproduction).”[50]

 

Surrealism

As a result of his campaigning, Tzara created a list of so-called “Dada presidents,” who represented various regions of Europe. According to Hans Richter, it included, alongside Tzara himself, figures ranging from Max Ernst, André Breton, Julius Evola and Igor Stravinsky.[51] An article by Jean-Pierre Lassalle, titled “André Breton et la Franc-Maçonnerie,” revealed the existence of a core of active Freemasons from the “Guénonian” Thébah Masonic lodge who were tied to the Parisian surrealists, many of them students of the alchemist Eugène Canseliet (1899 – 1982) and associated with André Breton (1896 –1966), the leader of the Surrealist movement.[52] Guénon’s work had an impact on many artists, in particular in the surrealist movement that developed out of the Dada activities during World War I. One example was Breton, who was interested in the works of Joseph Péladan.[53] Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement.[54] From the 1920s onward, the surrealist movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.

A very important exponent of the avant-garde was French surrealist artist Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963). In his early twenties, Cocteau had become associated with Action francaise and with the writers Ernst Jünger, Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. It was during his time with Action Française that Cocteau made his acquaintance of his close friend, Jacques Maritain (1882 – 1973).[55] Jacques Maritain’s grandfather was Jules Favre, a Freemason and a friend of Victor Hugo, the author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.[56] In 1904, Maritain married Raïssa Oumançoff, a Russian Jewish émigré. They then converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1906. Maritain was a friend and supporter of René Guénon, with whom he corresponded frequently on philosophy and metaphysics.[57] In addition to Cocteau, Maritain also counted among his friends the artist, Marc Chagall. Cocteau also met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. He wrote the libretto for Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus rex.

Cocteau became closely associated with the Dada movement. He collaborated on the Anthologie Dada and participated in a Dada matinée in 1920, along with Breton, Tzara, Francis Picabia and friend Max Jacob (1876 –1944). Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. Jacob, who was Jewish, claimed to have had a vision of Christ in 1909, and converted to Catholicism, hopeful that this conversion would alleviate his homosexual tendencies.[58] Jacob would become close friends with Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916. Jean Hugo was the great-grandson of author Victor Hugo. Cocteau behaved like a Dada “pervert,” producing phallic images and cartoons for Picabia. Although for this reason Cocteau would become known briefly as an “anti-Tzara,” Cocteau and Tzara posed together for a photographic artwork by Man Ray in 1922.[59]

 

Group Ur

After World War I, fascist intellectual “Baron” Julius Evola (1898 – 1974) had been attracted to the avant-garde, and briefly associated with Marinetti’s Futurist movement, and became a prominent representative of Dadaism in Italy. Evola was the most important successor to Guénon’s Traditionalism. According to one scholar, “Evola’s thought can be considered one of the most radically and consistently antiegalitarian, antiliberal, antidemocratic, and antipopular systems in the twentieth century.”[60] Evola authored books covering themes such as Hermeticism, the metaphysics of war, sex magic, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism and the Holy Grail. Evola’s influences included Plato, Jacob Boehme, Arthur de Gobineau, Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West he later translated into Italian.

Evola was introduced to Traditionalism around 1927 after he joined the Theosophical League founded by Arturo Reghini (1878 – 1946). As an Italian representative of the OTO, Reghini also had a common friend in Crowley with Evola.[61] In the final article of Book Three of the Introduction to Magic, Evola translates several sections from Aleister Crowley’s Liber Aleph, the Book of Wisdom or Folly, where Evola claims that, “In the contemporary magical amphitheater… Crowley is a figure of the first rank.”[62] In 1927, Reghini, Evola and other occultists, including Giovanni Colazza (1877 – 1953), a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, founded the Gruppo di Ur, which performed rituals intended to inspire Italy’s fascist regime with the spirit of imperial Rome. The Ur group also included Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986), a central figure in the history of Traditionalism.[63] First interested in Theosophy and Martinism, Eliade became an intimate friend Evola who introduced to the work of Guénon.[64]

Also belonging to the Ur Group was Maria Naglowska (1883 – 1936), a Russian occultist who wrote and taught sex magic and referred to herself as a “Satanic woman.”[65] She was rumored to have been initiated by Hassidic Jews or by Rasputin, or by the Russian sect of the Khlysty to which Rasputin was rumored to belong.[66] Naglowska married Jewish musician, Moise Hopenko, against the wishes of his family. The resulting break with Maria’s aristocratic family led the young couple to leave Russia for Berlin, Germany and then Geneva, Switzerland. However, after he met Theodor Herzl, he became a Zionist, and decided to leave them and move to Palestine around 1910, abandoning her and their children.[67] Naglowska moved to Rome around 1920 where she became acquainted with Evola.[68] In 1929, she moved to Paris where she conducted occult seminars on her ideas on sex magic. Attendance at these sessions included notable avant-garde writers and artists such as Evola, William Seabrook, Man Ray and André Breton. These gatherings eventually led to the establishment of the Confrerie de la Flèche d’Or (Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow).[69]  Evola, in his book Eros Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, claimed that Naglowska often wrote for shock effect, noting her “deliberate intention to scandalize the reader through unnecessarily dwelling on Satanism.”[70] In 1931, Naglowska compiled, translated and published in French a collection of writings by Paschal Beverly Randolph, who had a profound influence on the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. Her publication of Randolph’s previously little known teachings was the source of his subsequent influence in European magic.[71]

After the Italian surrender to the Allied forces in 1943, Evola moved to Germany where he spent the remainder of the war and also worked as a researcher on Freemasonry for the SS Ahnenerbe in Vienna. Inspired by SS member Herman Wirth, Evola reinterpreted Guénon’s perception that the origin of the “Primordial Tradition” was Hyperborean.[72] Evola admired Himmler and regarded the SS as a model elite, of which he wrote in Vita Italiana, “We are inclined to the opinion that we can see the nucleus of an Order in the higher sense of tradition in the ‘Black Corps.’”[73] Himmler then commissioned Wiligut to assess Evola. Apparently jealous, Wiligut concluded that “Evola works from a basic Aryan concept but is quite ignorant of prehistoric Germanic institutions and their meaning,” areas Wiligut was supposed to have excelled in, and recommended rejecting Evola’s “utopian” proposal.[74]

 

 


[1] Eli Valley. “A Springtime of Erasure.” Jewish Currents (November 25, 2019). Retrieved from https://jewishcurrents.org/a-springtime-of-erasure

[2] Stanley G. Payne. A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 30.

[3] Roger Griffin. The Nature of Fascism (Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), p. 201.

[4] Stanley G. Payne. A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1996).

[5] Max Nordau. Degeneration (London: William Heinemann, 1898), p. 15. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51161/51161-h/51161-h.htm

[6] Roger Griffin. “Fascism’s Modernist Revolution: A New Paradigm for the Study of Right-wing Dictatorships.” Fascism 5 (2016) p. 112.

[7] Ibid., p. 110.

[8] Marcel Roggemans. History of Martinism and the F.U.D.O.S.I (Lulu.com, 2009), p. 36.

[9] Alex Ross. “The Occult Roots of Modernism.” The New Yorker (June 19, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/the-occult-roots-of-modernism

[10] Xavier Accart. René Guénon ou le renversement des clartés : Influence d'un métaphysicien sur la vie littéraire et intellectuelle française (1920-1970) (Paris, Archè EDIDIT, 2005), p. 118.

[11] Marie-France James. Ésotérisme et christianisme autour de René Guénon (Paris, N.E.L., 1981), p. 129; cited in Christian Lagrave. Les dangers de la gnose contemporaine (Le Sel, 2012), p. 100.

[12] René Guénon, “F.-Ch. Barlet et les sociétés initiatiques,” Le Voile d'Isis, April 1925; Jean-Pierre Laurant. “Barlet, François-Charles.” Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (Brill, 2006), p. 163.

[13] Christian Lagrave. Les dangers de la gnose contemporaine (Le Sel, 2012), p. 100.

[14] Jean Louis Turbet. “Mouvement Cosmique et Rite Ecossais Ancien et Accepté.”  (November 1, 2021). Retrieved from https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jlturbet.net%2F2021%2F10%2Fmouvement-cosmique-et-rite-ecossais-ancien-et-accepte.html#federation=archive.wikiwix.com&tab=url

[15] “The Spiritual Fascism of Réne Guénon and His Followers,” Retrieved from http://www.naturesrights.com/knowledge power book/Guénon.asp

[16] Annie Lacroix-Riz. “Interview Annie Lacroix-Riz sur la Synarchie par le Canard républicain.” Retrieved from https://www.historiographie.info/synarchie.pdf

[17] Philippe Oriol. L’Histoire de l'affaire Dreyfus de 1894 à nos jours (Les Belles Lettres, 2014), p. 827.

[18] Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, p. 138.

[19] Fulvio Conti. Storia della massoneria italiana. Dal Risorgimento al fascism (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003).

[20] Viereck. Metapolitics.

[21] Brian Lowe. Moral Claims in the Age of Spectacles: Shaping the Social Imaginary (Springer, 2017). p. 72.

[22] Alexander Reid Ross. Against the Fascist Creep (AK Press, 2017).

[23] Marja Härmänmaa. “Marinetti, Machine, and Superman: Or About the Destructiveness of Technology.” The 13th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, in cooperation with the University of Cyprus.

[24] Catherine Evtuhov & Stephen Kotkin. The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789-1991 (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), p. 140.

[25] Robert Fox. “Back to futurism?” The Guardian (February 20, 2009).

[26] Tamara Ann Ramsay. Discursive departures: A reading paradigm affiliated with feminist, lesbian, aesthetic and queer practices (with reference to Woolf, Stein, and H.D.) Thesis (Wilfrid Laurier University, 1998). Retrieved from http://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/5/

[27] Peter Wyer, “The Racist Roots of Jazz.”

[28] Katherine O’Callaghan. Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism (Routledge, 2018).

[29] Alex Ross. “The Occult Roots of Modernism.” The New Yorker (June 26, 2017).

[30] Wassily Kandinsky. Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 4th ed. (Bern: Benteli-Verlag, 1952).

[31] John R. Covach. “Schoenberg and The Occult: Some Reflections on the Musical Idea.” Theory and Practice 17 (1992), 103.

[32] Michael Minnicino. “The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’,” (Fidelio, Winter 1992).

[33] Cited in Gottfried Heuer. “Jung’s twin brother. Otto Gross and Carl Gustav Jung.” Journal of Analytical Psychology (2001, 46: 3), p. 670.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Cited in Jay Sherry. Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 41.

[36] Susan Manning. Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 73.

[37] Evelyn Dörr. Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2008), pp. 99-101

[38] Ibid.

[39] Rudolf Laban. “Meister und Werk in der Tanzkunst,” Deutsche Tanzzeitschrift (May 1936), cited in Horst Koegler. “Vom Ausdruckstanz zum ‘Bewegungschor’ des deutschen Volkes: Rudolf von Laban,” in Intellektuellen im Bann des National Sozialismus, ed. Karl Corino (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1980), p. 176.

[40] Christine Eggenberg. “Sublime truth, exalted art.” Self-Organization of Cogniion and Applications to Psychology (Ascona: October 25–28, 2000). Retrieved from https://www.embodiment.ch/research/symposien/HA9.html

[41] Menachem Wecker. “Eight Jewish Dada Artists.” The Jewish Press (August 30, 2006).

[42] Ibid..

[43] Norman Finkelstein. Not One of Them in Place and Jewish American Identity (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture, State University of New York Press, New York, 2001), p. 100.

[44] Alfred Brodenheimer. “Dada Judaism: The Avant-Garde in First World War Zurich.” Jewish Aspects in Avant-Garde: Between Rebellion and Revelation, edited by Mark H. Gelber, Sami Sjöberg (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017), p. 26.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Andrei Codrescu. The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton University Press, 2009).

[47] Ibid.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Milly Heyd. “Tristan Tzara/Shmuel Rosenstock: The Hidden/Overt Jewish Agenda,” in Washton-Long, Baigel & Heyd (Eds.) Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Anti-Semitism, Assimilation, Affirmation (Brandeis University Press, 2010). p. 213.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Hans Richter. Dada. Art and Anti-art (Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004), p. 201

[52] Jean-Pierre Lassalle. “André Breton et la Franc-Maçonnerie” Histoires littéraires, 1 (January 2000).

[53] Alex Ross. “The Occult Roots of Modernism.” The New Yorker (June 26, 2017).

[54] Eddy Batache. “René Guénon et le surréalisme,” Cahier de l'Herne on René Guénon, p. 379.

[55] Richard Francis Crane. “Surviving Maurras: Jacques Maritain’s Jewish Question.” Patterns of Prejudice (Vol. 42 , Iss. 4-5, 2008).

[56] Richard D. E. Burton. Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840-1970 (Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 77.

[56] Ibid., p. 22.

[57] Robin Waterfield. René Guénon and the Future of the West: The Life and Writings of a 20th-Century Metaphysician (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2002) p. 36.

[58] “Max Jacob.” Poetry Foundation (March 21, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/max-jacob

[59] James S. Williams. Jean Cocteau (London: Reaktion, 2008), p. 78.

[60] Franco Ferraresi. “The Radical Right in Postwar Italy.” Politics & Society, 1988 16:71-119, p. 84.

[61] Marco Pasi, “The Neverendingly Told Story: Recent Biographies of Aleister Crowley,”

Aries 3:2 (2003): 243.

[62] Marco Pasi, “The Neverendingly Told Story: Recent Biographies of Aleister Crowley,”

Aries 3:2 (2003): 243.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Sedgwick. Against the Modern World, p. 49.

[65] Penelope Rosemont. Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. (Athlone Press, 1998). pp. lvi and xlii

[66] L’ésotérisme au féminin. (L’Age D’Homme, 2006), p. 118.

[67] Michael William West. Sex Magicians (Inner Traditions/Bear, 2021).

[68] Hans Thomas Hakl. “The Theory and Practice of Sexual Magic Exemplified by Four Magical Groups in the Early Twentieth Century.” Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism. (Fordham University Press, 2010) p. 465.

[69] William Traxler. “The Reconciliation of the Light and Dark Forces”, the Introduction to The Light of Sex by Maria de Naglowska. (Inner Traditions, 2011). pp. 4–8.

[70] Julius Evola. Eros Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex. (Inner Traditions, 1991) p. 261.

[71] Arthur Versluis. Gutierrez, Cathy, (ed.) The Occult in Nineteenth Century America. (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2005). p. 29.

[72] Stéphane François. “The Nouvelle Droite and ‘Tradition’.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism , Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2014), p. 98.

[73] (August 15, 1938).

[74] Sedgwick. Against the Modern World, p. 107

Zionism