A View From The Space Station

Occult Profiles: Baron Julius Cesare Andrea Evola

Baron Julius Cesare Andrea Evola is one of history's most enigmatic occult and parapolitical figures. Little-known outside Europe, Evola is often cited as the Godfather of contemporary Italian fascism and radical politics. A close examination of the historical record reveals a more complex figure. Evola wore many masks: a parapolitical philosopher who ranked with Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, a religious historian who coresponded with Mircea Eliade, and a provocateur who dabbled in Dada.

Born to a Catholic aristocratic family on May 19, 1898, Evola led an extraordinary life as a mountaineer, philosopher, solider, religious historian, artist, magician and political theorist.

Fluent in French and German, the young Evola was significantly influenced by the virtue theory of German philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche. As an ardent Mountain climber, the young Italian found spiritual invigoration upon the peaks of the Alps. Coming to age on the dawn of the First World War, Evola joined the Italian Army serving in the Mountain Artillery. (...)

Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites, spiritual oblivion and organised deviancy. To counter this and call in a primordial rebirth, Evola presented his world of Tradition. The core trilogy of Evola's works are generally regarded as Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins and Ride the Tiger. 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."^[1] Much of Evola's theories and writings are centred on spiritualism and mysticism; the inner life. He authored books covering themes such as Hermeticism, the metaphysics of sex, Tantra, Buddhism, Taoism, mountaineering, the Holy Grail, the essence and history of civilisations, decadence and various philosophic and religious Traditions dealing with both the Classics and the Orient.

Evola relocated to Vienna, where he found himself translating Masonic documents for Heinrich Himmler's SS, a political and military organization that he had long admired. During an Allied-bombing sweep in 1945, Evola was injured, leaving him in a wheelchair for his remaining life. The Mountaineer was never to climb a peak again, however his ashes were deposited atop Mt. Rosa, upon his death in 1974. (...)

Today, Evola still has a significant influence on Continental magic (especially Italian), and has remained an icon for right wing political groups, such as Italy's "revolutionary cells" and France's National Front Party.

Occult Artifacts: The Wizard Earl's Armillary Sphere

This magnificent armillary sphere stands in the centre of the museum's top gallery. It was designed to show a model of the universe according the ancient astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy, with the Earth at the centre and the sun and heavenly sphere rotating about it. During the Renaissance, such models were commonly used to understand the way in which the sun and stars seemed to move, and how this changes from season to season.

This one was probably made in Italy and came to England in the 1590s. It was owned by Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, who was also known as the 'Wizard Earl' because of his interest in magic, alchemy and the occult. Henry Percy's coat of arms is engraved on the base which is supported by three magnificent cast lions. Later, the sphere came into the hands of Sir Josias Bodley, the younger brother of Sir Thomas Bodley, who founded Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Order Of the Nine Angles: The Mythos of the Dark Gods:

According to the Sinister Tradition of the ONA, The Dark Gods (a.k.a The Dark Ones) are specific entities – living-beings of a particular acausal species – who exist in the realms of the acausal, with some of these entities having been presenced, via various nexions, on Earth in our distant past. These beings are shapeshifters, and can assume a variety of living causal forms, in the realms of the causal, including human form. The fictional stories Sabirah, and Jenyah, deal with one type of such acausal beings who have assumed human form – describing their need for the acausal energy (the “life-force”), possessed by humans, in order to sustain and maintain their shapeshifting causal form. The aural Sinister Tradition of the ONA holds that both Baphomet (the female entity as described by the ONA) and Satan are memories of, and manifestations of, two particular acausal beings, two particular Dark Gods.

Occult Profiles: The Order of Nine Angles

The Order of Nine Angles is the most important British, neo-nazi magickal order. It formed as a fusion of three other orders: Camlad, the Noctulians and the Temple of the sun. The ONA presents Satanism as a path of self-overcoming in a chaotic, amoral universe. The Satanist must break through his own limitations through acts considered illegal and evil to come into contact with acausal, sinister hidden magickal forces...including murder if required.

The Order of Nine Angles was originally formed in England in the 1960s, with the merger of three neopagan temples called Camlad, The Noctulians, and Temple of the Sun.