Baron Julius Evola’s Manifesto on Spiritual Mountain Climbing
I grew up in the Rockies, and the mountains are my most cherished connection to spirituality. So, when I learned of Julius Evola’s manifesto on spiritual mountain climbing, Meditations on the Peaks, naturally I had to read it. It’s a beautiful work about the possibility of spiritual overcoming and transcendent experience reached through the conquest of the icy extremes of the earth’s greatest heights. Although Evola’s philosophy was in some ways very much shaped by the times in which he lived, Meditations on the Peaks contains not only lasting truths, but also the outline of Evola’s technique of contemplative mountain climbing.
For the sake of illustration, I’ll give an example of Evola’s thinking as seen through the lens of a single chapter of Meditations on the Peaks. In the chapter “The Mountain, Sport and Contemplation” Evola comments upon a debate between two climbers that took place in a mountaineering publication of his time. The first climber, Anguissola, argues that the value of mountain climbing lies in contemplation and in “The impulse to establish contact with a world that helps one forget the mechanical and dull life of the modern cities.”
The other climber, Marimonti, claims that Anguissola’s views are outdated. He argues that the value of climbing lies only in the performance of more and more difficult feats of pure technical skill. Marimonti asserts that “We do not go to the mountain just to practice a contemplative form of climbing…. This takes place only during days of rest, when, in contemplation, we dream of a beautiful and difficult feat.” Marimonti believed that the only thing worth contemplating is the technical obstacle of the mountain, that the only value of contemplation purely pragmatic and material.
This debate in a way describes the world in which Evola lived, wrote and climbed. During his time as a climber, he watched as the deeply spiritual traditional villages of the Alps (in which every village, no matter how small, had its own chapel) were replaced by hotels, and the tourist business caused everything to look more and more like one ubiquitous ski resort. At the same time, cables were being erected on the slopes to take people to the tops of the mountains automatically, where they would play new music and party and drift down the snowy slopes on skis, only to return to the peaks lifted on mechanical chairs.
Marimonti wrote that “Not all those who take to the mountain have the necessary qualities to understand it.” And this is a point that all three climbers seem to agree on. It’s almost as if the conquering of mountains fosters a sort of elitism which is expressed in different ways by all three men. In Evola’s thought, this elitism is expressed as an elitism of spiritual strength.
Evola rejected bourgeois sentimentalism and romanticism in the wilderness of the mountain. For him, the peaks fostered an awareness of a power far vaster, which banishes such sentimentalism as mere construct, and leaves the spiritually oriented climber in a state of heightened clarity. To Evola, contemplation in the peaks consists not in letting the mind linger on scenes of beauty and flights of romantic fancy, but in an active and ascetic technique of spiritual mountain climbing which culminates in “The overcoming of the ordinary and individual sense of one’s self.” On the mountain, contemplation and action are “two inseparable elements of an organic whole,” and each is useless without the other. On the one hand, there is no room for haughty sentimental daydreaming. On the other, the mountain must not be reduced to “an X degree of difficulty, which has to be overcome through appropriate means in relation to a special form of action oriented to Y goal.”
Elsewhere in the book, Evola describes the transcendent states he reached through his practice of spiritual mountain climbing.
“To feel alone in a free, merciless world with only one’s strength to rely on; engaged in intimate dialogue with the deepest and most mysterious forces of one’s being; awakened to pure, harsh dimensions that almost enable us to partake of that same transcendence over and indifference toward the human domain that in the majestic and shining peaks seem to find their best symbolic representation.”
“Those who, in every physical ascent, experience a little the sense of an inner elevation; those who look at every icy height almost as the symbol of an intangible culmination; those who really grasp the message of the vast spaces, where there are only heaven and pure, free forces — they will most likely experience themselves not as body but as life; they are likely to transform their lives with a creative vital tension so much as to achieve the results of the technique I describe.”
“And just as at night, from an elevated place, the lights scattered in the plains can be seen all the way to the distant horizons, likewise what surfaces in my mind is the idea of a superior, incorporeal unity of the invisible front of all those who, despite all, fight in different parts of the world the same battle, lead the same revolt, and are the bearers of the same intangible tradition.”
“At these heights, symbols become alive and deep meanings are revealed”
There is an essential disharmony between Evola’s thought and the progression of modernity, and so from the modern perspective there will always be critiques of Evola. Some of these critiques are appropriate, while others are perhaps not so well founded. Whatever the values and the problems of Evola’s philosophy may be, there is something to be said for systematically questioning the assumptions of the modern world. Although Evola’s thought was clearly shaped by the circumstances of his birth, Meditations on the Peaks remains a breathtaking testament to the divinity of the mountains.
