Christian Chensvold examines how Julius Evola and Théophile Gautier connect sex, spirituality, and the timeless quest to rediscover Hyperborea, the ancestral paradise of the soul.
Julius Evola could explain divine order and how it should manifest in a civilization, and elucidate the immutable realm of being and urge for transcendence. He could describe mountain climbing and man’s encounter with the primordial energies the peaks inspire. But he could not dramatize what it feels like to glimpse the Olympian realm, the hidden Grail Castle, the spiritual wellspring beyond space and time.
In other words, he couldn’t describe what it’s like to actually find Hyperborea, the ancestral heaven that appears in the mind’s eye, source of our archetypes and fire of our imagination across thousands of years. For this we need a poet, that special kind of artist capable of putting into words inner knowledge that strains the capabilities of language, resonating with readers at their deepest level.
We need someone like Théophile Gautier.
In 1835, an astonishingly early stage of the “Romantic agony” or death struggle of the Western soul throughout 19th-century art and literature, Gautier saw the path to the spiritual homeland in his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin. Read esoterically, the book is filled with inspired imagery pointing the way back to the Primordial State of Adam Kadmon, blueprint of man as created by God before separation of the sexes in which Eve was removed from Adam’s soul. The vision of the hermaphrodite — a symbol that looms over this spiritual quest, known as the rebis in the alchemical tradition —increasingly haunted artists and initiates as the 19th century climbed to the West’s civilizational apex.
The cult of androgyny witnessed in Germany in the aftermath of the Great War — the era known as Weimar Berlin, whose echoes we see in the Marxist transgenderism of today — is the polar opposite of the spiritual quest for recovery of the Primordial State. The difference between a 45-year-old man who renounces his masculine consciousness to become a “woman” and one who re-integrates the feminine principle back into his soul — known as individuation in Jungian psychology, and symbolized by the dual-natured Mercury in alchemy — is the difference between matter and spirit, hell and heaven.
After examining sex from every possible angle in world traditions in The Mysteries of Eros, Julius Evola was forced to conclude that this quest for restoration of spiritual unity is the primary operating motive of the sexual impulse. Likewise, Gautier saw that behind the desire for erotic union with ideal beauty is something ambiguous, a kind of spiritual light that eventually reveals the ancestral homeland.
Gautier’s visionary language contains archetypal ancestral motifs: a gentle forest straight out of Disney’s Snow White, with birds, rabbits, and a stag whose antlers reflect in the waters of a lake. There are Greek motifs, such as urns and statues, and the overall language of an exalted, heavenly, incorruptible, pure wellspring of the spirit of the race, originating fountain of its individual souls and the distinct cultural expressions that belong to it and none other, for each of earth’s peoples has its own spiritual homeland in the divine light. These are not “mystic evasions and pantheistic confusions,” to use Evola’s description, of a disorganized mind, but true artistic inspiration from higher realms, the very workings of the divine spark made manifest. The following passages occur over several pages of letters from the protagonist to his angelic infatuation, the titular Mademoiselle de Maupin:
As soon as I saw you, I was torn asunder, a veil was lifted, a door was opened. I felt as if I were being flooded by waves of light… fallen in love with a divine spirit… the paradise of my dreams…
Before I met you I was already pining for your love. I called for you, I searched for you and was in despair of not encountering you on my path… You appeared to me so many times — at the window of the mysterious chateau, leaning in melancholy fashion over the balcony…
I have adored you ever since an idea first glimmered in my mind, that you have been revealed to me before, and that when I was very small you appeared to me in a dream with a crown…
As I grew older I became more and more obsessed by this gentle spirit. She always appeared to come between myself and the women who were my mistresses, smiling ironically and mocking their mortal beauty from all the perfection of her divine beauty.
… You appeared to me with the ambiguous, terrible beauty of the sphinx. Like the mysterious goddess Isis, you were wrapped up in a veil which I dared not raise for fear of being struck dead.
… The thing that in the dark I took to be a gigantic dragon with talons on his wings, creeping through the night with scaly claws, is nothing but a felucca with a silken sail, with painted gilded oars, full of women and men playing instruments…. graceful amphitheaters and silver palaces, terraces laden with urns and statues bathe their feet in lakes of azure and seem to be floating between two skies…
Are you Apollo chased from the heavens or white Aphrodite rising from the bosom of the sea?
To summarize, a man with the right qualifications — extremely refined, with a blasé attitude towards earthly life that allows him to glimpse higher reality — meets a captivating figure who combines feminine beauty with masculine spirit. He falls instantly in love with this vision, whom he feels has always been active in his soul, appearing as a mysterious figure looking out from the balcony of a palace with a melancholy air, like a spirit living dormant inside his mind, waiting to be found. The experience of this figure overtakes the young man, filling him with a radiant light that transports him to a visionary realm of castles and forests, lords and ladies, urns burning an eternal fire, and Greek statues that hover on waters reflecting the sky above. Deities appear and seem to integrate, mixing Apollo, the primary Hyperborean god, with Aphrodite, supreme personification of love and longing, the binding force of creation.
Note too the invocation the dragon, Traditional symbol of the primordial energy of the cosmos, which is terrifying if glimpsed by the ignorant, but which reveals divine secrets to intrepid souls who query its mystery.
Surely this spiritual dimension is the place Eliphas Levi calls “the living light,” and which Evola calls “The Land Of The Living.”
What could this be but Hyperborea, racial wellspring and paradise to which the souls of artists, heroes, sages and mages draw inspiration and ultimately return?
You, too, may stage a “revolt against the modern world,” suffer the destruction of your ego construct and wander in the desert half-dead, as dramatized by Xerxes in the film 300, encounter the strange hermits, find the “cave,” immerse yourself in the “waters,” and emerge luminous and glabrous, purified and enlightened, a lord of the dual natures, god-king of the ancestral spirit.
In other words, an exiled son of Hyperborea at the close of the cycle, trying to find his way back home.
Christian Chensvold is the author of Dark Stars: Heroic Spirituality in the Age of Decadence, which reveals the influence of Julius Evola’s esoteric writings.
