Was a difficult read. A lot of jargon, and I found myself needing to go to the dictionary to look at terms. Telluric, Dionysian, Apollonian, Chthonic etc. I found his critiques on modernity highly relevant and found myself agreeing with them. The Hyperborean Theory sounded very pseudoscientific and speculative. I found his ideas on Protestantism and the comparison between it and Catholicism deeply intriguing. The disregard that Protestantism has for tradition and ritual. I found it very difficult to reconcile the discrepency between sola fide Protestantism with the rationalist secularist prosperity gospel individualism Protestantism. I'm not sure how they intersect, one is religious whilst the latter is technically atheist? But they are both Protestantism. I like how he describes the Catholic Church as an imperialist type of state. That was fascinating, and his linking of Roman Regal Paganism and Catholicism was also very well done. I found the references to Greek Mythology, Nordic Paganism, Zoroastrianism, Aztec Religion, and other obscure belief systems to go over my head as I'm not really well versed in IE beliefs. He seemed to be branching out to too many directions at some points, and it lacked like a singular focus. I didn't really like how he lumped a lot of religions together into a voluptuous goo. I prefer to study religions separately on their own merit.

All in all, this was good.

I was already familiar with a lot of the ideas here but it did put them in a powerful context.

I was recommended Revolt with the idea that it's actually a lot more approachable (especially the second half) than one would think and I'd definitely agree.

Passages like Evola's criticism of modern slavery as being materialistic and barbarous, along with his recognition that if there were true Traditional men women would feel no need for their liberation is far better optics and attractive for newcomers than how his fallacious Wikipedia page describes him.

I think he builds a phenomenal foundation for a metaphysical opposition to modernity, as opposed to an empirical or purely aesthetic position. I can also see how smoothly Evola flows from Nietzsche, sort of a structuralizing of Nietzsche's thought into religious and traditional terms.

The differences I'd have with Evola would be in his ontology and some of the conclusions he reaches from it. He privileges being over becoming, siding with Parmenidies over Heraclitus. Though I'm not fully decided myself, I tend to lean toward process thought. I think the temporarily of becoming lends itself to a sort of Bergsonian vitalism which I'm increasingly interested in. Evola seemed to distinguish himself from the sort of mythic vitalism which would lead toward Sorelian violence expressed in Mishima and Pearse.

I think on that foundational level Evola fails to confront modernity. I've heard his critiques before of Yockey and Spengler are all based on a lack of 'metaphysical' thinking enough to satisfy him. Though I'm in agreement that Spengler can be quite atheistic, I think Evola is stuck in a sort of regression toward some ancient becoming, whereas to truly respond to modernity I think there needs to be at once an acceptance of its current hegemony and then a vitalistic response (as opposed to a conservative one).

There's something tragically funny in the introductions to the book trying to establish Evola as a non-racist, while entire text is drenched in racial ideas. It is true that the racism isn't so much i the modern sense, but praising a cast system, where aryans just so happen to be on top, is still racist non the less.

But not all the ideas here is to do with race, after all. It's all about Tradition and anti-modernism. There certainly is something to be said about the modern condition and humanities ever decreasing place within it but Evola does little to establish a solution. His main critiques basically points out a problem and then ipso facto establishes Tradition as the solution.
There's also something ironic in such a scathing critique of modernism using methodologies and thematic tool so heavily birthed from the all mother of modernism, the Renaissance. Both the scholastisism and idealism employed in this text is very much a product of German modernism, and it's evolution in the Conservative Revolution.