Beyond the Vertical
Evola, Vilar and some pre-Platonic convergent truths on sex and Tradition
Somehow they really are like the Sun and the Moon. Different natures, different cycles, often out of synch, separate worlds, but still linked cosmically. Thunder and lightning. Un moș și-o babă.
Let the Old Man be Julius Evola and the Old Woman be Esther Vilar. It’s the end of the 60s. They are both writing to their respective audiences. No overlap at first glance. He publishes Eros and the Mysteries of Love in 1969, she puts out The Manipulated Man in 1971.
Argentina - West Germany
Ladies first. As they are accustomed already. It’s been circulated in men’s rights circles, but let’s read it without the resentment lens they use. She is making observations related to life in mid century “civilized” world pointing out human behavior in its habitat. She notices how women have developed over millennia strategies to convert male energy into security and status. Optimization. Choosing rationally the hard working and reliable male.
It’s all couched in sarcasm and 60’s humor, but beneath the mock-outrage is the woman embedded in her biological contract. She just is her nature without any other pretensions of transcendence or anything else. She is executing efficiently. Meanwhile, the man is building things around her unaware of the forces at play. Vilar is not moralistic. She just points out things matter-of-factly. Hence the cold humor. Underneath the satire, she shows that the feminine principle is radically immanent. It doesn’t reach beyond. It converts male transcendental energy into stable, livable, generational structure. He is choosing the Longhouse as a result.
Italy - West Germany
In a completely different universe, Evola is digging deep for the metaphysical structure beneath sexuality itself, using Tantra, Roman mystery cults, alchemy, courtly love and much more as his evidence base.
He observes polarity, woman being lunar, man being solar. Woman is receptive, is nature itself. Man is reaching outside himself, aiming at transcendence. Like two magnetic poles they together create a field. This field collapses if any of the poles is weakened. Its strength lies in the difference. The modern world, by flattening the difference doesn’t liberate. It instead destroys the tension that generates erotic and spiritual intensity. For the temporary dissolution of solar-lunar opposition into something that transcends both (aka. the metaphysical event of the deepest sexual experience) we need powerful distinct poles.
So, if we squint at these two, they are both outlining the same structure. Noticing its modern dissolution, one stiff and serious, the other cracking jokes. The woman Vilar is describing is the embodiment of Evola’s lunar principle: absolute, self-contained, non-transcendent, ruthlessly effective within her domain. She doesn’t need meaning, she just follows her biological contract.
Vilar’s man, on the other hand reminds us of Evola’s evasive man. Derailed solar principle. Transcendent energy without metaphysical grounding, and clueless about it. They both touch on the same thing, that polarity must be inhabited, not resolved. The woman who abandons the lunar role trying to enter man’s world of transcendence via work is worse off. Trading actual power to the illusion of power. Evola notes that when polarity is flattened, both poles lose as the field between them loses.
Now, Vilar is a “feminine feminist”, secular, anti-romantic modern writer. She has nothing to do with metaphysics. But her cold observations point towards a portrait of the efficient woman very much alike with the feminine principle as it functions in the traditional societies. An ancient program running beneath the modern costume. Evola scketched the same profile by excavating the sacred, reverse engineering it by studying initiation rites and alchemical texts.
The modus operandi
Both of these POVs are presenting a black pill. Vilar ends by saying that only woman can stop this process, but she will never do it, as it’s not in her “interest”. Evola’s (almost) extinct differentiated man, a stranger in a gynocratic world. There is no going back. The way out, if any, is through. The Traditional world is gone because it has completed itself. The woman is manipulating man because it’s the logical evolution, not because she is evil. They both release us from false hopes, urging towards a better understanding of the playing field.
This would entail keeping a bird’s eye view of the whole field. Not picking sides. Perceive the tension between poles as generative rather than threatening. Not misogynistic, not cynical or nostalgic. Second, pole-maxxing. Go full in your own nature. No half-measures. Be a man’s man, or a woman’s woman as they say. The manipulation, as well as the polarity, are data. Like the weather, or the ocean currents, they should be navigated. Responding emotionally to them is literally “old man yelling at cloud”. These data is to be read and acted upon as one acts upon reading a compass or a thermometer. Most times often than not it will be not so comfy. And that’s good. The friction is the energy source. The drive toward calm waters is neutralization. It is collapsing the field.
All that brought us here was necessary, part of the process. Vilar’s man, as manipulated as he is, built our world as we know it. He produced, generated something. Kali Yuga as bleak as it is, it carries in itself the seeds for the next cycle. Even if it looks like a train wreck. All the debris left behind are the conventional aspects of the Traditional world, keeping the essence. It’s distillation. All of this is painting a clearer picture of the actual terrain on which the future will be built.
In the end we get two compatible types of freedom possible. Woman’s freedom is coldly playing the game without illusion. Men’s vertical freedom, participating in the age without being of it. Maintaining inner polarity even when all it’s flattened around him.
Embodying their polarities
Vilar is lunar herself, Evola is solar. She is just reflecting, observing within immanence. All horizontal, no interest in verticality. Cold water, no search for meaning or transcendence. Her humor comes out of the discrepancy of what people think of themselves and what they actually are. It’s a mirror. A funny reply guy.
Evola is vertical, climbing the peaks, building upon what he synthetizes across traditions, elevating, luminating from above. He is inhabiting the solar. Describing it from within. The same way she is describing the lunar.
This generates blind spots for both of them. Vilar doesn’t get why man would ever reach for something that is beyond the biological/material game. She does not see anything other than the real horizontal expansion. Evola on his part describes the lunar principle accurately, but he is not inhabiting it. He draws the map, while she is the territory.
Evola wrote exclusively for the differentiated man. The feminine principle does not require the vertical articulation. It just is the way it is. So he focused on the solar, leaving an empty space around the lunar. The lunar, in turn does not produce this kind of theorizing literature. Instead it manifests through observation, description, immanent intelligence. What Vilar did. Her books are lunar artefacts. She did not attempt to create a complement for Evola, she just was one. Together they complete a map, neither being aware of it. She is the swan, he is the arrow as pictured above.
The Children Question
Both are viewing kids quite cynically. For Vilar, they are instruments to be wielded by woman, levers to bind the man further, the most efficient conversion of male energy into female security ever devised. It does work like this, but she only sees their function, glossing over them as beings.
Evola in his vertical quest, does not have any interest in horizontal child rearing, in fulfilling any biological program. Children are quintessentially lunar, demanding presence, repetition, patience. When oriented upward, one would see them as dead weight or distraction.
But. For him the genuine erotic encounter is a metaphysical event where solar and lunar briefly dissolve into something that transcends both. I suspect children must be the material residue of this. The trace left in the horizontal after the vertical passed through it. X marks the spot. They are not a lever, an endpoint or an obstacle. They do not exist without the friction of the wheel turning, and without them the wheel will eventually stop.
The mother-child relationship doesn’t reach upward, is self sufficient, total presence, lunar fulfillment. Vilar only sees the leverage in this, missing that for a woman fully inhabiting her pole this is the closest thing to a complete world if confined inside the horizontal frame.
Evola treats them as part of the lower biological world, something for the solar principle to transcend. Still, they are potentially part of the chain of transmission. The flame is passed forward by initiation, formation, not only by texts. The father who initiates imbibes the solar in something that is otherwise destined to linger in the horizontal. These are the evasive and all other kinds non-differentiated men. The solar contribution to the child is pulling him out vertically. In a world lacking any trace of a Traditional initiation, this might be one of the few available solar tasks. This is not done through ideology or doctrine, but through example of what a solar orientation looks like in practice. One must see what is possible in order to imagine and to aim to get out of the trajectory leading to what Vilar labels the manipulated man.
Half assed polarity creates flatness in the children too. The field is worth transmitting when both poles are fully inhabited and engaged. In that case the children will take care of themselves in the sense they will get something genuine either to inhabit or to transcend in their own time. Otherwise no amount of care and attention can compensate for the flatness.
Doom and gloom
They both project doom. In different flavors. The solar one follows the cosmological cycle that necessarily passes through Kali Yuga. Man tries to survive it intact, carrying the flame, the seed. Fighting it does not make sense. No chance to reverse it. And the light at the end of the tunnel is just that. An abstract promise. With no historical reference point. And little action required from us.
The lunar sees no cycle, just more of the same, intensifying. No end in sight because she does not even look for one. She just shrugs at the horizon. Laughing about it.
And both are true. Since they wrote about it, the complacent man is even more complacent, the differentiated man is virtually extinct. The ever flattening polarity, the neutralization of sexual difference as an ideal, the collapse of initiation structures for men, the extension of comfort and security got to the point where the biological contract's original generative tension is largely dissolved. So we’re looking forward for the female revolution or for the start of the next cycle. Waiting for Godot. The promised land again and again. Just one more day bro, I promise.
Basically the same eschatology. Making the present bearable with the promise that it will be all great again. The apocalypse, communism, singularity and many more. Does this discredit the structure outlined above?
The descriptive aspect of it seems true, the projections should not be taken literally. Besides, while in aggregate it’s all going down the slope, there are pockets, smaller scale particular instances, where the polarity is still strong, where the place of the differentiated man should be by definition. Against the current of his age. Vilar also wrote her books from outside the system she is describing. So there is a scale where the field is still alive within the big flat mess we’re in.
These two sound like prophets of doom, when they are more diagnosticians of the present. The doom is the backdrop and the question is what we do in front of it. To do list:
seeing the manipulation without resentment,
inhabiting the polarity without nostalgia,
building at the scale where the field is still alive,
transmitting something genuine to whatever comes next without requiring that what comes next validates the effort.
Interlude
Why all these words?
I wrote not so long ago about letters being lubricant. Urging to “Ditch the letters. Meet your instincts!” Here:
Our two polar writers here are both products of extreme over-civilization. Sifting through piles of cultural debris to arrive at some ultra refined descriptions of concepts. Evola spent decades studying and distilling something that once upon a time any normie just lived through. Vilar gathered all her material to describe what any woman operating on pure instinct just knew and executed without needing to articulate it.
The intellectuals seemingly are the ones needing the most elaborate rescue operation to recover what was always in plain sight. My ramblings here make me an intellectual too, you see. We build a map that’s ultimately not really needed to navigate the territory. Some people that never read and never will read Evola or Vilar or any other book for that matter simply feel the pull toward genuine polarity. They don’t need it written down and pointed out. They embody the insight. For most of the history this was the norm, and it got us here, even if a was a little messy sometimes.
With time, layers of dogma, scientific reductionism, the marketplace of ideas, therapeutic culture, ideological frameworks buried this insight. Jammed the signal. Every instinct is intercepted by counterarguments, explanations, couched in different frameworks until it sits inert at the back. The over-civilized man feels the solar orientation pull and immediately finds a dozen cultural narratives to explain it away, pathologize it, making it safe and approved. The “less-civilized” man feels it and he follows it or he doesn’t. The signal is the same, it’s just cleaner. Embodied knowledge comes first. Theorizing it means translating it for nerds, and it inevitably loses something in translation. It is a hole we dug ourselves in and continue to dig as we rely on external media.
The passive ones are closer to the signal but in the same time more vulnerable to cultural burial because they don’t even see it as it is happening to them. He feels the pull, and letting himself drift away he accepts the justifications given for the discomfort. Usually something like “you need adjustment, not the world”. The theorized person at least knows he is manipulated. Even if more often then not lets himself being pulled just the same against his instincts.
I see it as two paths1, each with its own failure modes:
The embodied path: direct, robust, pre-theoretical, but vulnerable to cultural drift when the instinct isn’t honored and no framework exists to identify what’s being lost.
The intellectual path: indirect, high-maintenance, requiring enormous effort to exit at the other end, but produces a kind of explicit map that can resist cultural pressure more consciously.
Ideally, reading these insights would dissolve any built framework and clear the original signal. The long way around back to where it all began. I suspect most do not make it to the end. They just get a new ideology. Exchanging one set of chains for another.
The others, the rest, the plebs, the normies are closer by default, but are more naive also. They might just feel something is off, act accordingly, and voila. They do not need to take the whole trip. The value of taking the trip grows when the environment is misleading, saturated by lies. It acts like a diagnostic, a clearer lens, for when the signal is too drowned in noise. The destination is not the theory. The destination is the person who has either never lost or has fully recovered the embodied orientation and can hold it clearly, without resentment, without ideology, without needing external validation for what they simply know.
For both paths it is important to get to the destination. It’s all or nothing. Similar to what was said about fulfilling the duties of each respective caste.
Back to regular programming:
Mother beats lover
Evola makes the distinction between the mother and the lover types of woman emphasizing that the lover has diminished in status. Vilar also sees the protective love and the sexual love as distinct, observing the protective love is reigning in most relationships. Even the ones we would label “lover” these days are just looking for protection in disguise. Now, I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger. The true lover-type is as rare as the differentiated man.
Both writers signal an imbalance. Evola sees it as one particular woman is one or the other type, modern society encouraging the mothers. Vilar sees it as that woman is instinctively adapting by choosing to be protected, the lover type being just too ‘stupid’. The implication is the same. Vilar is the voice of the ‘modern society’ that Evola observes from a bird’s eye.
The lover type carried something initiatic. She was potentially destabilizing or transformative. The mother is not pushing anyone to his boundaries. It’s centering, gathering, closed.
Vilar scouts her horizontal map and sees this mechanism in action. Evola sees the cost of it as viewed from his high peaks. She sees that the lover is inefficient. A bad strategy. Mother wins. By choosing to be (sometimes low-key) protected. From within the horizontal contract erotic self-giving that doesn't secure resources is poor optimization.
The lover type requires from the man the solar orientation that the mother type does not appreciate very much. She survives around a man who doesn’t seek comfort or just the basic execution of the biological contract. The man cultivated by the mother type finds the lover type exhausting, unstable or unreliable. So the disappearance of the lover type went hand in hand with the disappearance of the solar oriented guy. The one who would have recognized her real value.
It was a process of selection. Modernity selected for the stable mother / manipulated-man. The alternative pairing worked when the environment was different. There is no apparent frontier anymore, we have instead an extended safety net. The biological contract is low cost. Lover type becomes “stupid”. Solar man becomes rare. That’s some of the “climate” change consequences.
Lover type used to create the vertical opening in the horizontal lunar plane. That opening was slowly forgotten, maybe even paved over by the mother type.
Going inside
You don’t throw your life away / Going inside
You get to know who’s watchin’ you
And who besides you resides / In your body
— John Frusciante (2001)
Considering that the scale where the field is still alive is substantially smaller and possibly heading towards extinction, one intermediary step after the present described by Vilar and Evola is to go inward. The last stand. The inner field.
I recently stumbled on a alternative reading of Fight Club, that proposed that Tyler and Marla are both imaginary. One representing the masculine pole, the other the feminine. Fighting for supremacy. Keeping the field alive inside the narrator. Most of what we see on the screen is inside. He is all three characters, and an unreliable narrator, and none of it is actually happening, as he is just dying of testicular cancer, an emasculating disease, hence his feminine side gaining ground and his masculine waking up just before disappearing completely. The story is basically the tragedy of the horizontal winning by destroying the vertical. Ending without his pants holding hands with the mother-type watching phalluses collapse.
“Hope that we die holding hands, always” — Speed of Pain by Marilyn Manson (1998)
Speaking of Marilyn Manson, he was doing the same thing on MTV at that time. Back to that movie, zooming out and extrapolating what’s happening inside him, we see polarities of different strength shoehorned into the bland efficient average. Compressed until we are left with just noise, no ups and downs.
One can not in fact NOT be compressed together with everything around. Just like with or without a crippling disease it all inevitably ends in death. The protagonist did not fail, we just watched him dealing internally with it all. It was all in his mind, as the Pixies song allude at the end. We might say that he was aligning himself with the world as Vilar describes it, he ended in the Longhouse. Not many vertical / solar portals in sight for the moment being.
Eventually as this becomes the norm, we will get saturation. There will be an uniformity that will act like a blank canvas, up for a new start. From this compost, I think some other 'thing' will rise as this 'efficiency maxing' did rise previously. It might have something in common with what they call Tradition, maybe not what most are expecting to, but it will feel as something new.
Not a light at the end. Just perpetual forward motion through increasingly strange and unexpected formations that emerge from the uniform substrate. The next thing won't announce itself as a return or a revolution. It will just appear, the way a pattern emerges from static when you look long enough. And it will feel genuinely new because the people who experience it will have no memory of what the dynamic range felt like before the compression.
I am the poison, I am the remedy
Circling back to Evola and Vilar. He writes for the differentiated man. For the ones who are already solar oriented. Kali Yuga is upon us. Cosmic decline. Traditional world gone. Differentiated man getting rarer. Gynocratic age. A call to a specific kind of inner resistance.
The same message lands quite differently for someone not possessing that orientation. Most of his readers, statistically will get a pass to stop trying. A sophisticated surrender presented as heroic detachment.
Now, back on Earth, the world described by Vilar runs on male energy redirected from that solar reaching back into fulfilling the biological contract. The man who works, builds, provides is the engine, he doesn’t ask for metaphysical reasoning. After reading Evola, that man first gets the confirmation that the doom is upon us and secondly that the wise response is to aristocratically withdraw from engagement. Coincidentally, by aestheticizing his own passivity he becomes exactly what the system described by Vilar needs. He is more captured than the man who didn’t read anything because he built himself a whole framework making his capture feel like wisdom. He feels his cynical withdrawal as clarity but he is in fact returned back to start, do not collect $100, the complacent man v2.0 with a long bibliography attached.
So what he wrote about riding the tiger does compute only if the rider came loaded with the orientation. His detachment is distinct from the passivity of the swept away. If one arrives already passive, the framework does not offer any correction. There are no guardrails. It would be like teaching riding the ones lying down.
From Vilar’s perspective, she would see a man who has given up but feels noble about it. He is more stable, more productive, and less disruptive than a man who is actively fighting the current. Misreading Evola creates men resigned, aesthetically consoled, philosophically armored against the discomfort that might otherwise produce genuine movement. Ideal citizens. The system is very good at converting resistance into fuel.
Evola’s work, in the hands of most readers, does low-key serve the world Vilar describes. Because the gap between the solar orientation required to read him correctly and the actual orientation of most readers is large enough that the framework gets repurposed by the very forces it was meant to resist.
Maybe that’s why he became a little more popular recently.
Zoom out more! MORE!
Plato. Yes, Plato. You know, Laws, Republic, bad cave, worse forms, So-fuckin’-crates… Plato. He inversed the value between the permanent and the changing. He put the ideal above any of its instantiation. The soul above the body. The imaginary above the palpable. On the surface no biggie, but it messed up everything downstream. Everything.
This makes darkness less than light. Chthonic lesser than heavenly. Evola inherits this completely. The solar principle reaching upward, the material as the lower pole to be transcended, the vertical axis. Up more real than down.
Vilar’s world has no ideal forms, no transcendence, but she still refers negatively to that framework. She is not seeing anything worthy up there so she mocks all of it cynically. She once again completes the picture almost as the negative space needed to surround a central element.
What if this all could be even more complete by taking yet another step back? Put on the pre-Platonic glasses. A chthonic worldview organized its reality not linearly upwards with a hierarchy, but cyclical, alternating, in seasons.
Most of the mysteries involved going down and coming back up again. The goal was not escaping darkness, but getting acquainted with all of the cycles’ aspects. What was down was not inferior to what was up. It might have been something older, operating by different rules, and in a way more fundamental.
So what does removing Plato do to the little framework we got here? Removing the hierarchy from the solar/lunar dyad we get something like alternative current. Two modes of a single cycling reality with its value residing in the alternation, not in either of its poles. In this exercise of imagination, the differentiated man is not just maintaining solar orientation against the downward pull. He is the one who can move through both phases without being destroyed by either. Repeated descent and return instead of ascent and transcendence.
Vilar’s world in this case is offering the portal, the threshold at the ground level. I visualize this lunar, watery realm as the rings on some planet, revolving around an axis on which the solar, fiery element is bouncing through the hole in the center. It might look like a circle with a dot in its center, or a cross if seen from another angle. It might look like a spinning top with a spark oscillating inside it from top to bottom while it all spins away changing its radius slowly.
Why changing its radius you ask? Well, in the horizontal plane where the lunar is spinning, if she spins closer to the center in small circles, she channels the lover type. This way she opens the gate for vertical movement, pushing the solar away from its plane. Forcing action, and more amplitude. The spinning top grows taller. If she spins further away from the center in wide circles she is the mother type pulling after her everything, gathering it all in her plane, closing the portals to the vertical axis. The spinning top almost becomes a disc, flattened.
So removing the Platonic layers we are left with this crossroads at the threshold of the chthonic. Descent is as necessary as ascent. Vilar’s biological contract gains in importance in the dark lazy winter season. The pumping vertical action accelerates during the lover-type fueled summers.
The chthonic view doesn't promise anything. It doesn't have a promised land or a next cycle or even a clear northern star. It is more about the present, this phase, this darkness, this compression. It has happened before. Not in a way you can remember or draw comfort from. Just in the way that winter has always happened and the earth has always been here before the snow and will be here after.
Return of the Gunas
I like it graphic. This system maps nicely onto the three gunas system. We got Sattwa being Evola's upward solar, Rajas being Vilar's horizontal expansion and Tamas being the chthonic descent. I mentioned above the "Lover-Rajas" orbiting tightly creating the field to push men out of the horizontal plane, and "Mother-Rajas" orbiting wide leaving space for manipulated man to barely oscillate almost fixed in the center of it all. The centrifugal one is solve, while the centripetal one is coagula. Solve as the lover's tight fast orbit breaking structures apart. Coagula as the mother's wide slow orbit consolidating and fixing.
The great cycle is alternatively narrowing and widening the thresholds, the distance between ceiling and floor, making so that currently it seems to be mostly squished, facilitating wide Rajas freedom of action, exaggerating coagula. Sattwa is pulling up, but only with correspondent Tamas pulling down we get the bouncing motion that is creating new instances, new life with potential to bounce further in time. Without it, it's like a slow motion rocket launch that ends in a freeze frame never getting anywhere. It "works" when all its components are moving. The Rajas oscillating between solve and coagula, the Sattwa and Tamas determining more or less ample bouncing.
This can be seen both at a small scale and at a bigger scale, of time as well as space. Fractals of these systems everywhere.
And this, my friends, is how the world works.
TLDR: If you think about it, the Sun bounces up and down above and below the horizon, while the Moon circles around tighter or looser.
These might be forced to map onto LHP and RHP, but it’s not about those “details” ultimately. That’s more theorizing. Another detour on the intellectual path. Might help, but that’s not the point. I tend to invent my own detours as one can see.