John Dunn

Sir John Woodroffe was an Indophile and orientalist whose legacy was the translation of more than twenty Tantric Sanskrit texts, which had a dramatic impact upon the intellectual life of the Western world. He made known the secrets of the Hindu religion to intellectuals such as Julius Evola (pictured left), who in turn absorbed and reworked Woodroffe’s writings into his own concepts of freedom and power.

The ‘absolute individual’ - analogous to the Ātmanconcept - was sought by Evola as the exemplar of absolute freedom and power. Expanding upon the deification of man that he drew from Eckart, Evola considered absolute freedom to be the principle sign of being ‘God’. ‘The body of the absolute individual is the universe’, wrote Evola in The Path of Cinnabar.

© John Dunn.