John Dunn

Arturo Reghini (1878–1946), pictured left, was an early influence upon Julius Evola and his philosophy of deification. Evola made a remark in Ignis, the journal that Reghini edited:

There is only one way to prove God: to make oneself God.

Later in the same Ignis article he wrote about Novalis and his ideas on man becoming God. Novalis believed that man in future should become independent from God and through this become deified himself, internalising the qualities of God such as omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality.

Again in the same essay Evola writes about Kirilloff, one of the characters in Dostojewsky’s novel The Possessed, who does not believe in God in the sense of inventing an imaginary God like many generations had done before him. Instead, he is forced to manifest his own divinity in order to demonstrate that God exists. Evola highlights free will as an attribute of Kirilloff’s self-deification. This free will can be called upon to prove his insubordination to God. In a passion of exhilaration and terror, this freedom is most convincingly proved, according to Kirilloff, by committing suicide. Was Kirilloff’s example and path followed by Otto Weininger and Carlo Michelstaedter one wonders?

In the same year (1925), in the work Essays on Magical Idealism, Evola echoed his own remarks, made in Ignis, as:

God does not exist. The Ego must create him by making itself divine.

© John Dunn.