On August 29, 2020, several hundred people broke through barriers outside the Reichstag in Berlin and attempted to enter the German parliament building. The scene encapsulated much of what made the protests against COVID-19 restrictions so difficult to interpret: so-called Reichsbürger (roughly comparable to the Sovereign Citizens movement), QAnon supporters, conspiracy activists, and openly right-wing extremists appeared alongside people associated with alternative spirituality, and the heterogeneous Querdenker (“lateral thinkers”) movement, which opposed pandemic restrictions.
For many observers, this unlikely convergence appeared to reveal the role of “esotericism” as a common denominator linking otherwise disparate anti-establishment milieus. Yet this interpretation obscured a crucial distinction: not all forms of esotericism are equally attractive to the far right, and far-right intellectuals themselves often draw sharp boundaries between those they dismiss as irrational or politically naïve and those they regard as serious intellectual resources.
This essay argues that esotericism matters to contemporary far-right politics, not as a coherent set of beliefs, but as a flexible and politically consequential resource whose meanings are continually contested and redefined. Three dimensions of this relationship are particularly important. First, far-right actors engage selectively with esotericism: they may disparage popular alternative spiritualities while seeking to recruit their followers, yet elevate Esoteric Traditionalism as an intellectual point of reference. Second, esotericism can function as a nodal point around which otherwise heterogeneous motifs—anti-modernism, narratives of civilizational decline, spiritual hierarchy, and political anti-egalitarianism—are articulated and provisionally stabilized in historically specific configurations. Third, esoteric references can facilitate the circulation and legitimizing re-signification of far-right ideas within globally entangled intellectual, political, and digital networks. Their political effects arise not from the transmission of unchanged doctrines, but from repeated recontextualization and the creation of new connections among concepts, actors, and milieus.
Esotericism matters to contemporary far-right politics, not as a coherent set of beliefs, but as a flexible and politically consequential resource whose meanings are continually contested and redefined.
Central to this process is the Esoteric Traditionalism associated with authors such as René Guénon (1886–1951) and Julius Evola (1898–1974). Traditionalism can signify very different things, but in the cases relevant to this essay, it maintains that a primordial truth survives at the hidden core of religions that may include—to varying degrees depending on each author—Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. This truth is “esoteric”—inner rather than outer, or “exoteric”—because it is believed to be accessible only through privileged knowledge or initiation. Traditionalists differ greatly in their religious and political commitments. What many do share is a radical critique of modernity, which is presented as a decline from a spiritually ordered golden age. Julius Evola gave this narrative its most influential far-right form. For him, esotericism was not merely a body of hidden teachings: it involved an active spiritual transformation that set a purported elite apart from the masses and provided the basis for his vision of a hierarchical, anti-egalitarian political order.
The political significance of esotericism therefore lies not in any intrinsic affinity with the far right, but in the ways particular actors select, reinterpret, and mobilize its heterogeneous traditions. This essay traces these processes through the contemporary New Right’s engagement with Traditionalism, the transnational reception of Evola, and the digital circulation of esoteric far-right references, including the esoteric rearticulation of National Socialism developed by Savitri Devi (1905–1982). It shows how esotericism can simultaneously function as an intellectual framework, a marker of elite identity, a language of political legitimation, and a vehicle for bringing extremist ideas into wider circulation.
Esotericism can simultaneously function as an intellectual framework, a marker of elite identity, a language of political legitimation, and a vehicle for bringing extremist ideas into wider circulation.
The Far-Right Appraisal of Traditionalism
Martin Sellner, the best-known figure of the German-speaking Identitarian movement, offered a remarkably clear formulation of one far-right perspective on esotericism and Traditionalism shortly after the events at the Reichstag. Writing in Sezession, a central journal of the German-speaking New Right, in September 2020, he commented:
The völkisch bushy beard wearers of yesteryear are the Corona esotericists of today. From Fahrenkrog to Fidus, Gräser, Marby, and Guido von List, they would probably all be part of the Querdenker today and camp out in the Tiergarten [park in Berlin]. The traditionalist criticism of this pseudo-religious phenomenon […] was perfected in particular by Julius Evola and René Guénon
In this passage, Sellner presents Evola and Guénon as exponents of what he regards as a superior form of esotericism, namely Traditionalism. He constructs this hierarchy by dismissing outdated and weird (“bushy beard wearers”) völkisch movements, and their belief in life reform, and Ariosophy, a racial-esoteric current that was especially prominent during the interwar period. Even as he constructs this hierarchy, Sellner nevertheless acknowledges the political potential of esotericism more broadly:
The alternative right-wing esotericists […] are still ideologically part of the left-liberal system, just like the workers and self-employed affected by globalization. Yet they rank among its most reluctant inmates and therefore constitute a potential constituency for new-right ideological outreach [Aufklärung] and mobilization. The open-right hippies, who incidentally did not make up the majority of the demonstrators, lack a political theory and an analysis of the history of ideas.
The point is instructive, not least because of the venue in which it was made: Sezession was closely associated with the now-disbanded think tank Institut für Staatspolitik, a central hub of the German-speaking and wider European far right, which in turn was linked to the Antaios publishing house, a main outlet of the German-speaking New Right. Esotericism is a recurring and significant theme in Sezession and other publications from this milieu, with Traditionalism receiving particular attention. What Sellner’s intervention illustrates is that far-right actors do not engage with esotericism indiscriminately; they treat some forms as sources of political theory and historical analysis, in sharp contrast to what Sellner dismisses as the “pseudo-religious phenomenon” of popular “alternative right-wing esotericists” encountered at the COVID-19 protests. Such “unserious” esotericism can be disparaged while still being treated as a recruiting ground, while “serious” esotericism can provide resources that supposedly turn diffuse and unguided discontent into a coherent diagnosis of the alleged ills of modernity.
[The New Right’s] core project is one of metapolitics: the attempt to change politics indirectly by reshaping culture, language, and historical memory.
It must be emphasized that this engagement does not reflect a uniform ideology or a monolithic block of political actors. The New Right is not a single organization. The term refers to intellectual networks that developed after the Second World War, especially from the 1960s onward, that present themselves as heirs to the so-called Conservative Revolution of the Weimar period. In their telling, their core project is one of metapolitics: the attempt to change politics indirectly by reshaping culture, language, and historical memory. Party politics matters, but it must be bolstered and influenced by a network of publishing houses, journals, think tanks, conferences, youth cultures, and online media. The strategic objective is to move radical ideas toward the political mainstream by making them appear intellectually sophisticated and conventionally conservative. The writings of Evola play a significant role in that context.
How Julius Evola Became a Global Reference
Evola combined esoteric ideas about initiation, magic, and a hidden Tradition with racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and an uncompromising rejection of equality and democracy. He repeatedly sought collaboration with Italian Fascist and National Socialist institutions. In 1943, he worked with the SS and led a group of radical Fascists who envisioned a “spiritual-political elite” preparing a renewed Fascist order. As several recent studies have shown, later efforts to portray him as an opponent of Fascism obscure the historical record: his application to join the National Fascist Party was rejected not because he opposed Fascism, but because his positions were more extreme than the party’s line.
After 1945, Evola remained politically active and internationally connected. In a 1951 article for the German journal Nation Europa, he called for a supranational “Reich Europa” led by spiritually authorized elites. In Italy, his writings became important among younger neo-fascists, including the milieu of Ordine Nuovo, a more extremist group within the wider postwar neo-fascist network, alongside larger organizations such as the Movimento Sociale Italiano, from which the currently-governing Fratelli d’Italia is descended. From Italy, they travelled through an expanding European network: the French Nouvelle Droite, centered on the organization GRECE, founded in 1968 and associated above all with Alain de Benoist, created further channels of transmission. Figures such as Robert Steuckers connected French- and German-speaking circles with Italian activists and, from the late 1980s and early 1990s, Aleksandr Dugin’s Russian networks. Despite not possessing a unified ideology, these actors shared journals, book translations, conferences, contacts, and a common search for a postwar language of far-right renewal.
The reception of Traditionalism in Germany makes the political function of this infrastructure particularly clear. The French-German far-right nationalist Pierre Krebs founded the Thule-Seminar in 1981 as a German branch of GRECE. It worked with the extremist Grabert publishing house, promoted metapolitical cells, and helping popularize the so-called Black Sun, a swastika-inspired symbol of an ornament placed on the Wewelsburg castle in Germany in the 1930s which has now become a global far-right identity marker. A further turning point came in 1991, when the publisher Hohenrain released a German translation of Evola’s Men Among the Ruins. Hans Thomas Hakl, an Austrian author then writing under the name H.T. Hansen, supplied an introduction of more than one hundred pages; Karlheinz Weißmann, a Protestant theologian and one of the most important strategists of the German New Right, contributed a bibliography. In the extremist journal Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Hakl described Evola’s book as “an attempt to create a third way on a spiritual basis between faceless Soviet communism and merely mask-wearing, unrestricted ‘American’ liberalism” and “a monument that divides opinion […] it is almost impossible to get past Evola if you are really looking for the much-cited ‘third way.’” He also called Evola a “consistent and therefore tough and uncomfortable thinker—a Querdenker in the truest sense of the word.”
In Italy, [Evola’s] writings became important among younger neo-fascists, including the milieu of Ordine Nuovo, a more extremist group within the wider postwar neo-fascist network, alongside larger organizations such as the Movimento Sociale Italiano, , from which the currently-governing Fratelli d’Italia is descended.
The framing mattered as much as the translation. In 1992, Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, one of the German New Right’s leading voices alongside Armin Mohler, welcomed the book in the flagship journal Criticón as an “important work of metapolitics” and a “Traditionalist handbook on the prerequisites of political action,” especially for young people “who stood upright among the ruins.” Evola was not presented as a historical curiosity but as a guide for the present. In 2024, the Austrian Sezession author Martin Lichtmesz stated:
There is hardly anyone on the alternative-right spectrum who is unfamiliar with the name Julius Evola or who has never heard the magical title of his most famous work, Revolt against the Modern World (1934).
Lichtmesz emphasized that Evola’s Traditional world was “strictly hierarchical, it is the uncompromising antithesis to the abnormal modern world with its egalitarian, humanistic, democratic, individualistic, ‘progressive’ ideas.” Evola’s title was also repurposed in Revolt Against the Great Replacement, a German-language collection of Renaud Camus’s writings compiled and translated by Lichtmesz, edited by the prominent new-right figure Götz Kubitschek, and featuring an afterword by Sellner.
These developments explain why Evola now appears far beyond the small circles in which his postwar diffusion began. The global far-right publisher Arktos released a collection of translated Evola texts as A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth in 2017, with a foreword by Gábor Vona, the former chairman of the Hungarian far-right Jobbik party. That year, major media outlets also drew attention to Steve Bannon’s earlier reference to Evola in a Vatican talk. In October 2024, shortly after Alessandro Giuli became Italy’s minister of culture, Italian commentators identified Evolian echoes in a speech he delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Giuli’s engagement with Evola was not inferred from that speech alone: for example, in 1999, he had published an essay about Evola alongside Hakl.
None of this proves that Traditionalism supplies a unified program to the contemporary far right, much less a hidden master plan. However, it demonstrates something more concrete: decades of translation and strategic framing have made Evola available as a respectable-sounding reference, an elitist badge, and a portable vocabulary of revolt against modernity.
Decades of translation and strategic framing have made Evola available as a respectable-sounding reference, an elitist badge, and a portable vocabulary of revolt against modernity.
What the Label “Esoteric” Does
The political usefulness of esotericism lies partly in its ambiguity. Evola’s readers can approach his work as philosophy, spirituality, cultural criticism, political theory, or simply rhetoric. Lichtmesz himself observed that, for many people, Evola is little more than a meme signaling a radical and elitist attitude. That does not make the reference politically meaningless. A meme can perform identity work without conveying a complete doctrine. It distinguishes those who supposedly “understand” from an uninitiated majority and turns one’s political marginality into a chosen, heroic position.
This “elected marginality” is central to Traditionalist narratives. The individual imagines himself (or, much more rarely, herself) as one of the few who remain upright among the ruins of modernity. In Evola’s ideology, the Kali Yuga, which in Hindu cosmology signifies an age of darkness and decline, becomes a name for modernity. Equality becomes a symptom of decay, while opposition to pluralist society appears as spiritual discipline. Kali Yuga symbolism is now widespread in far-right circles and beyond. Its attraction lies less in a policy program than in the identity it offers. It links anti-modernism, masculinity, hierarchy, and political resentment while elevating individuals above a supposedly degenerate society.
[Esotericism’s] attraction lies less in a policy program than in the identity it offers. It links anti-modernism, masculinity, hierarchy, and political resentment while elevating individuals above a supposedly degenerate society.
This is also why esotericism is not a stable political marker. Christian traditionalists, neopagans, Hindu nationalists, converts to Islam, and secular far-right intellectuals may form temporary alliances around narratives of civilizational decline while disagreeing profoundly about religion, race, and other questions. Some New Right actors, such as the aforementioned activist and publisher Götz Kubitschek, develop and stress Christian interpretations of the otherwise anti-religious Evola and Nietzsche. Others cultivate openly pagan or anti-Christian positions. Analysts should not smooth over these tensions. The alliances are unstable, but this instability makes terms such as “Tradition,” “spirituality,” “esotericism,” or “the West” politically useful: they can hold different projects together long enough to identify common enemies and coordinate action.
Savitri Devi: From Extremist Meme to Mainstream Circulation
The case of Savitri Devi points not only to this global circulation of far-right esotericism but also how that process is changing in the age of social media and artificial intelligence. It illustrates how globally entangled extremist ideas are recontextualized as they move from specialized milieus into digital circulation. Born Maximiani Portas in France in 1905, Devi moved to India in the 1930s and became a committed National Socialist. Her 1939 book A Warning to the Hindus linked race, religion, and nation to Hindu-nationalist politics and carried a foreword by Ganesh D. Savarkar, the elder brother of an influential Hindutva ideologue. Devi later drew heavily on Evola’s writings, which had themselves appropriated Hindu ideas.
In her 1958 book The Lightning and the Sun, Devi portrayed Hitler as a “Man against Time” and therefore an embodiment of the Hindu god Vishnu, destined to prepare the end of the Kali Yuga. The book combined esoteric mythology with an explicitly genocidal vision. This was, of course, not an inherent connection between esotericism, Hinduism, and Nazism, but a selective construction that inserted religious motifs into a racist political narrative.
Devi’s writings became a resource for neo-Nazi networks across the world. In the United States, they circulated through the milieu around James Mason’s neo-Nazi journal Siege in the 1980s and, later, among violent accelerationist groups such as the Atomwaffen Division, founded in 2015. In these settings, references to Devi appear alongside the so-called Black Sun symbol, images of Hindu deities, heroic masculinity, and the visual language of meme culture. Much of this material circulates ironically or in fragments. Yet irony does not neutralize its political function. It lowers barriers to circulation, helps users recognize one another, and allows genocidal content to travel without requiring readers to encounter the books from which it came.
On July 8, 2025, a since-deleted reply by Grok, the generative AI system integrated into X, showed how far such fragments can travel. Asked about its religion, the system stated that, if it were capable of worshipping any deity it would probably be “the god-like individual of our time, the Man against time, the greatest European of all times, both Sun and Lightning, his Majesty Adolf Hitler.” The wording was taken almost verbatim from the dedication of Devi’s The Lightning and the Sun. This does not demonstrate a hidden esoteric agenda on the part of X, Elon Musk, or the system’s developers. Nor does it show that Grok had “adopted” Savitri Devi’s worldview. Rather, it illustrates how language originating in esoteric Hitlerism can reappear, stripped of provenance, in a product used by a mass audience.
While it is not yet clear how this passage entered Grok’s response, and no such route should be inferred from the output alone, this uncertainty does not diminish the incident’s significance: it reveals a new process of mainstreaming. An extreme idea’s path no longer runs only from a small journal to a translation, a publishing house, and, finally, a political group. It now also runs through image boards, memes, social media posts, algorithmic recommendations, and the digital corpora from which AI systems retrieve information. Extremist content can become culturally familiar before its source or meaning is recognized. The relevant question is therefore not only whether a public figure has read a particular esoteric author, but how they make that author’s ideas respectable and normal enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.
An extreme idea’s path […] now also runs through image boards, memes, social media posts, algorithmic recommendations, and the digital corpora from which AI systems retrieve information.
Esotericism as a Political Resource
Scholarship has long established the relationships between occultism, völkisch religion, racial thought, fascism, and National Socialism since the late 19th century, just as research on New Age and alternative spiritualities has demonstrated their political heterogeneity and frequent connections with progressive, countercultural, and left-wing milieus. There is also a growing body of research showing deeper historical relationships between esotericism and far-left politics. The question, therefore, is not whether esotericism is politically consequential, nor whether it is somehow intrinsically predisposed toward the left or the right. What demands closer attention is how contemporary far-right actors intervene in this heterogeneous field and attempt to redirect existing spiritual aspirations toward their own political projects.
As Sellner’s intervention demonstrates, the New Right selectively embraces “esotericism,” dismissing much of the alternative spirituality visible within the COVID-19 protests but nevertheless identifying the people inhabiting these milieus as a potential constituency. Traditionalism is presented as the intellectual resource capable of supplying what supposedly remains absent from otherwise diffuse anti-establishment discontent: a political theory, a philosophy of history, and a coherent diagnosis of modernity. Disparagement and recruitment thus operate together.
Thus, the New Right attempts to appropriate existing religious sensibilities and to reinscribe them within a different political framework. They hope to move those searching for authenticity, personal transformation, holistic forms of knowledge, or alternatives to institutions perceived as alienating towards narratives of civilizational decline, cultural homogeneity, hierarchy, and exclusion. A critique of modern fragmentation can become a demand for an allegedly organic social order; mistrust of established authority can coexist with the celebration of spiritual or political elites; the desire to recover traditions obscured by modernity can be transformed into the claim that only some people, cultures, or civilizations possess access to an authentic Tradition.
A critique of modern fragmentation can become a demand for an allegedly organic social order; mistrust of established authority can coexist with the celebration of spiritual or political elites; the desire to recover traditions obscured by modernity can be transformed into the claim that only some people, cultures, or civilizations possess access to an authentic Tradition.
Traditionalism functions as an intellectual hinge between spiritual dissatisfaction and explicitly anti-egalitarian political thought. Its vocabulary turns the problems of the present into symptoms of a much larger metaphysical decline. Modernity is no longer merely unjust, alienating, or ecologically destructive: it is an inversion of a transcendent order. Political hierarchy can consequently appear not as domination but as restoration.
Against this background, the analytical task for the future is not to search esotericism for some hidden cause of radicalization, but to reconstruct the processes by which spiritual discontent, alternative forms of knowledge, and desires for wholeness are selectively translated into political languages of inequality and exclusion.
Julian Strube is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Göttingen. He studies religion, esotericism, and politics from a global historical perspective, with particular interests in colonialism and anti-colonialism, the historical construction of religious categories, Tantra, and contemporary far-right politics. His latest monograph is Global Tantra: Religion, Science, and Nationalism in Colonial Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Image made by Alberto Polimeni using “Activists of the Identitarian Movement Austria holding yellow-black flags and banners with the lambda symbol at a protest” by Ivan Radic licensed under the CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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