Evola in Space: The Fascist Fandom of Frank Herbert’s Dune

The old woman said: “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”

Permission to use this image has been granted by its creator, Douglas Wilson.

Last fall, after the release of the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction classic Dune, my department hosted a screening of Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One (2021) in the University Union. The event was a slick campus-life-meets-departmental-recruitment affair intended to impress upon students how insights from the academic study of religion can be brought to bear on popular culture. When I heard we were planning the event, I shamelessly invited myself to join the panel talk before the film; in addition to being a scholar of religion and—more recently—fascism, I am an unapologetic fan of science fiction and fantasy. What’s more, in anticipation of the release of Dune: Part Two (2024), I had at long last begun working my way through the six books in the series that Herbert finished before his death in 1986. Yet the more I read, the more I recognized themes from my study of Integral Traditionalism and religious fascism.

 “Why are you doing this?” he demanded. “To determine if you’re human. Be silent.” “It burns,” he whispered. “Silence!”

Permission to use this image has been granted by its creator, Jonathan Ying.

“Keep it short; keep it light,” our department chair reminded us before the talk. We did. He, a respected scholar of Islam and not-so-closeted fellow sci-fi nerd, talked about the Fremen—the indigenous population of planet Arrakis—as “space Muslims,” about “spice” as a metaphor for oil, and about the concept of jihad, which is central to the Dune saga. He also touched on themes of colonialism. A colleague who teaches a course called “Religion and Outer Space” remarked on how first the night sky and eventually outer space have inspired humanity’s religious imagination. One of our PhD students discussed religion and fascism, encouraging the audience to note the chanting and ritual blood sacrifices of the Padishah Emperor’s elite military force, the Sardaukar, and offered the historical comparison of a real-world fascist death cult. For my part, alas, I fear I tried to communicate my thoughts too briefly, too breezily, and too soon. Integral Traditionalism always takes a fair bit of explaining, and there simply wasn’t time to make my point effectively. I’m thinking of this article as my “mulligan.”

Image: “Dune – Gom Jabbar” by Christos Athanasios Christoforos Theocharis.

I realize now—hindsight is 20/20—that my intervention was never going to be short and light. Whereas my colleagues were primarily offering insight into the minds of the author and filmmaker, decoding symbolism (and working in a couple of history lessons) to help our young viewers interpret the allusive imagery, my own intervention was—and is—about reception. I was trying to tell a theater full of undergraduates that there were probably a couple of Zoomer edgelords in the audience alongside them, who see the archeofuturist vibes of Herbert’s Duneverse as aspirational rather than allegorical.

Permission to use this image has been granted by its creator, Adam Spivak.

For lots of folks, including the artists who generously gave me permission to include their depictions of the “pain box” scene, the far-right fandom of Dune is baffling, if not unfamiliar. Explaining to non-Traditionalist non-fascist fans of Dune what their “fellow fans” are seeing in Herbert’s story and how they arrived at that has been challenging, but, with time, I have whittled down my own scholarly interventions and fansplaining to what follows. I begin by identifying Herbert’s Dune saga as a piece of polyphonic literature, the definition of which precludes the possibility of a straightforward reading of it as a philosophical manifesto or political utopia. I then outline Julius Evola’s Integral Traditionalism and show what it looks like when that particular stripe of magico-political philosophy is read into the storyline of Herbert’s first book, Dune. My demonstration is presented as a plot summary from the Traditionalist perspective—reconstructed from, and supported by, various Evolan “insights” into Dune, which I have painstakingly gathered from some of the most self-important corners of the Internet. My parting shot includes some observations about the religious nature of this kind of fascist “philosophy.”

Misreading Dune as Traditionalist Manifesto/Utopia

At the time of the film screening, I had just finished book four, God Emperor of Dune, and I recognized the possibility for a distinctly Evolan reading of it. I refer, of course, to Julius Evola, the infamous Italian “super fascist,” failed Dadaist painter, sex magician, and author of the well-known (at least in certain circles) Revolt against the Modern World. In Revolt, Evola devotes considerable attention to the sacred nature of kingship, the virtue of holy war/jihad, the ontological imperative of a caste system, and other far-right ideological dainties—all of which figure into the storyline of Herbert’s Dune saga. While reading God Emperor, I had come to suspect that, much like young Potterheads who fantasize about being whisked off to Hogwarts where they hone their magical talents and discover their role as “chosen” in a prophecy that culminates in a showdown with evil incarnate, these metaphysics bros were falling asleep with their tattered copies of Dune, dreaming of mystically leveling up as they gradually realize that their coming had likewise been foretold, albeit as the Kwisatz Haderach, destining them to save humanity by sifting it and by restoring “Tradition.” So… yeah, I could see how the Dune saga would be like Harry Potter for a certain kind of Traditionalist/fascist reader.

Dune as Polyphonic Literature

I reiterate that I was (and am) thinking about reception, not intent. I’m not suggesting that Herbert was a fascist or that he was even aware of Julius Evola. For that matter, the term archeofuturism wasn’t coined until 1998, twelve years after Herbert’s death. His intentions aren’t the point of my intervention, nor are they something I would try to unpack in a blog post. What I am saying is that the Dune saga invites—or at least permits—an archeofuturist magico-fascist reading.

The Dune saga invites—or at least permits—an archeofuturist magico-fascist reading.

Whatever else it is, Dune is an example of polyphonic literature. All of the important characters are fully fleshed out, not just the protagonists. Because of this, any number of readings can seem plausible. When Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin proposed the idea of literary polyphony, he noted that Dostoyevsky’s readers often came to conflicting conclusions about the meaning of his novels because they believed they had located the author’s personal perspective in different characters— characters perhaps more sympathetic to their own points of view than to Dostoyevsky’s. The same will be true of Herbert and his readers. That’s my point.

“…in a work as complexly layered as Dune—Herbert called it an “ecological fugue” in which multiple independent voices are heard—parts should not be artificially separated for analysis without being reinterpreted from a sense of the whole, which is in effect a long open-ended dialogue in which many ideologies, as unmerged voices, interrelate. As Liet Kynes, the planetologist of Dune’s Imperium remarks, the universe is a place of constant conversation. In reality there are no isolated discourses in the Dune series. Rather, the whole is orchestrated in a “polyphonic” manner so that every voice is qualified, questioned, even subverted, by others. It is this compositional aspect of the Dune series that makes it unique.”

From Frank Herbert, by William F. Toupounce

The Problem of Reading Philosophy into Dune

The polyphony of the Dune saga seems to be causing confusion elsewhere in the popular discourse as well. It is especially palpable in the flurry of recent blog posts, YouTube videos, and TikTok reels that compare Herbert’s Dune to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in an effort to explain Tolkien’s “intense dislike” of Dune. A short video suggests that Tolkien’s “clear moral universe” of good vs. evil represents the kind of art that can be co-opted to “hype people up to commit atrocities.” “Beethoven was played at Nazi pep rallies,” he reminds us. Insofar as the video’s creator means that real-life bad guys sometimes identify with the virtuous protagonists in morally black and white fiction, he’s not wrong. Life-long fan girl, former Hobbit cosplayer, and far-right prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, made headlines in 2023 with her take on Tolkien’s classic—keep the Orcs (read: Muslims) out of Númenor (read: Italy). Recognizing this tendency, the video claims that after WWII, artists like Herbert started creating work that was harder to use as a “straight-forward rallying cry.” He clearly recognizes that there is something different about Herbert’s Dune, but he seems to be saying that Herbert would have written more like Tolkien if it hadn’t been for the Nazis. I’m unconvinced.

A post on a philosophically oriented blog called Whither the West? offers another explanation for the difference between the two authors and for Tolkien’s disparaging opinion of Dune. Wither believes it is a matter of fundamentally incompatible philosophies of ethics. “Tolkien was an avid deontologist,” he writes, “and Dune is pure consequentialism.” From the deontological perspective, “acts are in themselves either good or bad,” whereas according to the consequentialist school of thought, “whether an act is good or bad depends on the consequences.” Okay, I’ll grant that Lord of the Rings is about as deontological as it gets, but I reject the author’s assertion that Dune is “pure consequentialism.” His analysis creates a false dichotomy. Deontology and consequentialism are competing philosophies of ethics, but they are still both about what’s right and what’s wrong. Literary polyphony represents a different kind of writing altogether. American literary critic and translator of Bakhtin, Caryl Emerson, describes it as “a decentered authorial stance that grants validity to all voices.” An author uses polyphony to suspend any cut-and-dry ethical analysis; it is a literary meditation on a problem for which the author may see no solution. In other words, it’s about being “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Evola’s Traditionalist Philosophy

So, how did I know that the metaphysics bros would be congratulating themselves over this bit of cinema? What was it about Herbert’s Dune saga that got my spidey sense tingling? In my research, I have spent an uncomfortable amount of time thinking about—and hermeneutically thinking like—Julius Evola. For the above-mentioned article, I made a thorough analysis of his main ideological calling card, Revolt Against the Modern World. That analysis, which I used to compare Revolt with a contemporaneous Romanian Christo-fascist manifesto, yielded a list of themes and preoccupations in his thought. The deeper I got into the Dune saga, the more that list—now a permanent part of my hermeneutic of moustache-twirling villainy—nagged at me.

Of course, I’m not the only person to analyze Evola’s Revolt. Internet summaries abound. For the most part, though, the way that they’re schematized depends on the sympathies of the one doing the analyzing. For example, the “blurb” that accompanies the first scholarly book-length English-language study of Evola’s philosophy, Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola (2011), describes his politics as “avowedly traditionalist, authoritarian, anti-modern, anti-democratic and anti-liberal.” All perfectly true, but this presents Evola’s thoughts from a position of such liberal normativity that they appear to be no more than a nosegay of reactionary grudges. By contrast, Michael Millerman, an academically trained metaphysics bro, describes Evola as a Traditionalist philosopher and esotericist whose “critique of modernity, rooted in rejection of both liberalism and materialism, is crucial for understanding his worldview.” Millerman’s version better reflects the interrelationship of Evola’s ideas, but it (consciously) obscures their pathologically batshit nature. Evola’s political musings are based in the same Hermetic metaphysics as his multiple books on magic. Did I mention Harry Potter for fascists?

Both of those summaries put the chariot before the horse by characterizing Evola first as “Traditionalist” and then as anti-modern. The Traditionalist meme above more accurately presents the relationship of “Tradition” to “Modernism” in Evola’s thought. It portrays “Modernism” as a boogieman that has no real semantic value until it’s shown launching “equality, individualism, and progress” from its gnarled claws. The memester intuited this, perhaps in spite of himself. He—it’s never a woman—literally demonizes modernity and then associates “equality, individualism, and progress” with the demon to show that these things are bad. “Tradition” does nothing but stand there larping as a centurion and holding back the terrible awful. Both Modernism and Tradition are hollow categories. You could just as easily keep the mascots, switch the labels, and change “equality, individualism, and progress” to their opposites, “hierarchy, fascism, and idealism.” I mean, you might want to put “Modernism” in a unisex Starfleet uniform, but you get the point.

Conveniently enough, the Traditional memester’s sincerity also highlights Evola’s fixation on magico-ontological hierarchies with “equality” as the foremost curse(?) finger missile(?). Hierarchies are the whole point of Evola’s Rube Goldberg machine of a philosophy; they’re the reason he’s anti-modern. He isn’t anti-modern out of some animus for Edison’s electric bulb; he’s anti-modern because he is an idealist (in the Platonic sense) who bewails the passing of the because-that’s-how-it-is ontology that legitimated aristocratic privilege and serfdom in premodern Europe. His anti-modernism is primarily directed at the intellectual and social consequences of the Enlightenment. When inductive reasoning from material evidence—the scientific method—became the standard for talking about society, thus giving rise to the social sciences, old idealist notions about fixed hierarchies of civilizations, races, castes, and genders lost credibility in intellectual discourse. A careful reading of Evola’s best-known work reveals that it might just as well have been titled Revolt Against the Modern Method. “Traditional” just sounds better than “obsolete.”

Understood this way, the pieces of Evola’s political “philosophy” fall into place. Evola was a reactionary dandy with no credible justifications for his prejudices. He adopted Traditionalism because he needed a rhetorical and conceptual framework in which to mount an anti-materialist—and therefore also anti-modern—argument. The magico-religious neo-Platonic metaphysics of Hermeticism made that possible for him.

It is often claimed that Evola was also anti-Christian. He was, yet much of his anti-Christian sentiment can also be explained in terms of the anti-rationalism that he embraces in order to defend premodern social hierarchies. His “paganism,” like his anti-modernism, is an effect rather than a cause of his ideology. Evola thinks Catholicism took a tragically wrong turn somewhere in the High Middle Ages, right about the time that Thomas Aquinas began incorporating Aristotelian reasoning (materialist and inductive) into Catholic theology (e.g., the five ways). He views Protestantism in all its forms as nothing but decadent individualist nonsense. Eastern Orthodoxy, which never embraced Aquinas’ Scholasticism, sometimes gets a pass, but only to the extent that it is nationalist, monarchist, and Platonic (idealist and deductive)—in other words, “traditional.”

Still, the biggest problem Evola has with Christianity is Christ. The idea of a heavenly king messes with his whole vibe. Ruling over Evola’s modified caste system is a divine king, who wages sacred war against other nations. The perpetual struggle to dominate has the effect of both revealing and reinforcing the hierarchies that Evola is so keen on. To wit, as long as there is war, the entire society is beholden to the warrior caste, which he has placed at the top (rather than the priestly caste, as in Hinduism). Furthermore, when a nation/race is conquered, the superiority of its conqueror is made evident. When this happens, the conquered nation is folded into the conqueror’s lower castes; the conquering nation becomes an empire; the warrior caste’s position is validated; and the king’s divinity is confirmed.

Evola has no use for a King of Kings who “turns the other cheek.” The Islamic concept of jihad—or at least his understanding of it—suits him much better. Divided into the greater and lesser jihad, this concept gives juice to Evola’s “Traditional” hierarchies in a way that Jesus never could. The greater jihad refers to the inner struggle to be your best Traditional self. Unsurprisingly, this tendency has inspired some Evola-Jordan Peterson crossover. By contrast, the lesser jihad is between races (see Traditional coffee mug, below). The fact that the “greater” of the two jihads is internal to the individual seems antithetical to Evola’s anti-individualist goals, but maybe no one else has noticed.

Evola borrows enthusiastically—if selectively—from Hindu cosmology. In addition to caste hierarchies, he brings in the idea of cyclical Ages of the world called yugas. The four yugas run in a never-ending pageant of decline toward the darkness and ruin of the Kali Yuga (our current age) and subsequent rebirth from the rubble into a new Satya Yuga (golden age). It’s literally the opposite of any concept of progress based on causal (i.e., material) logic. You can’t make things better by changing them, so don’t try; you’ll only make it worse—literally. According to this kind of thinking, decline is driven by the rejection of cosmically ordained hierarchical order. It all seems too bonkers for words until you realize that this framework allows the upper castes to blame the lower castes for everything that goes wrong.

A Traditionalist Reading of Dune

If you’ve ever read the Dune books or seen the movies, you’re probably starting to recognize the elements of Herbert’s story that the mistico-fascist fanboys (whom I call the “metaphysics bros”) are seizing upon in their readings of it. The story takes place in humanity’s far distant intergalactic future, after the Butlerian Jihad, in which all the “thinking machines” (i.e., computers) have been destroyed along with their creators. Freed from the tyranny of technocracy, but somehow still possessed of “non-thinking” technology so advanced it seems like magic, humanity reorganizes itself into space feudalism. So, hierarchies? Check. Kali yuga and rebirth? Check. What about jihad and Platonic idealism? Pardon me while I twirl.

Finally, I arrive at something I might have shared with the student audience of my department’s film screening had I the time and forethought to prepare it. It is a Traditionalist reading of Dune—not the “ecological fugue” that Herbert intended, but rather a mistico-fascist utopia incorporating the most consequential aspects of Evola’s politico-religious philosophy. To substantiate my characterization, I have interspersed it with representative quotes about Evola and Dune from real metaphysics bros along with links to their upwellings of ideological enthusiasm. For context and color, I have included some of my own commentary. Above all, I have blatantly disregarded everything that I myself have said about literary polyphony up to this point.

The traditionalist reading of Dune finds not the “ecological fugue” that Herbert intended, but rather a mistico-fascist utopia incorporating the most consequential aspects of Evola’s politico-religious philosophy.

The narrative of Dune—and of most of the Dune saga—centers on members of the Atreides family. House Atreides traces its lineage back to mythical King Agamemnon in ancient Greece, on ancient Earth (in other words, to the Great White West of fascist fanboy fantasies like this one). The Atreides are among those who regained their aristocratic status after the Butlerian Jihad, and for the last 10,000 years, they have been living on Caladan, a halcyon planet which they rule as their fief (Tradition!). The story opens with Duke Leto, the Atreides patriarch, preparing to relocate his advisors, administrators, military, along with his “bound concubine” (I know, right?) and their son Paul to Arrakis, a remote desert planet also known as Dune. The emperor has ordered Leto to take over administration of Dune, which is the only source of “spice,” the most valuable commodity in the Universe. It is also home to giant sandworms that make harvesting spice very dangerous.

Spice (the main fantastical conceit of the story) is a mildly narcotic wonder drug that not only grants perfect health and long life but also facilitates “prescience” (Also, in sufficient quantities, it turns your eyes a vibrant blue). With extensive training, it allows one to see into the future with enough clarity to choose a course of action based on foreknowledge of the outcome (i.e., deductively, rather than inductively from material evidence). The greater the skill of the adept and the larger the dose of spice, the further into the future it is possible to see (Spice makes the metaphysics of Platonic idealism seem less ridiculous). Without computers, space travel is only possible thanks to the Spacing Guild’s Navigators, the biggest spice fiends in the Duneverse, who use spice prescience to plot courses through the galaxy. The Guild’s effective monopoly on commerce forces the aristocracy into an obsequious position and has started to threaten Traditional aristocratic hegemony in the way that merchants’ guilds did in early modern Europe.

Yet the Guild aren’t the only ones using the effects of spice to destroy Traditional hierarchies. An order of female adepts, the Bene Gesserit, train their minds and bodies to make the greatest possible use of the effects of spice with knowledge they keep hidden from men. They ally themselves with the great Houses as Truth Sayers, a sort of vizier, while secretly conspiring to pull the strings of history by means of a millennia-long breeding program they created to genetically engineer a messiah whom they will control (What the bros find appalling about this is not the eugenics, which is Traditional, but the fact that women want to use it to control men). Power, which should be vertically organized according to Traditional hierarchies, is divided among the “great Houses,” a sort of merchants’ guild, and a priestly class of women(Such decadence can only be redressed with jihad).

“Paul Atreides of Dune highlights the type of men we must become in order to preserve our unique Western people and cultures.  This lecture series will teach you how to fight for the West, according to the philosophy of Dune by Frank Herbert.”

The numerically underwhelming, but nevertheless all-in metaphysics bro, Rogue ⏐ Philosophy, explains in the first part of his chapter-by-chapter, 49-part lecture series.

The first book of the Dune saga recounts the ascent—the inner/greater jihad—of Paul Atreides, Leto’s heir. Paul’s father, the Duke, saw to it that he studied politics and martial arts with the best tutors, and his mother (the Lady Jessica, a Bene Gesserit as well as a concubine) has given him more training in the Weirding Way than boys ever get. She defied instructions from her order to bear a daughter for their breeding program because Leto wanted a son (The bar for Trad concubines is apparently quite high). She also consistently refused to marry him because she recognized the importance of the possibility of a marriage alliance with one of the other great Houses (There’s a lot to unpack here. Leto’s monogamy represents a sentimental weakness of character, while Jessica’s subservience to him represents her strength).

“The female quality is associated with deception, changeability, the moon, the earth, darkness, wetness, passivity, and dependence on another. In Evola’s words, what the Greeks called ‘heterity,’ that is, being connected to another or being centered on someone other than oneself, is a characteristic proper to the cosmic female, whereas to have one’s own principle in oneself is proper to the pure male.”

From “Julius Evola on Women” by metaphysics bro and—by the sound of it—vampire, Ariya Khattiya.

Early on, Leto is betrayed by a member of his own House and captured by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, his cousin, who had previously administered spice production on Arrakis until mysteriously vanishing (Monstrously fat, and gay verging on pedophile, the baron is unacceptable as a Traditional ruler, despite his aristocratic breeding and ambition.) We learn that the baron’s disappearance was part of a plot orchestrated by the emperor to get rid of Duke Leto, who was becoming too popular with the other great Houses. Leto dies in captivity, but Paul and Jessica manage to escape—narrowly. They end up in the deep desert among the Fremen (i.e., the blue-eyed space-Muslims) where Paul learns to embrace Traditional values (such as polygamy and violence for its own sake) in ways that his father was never comfortable with. As the story progresses, more and more of the Fremen come to believe Paul is the Lisan al Gaib, the “Voice from the Outer World,” of their ancient prophecies. We also learn that the Bene Gesserit planted those prophecies in anticipation of finally producing a messiah with their breeding program.

To put it simply, Paul is the pinnacle of the aristocratic worldview. Not only is he the son of a duke, but he is a warrior, a product of relentless selective breeding, and has a direct tether to divine truth due to these inherited factors. Paul Atredis [sic] is exactly the half-political half-religious monarch of Evolian philosophy; he is the exact definition of the individualistic and aristocratic Nietzchian [sic] Ubermensch; he is everything loved by an aristocratic order, and by extension, everything I personally profess.

From “Dune Two: A Masterpiece Through the Lens of Traditionalism” by metaphysics bro, Ezio N Salimbeni

Paul’s internalization of the Fremen’s Traditional way of life catalyzes the political savvy he got from his father, the esoteric learning he got from his mother, and his aristocratic blood (obviously), which, it turns out, he gets from both sides (Don’t get me started.) He starts to become the messianic figure of the planted prophecies. To complete his transformation, Paul, who has taken the Fremen name Muadib and a Fremen concubine named Chaney, undergoes a Bene Gesserit rite of passage known as the “spice agony.”

The ritual involves ingesting the poisonous effluvia of a drowned juvenile sand worm and using Bene Gesserit training to transmute its toxic compounds into the “water of life” (The principal application of the water of life seems to be inciting community orgies. Tradition? Probably.) If the adept is successful—some die attempting to change the waters—she emerges as a “reverend mother.” Unsurprisingly, Paul-Muadib accomplishes the feat spectacularly. He undertakes the ritual by himself—subduing and drowning the man-sized sandworm without help—and emerges with fantastic displays of power (proving that anything the Bene Gesserit can do, a man can do better). Yet the transformed Paul-Muadib is not merely some perverse male version of a reverend mother. No! He is more; he is paradigm-altering. His prescience extends to places inaccessible to the Bene Gesserit. He is more than the messiah the Bene Gesserit had been breeding for millennia. He is the Kwisatz Haderach, the “One Who Can Be Many Places at Once.” Most importantly, he is not under their control. As it turns out, his mother’s subservience to her lord duke was the tipping point that began to restore Tradition.

“Why are we collectively obsessed with messiahs and holy wars? Because they are fought within us everyday, and the messiah is the one who wins them.”

“So, let’s talk about waging that inner jihad. One thing I’ve learned about this path is that most days, especially at the beginning, you’re going to lose and that’s okay. For instance, after I saw Dune 2 for the first time, I felt really fed up with myself and this inspiration to win the holy war, so I got home and one of the things I did was I deleted Instagram and Facebook off my phone. I was so done wasting my attention when I knew I could be so much more. Lo, and behold, the next day I found myself scrolling through YouTube shorts and then I went through a multiple monthlong process of disciplining my social media consumption.”

Metaphysics bro, jihad expert, and aspiring Kwisatz Haderach, Wisdom Warriors, explains the Evolan wisdom of Dune.

Paul-Muadib completes his mother’s betrayal of the Bene Gesserit and advances the restoration of Tradition by teaching the Weirding Way to cadres of the most exceptional specimens of Fremen masculinity (Tradition is often vaguely homoerotic). These are the Fedaykin—a warrior caste capable of defeating the emperor’s Sardaukar, taking back Arrakis, and ultimately combating the degeneracy of the great Houses (Make Aristocracy Great Again!) By sabotaging spice production, now back in the hands of House Harkonnen, Paul lures the emperor, his Sardaukar, and the entire imperial entourage to Arrakis. The Fedaykin defeat the Sardaukar, and once he has the emperor face to face, Paul threatens to use the “water of life” to start a chemical chain reaction that will kill all the giant sandworms, the larval form of which is indirectly responsible for creating spice. Without spice, the navigators would lose their prescience, and all commerce in the galaxy would cease (The metaphysics bros see this as an allegorical victory over internationalism.) Without spice, the Bene Gesserit would lose most of their abilities.

Their altercation is interrupted when Feyd, nephew of the Baron Harkonnen and last scion of that House, challenges Paul-Muadib to a knife fight to avenge his family, which was all but ended by the Fremen rebellion. Paul kills him (basically, by being more Traditional) despite the fact that Feyd is himself a deadly fighter and tries to cheat (In Evolan terms, this is a necessary demonstration of Paul-Muadib’s physical prowess to go along with his political acumen.) Left with no options, the emperor consents to abdicate his throne and marry off his daughter, the Princess Irulan, a Bene Gesserit, to Paul-Muadib (who picked up a Fremen concubine along the way).

Stelios: Would [Evola] say that people owe unconditional obedience to the king? Because…

Carl: Only while the king is embodying the transcendental doctrine of rites.

Stelios: Okay, so that’s conditional. So, on the condition that the king manifests the Transcendent order we are going to obey?

Carl: Yeah

Stelios: But if the king does not, the king is no longer legitimate.

Carl: He’s a tyrant, and he’s not upholding the solar order.

Stelios: He’s no King.

Carl: No. He’s no king.

Stelios: Yeah, yeah.

Carl: The king is only really the king while he upholds this solar tradition, and if he doesn’t, you know he’s not immanently transcending reality. He’s not bringing it into existence–right? You know–in the person of him. And so he’s not the king. You know the king is never the king unless he’s doing this, and he’s got to do it all the time.

Metaphysics bros and “lotus eaters,” Stelios and Carl, discuss Evola’s thoughts on The Transcendental Nature of Kingship

This means that noble-born Paul-Muadib becomes the Traditional Messiah-Emperor. He accepts the emperor’s concession and agrees to marry Princess Irulan, yet he ultimately deprives her of any form of affection (He turns the imperial princess, who was previously dismissive of him, into an incel, while siring his children on the Traditional concubine who loves and fears him. Tradition.) Finally, despite already holding all the cards, Paul-Muadib sends his warriors out into the galaxy on… jihad (This very Traditional holy war turns out to be necessary to “save” humanity from the vague but ominous threat of future degeneration.) The decision to consign millions upon millions to death in his jihad is justified because Paul-Muadib has “seen through the spice,” a reference to his now-unmatched prescience (Deductive reasoning based on a magically foreknown outcome). In jihad, the newly created warrior caste of Fedaykin replace the priestly caste of Bene Gesserit at the top of the system of castes, and with each victory, their supremacy and Paul’s divinity are reaffirmed. Tradition, at last…until you read the other books.

Fascism as Religion

Not the Dune you read/saw? Then you’re probably not a metaphysics bro. Consider yourself “sifted,” animal.

So, what can we learn from the metaphysics bros’ reception of Dune? I’m not saying that authors and filmmakers should devote any special attention to how their work will be understood and used by those among us with savant-like abilities to miss the point. I’m not even saying, “This is why we can’t have nice things!” What I am saying is that the Traditionalist reading of Dune I have presented here is demonstrable, identifiable, and predictable. Evola’s magical fascism has only grown in popularity since the translation of Revolt Against the Modern World and a handful of his other works in the mid-1990s. Even more of it is translated now, and there are plenty of other Traditionalist “philosophers” like him. Check out “esoteric Hitlerism” if you’re curious.

This fascism-as-religion isn’t going anywhere; we’re stuck with it. There is a growing discourse space (much of it online) in which racism and misogyny are embraced as higher ideals—as articles of faith. Violence is a virtue. Equality is degeneracy. Empathy is spiritual weakness—a form of sloth. As a religion, Evola’s Traditionalism is divorced from material reality, so there is no “reasoning” with its devotees. There is no appealing to decency or love since, for them, the decent thing to do is to eliminate anyone or anything that weakens the race as a whole. Metaphysics bros are effectively religious fundamentalists who are looking for a proud, vain, acquisitive, wrathful messiah to crown as their divine king—someone who will call for jihad to give their lives meaning and point them at the “infidels.” Sound familiar?

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Jason Roberts is an associate professor of instruction at the University of Texas at Austin with appointments in the departments of Religious Studies and of Slavic and Eurasian Studies. His research focuses on fascist philosophies and theologies and on politico-religious co-belligerence.