Evola sees the Bhagavad-Gita as a preservation of early Indo-European tradition before the corruption of the extraracial faiths of Christianity and Islam, and delves briefly into the internal duality of the mythic hero Arjuna and the deity Krishna. He makes quick work of the 20th century notion that Hinduism is a pacifistic religion.

His main thrust—and the most important aspect of his work for the modern man of European descent, is his strong case for the dispelling of the popular notion that western culture is by nature materialistic and that oriental culture is more spiritual:

“The modern [materialistic] West is just as opposed to the ancient West as it is to the East.”

The lesson of Krishna is then reviewed, indicating that the hero is he who has been able to subdue his animal passions, his materialism, his need for “profit” and “proprietorship” and the resulting lethargy of owning rather than being and transcending.

Evola sees this most ancient document as a blueprint for comprehending “the imperishable soul,” and embracing the essential divinity of risky action.

Krishna finally reveals himself as the transcendent form of lighting—or as Zeus. Much is made of the many legends of Zeus, philanderer of the Olympians and his many dalliances with mortal women, with moderns, wedded to the Judeo-Christian ideal of the slave master god of micromanagement of the spiritual plantation, and hence failing to understand that Zeus is the Earth-impregnating action of the heavens, as was the Iroquois “Thunderer” who sends his energy earthward in various forms of sound [thunder], light [lightning], force [wind], and water [rain], the earth his mate and the rivers their sons.

As always, in the materialistic end time, fallen, decadent Man sees only the artifice and not the spirit of the myth. For Evola war is identified with the path of God, the bow with life, the arrow with the mind and the target the transcendent, “supreme spirit.”

Evola sees the modern lack of appreciation for war as an expression of transformation and instead a degenerate notion of profit-driven neurosis—which it indeed becomes in the sick modern meta-mind—as a definite sign that civilized man has reached a nadir of the soul.

The hero’s calling is to manifest the divine in action:

“…to manifest the character of purity, power, irresistibility, and transcendence over all pathos, passion and human limitation.’

How ironic that I read this book in the bowels of a crumbling society, degenerate beyond pathos, obsessed with its passions and consumed by the worship of the State—the deified steward of man’s limitations.