PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS - Università degli Studi di Messina

Hans Thomas Hakl, independent scholar, Austria
Julius Evola’s Relations with Women
Male and female are two transcendent categories for Evola which according to Aristotle can be
characterized as “active” and “passive”. A heavy influence exerted by Otto Weininger’s work
Sex and Character strengthened this attitude of his. And when he was 26 he wrote a
provocative essay titled “Woman as object”. At the same time he dressed and behaved as a
dandy giving way to rumours that he was a homosexual although no proof has ever been
produced for this allegation. On the contrary Evola was a known womanizer nicknamed the
“spider” because of all the women ending up in his “net”. Although he never spoke about it
two famous women had a love affair with him. The first was Sibilla Aleramo (Rina Faccio) an
early feminist, communist and writer, who was friends with the likes of Maxim Gorki, Luigi
Pirandello, August Rodin or James Joyce. She wrote about her love affair with Evola in a
novel. The second famous woman with whom he most probably had an affair was Maria de
Naglowska, a Russian poetess and founder of a satanic sex cult. There are however two further
ladies whom I could still interview in the eighties of the last century who talked to me about
their relations with Evola. One was a very successful business woman in Hannover, who freely
admitted to have been in love with him. She also had helped him with translations from
German. The second lady came from an old noble family in Germany and was the first wife of
Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, the renowned German expert on psychological racial traits, greatly
admired by Evola. She told me about Evola’s strong presence during the three or four visits he
paid to her husband. Quite well known are also his cynical remarks about women in general as
they appear in letters or in conversations, one example being the conversation he had in Roma
with the Zen expert Karlfried Graf Dürckheim. Although Evola has the reputation of being a
misogynist this probably was not the case. Otherwise, how could we explain, that he asked
two women to execute his last will.
Tue 15 th , 11.00, Classroom 5
Olav Hammer, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
Modern Jesus Legends and the Modalities of Religious Innovation
Religious innovations, and an ensuing religious plurality, regularly arise when elements of
religious discourses, practices and social formations migrate across the porous and often quite
arbitrary boundaries between traditionally defined social arenas and religious traditions. This
tendency toward innovation and plurality is counteracted by intense disciplining by those who
wish to construct a religious monoculture, erect boundaries between “mainstream” and
“alternative”, and legitimate the former at the expense of the latter. Vestiges of this disciplining
process influence even prevalent theorizing on the development of “alternative” religious
developments. Well-known sociological theories, e.g. Colin Campbell’s concept of the cultic
milieu, presuppose that there is a dominant, nearly monolithic mainstream culture, in
opposition to an underground of divergent and deviant innovations. Departing from a case
study, the development of a number of modern “alternative” Jesus legends from Blavatsky to
Dan Brown, this paper investigates how an anthropologically informed concept of culture and
religion as a profuse repertoire of discourses and practices might elucidate a number of
mechanisms of religious innovation, plurality, hybridity, and disciplining.
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Tue 15 th , 16.20, Classroom 13