Baron Julius Evola’s Manifesto on Spiritual Mountain Climbing

I grew up in the Rockies, and the mountains are my most cherished connection to spirituality. So, when I learned of Julius Evola’s manifesto on spiritual mountain climbing, Meditations on the Peaks, naturally I had to read it. It’s a beautiful work about the possibility of spiritual overcoming and transcendent experience reached through the conquest of the icy extremes of the earth’s greatest heights. Although Evola’s philosophy was in some ways very much shaped by the times in which he lived, Meditations on the Peaks contains not only lasting truths, but also the outline of Evola’s technique of contemplative mountain climbing. For the sake of illustration, I’ll give an example of Evola’s thinking as seen through the lens of a single chapter of Meditations on the Peaks. In the chapter “The Mountain, Sport and Contemplation” Evola comments upon a debate between two climbers that took place in a mountaineering publication of his time. The first climber, Anguissola, argues that the value of mountain climbing lies in contemplation and in “The impulse to establish contact with a world that helps one forget the mechanical and dull life of the modern cities.” <a href="https://medium.com/@fraterbarbarous/baron-julius-evolas-manifesto-on-spiritual-mountain-climbing-ff66cc64400a">Website</a>