WHEN, in 2023, Penguin Books published Mark Sedgwick’s Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order, I was surprised to discover that not a single mention had been made of Black Front Press; neither in the text, nor in the bibliography at the back of the book. It was, in all respects, a rather straight-laced and mainstream effort to introduce Traditionalism to a wider audience and yet I believe that the omission was somewhat unjustified. Particularly, it must be said, when I had personally been interviewed by Mr. Sedgwick in London some twenty years previously.

I launched BFP in December 2010, after deciding to self-publish my biography of the conservative revolutionary, Otto Strasser (1897–1974), although since then we have gone on to produce something in the region of 170 texts. These include a large number of topics and fall into seven main categories:

HISTORY

Henry the Fowler, Otto the Great, Alfred Dreyfus

ESOTERICA

Runes/Wodenism, Georges Bataille, Rudolf Steiner, Fernando Pessoa, Austin Osman Spare, Mircea Eliade, Ritual, Symbolism, Magick

POLITICS

Otto Strasser, Gregor Strasser, Corneliu Codreanu, Horia Sima, Max Stirner, Thomas Sankara, Ernst Röhm, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ayatollah Khomeini, Douglas Hyde, Arnold Spencer Leese, Jonathan Bowden, Ernst Jünger, National-Anarchism, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Conservative Revolution, Anti-Zionism, British Radicalism, Communism, Fascism, Panait Istrati, Gabriele D’Annunzio

PHILOSOPHY

Friedrich Nietzsche, Frederick the Great/Machiavelli, Romanticism, Absolute Idealism, Keiji Nishitani/Kyoto School, Byung-Chul Han, Oswald Spengler, Gabriel Marcel, E. F. Schumacher, Sexuality, Death, Evil, Heidegger, Frankfurt School

PSYCHOLOGY

Carl Gustav Jung

LITERATURE

Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Yukio Mishima, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesteron, J.R.R. Tolkien, Louis-Ferdinand Céline

THEOLOGY

Augustine of Hippo, Rudolf Otto, Christian Mysticism, Emanuel Swedenborg

We have also published a number of books dealing with Black Metal and Neofolk music, explorations of underground counter-culture, novels and collections of both adult and childrens’ poetry.

The first Traditionalist text to see the light of day was 2011’s Evola: Thoughts and Perspectives, Volume One. Although this was the first in a thirteen-part series, it was the only book in the series dealing specifically with a Traditionalist thinker and included chapters about the Italian’s thoughts on race, feminism, art, capitalism, Islam, sexual aesthetics and counter-initiation.

In 2016, Torchbearers of the Perennial Tradition: Julius Evola, Charles Maurras and Guido De Giorgio appeared. I edited the book alongside Cologero Salvo, mastermind of the famous Gornahoor blog. Charles, as he was known, sadly passed away in the Spring of 2023 and his legacy survives online. Our book was divided into three parts and contained original translations of Evola’s ‘Race of the Soul and the Spirit’ taken from Sintesi di dottrina della razza (1941), Maurras’ ‘Toward Tradition’ from Mes idées Politiques (1937), and De Giorgio’s ‘The Establishment of a Traditional Society’ from La Tradizione romana (1939).

In 2017, we released my The World Through a Monocled Eye: A Detailed Exposition of Julius Evola’s Men Among the Ruins. I had first published this text back in 2002, when I was editor-in-chief of The Rising Press in England, and this revised and expanded edition was eager to point out how Evola’s Gli uomini e le rovine (1953) had been issued at a time when Europe was still emerging from the dark shadows of the Second World War and was an attempt to account for the increasing materialism of the modern age. Whilst Evola is often dismissed as a ‘fascist’, however, his work is not afraid to address the many shortcomings of the ideology itself and calls for a true revival of the Traditionalist ethos. Tracing the disastrous course of modernism from the bourgeois ‘revolutions’ of 1789 and 1848 onwards, Evola sought to account for the rapid decline of European values and present his thoughts on the true nature of freedom, sovereignty, elitism and hierarchy. I later serialised this book on my Substack page, in order to bring it to a larger audience.

The Real & The Illusory: Essays on the Perennial Philosophy came along in 2018 and was an unusual blend of Tradition-inspired texts featuring articles by a number of writers. Contributions included essays on Anti-Tradition, eternal strife between the earth and the world, Eliade on perennial religion and time, Alfred North Whitehead and the idea of a dipolar god, challenging post-modernism, the illusion of democracy, the Christ Myth, poetic wisdom, the flamma non urens, Christian myths and mysticism, Friedrich Schelling, syncretism in Mariology and Marian cults, and Jacques Derrida.

In 2019 we published my Jewish Mysticism: From Pagan Antiquity and the Hebrew Prophets to the Kabbalistic Renaissance and Beyond. Despite being an overview of Jewish mysticism in general, the book set out to re-establish Judaism as a form of Primordial Tradition and chapters explored gender-oscillation in Jewish paganism, prophets and visionaries, exile and Hellenisation, Rabbinical Judaism, Merkabah-Hekhalot mysticism, the Sefer Yetzirah, the formation of East European Jewry, Jewish spirituality in Early Medieval Europe, the Sefer Ha-Zohar, Isaac Luria and the Kabbalistic Renaissance, the Maharal of Prague, the mystical patriarchs of Later Hasidism, Yizhak Isaac Safrin of Komarno, the Wider Influence of Jewish Mysticism, and Jewish mysticism in the new millennium. I used many primary sources for this volume, purchasing a large number of volumes that are usually housed in Jewish libraries.

In 2020, BFP issued my Return to Evola: A Fresh Look at Revolt Against the Modern World, which was a chapter-by-chapter summary of Evola’s 1934 opus and an attempt to introduce the work to a new generation of readers. We received a very positive response for this work, as some people find Evola’s text extremely difficult and I tried to extricate his ideas in a clear and detailed fashion.

Eduard Alcántara’s Man of Tradition: Actualising the Evolian Character was next on the list, appearing in 2021 as a translation of the work first published in Spain by Ediciones Camzo in 2011, in Portugal by Editorial fasciNAÇÃO in 2014, and again in Spain by Editorial EAS in 2017. Eduard’s work dealt with roots, nature, the intransigence of the idea, duty, the warrior, silence, the race of the soul, deconditioning, death, the Ariya, coagulation and what he termed the dangerous seat.

Also in 2021 we released Protector of the Sacred Flame: Essays on the Life and Thought of Julius Evola. Writers including João Franco, Robert Steuckers, Alberto Lombardo, Georges Feltin-Tracol, Primo Siena, Kerry Bolton, Sean Jobst and myself discussed Evola in a number of interesting contexts. Among them were his role as a prophet of dormant empires and ideas on freedom through struggle, J. J. Bachofen, Nietzsche, anti-Americanism, H.F.K. Günther, primacy of intellect, Herculean way of Tradition, life-after-death, character of work, Gentile, Bataille and the pagan anarch.

Eduard Alcántara made a return in 2021 and we printed his Evola Against Fatalism: Tradition, Freedom and Transcendence. Originally published in Spanish by Editorial EAS in March 2019, the book examined themes such as Alea Iacta Est, the Great Autarch, Fideist Man, lunar religiosities, Helleno-Christianity, the linear conception of history, the Free Man, heroic cycles and historical determinisms, the prisetly caste, the Diocesans, the four ages and hegemony of the fifth estate, Evola vs. Guénon, overcoming determinism, numina, the fall of Indo-European man, the Vedanta, and riding the tiger.

In 2022, my Surviving Kali Yuga: A Contemporary Reading of René Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World was published. In nine chapters I looked at the Frenchman’s text in some detail and tried to relate what he had said about the decline of Western civilisation in 1927 to the situation we find ourselves in today. I was especially keen to point out that Guénon had already noted the collapse of Tradition in the East, despite Oriental ideas arriving in Europe in the decades following the publication of his work.

A companion volume appeared that same year, entitled The Master Metaphysician: Essays on the Life and Work of René Guénon. The volume had a number of interesting writers from France, Portugal, Italy and America and concerned itself with the esoteric Dante, viruses and hallucinatory civilisation, Guénon and Drieu, the rejection of the elites in Ancient China, Islam, democracy and the mass-mind, German influence on indology, festive society, the cracks in the great wall, the interminable crisis of modernity, pride of being a “reactionary,” the lost spirituality of money, origin of the economic vision, the Catholic Tradition, the Reincarnationist fallacy, pseudo-metaphysics, and Guénon’s spiritual paradigm.

In 2023, BFP published Guardians of the Primordial Tradition: Exploring the Ideas and Personalities of the Traditionalist School. With a strongly Continental line-up, the work focussed on Frithjof Schuon and the Native American Tradition, the life

and work of Martin Lings, Mircea Eliade as a Traditionalist, Frithjof Schuon and man’s link with the Transcendent, Elémire Zolla’s Traditionalism, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Alan Watts and his misinterpretation of Tradition, Guénon and the metaphysics of society, the awakening in Elémire Zolla, notions of divinity in Augustine, Schuon and Aleister Crowley, the presence of Guenon in Mircea Eliade and Carl Schmitt, Titus Burckhardt and the rules of the game, S. H. Nasr’s thought of Tradition, East and West in Georges Vallin, and Schuon and profane mythology.

By 2023 we had unveiled Evola: Philosopher of the Sun, a new collection of writings about the Baron’s work and one which included chapters on Evola and the Primordial Tradition, the subversive nature of Capitalism, from Mafarka to Mitra, Evola and the critique of Americanism, Hermann Wirth’s relationship with Julius Evola, Evola’s thoughts on Zen Buddhism, Evola’s Anti-Americanism, Evola and the Night of the Long Knives, the Esoteric Journey of Evola, the Influence of Oswald Spengler on Evola, from ‘Ruins’ to ‘Ride,’ a note on Evola and Dante Alighieri, and an interview with Julius Evola himself.

2023 was a busy year for Traditionalist texts and my Roots in the Sublime: Frithjof Schuon’s Traditionalist Interpretation of the Great Religions appeared on the scene. Examining Schuon’s first major work, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, I explained that the Swiss had wished to elaborate upon the underlying or foundational aspects of religiosity. As I continued, beyond the ordinarily discernible reality of human experience there lies a supreme conjoinment at the level of the sublime. A single truth, therefore, that becomes manifest through a variety of different forms which are themselves the divine unfolding of an absolute principle.

Contra-Modern: Further Essays on Baron Julius Evola was also released in 2023, a study of topics as diverse as the Ur Group, Evola as the first non-globalist, Evola and historicism, the Hyperborean mystery writings of 1934-1970, correspondence between Evola and Gottfried Benn, Evola and Buddhism, aestheticism as inner philosophical life, the remains of Evola, 1968 and the revolution of the spirit, an anarchist reading of Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola and Wagner, the way of the Gods, and Evola and caste.

In 2024 my Gold Among Lead: Riding the Tiger with Julius Evola was published, part of which was given as a speech at a landmark Portuguese conference marking the fiftieth year since Evola’s death in 1974. Organised by José Almeida and staged in the northern city of Porto, the event was a huge success. The book itself looked at the Italian’s Cavalcare la tigre (1961), which is remarkable for demonstrating how Evola’s thought had progressed with the arrival of the so-called ‘Swinging 60s’.

Finally, it has been a privilege for me to bring these books into being and to know that people have benefitted from the information and knowledge that has been shared by myself and the other contributors. Those who would like more information about the work of BFP can contact us via blackfrontpress@yahoo.co.uk