Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century

* Book: Against the Modern World. Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. By Mark Sedgwick.

Summary

From the reading notes of Michel Bauwens, 2005:

The first chapter details Guenon's Catholic sympathies in the 2nd period of his life (after occultism, and before Islam). It dates the beginning of perennialism with Ficino in the Renaissance), who misdated the Corpus Hermeticum as pre-Greek and christian. After the correct dating, perennialism collapsed except through Masonic orders ("les Elus Cohen"). Vedantic perennialism is traced in particular to Emerson's transcendentalism and Olcott and Blatvatsky's Theosophy.

Guenon's first master Encausse (Papus) was a theosophist. He founded the Martinist Order, which he saw aa a true masonry devoid of deviations; he also founded a Review, Le Voile d'Isis, which would last over a 100 years until 1992 (it was named Les Etudes Traditionnelles after 1933).

Coomaraswamy's traditionalism was inspired byWilliam Blake and Yeats.

The second chapter describes the Gnostic, Taoist, and western converts to Islam, during the time that Guenon was a member of a gnostic church. His last and sixth initiation was into regular masonry by Oswald Wirth, the beginnings of a journey into respectability under the auspices of Catholic friends such as Jacques Maritain.

The next chapter describes Guenon's life in Cairo, pious, traditional through his wife, but intellectually still Western. Then the book moves to the background of Fritjof Schuon.

Chapter 5 focuses on fascism, starting with Evola's attempts to influence it, including the SS in 1938. He had a non-biological, spiritual doctrine of race, favoured action over initiation, and saw in them institutions with the potential to play a role in transforming individuals. Eliade is shown to have been more of a Evolian than a Guenonian. The latter's links with the extreme-right proto-fascist League is clear established through his articles praising them. He showed anti-semitic tendencies as well.

As Eliade would embark on his scholarly career, he differed from traditionalism in his focus, not on the spiritual elite, but on constructing a general theory of religion which could renew the whole culture. His focus was not on Primordial Tradition but on the related concept of 'archaic religion', which he researched and reconstructed. He did not seek 'initiation'.

The book then continues the varied history of hard and soft traditionalism, focusing in particular on the influence of Schuon and his Maryamiya, but also on Eliade, the right wing terror in Italy and its links to Evola, the academic influence of soft traditionalist scholars and finally, to the Eurasian movement in Russia, with A. Dugin.

More information

A BIBLIOGRAPHIC GENEALOGY OF TRADITIONALISM

Rene Guenon

- “The essentials of the Traditionalist Philosophy can be found in four books written between 1921 and 1924”

   - L’introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues, 1921
   - Le Théosophisme, histoire d’une pseudo-religion, 1921
   - L’erreur spirite, 1923
   - Orient et Occident, 1924

He publishes six more books in the 1920s:

   - L’homme et son désir selon le Vedanta, 1925 (continues the ‘intro generale’)
   - La crise du monde moderne, 1924 (continues ‘orient et occident)

Coomaraswamy

   - A new approach to the Vedas, 1928
   - The transformation of nature in art, 1934 (compares oriental and medieval western concepts)
   - Hinduism and Buddhism, 1941

Classics of Theosophy

   - Isis Unveiled (1877)
   - The Secret Doctrine (1888)