A Blog for the study of Traditionalism and the Traditionalists
moderated by Mark Sedgwick
The cover (click on it for enlargement) is by the Swedish artist Fredrik Söderberg (see here) and features a tiger in honor of Julius Evola and the snake of cyclical time. An unusual touch is that the back cover features what look like wine stains, as Söderberg thought that a book about the tradition should not look brand new.
A new book, Charles Upton’s Giving Myself Away (New York: Angelico Press, 2025), casts important new light on the Maryamiyya from the 1980s to the 2010s. Upton and his wife Jenny were for some years close to the Maryamiyya, and although Upton is critical of it, he does not hold the animus against it that some ex-Maryamis do. This makes him a more reliable witness. He describes himself as a “'graduate' of the Traditionalist School rather than an active member,” and still maintains that “for some spiritual temperaments, the Traditionalist/Perennialists are the best possible introduction to comparative religion and traditional metaphysics.”
Giving Myself Away is a spiritual autobiography, and the Maryamiyya is only one of the American spiritual and religious groups dealt with. The book also, for example, describes the Nimatullahi Sufi Order and its gradual movement away from Islam.
What is most important for those interested in Traditionalism is what Giving Myself Away has to say about internal divisions within the Maryamiyya. The most important of these was one that developed between Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Upton once asked Nasr what the difference was between Schuon’s practice of Native American Spirituality (“Indian Days”) and “the hippies, with their fringed buckskin jackets and headbands,” and Nasr responded “I really couldn’t say,” a response that (in my view) was as close as possible to an explicit repudiation. It was Nasr who had accepted Upton’s wife Jenny into the Maryamiyya, and it became clear on one occasion that he regarded her connection as being to him, and not to Schuon. A probable outline of Nasr’s response to events in Bloomington thus becomes visible: he seems to have decided to distance himself and his own followers from developments of which he could not approve, but without causing scandals or splits.
Another division was between Nasr and Martin Lings, as after Schuon abdicated his position to the two men, they operated independently to the extent that one visitor to Bloomington was identified as a representative of Lings, that is to say not of Nasr (or Schuon).
Huston Smith (1919-2016) initially followed Nasr, but at one point experienced a strong attraction to the Russian Orthodox Church, and asked Nasr for permission to convert from Islam to Orthodoxy. Nasr refused permission, proposing instead that Smith remain a Sufi in his esoteric practice and, if he wished, take his original Methodism as his exoteric form, a solution that Smith rejected as promoting the very syncretism that the Maryamiyya had always condemned. This led to a breach between Smith and Nasr. One might argue, though Upton does not make this argument, that Nasr saw his proposal as preferable to apostasy from Islam.
And finally Giving Myself Away clarifies the positions of Schuon’s leading Christian followers, Rama Coomaraswamy (1929-2006) and James Cutsinger (1953-2020), the former a surgeon and a son of René Guénon’s collaborator Ananda Coomaraswamy and the latter a professor of religious studies. Coomaraswamy began as a Roman Catholic but after the Second Vatican Council seemed to have surrendered to modernity joined the rejectionist Society of Saint Pius X and later moved to the even more rejectionist Society of Saint Pius V, ending as a sedevaccantist priest, maintaining that the See of Rome has been vacant since the death of Pius XII. Cutsinger joined the Russian Orthodox Church, and ran an “Ordo Mariana,” the practice of which paralleled the main Maryamiyya in focusing on the invocation of the divine name, a form of dhikr, loosely based on the Orthodox Jesus Prayer. He at one point opened a sort of Traditionalist and Orthodox Liberal Arts College, but this closed after two years. The Ordo Mariana finally ceased operation, and Upton’s view is that this was because Cutsinger lost interest in it, finally moving away from Traditionalism, as he “began to teach a range of non-traditional doctrines derived from the ‘esoterism’ of the counterculture, drawing on sources like G. I. Gurdjieff and Alan Watts.”
Many other Traditionalists appear in the book, which is warmly recommended.
This post has been updated to correct an earlier statement that "Upton and his wife Jenny were for some years members of the Maryamiyya." As Charles Upton explains in a comment, he "was never an initiated member of the Maryamiyya as [his] wife was, just a close fellow-traveler, or perhaps a fly on the wall." Apologies.
Mahmutćehajić discovered the writings of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon as a young man. He trained as an electrical engineer, did a PhD in Italy, and taught electrical engineering in Croatia during the last period of Yugoslavia.
When the Bosnian war started, he joined the Bosnian defense, arranging the provision of arms to the defenders of Sarajevo and serving in the first Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as Minister of Energy, Mining and Industry and as Vice President. He resigned from the government in protest at the Dayton Agreement, which ended the war but accepted the de facto partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina into Muslim, Serb and Croat entities. As a believer in the transcendent unity of religions, Mahmutćehajić also believed in the unity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which he worked with devotion after Dayton in a private capacity, though without success—the forces keeping the three entities apart were too strong for anything or anyone to counter.
Mahmutćehajić founded the International Forum Bosnia and the journal Dijalog, wrote many articles and books (several of which were translated into English), and played an important part in the reception of Traditionalism in Bosnia, described in Samir Beglerović and Mark Sedgwick, "Islam in Bosnia Between East and West,” for which see here.
Of his books in English, the three most notable are:
A new article places Julius Evola’s understanding of the figure of the Samurai in its Italian context. It is Michele Monserrati, “The Transnational Samurai: Nation-Building and Community for the Italian Far-Right,” Japan Review 41 (2026): 255–280, available (open access) here.
Italian interest in the Samurai started after the Japanese victory against Russia in 1905, and was initially guided by the English-language Bushido: The Soul of Japan by the Japanese nationalist Inazō Nitobe (1862–1933), which understood the Samurai ethic in terms of medieval European chivalry. Bushido was translated into Italian in 1917 but many Italians had by then reimagined the Samurai in terms of the classical Roman hero, popular among Italian nationalists. There then emerged two models of the Samurai in Italy, according to Monserrati, a Shinto-inflected model that emphasized patriotism and a Zen-oriented model that that emphasized individual spirituality. The Shinto-inflected model, which the article examines in detail, was dominant until the end of Fascism, which killed Italian militarism, leaving the field to the Zen-oriented model, of which the most important proponent (though not the first) was Evola. For Evola, “the samurai’s warrior ethos represented a potential archetype for rediscovering a lost Western tradition of heroic spiritual transformation.” He “emphasized the spiritual reawakening of the individual as a condition for the heroic gesture.” This view, writes Monserrati, subsequently became popular among the Far Right, but he spends less than a page on this.
Monserrati says he is not investigating Orientalism but what he calls “the process of cultural translation.” In this case reception was positive, though inevitably molded by the circumstances and interests of the period.
Alexander Dugin’s modernity, like that of René Guénon but more explicitly, is located in the West. Dugin therefore calls for the end of Western hegemony and the liberation of other civizational spheres. He is not alone in doing this, as has been pointed out in a recent article by Miri Davidson, an assistant professor in Political Theory at the University of Warwick. The article is “On the concept of the pluriverse in Walter Mignolo and the European New Right,” Contemporary Political Theory 24 (2025), pp. 469–489, available open access at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00732-x.
Davidson compares the views of Walter Mignolo, an American scholar of Argentinian origin and doyen of the post-Marxist “decolonial school,” with those of Dugin and Alain de Benoist, the French doyen of the “New Right.” The term “pluriverse” was popularized by Arturo Escobar, another member of the decolonial school, as an alternative to the dominant Eurocentric, conquering, capitalist worldview. It is, Davidson shows, comparable to Benoist’s ethnopluralism and Carl Schmitt’s great spaces as adopted by Dugin. Yet there is a difference, she maintains: the decolonial pluriverse is open, “composed of many related and entangled worlds which mingle and coexist with one another,” while the pluriverse of Benoist and Dugin is closed, as “culturally diverse worlds can only live a healthy existence in separation from one another.” This is probably true of Benoist, but not—at least in principle—of Dugin, for whom traditional civilizations can and should combine.
Davidson makes another interesting point, that both versions of the pluriverse imagine hegemony erasing difference. This, she argues, misunderstands the nature of imperialism, which “does not only homogenise and erase difference—which it certainly does on a cultural level—but also constantly and relentlessly produces difference in the form of striated, hierarchical, and often essentialist ethnic, racial, national, and sexual identities.”
An interesting article, which shines a new light on Dugin’s theories, and also (though Davidson does not say this) shows the limits of classification in terms of “left” and “right.”
