This blog already has several posts on the anarchist Peter Lamborn Wilson (1945-2022), also known as Hakim Bey, one of the most remarkable former Traditionalists. See here. One (here) reports an assurance that although Lamborn Wilson was definitely “in the circle of Nasr,” he was not actually a Maryami.
Daoud El-Alquist Bey of the Moorish Orthodox Church has drawn my attention to an interview conducted shortly before Lamborn Wilson's death in which he discusses the Maryamiyya. It is with Tamas Panitz, in Conversazione (Autonomedia 2022), pp 91–97. In this interview, Lamborn Wilson makes it clear that he was indeed a Maryami.
Lamborn Wilson said he followed Frithjof Schuon because he (LW) followed Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Nasr followed Schuon. When he met Schuon, he found him charismatic. “He was overwhelming. He'd blow you away with his absolute assurance that he was god on earth.” He became disenchanted, however, because there seemed to be one rule for “soldiers” like himself, and another rule for Schuon “and his inner circle.” “Soldiers” had to be “orthodox” and pray and fast and abstain from alcohol, but as Schuon was an avatar (divine incarnation), these rules did not apply to him. One evening in London, where Lamborn Wilson moved after leaving Tehran, he was walking across a bridge over the Thames and “I just had this vision of one of the Ismaili lmams… who told me to go drink a bottle of wine, and quit being Orthodox. So I did.”
Another moment of disenchantment came when he was talking to the British painter Cecil Collins (1908–1989) after having tea with the Neoplatonist poet Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), who “was one of the people who inspired me to get away from the Schuonites” and lived in the same house as Collins. Collins “had seen [Schuon’s paintings] and he said to me you know everything that Frithjof Schuon believes in is the exact opposite of what he does in his paintings. They're sentimental, they're like Hallmark greeting cards. Suddenly my eyes were opened, I said by god Cecil you're right, they're like Hallmark greeting cards. You can be under a spell with things like that, and not see them.”
So like Cecil: pithy, pointed and challenging! LIke Kathleen Raine, Collins principal disagreement with the Traditionalists was that they could not acknowledge that symbols can become depleted of meaning, and need renewal, and that renewal can be genuinely creative. The Spirit can inspire now, and in the future, revelation is not a closed category. There is an underlying unity to reality, that is sacred, eternally present yet evolving actively
ReplyDeletein time; hence Collins own exploration of new/old artistic forms, symbols and personifications and the creation of great art unlike Schoun's sentimental exercises in nostalgia (not to mention the dire poetry).
[Incidentally, Raine was effectively Collins' landlady, hence their living in the same house]!