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 members of 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.
