Hermetic Traditionalism in Spain

A new article: Mark Sedgwick, “Hermetic Traditionalism in Spain,” Aries (2026), available here. 

According to the abstract,

Traditionalism, usually associated with Sufism following the examples of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, took an unusual Hermetic form in Spain under the leadership of Federico González Frías (1933–2014). González, originally from Argentina, established the Barcelona-based Center for the Study of Symbology during Spain’s democratic Transition, when interest in spiritual alternatives flourished. Rejecting both Sufism and Schuon’s Maryamiyya, González developed a distinctive “Hermetic” Traditionalism that emphasized symbolism, alchemy, Kabbalah, and Western esoteric traditions. His teachings, consolidated in the Agartha Program, combined perennialist philosophy with Hermetic practice and were extended through Freemasonry, publications,  and initiatic theater. This article explores the origins, development, and reception of González’s movement, situating it as the only known case of Hermetic Traditionalism and assessing its relationship to Guénonian orthodoxy and Spain’s historical context.

New PhD thesis on Guénon, Metapolitics, and the modern ethical domain

A PhD thesis on Guénon has just been defended at the City University of New York. It is by Frederic Colier, entitled “Beyond the Veil of Modernity: René Guénon, Prophet of the Metapolitical Imaginary,” and is available here.

As Colier tells us, Guénon did not use the word “metapolitical” himself, but many of his late followers use it, and Colier argues that Guénon’s work was indeed metapolitical, not purely spiritual, as some claim. Guénon's metapolitical aim was “to neutralize the modern ethical domain and reorient it towards a… theocratic doctrine in which social and political structures are rooted in a permanent, rigid spiritual universality.” 

That Guénon’s work has such political significance today is partly a result of this, and partly a result of the recent “globalization of capitalism and liberalism.” “Guénon reemerged at the beginning of the 21st century because his metapolitical work enables new extreme discourses to implement other ‘salvific’ alternatives. Liberated from Judeo-Christian [ethical] ‘shackles,’ neo-traditionalists profess radical measures to confront the perceived mounting threats, no matter the cost.” At the end of the thesis, Colier argues that “Together, Guénon, Evola, Eliade, Dumézil, and Schmitt have played their part as ‘horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ They toiled hard, often in obscurity, to cut loose the moral reins restraining the horse.”

Colier makes his argument primarily by placing Guénon in the context of the intellectual currents of his time, both French (Joseph de Maistre, Martinists, and others), as has been done before, but also beyond that: Spengler and Moeller van den Bruck and, especially, Neo-Thomism. As Colier points out, Guénon spent many years working with Western philosophy. He argues that Guénon’s esoteric/exoteric/initiatic mirrors Aquinas’s division between dogmatics, morality, and ritual. Perhaps, though I myself would trace the esoteric/exoteric pair to Sufism and earlier Western esotericism. He further argues that “through his exposure to the structured Masonic organization, Guénon learned about the crucial role of transmission, hierarchy, and alternative history, elements that became integral to Primordial Tradition and to Crisis.” Yes, but also through his contact with Sufism, in my view.

Finally, Colier also makes his case with a close reading of La Crise du monde moderne, and by pointing out how practically oriented were Guénon’s repeated hopes for the Catholic church would rediscover tradition and lead the salvation of the West.

A subsidiary argument is that Guénon was antisemitic, and that French scholars, especially, have knowingly or unknowingly obscured this. I think Colier is probably right—as he says, almost everyone else Guénon was in contact with was even more antisemitic. I am not sure exactly where this point gets us, beyond (perhaps) the neutralization of the Judeo element in the modern Judeo-Christian ethical domain.

Colier’s critique of Guénon includes the observation that conspiracy theories always follow the same pattern, “an effect looking for a cause,” and that Guénon’s approach to history rather fits this pattern. Indeed.

Interestingly, Colier pairs Julius Evola and Mircea Eliade among Guénon’s successors. Evola’s positions are well known, but there is a greater variety of views on Eliade. For Colier, Eliade’s “entire oeuvre reads like a manifesto for transforming the substitution of the ethical domain into its outright suppression.” The goal of Eliade’s archaic pagan religiosity was “to sever all Judeo-Christian roots of Western culture, especially its ethical domain, and substitute them with a mystical exaltation of the Sacred: cyclical, natural, and regional.” In this sense, perhaps, yes.

A good thesis, with many interesting observations along the way, though I am not entirely sure that Guénon's aim was really “to neutralize the modern ethical domain,” even if that may have been one of the consequences of his work.

Monumental biography of Julius Evola now available in English

Now available in English: Andrea Scarabelli’s monumental biography of Julius Evola, Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life. Co-published by Prav Publishing and Arktos, $9.99 ebook, $64.50 hardcover, available here.

The biography, released in Italian in 2024, is 768 pages long in the English translation. It is not an objective scholarly study: Scarabelli works with the Fondazione J. Evola, and the French translation carried an introduction by Alain de Benoist, now translated into English. It follows academic convection, however, citing its (many) sources, even if it occasionally departs from academic sobriety, for example using the term “ravings” to describe the contents of the Revue internationale des sociétés secrètes.

Scarabelli divides Evola’s life into ten phases, giving rise to an equal number of chapters. They are

1. Julius Evola’s First Life (1898–1922)
2. Philosophy, Esotericism, and Politics (1923–1926)
3. Mornings of the Magicians (1927–1929)
4. Interregnum (1930–1934)
5. A European Secret Order (1935–1939)
6. The End of a World (1940–1943)
7. From One Italy to Another (1943–1948)
8. Forced Holidays (1949–1958)
9. Julius Evola’s Second Life (1959–1968)
10. Finis Coronat Opus (1969–1974)

The biography provides a complete account of Evola’s life. It goes into great detail about who he met, when and where, and gives background information at length, one reason why it is so long. We learn what Evola was working on at each moment. It is written very much from Evola’s own perspective, but does not attempt to conceal what Evola himself conceded. His involvement with Fascism and Nazism is covered in detail, as is the fact that, although he later stressed that he had never joined the Fascist Party, he did actually apply to join it.

What Julius Evola: An Adventurous Life arguably lacks is analysis. This is what sets it apart from recent articles published in Aries (see here), for example. It will, however, provide valuable support for those who are themselves interested in doing critical analysis.

Traditionalist Taoism in Peru

A new article identifies the Traditionalist emphases in a Spanish translation of the Laozi (the Dào Dé Jīng) done by the Peruvian scholar and Traditionalist Onorio Ferrero (1908–1989). It is Filippo Costantini, “Laozi’s Intercultural Reception: A Journey from Europe to Latin America,” Asian Studies 14 (2): 415–437, available here (open access).

Costantini identified 57 translations of the Laozi, and selected three to be examined in his article, chosen to “reflect distinct phases and methodologies.” “Ferrero’s translation,” he writes, “greatly influenced the local circulation of the text, being one of the few editions published in the country [Peru], and also reached a wider Spanish-speaking audience through numerous reprints.”

There are several telling examples of “Traditionalization” given, including the translation of yan you zong 言有宗 (my words have an ancestor) as “my words derive from a Primordial Tradition,” and of daoji 道紀 (continuity of the Dao) as “initiation to the Dao.”

The case of Ferrero illustrates a wider phenomenon, that while Traditionalist scholars have over the years done important work in explaining non-Western religions to Western audiences, this work brings with it Traditionalist understandings that are visible only to those who, like Costantini, know where to look.

For more on Ferrero and Peru, see Mark Sedgwick, “Guénonian Traditionalism in South American Literature and Academia.” International Journal of Latin American Religions 5:1 (2021): 164–80, available here. 

Traditionalism now available in Swedish

Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Pelican Books) is now available in Swedish, as Den eviga ordningen: Filosofisk mystik och den radikala högern (The Eternal Order: Philosophical Mysticism and the Radical Right), Stockholm: Fri Tanke, 294 kr. (buy it here). The Traditionalists' traditional order was indeed eternal as well as sacred. Introduction by David Thurfjell.

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.

New light on the Maryamiyya, and especially on Nasr

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.