A small anti-Traditionalist war machine: Bergson against Guénon

A recent article presents a critique of Guénon’s metaphysics using the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). It is Fernando Monegalha, “A tradição e seu outro: Bergson contra Guénon” (Tradition and its Other: Bergson versus Guénon), Revista Ética e Filosofia Política 28:2 (December 2025), available here (open access). It is in Portuguese, but with the help of AI we can all read Portuguese nowadays.

Monegalha suggests that “the far right is a symptom of [the] return of metaphysics, not its cause,” even if many people think the opposite, as the Traditionalist rejection of modernity is metaphysical, not sociological. 

He then attempts “to construct a small anti-Traditionalist war machine by opposing Bergson’s conception of metaphysics to that presented by Guénon in his writings,” beginning with Guénon’s criticism of Bergson and then attempting “a kind of Bergsonian metacritique of Guénon.” We must understand his need for an anti-Traditionalist war machine in terms of Brazilian politics, where the Bolsonaro famiy are associated with Traditionalism through Olavo de Carvalho (see here).

• Guénon understood time as a function of manifestation. The Principle is necessarily timeless; time, including decline to the Kali Yuga, comes with manifestation. 
• Bergson, in contrast, held that duration and creative change characterize even the ultimate Principle.
• For Guénon, this showed that Bergson’s metaphysics was wrong and distinctively modern.
• Monegalha argues that Guénon misunderstood Bergson. 

What is less clear, however, is whether Monegalha has achieved his objective of critiquing Guénon’s metaphysics in general, rather than just his understanding (and so critique) of Bergson. Bergson’s conception of duration is certainly incompatible with Guénon’s conception of the relationship between time and eternity, so they cannot both be right, but how do we know that Bergson was right, not Guénon?

Ivan Aguéli in Paris

The Swedish Institute in Paris is launching an exhibition entitled “Soleil et Lune. Andreas Eriksson en dialogue avec Ivan Aguéli” (“Sun and Moon: Andreas Eriksson in Conversation with Ivan Aguéli”) 20 October 2026 to 10 January 2027 at the Swedish Institute, 11 rue Payenne, 75003 Paris, Tuesday to Sunday, 12 pm to 7 pm. Late opening on Thursday, to 9 pm. Free admission.

Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975) is a contemporary Swedish artist who “works… in the fields of painting, photography, sculpture, film, and printmaking. Nature—especially trees—is an important source of inspiration for him,” according to Wikipedia.

According to the Swedish Institute,

At first glance, one might think that the differences between the two artists could not be greater. Ivan Aguéli, the anarchist, the Sufi, whose life of wandering in search of wisdom led him to an early grave, in extreme poverty. And Andreas Eriksson, whose art emerges from a single place. One constantly on the move, the other making immobility a necessary condition of painting. Yet, when we see their works side by side, the biographical differences seem to fade away. What unites them is the presence of the sensory in their work. Earth, stones, trees for Andreas Eriksson; sky, sun and moon for Ivan Aguéli. These paintings live in the same atmosphere and reflect a common quest for truth.

Further details at https://paris.si.se/en/events-projects/exhibition-soleil-et-lune-andreas-eriksson-in-dialogue-with-ivan-agueli/

In addition, there is a book by Sara Arrhenius, director of the Institute, that “presents the works of the two artists in parallel.”

My thanks to Marco Pasi for bring this exhibition to my attention.

Guénon, Coomaraswamy, and Eliade: who inspired whom?

There is a chapter on “Philosophia Perennis: Critical Syncretism in Coomaraswamy’s Native Hermeneutics of Asiatic Art” in Orientophilia and the Birth of Asian Hermeneutics (Brill, 2026) by Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay. Other chapters deal with “Orientophiles” of purely European origin: Goethe, Hegel, Herder, and Schopenhauer, before turning to Vivekananda and then Ananda Coomaraswamy. Or rather to Coomaraswamy, Mircea Eliade, and René Guénon—in that order. He introduces Guénon and Eliade as among “those who followed” Coomaraswamy.

The chapter’s decentering of Guénon raises interesting questions. Mukhopadhyay focuses instead on the Coomaraswamy-Eliade relationship, drawing extensively on Eliade’s long 1979 review of Roger Lipsey’s three-volume Coomaraswamy (Princeton: Bollingen Series, 1977). This review, naturally enough, focuses on Coomaraswamy rather than Guénon. It also makes a comparison between the two to Guénon’s disadvantage: “contrary to René Guénon… Coomaraswamy developed his exegesis without surrendering the tools and methods of philology, archaeology, art history, ethnology, folklore, and history of religions.” One has to admit that Eliade’s judgment is justified, but one still wonders what Eliade would have said had he written at equal length on Guénon, which he did not.

So, who mattered most for Eliade, Coomaraswamy or Guénon? Perhaps it was indeed Coomaraswamy, as Mukhopadhyay’s treatment suggests. Alternatively, Coomaraswamy might have replaced Guénon. Eliade might have learned his perennialism from Guénon and then found Coomaraswamy’s more scholarly version more satisfying. The order may still have been Guénon to Coomaraswamy and Eliade, then, not Coomaraswamy to Guénon and Eliade. One can in fact see both Eliade and Coomaraswamy as adding a rigorous use of the tools and methods of philology, archaeology, etc. to Guénon’s basic schema.

Mukhopadhyay has an unusual view of the origins of Guénon’s thought:

Both Guénon and Coomaras¬wamy’s orientalist aesthetics are rooted in a select mix of orthodox Catholic doctrine and Protestantism, Oxford Idealism and Cambridge Neoplatonism, Bradleian Idealism and German Transcendentalism (whose dialectical philosophy of art follows from the same orthodox sources of Thomism, Spiritualism and the preceding Geistwissenschaft).

To some extent for Eliade, perhaps, but certainty not for Guénon.

Guénon in Russian

Readers of Russian are probably well aware of this, but I have only just come across the Minsk Corpus of René Guénon, at https://guenon.ru. This is the work of Maxim Makovchik, a Belorussian translator and Traditionalist who has been working on Guénon’s works since 2013. He has taken all existing Russian translations and improved them, having now covered (according to the website) all books published in Guénon’s lifetime, 55% of posthumous editions, 69% of joirnal articles, and 25% of letters. A valuable resource, comparable to the Index de l’œuvre et de la correspondance de René Guénon at https://www.index-rene-guenon.org.

Wendell Berry (1934–2026)

 

Wendell Berry, farmer, novelist, poet, and (perhaps) soft Traditionalist, died on August 31, 2026, at the age of 92. See earlier post and subsequent discussion here.

New Study on John Michell, the "Radical Traditionalist"

Marleen Thaler has just published Albion’s Sage for the New Age: John Michell, Radical Traditionalism, and the Myth of Sacred England (Sheffield: Equinox 2026). It is beautifully written and highly readable, and covers Michell and his world very well—but leaves unanswered some questions regarding his “Radical Traditionalism.” Thaler previously published an article on Michell, for which see this post.

Thaler divides Michell’s life into two periods: an “early period… with the English counterculture… psychedelia, New Age, alternative archaeology, and Earth Mysteries,” and a “late period… as an antiquarian, devoted Traditionalist, and Neoplatonist.” In her view, Michell’s most important books were The Flying Saucer Vision: The Holy Grail Restored (1967), The View over Atlantis (1969), and City of Revelation: On the Proportions and Symbolic Numbers of the Cosmic Temple (1972). These all belong to his early period, as does his role in starting what became the Glastonbury Festival in 1971. Glastonbury’s status as the pagan capital of England, perhaps Europe, is lasting monument to him, and also belongs to the early period. The late period includes his stated admiration for Julius Evola and articles in The Oldie, a publication that lay somewhere to the right of the mainstream Conservative Party. This might seem a conversion, but Thaler argues it was not: being part of the counterculture, as Michell very much was, does not have to mean that one is left wing.

The book starts with two introductory chapters, one of which introduces Traditionalism for readers who do not know it, while the other introduces “alternative theories on sacred place and nature,” an understanding of which is crucial for understanding Michell’s work. Then comes a biographical chapter. This is followed by a chapter on Glastonbury, another on Michell’s “sacred place theory,” and then “Glastonbury as spiritual hub,” which brings the two preceding chapters together.

The book covers Michell, sacred place theory, and Glastonbury convincingly and in depth. Radical Traditionalism is less well covered. Thaler notes in her conclusion that the scope of her study “precluded examining… Michell’s involvement with political Traditionalism, particularly within the frameworks of the European and North American New Right.” This is true. The book also leaves unanswered certain questions about Michell’s religious Traditionalism. Certainly, he identified as a “radical Traditionalist” and admired Evola, but who was more important for him, Evola or William Blake? How much of Evola and of Guénon can be found in his work? In quite what way was he a perennialist? Thaler has advanced our understanding of Michell considerably, but more work still remains to be done.

Simone Weil and René Guénon

Nicolas Bommarito has just published some of notes on Hinduism of the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943, pictured) as Dharma and Detachment: Writings on Indian and Tibetan Thought (Abingdon: Routledge, 2026). In a review of this book, Sunny Kumar notes “During her exile in Marseille in 1940, she [Weil] was introduced to the Gita by René Daumal, an Indologist. On Daumal’s suggestion, she also read René Guénon. Daumal’s and Guénon’s influence can be discerned in Weil’s reading of the Gita and other Hindu texts.” This seems to be Kumar’s own view, as Guénon is not mentioned by Bommarito. Daumal certainly knew and valued Guénon’s works, so Kumar is probably right. The review can be read in the Journal of Hindu Studies (2026) here.

Happy twentieth birthday, blog!

Hard to believe, but this blog is now twenty years old. The first post was dated June 14, 2006, and explained that it was time for the addenda I had been publishing on the companion website to Against the Modern World to take a new form. June 15, 2026 saw the first real post: a book announcement, welcoming Jean-Pierre Laurant’s René Guénon, les enjeux d'une lecture. Since then there have been 536 more posts, an average of about two a month, and 1,209 comments.

The blog has become more popular over time. It took nine years to reach 250,000 page views (in 2015), two more years to reach 500,000 page views (in 2017), six years to add a further 500,000 page views and reach 1,000,000 (in 2023), and finally three years to reach 2,000,000 (in 2026). This reflects both increased interest and the fact that as the years have passed there have been ever more pages for an interested visitor to view.

Over these twenty years, the blog’s audience has become more global. From 2006 to 2015, 45% of visits came from the US, UK and Canada, and from 2006 to 2017, 59% from the US alone. By 2023 the US share had fallen to 38%, and to 37% by 2026. Non-US interest came initially from the UK, France, Germany, Russia, Sweden, and Brazil, then (by 2017) especially from the UK and Russia, a pattern little changed in 2023. By 2026, Singapore came in second place after the US, followed by the UK, Brazil, Hong Kong, France, Germany, and Russia. Why the new interest in Singapore and Hong Kong? If you know, please leave a comment.

Traditional Studies in Contemporary Iran

Conference report by Youna Eskandari

An international conference entitled "René Guénon and the Revival of the Primordial Tradition" was held on February 17–18, 2026 at the Iranian Institute of Philosophy (IRIP) in Tehran. Originally founded by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in 1974, the institute still hosts enthusiastic readers of René Guénon, notably Babak Alikhani, the scientific secretary of the conference, who leads an annual seminar on Guénon for Iranian students, and Dr. Esmaeil Radpour, co-organiser of the conference and scholar of Chinese esoteric traditions.

Over two days, the papers explored a remarkable range of themes: the desacralisation of psychology, the symbolism of the Companions of the Cave, orientalism and orientality, counter‑tradition, Traditionalist political theory, initiation and socratic education, the symbolism of theatre, Iranian primordial tradition and Shi'a gnosis, the doctrinal function of Michel Valsan, Chinese esotericism, and even the symbolism of the traditional Iranian instrument, the santur. The full programme is available here.

What struck me most was not the thematic diversity but the epistemological attitude towards Guénon himself. In the Western academic world, any discussion on Guénon is typically marked by external critique, historical contextualisation, or outright dismissal. Scholars feel compelled to distance themselves from his "Traditionalist" positions, to deconstruct his claims, or to reduce him to a footnote of esoteric eccentricity. In Tehran, by contrast, Guénon was not studied externally or critically; his thought was accepted a priori, as a valid framework to be applied, developed, or revived.

As the organisers explicitly stated in the description of the conference published online: "Organizing a conference aimed at clarifying the contributions of the French metaphysician René Guénon is not born out of amusement, but of a deep sense of urgency and necessity." The intent was to "awaken and revitalize… the Iranian civilization by restoring its rightful stature among the diverse civilizations." This objective, they say, can only be realized through the revivification, commentary and elucidation of the works of René Guénon, described as a "great sage of our era." This is no small matter, for this exercise took place in Iran, the land where, as the organisers remind us, Suhrawardî, the master of illuminative metaphysics, expressed in his own terms the idea of the primordial tradition: al-khamîrah al-azaliyyah (the eternal leaven). As the conference organisers wrote: "It does not seem difficult to understand that the oriental metaphysics referred to by René Guénon is fundamentally one with the oriental metaphysics (al-hikmat al-mashriqiyya) of Avicenna—and especially with the illuminative metaphysics (ḥikmat al-ishrâq) of Suhrawardî." One could even say that this redeems the university, or rather elevates it to the true worth of its name, for universitas means "whole, totality, universe." In its very etymology, the university carries the ideal of universality. In Tehran, that ideal was realised, the university fulfilled its finality by being an echo of the primordial Tradition, that Knowledge which embraces the totality of all knowledges in their common principle.

One could thus say this was a profoundly "Oriental" conference, in Guénon's own sense of the word, meaning traditional, and it was accomplished in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The proceedings of the conference are to be published in 2027 in the Institute’s journal, aptly titled Sophia Perennis, additional proof, if any were needed, that Guénon’s thought remains alive in Iran.

Dugin as viewed from the American Left

Bruce Lerro, an adjunct college professor of psychology who describes himself as a libertarian communist, has written a long article on Alexander Dugin’s concept of the ethnos, which you can read here.  It is entitled “From Shaman to Heroes, From Prophets to Traders: Alexander Dugin’s A Russian Eurasian Perspective on Ethnogenesis.” Interestingly, it was published on a website called Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.

Lerro asks the question “Why Should You Care?” and answers: 

For socialists, a knowledge of the history of human societies is vital to understand the dynamics of why societies arise and break down. As historical beings we train ourselves to accept the torch of existing social conditions and pass the torch to the next generation to help plant better social conditions. The Atlanticist world of the West is falling apart. The Asian world is rising. While Western anthropology and macrosociology has made some important contributions it has been relatively neglectful of steppe people and has generally looked skeptically on the value of ethnicity and other forms of attachment. This is because capitalist societies need individuals, not groups to be the lowest unit for its economic advertising. Dugin’s work, as shown in this article, supports both ancient forms of attachment and the place of steppe people in social evolution. In the extent to which socialists wish to be Eurasian polarists, we owe it to the world and ourselves understanding of their picture of how societies evolved.

In principle Dugin sees himself as neither left or right, but in generally his reception in the West has very much been on the right, and Lerro's article was republished on Countercurrents (here), which is generally described as alt right. What is interesting is to see the American left taking an interest.

Australian Traditionalism and Architecture

A new article examines the activities of the Australian Traditionalist architect Adrian Snodgrass (1931–2025), see photo (from about 1957). It is Amit Srivastava, Peter Scriver, Cole Roskam and Anna Dearnley, “Beyond Sydney School: Australian Architects and the Encounter with Asia (1950s–1980s),” Architectural Theory Review (2026), available here (open access).  

Snodgrass was a member of a small Traditionalist group led by Harold Stewart (1916–1995), a poet, that met in a Sydney bookshop in the 1950s, mentioned in an earlier post here and discussed in Peter Kelly, Buddha in a Bookshop (2007), for which see post here. 

The article identifies Snodgrass as a Traditionalist, but does not investigate his Traditionalism beyond noting that his “exposure to these [Traditionalist] theorists provided an intellectual framework that his contemporaries, including [Alan] Gilbert and [Peter] Muller, would encounter through their friendship with him.” Gilbert and Muller, both architects, are also discussed in the article; it is not clear to what extent they were also Traditionalists. The article focuses on the travels of the three men and on their architecture.

Snodgrass traveled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1957 together with Barry Windsor (1930–1994), another Australian who was in contact with the Sydney group, and was presumably to some extent also a Traditionalist, at least in 1957. They found their way to Kataragama, a pilgrimage site for Buddhists as well as Hindus, where they joined a small Hindu group known as Kutti Kuttam (the Council of Cubs) because all its members were given animal names. Snodgrass became Punaikutti Swami (kitten) and Windsor became Narikutti Swami (young jackal). Kutti Kuttam followed Yogaswami (1872–1964), a Jaffna-born guru who had been inspired in his youth by Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). Most of its six members were Westerners.

Windsor remained in Ceylon for the rest of his life, but Snodgrass traveled to Japan with Stewart in 1963 and joined a Pure Land Buddhist group in Kyoto connected to Bando Shojun (1932–2004), a professor at Otani University, where he was ordained a priest. He then returned to Australia in 1975, completed a PhD, and spent the rest of his life as an architect, lecturer in architecture and religious studies at the University of Sydney, and writer on Asian art. His best known book was The Symbolism of the Stupa (1985), which starts with a reference to “the traditional Indian view,” footnoted to René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Mircea Eliade. He remained a Traditionalist, then. Together with Gilbert and Muller he established Regional Design and Research, which “represented the practical application of principles that Snodgrass had explored philosophically, Gilbert had developed ethnographically, and Muller had implemented through site-specific practice.” Gilbert worked on hotel design in Hong Kong, Japan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as in mainland China. Muller's sites included the Bali Oberoi and the award-winning Amandari Resort in Bali. What these all had in common was that they provided international standards of comfort combined with distinctive local character.

The article concludes that 

What began as individual journeys of discovery by emerging architects seeking alternatives to modernist orthodoxy through sustained Asian engagement evolved into a collective reconsideration of possible alternative cultural and philosophical approaches to contemporary architectural design in what was already becoming an increasingly transnational world of practice.

What evolved into this reconsideration and various architectural projects also began as Traditionalism, and passed through Hindu and Buddhist practice on the way.

This post draws also on 

• Glen Hill, “Vale Adrian Snodgrass 1931–2025,” Architecture, Au 23 April 2025, available here
• Ramana Hridayam, “Swami Narikutti or Barry Owen Windsor (1930-1994),” available here  
• The swamis of the Saiva Siddhanta Yoga Order, The Guru Chronicles, The Making of the First American Satguru (Kapaa, Hawaii: Himalayan Academy, 2011)

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 convention, 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.

See also review at compactmag.com/article/julius-evolas-many-lives/.

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.

Rusmir Mahmutćehajić (1948–2026)

Rusmir Mahmutćehajić, the leading Bosnian Traditionalist, died in Sarajevo on 5 April 2026.

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:

• The Denial of Bosnia (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000)
• Bosnia the Good: Tolerance and Tradition (Central European University Press, 2000)
• Sarajevo Essays: Politics, Ideology, and Tradition (State University of New York Press, 2003)

My thanks to ND for bringing this news to my attention.

Evola's Samurai in context

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.

Dugin and the Decolonial School

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.”