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.

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.

Spiritualism in defense of Islam

Mattias Gori Olesen recently covered the debate between René Guénon and the Egyptian intelelctual Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī (1875-1954) over modern spirituality in Al-Maʿrifa (see post here). A new article, “Taming the Animal within in Cairo: Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī and ‘Temperate Vegetarianism’” by Mariam Elashmawy (Alif 45, 2025), here, open access) revisits this debate and adds more to our understanding of Wajdī. “It is important to understand that he [Wajdī] sees spiritualism through an Islamic lens,” argues Elashmawy. Spiritualism was not an import from the modern West, as Guénon thought, but a long-standing part of Islam. “As for us Muslims,” wrote Wajdī, “the matter of the appearance of spirits is one of the most common occurrences for those close to Allah” [ie. saints/awliyāʾ]. Spiritualism, as a scientific endorsement of one aspect of Islam, could serve as a defense against the growing threat of materialism and atheism. Wajdī agreed with Guénon regarding the threat, then, but not regarding the remedy.

Anarchist Podcasts on Traditionalism and Against the Modern World

“The Empire Never Ended Podcast” has been getting into Traditionalism. Episodes are listed below. The Empire Never Ended describes itself as “a weekly podcast about fascist freaks and Balkan (anti)nationalist history” and is hosted by Boris Mamlëz and Rey Katula. Nothing is known of Mamlëz, which may be a pseudonym, but Katula is an editor of Antipolitika, an anarchist magazine (see here) published in English and “Shtokavian,” a supradialect that functions as a substitute for what used to be called Serbo-Croatian. The podcast is serious but humorous, and membership levels proceed from “Regular OK person” ($5) through “Salaried Antifascist” ($10) and “Western Liberal” (§25) to “German” ($50). But some episodes are free.

The first podcasts were part of the “Kali Yuga Reading Room” series in 2023, starting with René Guénon's The Crisis of the Modern World (#217, here) and proceeding to Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World (#221 and #224, here and here), then Men Among the Ruins (#231, here) and Ride the Tiger (#234, here).

In 2025 came three new podcasts, based on Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: #217 on Guénon (here), #340 on Schuon (here), and #341 (here), returning to Evola.

Enjoy. 

(and thanks to  DV for drawing my attention to these podcasts)

A note on Guénon’s sources for Dante

A new article on the esotericism of Dante focuses on the way in which the Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste (1854) of Eugène Aroux, a major source for Guénon’s L’Ésotérisme de Dante, is plagiarized from La Beatrice di Dante (1842) by Gabriele Rossetti. It is Piero Latino, “The Forgotten History of an Indirect Influence: From Gabriele Rossetti to Eugène Aroux, «L'eminente Plagiario», and the Spread of a Silent Idea in European Literature,” Studi Medievali e Moderni 29 (2025), pp. 135-156. 

Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854) was an Italian poet, nationalist revolutionary activist (and consequently later exile in London), and an enthusiast of Dante. One of his sons, Dante Gabriele Rossetti (1828-1882), was among the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London. Eugène Aroux (1793-1859) was a less distinguished French politician and writer, and in his Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste, révélations d'un catholique sur le Moyen Âge (Dante: heretic, revolutionary, and socialist: Revelations of a Catholic about the Middle Ages) reversed the central message of Rossetti, still basing that new version largely on Rossetti’s work. 

Conference in Paris: René Guénon et l’Orient

René Guénon et l’Orient:

Perspectives critiques 100 ans après La métaphysique orientale (1925-2025) 

11 avril 2025 (9h-18h30) 

École Pratique des Hautes Études-PSL

Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Salle 1 54, Bd Raspail, 75006, Paris 

Événement partenaire du FRÉSO (Association Francophone pour l’Étude Universitaire des Courants Ésotériques) et de l’ESSWE (European Association for the Study of Western Esotericism) 

Conférence organisée par : Roberto Corso (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”/École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) Comité scientifique : Jean-Pierre Brach (EPHE-LEM) ; Vincent Eltschinger (EPHE-GREI) ; Margherita Serena Saccone (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”) ; Thierry Zarcone (CNRS-GSRL) 

Nombre de places limité. Réservation requise en envoyant un e-mail à l’adresse suivante : roberto.corso@unina.it 

Programme 

Accueil (9h-9h15)

• Mot de bienvenue de Jean-Pierre Brach (École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) et de l'organisateur (9h15-9h30) 

Session 1 (9h30-11h) 

• Modératrice : Mayssa Coutard-Evangelista 
• Davide Marino (CAS-E, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg/University of Vienna) : Chinese Whispers. René Guénon and La métaphysique (extrême-)orientale 
• Alessandra Marchi (Università degli Studi di Cagliari) : Parcours soufis du traditionalisme guénonien en Italie 

Pause 11-11h30

 

Session 2 (11h30-13h) Modérateur : Roberto Corso 

• Hugo David (École Française d’Extrême-Orient) : René Guénon et le Vedānta : retour à la tradition ou nouveau syncrétisme ? 
• Dominique Wohlschlag (Chercheur indépendant) : Guénon et les cycles cosmiques 

Déjeuner libre 13h-15h

 

Session 3 (15h-16h30)

• Modérateur : Nathan Fraikin 
• Marco Giardini (Chercheur indépendant) : L’« Orient merveilleux » médiéval et ses relectures ésotériques au XXe siècle : la légende du Prêtre Jean entre les « études traditionnelles » et la théorie du « monde imaginal » 
• Youna Eskandari (École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) : René Guénon : orientaliste ou oriental? 

Pause 16h30-17h 

Session 4 (17h-18h30)

• Modérateur : Tom Fisher 
• Roberto Corso (Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”/École Pratique des Hautes Études-LEM) : « La part de l’inexprimable ». Perspectives critiques sur les idées de métaphysique et d’Orient dans l’œuvre de René Guénon 
• Jean-Pierre Laurant (École Pratique des Hautes Études) : Apprendre à vivre au hasard d’une rencontre : René Guénon

More Guénon in Arabic

A good part of the work of René Guénon is finally available in Arabic. Nine books have been published by a Jordanian publisher, عالم الكتب الحديث (Modern Books’ World). This is major news, as previously the work of Guénon seemed to have been received with interest in the Muslim world in Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, and Bosnia—but not in the Arab world. 

The translations are all by Shaykh Abdul Baqi Miftah (born 1952), an Algerian scholar and shaykh. He was born in the small town of Guemar in the province of El Oued, an agricultural area. His father was an imam and a Tijani, and he started reading Ibn Arabi as a teenager.

He studied physics at the University of Algiers, where, at the age of about 20, he discovered the work of Guénon. He later told an interviewer: "I was quite amazed by the breadth of Guénon’s outward and inward knowledge... Just as I believe that the greatest unveiler of spiritual realities after the Prophets is Ibn ʿArabi, so too do I think that the greatest spiritual figure to have come from the west is René Guénon. Indeed, his explication of metaphysical doctrines perfectly accords with Ibn ʿArabi’s perspective, which is not surprising, since there is only one Reality."

At the age of about 21 he joined the Habriyya, a branch of the Darqawiyya. He taught science and mathematics in local high schools, and on the advice of his shaykh, Sayyid Muhammad Belkaid al-Tilimisani (1911-1998), opened a zawiya of his own in Guemar in 1988. He began to write about Ibn Arabi, on whom he published his first book in 1997, followed by several more. 

He started to translate Guénon at the suggestion of Guénon's son Abd al-Wahid, who was a follower of the son of his own shaykh, and the first translation was published in 2013 (see cover image above). On at least one occasion he edited his translation to remove some of Guénon’s universalist positions, which are of course problematic from most Islamic perspectives. 

PDFs of the translations are all available on the Internet Archive, at https://archive.org/details/RG-Arabic/RG%20-%20Tarbiyya-Tahaqquq/mode/2up.

It would be interesting to know more about the reception of these translations in Algeria, in Jordan, and beyond. 

My thanks to Bnar Jabar for bringing Shaykh Abdul Baqi’s translations to my attention, and my thanks to an the reader of this blog who left the first comment below, directing me to the interview from which I quoted above. This is Hany Ibrahim and Mohammed Rustom, "An Interview with Abdel Baki Meftah, Algerian Master of Akbarian Teachings," Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society 72, 2022, available at https://traditionalhikma.com/an-interview-with-abdel-baki-meftahalgerian-master-of-akbarian-teachings/. After reading this article, I made major revisions to this blog post.

New article on Guénon in Cairo

A new article by Mattias Gori Olesen in Aries explains and contextualizes René Guénon’s impact on Egyptian intellectual life before and during his time in Cairo. It is “The Perennial Solidarity of the East: René Guénon, Sufism and Easternist Anti-Colonialism in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt,” Aries 2024, online first at https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-tat00020. 

The article is developed from Gori Olesen’s PhD thesis, for which see an earlier post here. Again, we see the reception of Guénon by ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri, and the subsequent engagement of Guénon with the “Easternists” and the Egyptian journal Al-Maʿrifa, in which Guénon at first wrote. This engagement ended with disagreements over modern education with Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī and over modern spirituality with Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī. 

Gori Oleson concludes that neither “Traditionalism nor any other expressions of Western esotericism came to play a role in Egypt similar to that played by the Theosophical Society in India.” Indeed. When it comes to the roles that India played for the Theosophical Society and that Egypt played for Guénon, and thus for Traditionalism and Western esotericism in general, it is less clear. The experiences that Gori Olesen has brought to light help explain how Guénon came to modify his earlier pairing of the East with tradition and the West with modernity, as they showed that modernity was also present in Egypt. Presumably there were other experiences, of which we do not yet know the details, that would help explain other modifications, notably the growing emphasis on the need for an orthodox exoteric frame for esoteric practice.

Traditionalism and Nikolai Berdyaev

The Polish philosopher Marek Jedliński has just published an article in Studia z Historii Filozofii (in English) entitled “Russian Yearning for Elite Power: Nikolai Berdyaev’s Reflections on the Metaphysics of Democratism” (available here). Berdyaev (1874-1948, pictured) was a Russian philosopher and exile whose critique of modernity was grounded in religion. 

Jedliński, who has previously published on Julius Evola, René Guénon, and Traditionalism, terms Berdyaev a “traditionalist” and compares him in several respects with Guénon, especially with regard to their understandings of modernity and democracy. Berdyaev even wrote of a “democratic ideology of quantity” (48). There are certainly interesting parallels, but in the end Berdyaev was not a perennialist, even if he was an anti-modernist. 

Jedliński’s article raises the question of what Guénon and Berdyaev thought of each other’s work. They both lived in Paris at the same time, and Berdyaev’s key Le Nouveau Moyen-Âge (The New Middle Ages) was published in French in 1924. Berdyaev was friends with Jacques Maritain, at one point Guénon’s sponsor. Yet Guénon never seems to have mentioned Berdyaev, nor Berdyaev Guénon.

New thesis looks at Pouvourville and his impact on Guénon

A new thesis sheds new and important light on Eugène Albert Puyou de Pouvourville (1861–1939), his understanding of Taoism, and his influence on René Guénon. It is "Chinese Whispers: Albert de Pouvourville, René Guénon, and Traditionalism’s Hidden 'Chinese Roots,'" by Davide Marino, submitted at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and available here.

The main significance of the thesis is that it argues that the impact of Pouvourville on Guénon was comparable to the impact that Ivan Aguéli had, an impact that, as I argued in "The significance of Ivan Aguéli for the Traditionalist movement" (see here), is greater than generally realized. Likewise, the impact of Pouvourville was greater than has been realized.

The thesis consists of an introduction, eight chapters arranged in three sections, and a conclusion. The chapters are

Part I: Framework
1. Occultism, Traditionalism and the Crisis of Authenticity 
2. Orientalisms

Part II: De Pouvourville, Guénon and the Birth of Traditionalism
3. Albert de Pouvourville’s Colonial Occultism
4. De Pouvourville Meets Guénon
5. De Pouvourville’s Influence on Traditionalism
6. Making Masters and Losing Friends

Part II: Two Shades of Esoteric China
7. De Pouvourville’s Tradition orientale
8. Traditionalist China

The central argument is that "the orientalist interpretation of China proposed by the occultist Albert de Pouvourville become the metaphysical core of René Guénon’s esoteric movement (Traditionalism)," While Aguéli contributed the Sufi pair of bāṭin and ẓāhir to Traditionalism's pair esoteric and exoteric, and Aguéli's binary of traditional Sufism and modern reformism to Guénon's binary of tradition and modernity, Pouvourville's contribution was even prior to that, as Marino argues in chapter 5: "From fundamental elements of Traditionalism like intellectualism and the theory of 'multiple states of Being' to secondary aspects like a distaste for Buddhism and contempt for 'sentimentality,' de Pouvourville’s teachings can be found all across Guénon’s work."

New book on Traditionalist thought published (coming soon in US)

Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order is now available in Europe and Canada. Readers in the US will have to wait until July 6. 

Official UK price is £25, but Amazon.co.uk is selling for £22 and £12.99 on Kindle. In Canada, $53.95 and $17.99 Kindle, and in Europe €22.19 and £18.75 Kindle. 

One of the first reviews is in The Scotsman, and says (in part) "This very fine book is a forensic look at the movement and its influence, and has several points where you both realise something and ponder 'why did I never realise that?'” That is rather what I had hoped for.

The book looks at the intellectual foundations of Traditionalism, its application both to various projects, and "post-Traditionalism." Each chapter looks first at the general intellectual background to the issue it discusses, and then at Traditionalist understandings, starting in most cases with René Guénon and ending as much as possible with living Traditionalists.

Guénon in The Philosophical Forum

Following on Professor Wael Hallaq’s academically Traditionalist book Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (see blog post here), another scholarly article has appeared, in the venerable journal The Philosophical Forum, by Noah H. Taj. This is "On rooting religious studies: The metaphysical proposal of René Guénon," and can be read here. The abstract is:

The   present   article   problematizes   current   dominating   approaches  to  method  and  theory  in  the  study  of  religion  by  pointing  to  their  inapplicability  to  theorists  working  outside secular worldviews. The first section of this article introduces  decolonialist  narratives  by  touching  on  important topics which are subsumed within larger discussions, such as secularism, positionality, and others. This is done by putting René Guénon (1886–1951) in conversation with other  theorists,  the  foremost  of  whom  is  Bruce  Lincoln.  Section two introduces Guénon using Wael Hallaq's categorisation of him as a subversive author, and sections three and  four  elaborate  on  his  subversion  through  touching  on  two key theories. The first relates to problematizations of the term ‘religion’ itself along with a treatment of Guénon's actual  theory  of  religion.  The  second  is  Guénon's  metaphysical  method,  which,  contrasted  against  the  historical,  opens  new  avenues  for  our  study  of  the  past  in  manners  unrestricted  to  materialism  alone,  expanding  thereby  the  academic frameworks with which we come to the table in the academic study of religion.

New light on Guénon's impact in Egypt

A recent PhD thesis defended at Aarhus University sheds new light on René Guénon’s reception in Egypt. This is Mattias Gori Olesen’s “The Future is Eastern: Muḥammad Luṭfī Jumʿa (1886-1953) and the Drang nach Osten in Interwar Egypt.”

Guénon’s first reception by an Egyptian was before he moved to Cairo, in the 1925 doctoral thesis on the Caliphate of the Egyptian lawyer (and later jurist and politician) ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī (1895-1971). The thesis argued for the re-establishment of a caliphate, and drew on Guénon to argue that an East-West rapprochement could be achieved partly by re-traditionalizing the West, and also argued that different Oriental forms all reflected one common tradition. Al-Sanhūrī presumably encountered Guénon in France while working on his thesis, and does not seem to have been much influenced by Guénon in his later work.

The second reception was after Guénon’s arrival in Cairo, and was in the journal al-Maʿrifa, edited not by Muṣṭafā ʿAbd al-Rāziq (1885-1947) as both Xavier Accart and I wrongly supposed, but by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Islāmbūlī, about whom little is known. Al-Islāmbūlī was evidently himself a Traditionalist, not only publishing an article by Guénon in the first number of al-Maʿrifa, but also later arguing himself that Ibn ‘Arabī and Advaita Vedanta were one and the same. In this first article, Guénon explained the basics of Traditionalism, with “primordial tradition” rendered into Arabic as al-ʿilm al-qadīm (ancient knowledge).

This second reception soon ran into difficulties, however. First, in June 1931 al-Islāmbūlī arranged a public meeting that was attended by both Guénon and Valentine de Saint-Point. Guénon did not speak, but Saint-Point argued in Traditionalist fashion that education in Egypt should not be modernized to focus on exoteric knowledge, but should rather focus on the esoteric to equip Egyptians to resist modernity. This drew an angry response from Muḥammad Luṭfī Jumʿa, who believed that modern education was one way to strengthen the Eastern nations against the West—this was fundamental to the “Easternism” that he supported, and which is the main topic of Gori Olesen’s thesis.

Then, the next month, al-Maʿrifa published an exchange between Guénon and Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī (1875-1954) on the topic of spiritism. Wajdī wrote in favor of it, Guénon against. Wajdī rebutted, and Guénon rebutted the rebuttal, and never published again in al-Maʿrifa, or perhaps was never published again in al-Maʿrifa. Ironically, as Gori Olesen notes, in 1907 Wajdī had written in Ivan Aguéli’s Il Convito on “L’Islam, Religione Universale” (Islam, the Universal Religion). An Islamic universalism that had agreed with Aguéli, then, did not agree with Guénon.

Gori Olesen concludes:

Ultimately, Guénon and traditionalism were thus only of selective use to the Easternists. The perennialism and praise of the esoteric and spiritual that traditionalism represented were amenable to both Easternism’s political and cultural project and the way they conceived the problem and incipient solution at hand. But the anti-modernism was not… In Jumʿa’s case, the more direct inspiration for his perennial vision came from theosophic literature.

 This seems just about right.

Forthcoming book on Traditionalist thought

One of the criticisms that have been made of my original Against the Modern World is that I did not pay enough attention to Traditionalist thought. I agree, and therefore a new book will come out in June 2023 focusing on ideas: Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order. The book is a companion to Against the Modern World, not a replacement--it goes over different ground.

The publishers are Oxford University Press in the US (see cover without tree) at $29.95 (pre-order here) and Pelican in the UK (see cover with tree) at £22 or £9.99 on Kindle (pre-order here). Two very different covers, but the text is the same. 

 

The chapters are:

INTRODUCTORY
1. Traditionalism and the Traditionalists  
2. Historical perennialism  
 
PART I: FOUNDATIONS
3. Traditionalist perennialism   
4. Traditionalist history   
5. The Traditionalist critique of modernity   
6. Traditionalism, thought, and society    

PART II: CORE PROJECTS
7. Self-realization    
8. Religion    
9. Politics    

PART III: FURTHER PROJECTS
10. Art    
11. Gender    
12. Nature    
13. Dialogue  
  
PART IV: POST-TRADITIONALISM
14. The radical right   
 
CONCLUDING
15. Conclusion    

Mary Schillito: correction

René Guénon first traveled to Cairo in 1930 in the company of Mary Schillito (image to right), who I identified in Against the Modern World as a convert to Islam on the basis that she had taken the first name Dina. In fact, Dina was the surname of her husband, Assan Dina, who was not Egyptian (as I had wrongly supposed) but rather the wealthy son of an Indian-Mauritian father and a French mother. 

Assan Dina died in Egypt in 1928 while traveling home through the Suez canal from India to the chateau that he and Mary had built at Cruseilles in the French department of Haute-Savoie, just south of Geneva. This chateau, the Château des Avenières, contained a remarkable chapel with mosaic wall panels from the tarot, which can be seen on this website. The chateau is now a hotel with a fine restaurant, and those with sufficient funds can book a stay or a table here (though at present it seems to be closed). 

Alternatively, those who are looking for somewhere to live in Cincinnati, Ohio, might consider The Lofts at Shillito Place (see here), once the massive department store built by Mary Schillito’s father John Schillito, whose career is described in the Northern Kentucky Tribune (see here). 

 My thanks to Davide Marino for correcting me regarding Assan DIna.

New article on Traditionalism in South America

A new article, Mark Sedgwick, "The Glocalization of Esotericism: Guénonian Traditionalism in South America" has been published in Nova Religio 26, no. 1, pp. 35-58, https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2022.26.1.35. It brings together three earlier articles on South America. It is aimed at readers interested in religious studes who do not know Traditionalism. The abstract is:

This article traces the history of the South American reception of the work of the esoteric philosophers René Guénon and Julius Evola, and of the Maryami Sufi Order of Frithjof Schuon, focusing on Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. It compares South American forms of Traditionalism with those found elsewhere, primarily in Europe and North America, understanding differences between these in terms of “glocalization,” the local adaptation of the global. Traditionalism in South America was most localized in its religio-political form, which was more important for the Right in South America than elsewhere, and least localized in its purely religious form, which was less significant in South America than elsewhere. The impact of Traditionalism in South American academia, notably in philosophy and anthropology, also reflects local conditions, as does an unusual interest in indigenous peoples.

New Portuguese translation of Guénon with Luiz de Carvalho

A new translation of the essential works of René Guénon is being prepared in Brazilian Portuguese.

Subscribers to the series (link here) will receive the following titles:

1. General Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines 
2. Man and his Becoming according to the Vedanta 
3. East and West 
4. The Crisis of the Modern World 
5. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times 
6. Perspectives on Initiation
7. Fundamental Symbols of Sacred Science
8. Oriental Metaphysics

A new publisher, Estrela da Manhã (Morning Star), has been set up for this purpose.

One of those behind the series is Luiz Gonzaga de Carvalho Neto (born 1971), a son of the late Olavo de Carvalho (1947-2022), once the leader of the Maryamiyya in Brazil and then an influential “Catholic” philosopher,   admired by President Bolsonaro, whose online lectures were extremely popular.

Luiz de Carvalho, who probably first learned about Traditionalism as a child, has for some time been giving on-line courses at the Instituto Cultural Lux et Sapientia (Light and Wisdom Cultural Center), which does not self-identify as a Traditionalist organization, but encourages visitors to “learn traditional cosmovision and have a life with meaning.” In 2015, its recommended introductory reading list listed six books, five of which were by Traditionalist authors, including one by Olavo de Carvalho from his Traditionalist period.

Purchasers of the series get three free lectures with Luiz de Carvalho, who seems to be following in his father’s footsteps, both as lecturer and as Traditionalist.

My thanks to DP for drawing my attention to the new translation.

New book on Arturo Reghini and the background to Evola's Pagan Imperialism

Christian Giudice has just published the first book in English on Julius Evola’s early teacher, Arturo Reghini (1878-1946). This is Occult Imperium: Arturo Reghini, Roman Traditionalism and the Anti-Modern Reaction in Fascist Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). The book is based on Giudice's PhD thesis, previously reviewed on this blog.

Reghini was an Italian esotericist who translated some of René Guénon’s works in journals he published with help from a small group including Evola, and who in 1914 wrote a crucial article on “Pagan Imperialism” (Imperialismo pagano) that became, in 1928, the basis of Evola’s own work of the same title. Evola’s 1928 publication was one of the causes of a breach between Evola and the Reghini group that ended up with Evola losing a court case against Reghini, but Reghini losing much of his reputation in Fascist Italy. Giudice translates the original “Pagan Imperialism”  in an appendix to this book.

It was Reghini who developed the idea of an Italian imperial tradition that Evola adopted, a Western alternative to Guénon’s Oriental tradition. Evola’s fierce anti-Catholicism and the blaming of Christianity for the fall of the Roman empire also come from Reghini, or at least from Reghini’s milieu, where such ideas were widespread, popularized by the novelist Ciro Alvi (1872-1944) among others. As Giudice shows, Italian nationalism had always tended in a pro-pagan and anti-Catholic direction, if only because the nationalists of the Risorgimento wanted imperial Rome as their inspiration, not the Papacy’s Rome, and because the Papacy initially opposed Italian unification. While modern paganism in Britain and Germany inevitably referred to obscure folk traditions, modern paganism in Italy instead referred to the well-documented and respected classical tradition.

Occult Imperium is interesting for the light it sheds on Evola’s thought. The connection with Guénon in fact started with Reghini’s own teacher Amedeo Armentano (1886-1966), who together with another Italian, Giulio Guerrieri (1885-1963), visited Guénon in Paris during the 1910s. Armentano founded the Schola Italica group that Reghini later took over, and Reghini was on good terms with Guénon during the 1920s, accepting Guénon’s concept of the perennial tradition and much of his anti-modernism, though not sharing his interest in the Orient. The idea of the Middle Ages as a period of relative tradition is common to Guénon, Reghini, and Evola. 

Occult Imperium is also interesting for what it shows of the Italian esoteric milieu before and after the First World War, a milieu that resembled that of Paris, for example in the importance of Theosophy and esoteric Freemasonry, but that also had its own special characteristics, of which the idea of Pagan Imperialism was probably the most important. Occult Imperium also tells the story of the groups and journals led by Reghini that Evola was part of: the journals Atanòr, Rivista di Studi Iniziatici (Atanòr, Journal of Initiatic Studies, 1924), Ignis (Fire, 1925), and then Ur: Rivista di Indirizzi di una Scienza per l’Io (Ur: Journal of Orientations Towards a Science for the I, 1927).

An important contribution to our understanding of the background of Evola's thought.

New collection on Ivan Aguéli

Just published: Anarchist, Artist, Sufi: The Politics, Painting, and Esotericism of Ivan Aguéli, edited by Mark Sedgwick (Bloomsbury). 

14 chapters by 13 scholars, plus English translations of some of Aguéli's own writings. Sections on art (and anarchism) in Paris, Sufism in Cairo, and Traditionalism--influence on René Guénon. and Traditionalist theories of art. 

Chapter 13, "The significance of Ivan Aguéli for the Traditionalist movement," looks directly at Aguéli, Guénon, and later Traditionalists, but the chapters on Aguéli the Sufi will also be of interest to those who are interested in Traditionalism. And the chapters on Aguéli the Anarchist Artist place everything in a wider context.

And as the blurb says, the book shows that "Islam occupied a more central place in modern European intellectual history than is generally realized. [Aguéli's] life reflects several major modern intellectual, political, and cultural trends. This book is an important contribution to understanding how he came to Islam, the values and influences that informed his life, and-ultimately-the role he played in the modern Western reception of Islam."

The table of contents is:

1. Ivan Aguéli: politics, painting and esotericism, Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University, Denmark)

Part I: Ivan Aguéli, the Anarchist Artist
2. Ivan Aguéli's life and work, Viveca Wessel (formerly Moderna Museet, Sweden)
3. Exploring the territories of the avant-garde: Ivan Aguéli and the institutions of his time, Annika Öhrner (Södertörn University, Sweden)
4. Ivan Aguéli the esotericist in reality and fiction, Per Faxneld (Södertörn University, Sweden)
5. Ivan Aguéli's monotheistic landscapes: From perspectival to solar logics, Simon Sorgenfrei (Södertörn University, Sweden)
6. Painting the sacred as an initiatic path: Art and Cubism in the eyes of Ivan Aguéli, Thierry Zarcone (CNRS, Paris, France)
7. “Kill the audience:” Ivan Aguéli's moralistic utopia of anarchism and Islam, Anthony T. Fiscella (Formerly Lund University, Sweden)

Part II: Ivan Aguéli the Sufi
8. Ivan Aguéli's second period in Egypt, 1902–09: The intellectual spheres around Il Convito/Al-Nadi, Paul-André Claudel (University of Nantes, France)
9. Sufi Teachings for pro-Islamic Politics: Ivan Aguéli and Il Convito, Alessandra Marchi (University of Cagliari, Italy)
10. Ivan Aguéli and the legacy of Emir Abdelkader, Iheb Guermazi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
11. Ivan Aguéli's humanist vision: Islam, Sufism and universalism, Meir Hatina (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
12. Feminism and the Divine Feminine: An exploration of female elements in Ivan Aguéli and subsequent Traditionalist thought, Marcia Hermansen (Loyola University, USA)

Part III: Ivan Aguéli and Traditionalism
13. The significance of Ivan Aguéli for the Traditionalist movement, Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus University, Denmark)
14. What is esotericism in art? Ivan Aguéli's art versus the Traditionalists' “traditional Art,” Patrick Ringgenberg (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)

Part IV: Writings by Ivan Aguéli
15. Letter from Paris
16. Letter from Ceylon
17. The Enemies of Islam
18. Pure Art
19. Universality in Islam

Bibliography
Index

The book is currently available only in hardback at £85 or $137.60 and on Kindle at £51.11 or $82.80, so get your library to order or it or wait for the paperback. And in the meantime you can read the introduction and bits of some other chapters on Google Books here.