Traditionalism and Eastern Orthodoxy: Call for contributions

The reception of Traditionalism has been better studied in some contexts than in others. This Call invites proposals for chapters in a forthcoming multi-author book to be entitled The Reception of Traditionalism in Eastern Orthodoxy: Mysticism and Politics, edited by Mark Sedgwick. Contributors will be invited to an authors’ workshop in Belgrade in March 2027 to discuss pre-circulated drafts (expenses covered by the organizers).

Topics to be covered include: Traditionalism in interwar Romania: Mircea Eliade and his circles; Traditionalism in Yugoslavia and Serbia; Eastern Orthodox Traditionalism in the West: James Cutsinger, Philip Sherrard, and John Tavener; Traditionalism in late-Soviet and early post-Soviet Russia; Traditionalism in Ukraine, Belarus, post-Communist Romania, and b; Aleksander Dugin and the development of Traditionalist Eurasianism; and perhaps also Traditionalism in Bulgaria, Moldova, and/or Georgia.

Chapters should cover the reception of Traditionalism in the country(ies) and period(s) in question, explaining who transmitted and developed Traditionalist thought, what aspects were stressed, glossed over, and further developed, and how this relates to the context of the place(s) and time(s).

Brief proposals (500 words), including a proposed title, should be sent to Mark Sedgwick (mjrs@cas.au.dk) before midnight CET on February 15, accompanied by a biographical note that mentions relevant prior publications. Feel free to send more than one proposal. On the basis of these proposals, actual chapters will be commissioned as soon as possible, to be researched and drafted before March 2027.

The authors’ workshop will refine the drafts and allow us to discuss how the reception and development of Traditionalism in Eastern Orthodoxy differs from what happened in the Catholic and Protestant West, and in Latin America, and to explore what this tells us about Traditionalism, mysticism, politics, and Eastern Orthodoxy.

“Traditionalism” as used in this Call refers to those working with the idea of an esoteric primordial tradition as developed by René Guénon. The book will not cover forms of traditionalism that have no connection with Guénon.

This project is funded by the Templeton Religion Trust through the Program in the Study of Mysticism (PRISM) at Tampere University, Finland.

A new journal and a new generation

A new Traditionalist journal was published in 2023: Passages: Studies in Traditionalism and Traditions (cover to left). It represents a new generation of Traditionalists: Americans, Russians, and Europeans.

Passages describes itself as “a textual forum for studies on and in Traditionalism” in succession to earlier Traditionalist journals such as Études traditionelles, Studies in Comparative Religion, Sophia, and Sacred Web, and is published by PRAV Publishing, on whom more below. It is more of an annual than a journal, as the first volume is 393 pages long, and the next volume is due in 2024 or perhaps early 2025.

The lead editor of Passages and the Editor-in-chief of PRAV Publishing is Jafe Arnold, an American with an MA in Religious Studies and Western Esotericism from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in Philosophy and Education at the University of Warsaw, where he submitted a dissertation on “Heidegger’s Ins and Outs of Plato’s Cave: The Mythical Liberation of Education in Heidegger’s On The Essence of Truth” in 2024. Arnold is one of the most active Traditionalists of the new generation, and has worked on and with Alexander Dugin. One article of his was previously discussed on this blog (see here). 

The opening article in Passages 1 is a translation of Dugin’s “René Guénon: Traditionalism as Language,” originally a 1998 lecture, and certainly one of Dugin’s most important pieces on this topic. Of the following seventeen articles, two are by Russians, three by Hungarians, and six by Italians, including two authors from the Julius Evola Foundation (definitely not the new generation). There are also two Americans, one Belarusian, one Englishman, and one Frenchman—this last being Jean-Pierre Laurant, the venerable doyen of French scholars of Guénon, neither new generation nor usually associated with Dugin.

PRAV Publishing (website at pravpublishing.com) describes itself as “devoted to the publication of scholarly and popular works which build bridges of ideas between Continents and Civilizations.” The ideas in question are those of Traditionalists, especially Russian ones. So far it has published sixteen books. These include three volumes on the Foundations of Eurasianism, translated and edited by Arnold together with John Stachelski, an American who recently completed a PhD on “The geopoetics of an undiscovered continent: Eurasianism as a writing practice” at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale. The first volume of the Foundations is introduced by the contemporary Russian Traditionalist and Eurasianist Leonid Savin, and contains texts by the classic first-generation Eurasianists, especially Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), Petr Savitsky (1895-1968), and Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). These are the thinkers on whom Dugin’s Eurasianism, sometimes called neo-Eurasianism, builds, combined with Guénon and Evola.

Two of the other books are by Daria Dugina (1992-2022), the daughter of Alexander Dugin who was killed by a Ukrainian car bomb that was probably intended for her father. There are no books by Dugin himself, as the English translations of these are mostly published by Arktos, an older publisher focusing on Traditionalist works, established in 2009. Five of PRAV’s other books are by Askr Svarte (Evgeny Nechkasov), a Russian Pagan Traditionalist who was once a prominent member of Dugin's Eurasian Youth Union and in 2011 founded Svarte Aske (Norwegian: Dark Ash[tree]), an Odinist community in Siberia. Then there are two books by Boris Nad, a Serbian writer whose Vreme imperija (Time of Empires, 2002) was published with an introduction by Dragoš Kalajić, the leading Serbian Traditionalist of the first generation, discussed in a recent blog post here. In addition there four more books written by two Americans, a Russian, and an Italian. 

I am told that PRAV is working on an English translation of Andrea Scarabelli’s Vita avventurosa di Julius Evola (The Adventurous life of Julius Evola), a monumental biography of Evola, a blog post on which is overdue. 

PRAV, Passages, and Arnold and his collaborators are definitely worth watching. 

This post has been edited to correct a number of small errors.

A Traditionalist Initiatic Novel

In his new book on Serbian literature and esotericism 1957–2000 (Српска књижевност и езотеризам 1957–2000, vol. 2 in the series Подземни Ток, Belgrade: Službeni Glasnik, 2020), Professor Nemanja Radulovic of the University of Belgrade devotes a chapter entitled “Portrait of a Traditionalist” to the Serbian painter, essayist, novelist and political commentator Dragoš Kalajić (1943-2005), already discussed in a previous post here, based on a 2020 article by Branislav Jakovljević. 

Radulovic adds a lot of detail to Jakovljević’s article, covers the whole of Kalajić's career, and helps answer the question I asked at the end of my last post: what Kalajić’s distinctive contribution to Traditionalist thought was. 

Radulovic argues convincing that whenever René Guénon and Julius Evola differed, Kalajić followed Evola, and also that where de differed from both Guénon and Evola was in his emphasis on the Slavs as the bearers of tradition. Here and in his views on international relations he comes close to Alexander Dugin who, according to Radulovic, he knew, and whose politics he echoed during the 1990s and 2000s, though it is unclear to what extent he was influenced by Dugin and to what extent he came to similar conclusions independently. 

What appears as Kalajić’s distinctive contribution to Traditionalism, however, was his “initiatic” novel Kosmotvorac (Cosmocreator; Belgrade: Beletra, 1989), cover pictured above. This, as Radulovic shows, is very much built on an Evolian view of things. It is set in the future and deals with the trial of members of the defeated Ordo explorarum (Order of Explorers), which is based on the actual Order of Templars, and led by an Elder Yalomed, a reverse anagram of the name of the actual Templar Grand Master (Jacques) de Molay. One of the monks of the Order is even called Alovej, J. Evola in reverse. 

The Ordo explorarum teaches that there is a divine spark in man, and seeks to replace the diversity of manifestation with original unity. Its members “preserve the doctrine of the restoration of the primordial state, the seeds of which they are to carry into the next cycle.” They also represent the male principle of order against the gynecocratic government, which defeats them, and is then itself defeated in a terrorist attack aided by alchemy. Kosmotvorac is, in Radulovic’s view, an initiatic novel not just because it tells of an initiatic journey, but also because it seeks to alter the reader.

New article on Traditionalism in Bosnia

A comprehensive study of Traditionalism in Bosnia has just been published: Samir Beglerović and Mark Sedgwick, "Islam in Bosnia Between East and West: The Reception and Development of Traditionalism," Journal of Religion in Europe 13, no. 1-2 (December 2020): 145–172, https://doi.org/10.1163/18748929-20201498.

According to the abstract, 

The article looks at the reception and development of Guénonian Traditionalism in Bosnia from the 1970s to the present day. Traditionalism was initially received in Yugoslavia as esotericism, but then its reception became more Islamic, based in Sarajevo’s Islamic Theology Faculty. After the Bosnian War, Islamic Traditionalist works became popular among young Bosnians who wanted to combine Islam with European identities. Some Bosnian ulama taught Traditionalist works to their students, a development unparalleled elsewhere, and wrote their own Traditionalist-influenced works, mostly dealing with interreligious dialogue. The Bosnian reception and development of Traditionalism is unique, and it is argued that this reflects Bosnia’s special position between East and West. 

Samir Beglerović (1973–2020) was an associate professor of aqida (dogmatics), Sufism and Comparative Religion at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences, Sarajevo. He died of COVID-19 on 9 November 2020 as the final touches were being put to this article. An obituary in English can be read at https://www.unsa.ba/en/novosti/prof-dr-samir-beglerovic-passed-away.

Dragoš Kalajić and Traditionalism in Yugoslavia

A new article (in English) explores the role of Dragoš Kalajić (1943-2005, see photograph) in introducing the idea of Julius Evola in Yugoslavia between 1969 and 1989. This is Branislav Jakovljević, “The Ownership of Evil: 1968, 1989, and the Mainstreaming of the New Right,” Primerjalna književnost 43, no.3 (2020): 49-63, DOI: 10.3986/pkn.v43.i3.03.

Kalajić was a painter who trained in Rome, where he met Evola, though details of this are unclear. Evola was not visible in Kalajić’s 1968 book Krševina (Wreckage), but is very visible in his Uporište: rehabilitacija structure integralnog čoveka (The Stronghold: A Rehabilitation of Integral Man’s Structure) and in all his subsequent work, including his articles in the major newspaper Politika, his columns in the magazine Duga, and his editorial work for the publishing house Prosveta. Two notable later books by Kalajić are Mapa (Anti)utopija (A Map of (Anti) Utopias, 1978) and Smak sveta (Doomsday,1979), which is a collection of his magazine articles. Although Evola was Kalajić's main source, René Guénon was also introduced to the Yugoslav public.

Jakovljević suggests that Kalajić got away with publishing ideas that were not exactly compatible with Yugoslavia’s ruling communism because the Yugoslav authorities were at that time more worried about the New Left than the New Right. As Serbian nationalism began to replace communism, his ideas became ever more popular in certain circles.

Since Jakovljević understands Kalajić as a neo-fascist, his article also covers the critique of Nazism and totalitarianism made by Radomir Konstantinović (1928-2011) in Filosofija palanke (The Philosophy of Parochialism, 1969).

Jakovljević clearly shows the importance of Traditionalism for Kalajić. It is less clear what Kalajić’s distinctive contribution to Traditionalist thought was. This may be covered in a later article. The article stops in 1989, and we can only hope for a subsequent article covering the remainder of Kalajić’s career and activities.

(This post has been updated at the suggestion of Branislav Jakovljević to clarify the nature of the critique made by Konstantinović).

If you prefer to read in Serbian...

If you prefer to read in Serbian, Against the Modern World is now available in that language, as Protiv modernog sveta: tradicionalizam i tajna intelektualna istorija dvadesetog veka by Mark Sedžvik (Belgrade: Ukronija/Biblioteka Vrhovi, 2006; 377 pages; ISBN 86-84807-17-0).