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.

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 article on Aguéli and Swedenborg

Simon Sorgenfrei, a Swedish scholar, has just published an article on "The Great Aesthetic Inspiration: On Ivan Aguéli’s Reading of Swedenborg," in Religion and the Arts 23 (2019), pp. 1–25.

The article starts with the personal links between Aguéli and Adolph Boyesen (1823–1916), a notable Swedenborgian pastor in Stockholm. It follows Aguéli to Paris and into the Theosophical lodge Ananta, and then into anarchist circles and jail. The main point of the article, however, is to review Aguéli's views on aesthetics, esotericism, modernism, monotheism, painting, and religion, mostly from Aguéli's correspondence, and to compare these systematically with the views of Swedenborg, and with some other influences of the time.

The article is fascinating, and totally convincing. Sorgenfrei knows both his Aguéli and his Swedenborg well.

New book on Western Sufism

A new book on Western Sufism is due out some time around October 2016: Mark Sedgwick, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (New York: Oxford University Press).

Western Sufism is in some ways the continuation of Against the Modern World, but also goes a long way back in time, as the subtitle suggests. Actual Guénonian Traditionalism is only one topic among many, but perennialism is a topic that comes and goes throughout the book, and Guénonian Traditionalism appears in a new light (as do many other things, from Maimonides to Gurdjieff). Ivan Aguéli is covered in more detail than in Against the Modern World, as Swedish sources have been used.

The table of contents can be seen on the companion website, which also has a gallery which gives a good idea of the book's contents. There is also a companion blog, which will be used for posts that are not relevant to Traditionalism.

It is possible to pre-order the book now: $35.00 from Amazon in the US or from Oxford, or £22.99 from Amazon in the UK.

Deep background, especially US

A new book, Patrick Bowen's A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States: White American Converts before 1975 (Brill, 2015), does not deal directly with Traditionalism (though Guénon is mentioned) but does deal with various topics that are part of the background to Traditionalism, and part of the background to Sufism and Traditionalism in the United States. There's lots on the Theosophical Society, on Martinism, on early neo-Sufis, universalism (if not exactly perennialism) and on changes in attitudes to religion in the nineteenth century. A good book, recommended.

Arturo Reghini and Roman Traditionalism

Two resources for those interested in Arturo Reghini (photo below), Roman Traditionalism, and Julius Evola, both maintained by Christian Giudice, a PhD candidate at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden:

• A blog, Arturo Reghini and Roman Traditionalism.
• A Facebook page, Arturo Reghini: Roman Traditionalism and Italian Esotericism.

 For those who do not know Reghini, Evola wrote:

It is thanks to my encounter with Reghini (and Guenon, who Reghini first mentioned to me) that I decidedly broke with what “occultist” or Theosophical tendencies I still possessed, and came to acknowledge the complete separateness and transcendence of initiatory wisdom with respect to all profane culture, and particularly modern.

(quotation taken from Giudice's blog).

You can also read about how Evola slapped a German soldier in Capri, and of course about Reghini himself. The Facebook page carries periodic announcements that may be of interest to readers of this blog, for example of a paper Giudice is due to deliver on April 23, 2014, at Ben Gurion University, on "‘Why is the last mile the hardest mile?’: Mountaineering as an metaphor for spiritual advancement in Julius Evola and Aleister Crowley."

Eliade and William W. Quinn

Thanks to LP for drawing my attention to William W. Quinn, Jr., "Mircea Eliade and the Sacred Tradition (A Personal Account)," Nova Religio 3, no. 1 (1999), pp. 147-153.

As mentioned in Against the Modern World, Quinn (who was Eliade's PhD student) remembers Eliade as a Traditionalist. This article gives more details of the relationship, generally confirming what is already written.

One interesting detail: Quinn reports that Eliade "instructed [him] to minimize [his] use of the principal figures and literature of modern theosophy during my tenure as a student." Rather as Eliade himself minimized his public use of Traditionalist litterature? For Quinn, this cautious approach was "more like a sublimation than a repudiation ... and [his] ultimate success at the university ... was the proof of its wisdom."

Guénon and Agarttha

Just published: Marco Baistrocchi, "Agarttha: A Guénonian Manipulation?" Theosophical History, Occasional Papers, vol. 12. This is a translation by Joscelyn Godwin of three articles originally published in Italian in Politica Romana in the 1990s, by an Italian diplomat. An "engaged" author rather than a scholarly one, but still worth reading.

The whole question of Agarttha and Guénon's Le roi du monde (The King of the World, 1927) is puzzling. In Le roi du monde, Guénon endorsed views about the existence of "Agarttha," a hidden subterranean initiatic kingdom, that were highly imaginative. Guénon did not always check his sources as painstakingly as is required in academia, but on no other occasion did he devote so much energy to something quite so unlikely. Why?

Baistrocchi provides a useful introduction to, and summary of, the problem. He also more or less excludes one possible answer to the question. Guénon can hardly have actually believed the imaginative accounts he endorsed in Le roi du monde. He knew, as Baistrocchi shows (p. 22 and passim), one of the main sources for the imaginative account of Agarttha, Louis Jacolliot's Les Fils de Dieu (1873). But...  Jacolliot was writing not about Agarttha, but about Asgard, the abode of the Norse gods!

So what was Guénon up to? Baistrocchi's suggestion, that Guénon was joining in a conspiracy to combat the interest in Asiatic religion awakened by the Theosophical Society for the sake of maintaining public interest in Catholicism and Islam, seems to me unlikely.

The puzzle, then, still awaits solution. But at least one possibility now seems to have been excluded.

More on Valentine de St.-Point

In my last post on Valentine de St.-Point, I said that it seemed she was more important as an artist than I had thought. Well, it now seems that I have to add to this that she was also more important as a thinker than I had thought.

An anonymous comment on my earlier post has drawn my attention to her Manifeste de la femme futuriste (Manifesto of the futurist woman) of 1912. This is available in French in a new edition of 2005 (Paris, Mille et une Nuits) and in English translation in Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: a century of isms (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), and makes fascinating reading in whatever language.

Like Evola, St.-Point is interested in virility, and like Evola, St.-Point distinguishes the spiritual from the biological. “It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of masculinity and femininity.” Unlike Evola, she sees a need for a balance in these two essential principles: “The fecund periods, when the most heroes and geniuses come forth from the terrain of culture in all its ebullience, are rich in masculinity and femininity.” Like Guénon (and of course like many others at the time), she sees an age ending–an age dominated by femininity. A strong dose of virility, of the brute, was needed to restore balance and move on to the next age. Unlike Guénon, she placed the new age firmly in the future (she was a futurist, after all), associating “turning toward the past” with femininity.

Nancy Locke sees St.-Point’s Manifesto as Fascist (“Valentine de Saint-Point and the Fascist Construction of Women” in Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, eds, Fascist visions: art and ideology in France and Italy, Princeton University Press, 1997) while Barbara Spackman sees it as pre-Fascist (“Fascist Women and the Rhetoric of Virility” in Robin Pickering-Iazzi, ed., Mothers of invention: women, Italian fascism, and culture, University of Minnesota Press, 1995). In certain ways, both are right–depending very much on what one means by fascism, of course. Perhaps more accurately, Steven Aschheim sees it as "almost a parady of eclectic, erotic-liberationist Nietzscheanism" (The Nietzsche legacy in Germany, 1890-1990, University of California Press, 1994).

St.-Point provides yet another glimpse of the period and intellectual milieu out of which Traditionalism arose, even if she had no direct influence on its origins. Nietzsche, avant-garde art... and of course Theosophy too. St.-Point converted to Islam in Morocco in 1918, then spent several years with Blavatsky's works.

She moved to Cairo in 1924, and was initially involved in something like a Cairene version of her earlier life--a "Centre idéiste" and political activity in favor of the Egyptian and Syrian nationalists, rather like Aguéli some years before. She published a French-language journal, Phœnix, revue de la renaissance orientale (despite the widespread view in Egypt at the time that the Oriental Renaissance involved a renaissance of Arabic literature). Political activities ceased in 1928: she was expelled from Egypt, and the order was only rescinded after the intervention of the French embassy, and on condition that she abandon politics. Two years later, Guénon arrived and she became his closest French friend in Cairo.

There are a number of books on her in French, of which the most recent and most complete seems to be Véronique Richard de la Fuente, Valentine de Saint Point, une poétesse dans l'avant-garde Futuriste et méditerranéiste (Édition des Albères 2003).