Kristiane Backer and the Maryamiyya

In the 1980s and 1990s, Kristiane Backer, of German origin, was a glamorous MTV presenter. She was introduced to Islam by Imran Khan, and although her relationship with him ended, her interest in Islam did not. Her 2009 autobiography, From MTV to Mecca: How Islam Inspired My Life, tells of her first encounters with Islam, her meeting with Shaykh Nazim and her conversion in the Naqshbandi milieu, and then her involvement with the Maryamiyya. Imran Khan introduced her to Gai Eaton, who introduced her to Martin Lings, who after some time became her shaykh. She followed him until his death.

From MTV to Mecca is a very personal and honest account of its author’s experiences, difficulties (often related to gender), and triumphs. We meet not only Lings and Eaton but Seyyed Hossein Nasr and many other Maryamis, all referred to with respect, never judged. Schuon is mentioned only in passing; she never met him. Others who appear in the book are never judged either, but what we read of some of the men in her life (not of the Maryamis) may provoke more negative judgments in the reader.

Backer’s autobiography shows the Maryamiyya at its best: profound, inspiring, supportive. Theological issues are occasionally visible, but never noted.

Traditionalism, the myth of Hyperborea, and Masculinity

A new article by Christopher E. Forth traces the development of the myth of Hyperborea and its entanglement with Julius Evola’s views on gender. It is “From the far north to the far right: white masculinity and the myth of Hyperborea,” Journal of Gender Studies online first, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2025.2576814.

Forth finds the origins of the Hyperborean myth in Pinder, and proceeds from there to Helena Blavatsky and the Traditionalists, particularly Evola, who added a north-south axis to the more standard east-west axis, associating the northern (and thus Hyperborean) with the male and the southern with the female. This pair is then adopted by Alexander Dugin and the far right in general, joining concern at what Guillaume Faye called “devirilization.”

Forth argues that myths such as this are important for understanding the appeal of the far right to many men, and that standard arguments referencing patriarchy and the loss of male white (material) privilege do not fully explain what is going on. He sides with the “growing number of gender scholars who acknowledge that… many males… seek existential or ‘ontological security’… in the semblance of a meaningful and inhabitable future.” Concerns about “the erosion of traditional structures of identity, community, and meaning – structures that necessarily include gender roles and expectations” may be legitimate, even if the responses offered by the far right are not.

The remainder of the article discusses Hyperborean memes and the issue of whether Hyperborea is real or mythical. Here Forth cites Greg Johnson, who welcomes myths because they offer “a concrete vision, a story of who we are and who we wish to become... Myths can inspire collective action to change the world.”

An interesting article. It raises questions about the relationship between Evola’s understanding of gender as primarily spiritual and contemporary understandings that might be described as “biological determinism.” In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola wrote:

It is not a coincidence for a being to “awaken” to itself in the body of a man or a woman... The physical difference should be viewed as the equivalent of a spiritual difference; hence a being is a man or a woman in a physical way only because a being is either masculine or feminine in a transcendental way; sexual differentiation, far from being an irrelevant factor in relation to the spirit, is the sign that points to a particular vocation and to a distinctive dharma.

Evola’s “particular vocation” and “distinctive dharma” are spiritual, not really what is usually meant today by “gender roles.”

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 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.

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    

Seyyed Hossein Nasr as shaykh

Traditionalism, René Guénon and the contemporary Maryamiyya are discussed in a new book, Living Sufism in North America: Between Tradition and Transformation by William Rory Dickson (State University of New York Press, 2015). The first part of the book provides an excellent concise history of Sufism, in the Muslim world and then in the West, which is where Guénon is discussed, and contextualized. Then, in the second part, Dickson discusses the responses of ten leading contemporary American Sufi shaykhs, including Seyyed Hossein Nasr of the Maryamiyya, to five topical issues impacting all American Sufis: authority, culture, gender, the relationship between Sufism and Islam, and the participation of non-Muslims.

As Dickson notes, it is clear that Nasr emphasizes Islam more than Frithjof Schuon did, and does not prioritize the esoteric in the same way as Schuon. Commenting on what he calls "California Sufis," those who want to have Sufism without Islam, Nasr notes that they want to have the fruit without the tree, and so have a limited future: the tree is necessary, and non-Islamic Sufism lacks rooting in a divine message. Nasr also emphasizes that traditional forms and practices have value in themselves. This sets him apart from most of the other Sufis interviewed by Dickson, who are much happier to sacrifice forms and practices to adapt to American realities.

Even Nasr, however, makes some concession to realities where gender is concerned. While (unsurprisingly) rejecting feminism in principle, Nasr distinguishes between "instructive" and "administrative" functions within Sufism, and reserves only administrative functions (which others might call positions of power) for men. There are, according to Nasr, ever more "highly qualified women who are interested in the spiritual life... and who also, intellectually, are able to deal with the gnostic, intellectual aspects of Sufism." He explains this partly in sociological terms, as women go to college and experience and act just as men do, but firstly in metaphysical terms, as "compensation for the downfall of men spiritually."

Living Sufism in North America is interesting because it puts into dialogue with each other the views of different Sufi shaykhs on issues that they all encounter but rarely discuss openly or comment on publicly. One exception to this is that another shaykh interviewed by Dickson, Yannis Toussulis, does make one explicit comment on Traditionalist positions. He criticizes the Traditionalist quest for what he calls "hyper-coherence," a quest that he feels leads the Traditionalists to ignore the diversity that has always existed within Islam and Sufism.

My thanks to Neon Knight for drawing my attention to this book as one of the few places in which Nasr publicly discusses his work as Maryami shaykh.

Evola and Futurism

A new exhibition entitled Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe opened at the Guggenheim New York on February 21 and runs until September 1, 2014. Evola is not among the Futurists exhibited, but Valentine de Saint Point is, and her "Manifesto of the Futurist Woman" is among those excerpted on the excellent exhibition website. So is the original 1909 "Manifesto of Futurism" of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, generally accepted as the founder of Futurism. This makes clear that Evola's earlier participation in Futurism before his engagement in Traditionalism was not an aberration but a preparation: Futurism, like Traditionalism, included a radical critique of the status quo. "There is no beauty that does not consist of struggle," wrote Marinetti in his Manifesto. "We intend to glorify war—the only hygiene of the world." Ten years later, in 1919, Marientti helped write the Fascist Manifesto (Il manifesto dei fasci italiani di combattimento).

María Zambrano

I have just stumbled across the work of María Zambrano, the Spanish philosopher and sometime poet who died in 1991.

Zambrano is interesting because she read and was influenced by Guénon in the 1930s and 1940s, during a period when Traditionalism seems otherwise to have had little impact on the Spanish-speaking world, and because she was herself a leftist--the daughter of a member of Socialist Workers Group, the wife of a diplomat of the Spanish Republic that lost the Civil War to Franco, who returned to Spain precisely because the war seemed lost, who left Spain for exile as Barcelona was about to fall to the Nationalists, not to return until 1984. Finally, she is interesting because she was a woman--there have been female Traditionalists, but all the major figures and writers have been male.

Zambrano is in fact so unusual in Traditionalist terms that a careful examination of her relationship with Guénon's work is required. There seems to be general agreement that she was a perennialist and that Guénon was important to her, and that the mystical is central to her work, but she of course had many other sources, from Plotinus to the Spanish tradition, in which some include Ibn Arabi. Zambrano was also involved with the circles around Eranos. Some of these issues are examined by Adele Ricciotti in "Método y simbología en la razón poética de María Zambrano,"Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Skłodowska 36, 1 (2011), pp. 27-39. But more work is needed.

For those who know Spanish,  a beautiful reading of a beautiful passage from Zambrano's Claros del Bosque (1977) is to be found on YouTube.

T. J. Winter on Valentine de St.-Point

Thanks to Mohsin R of Lahore for drawing attention in a comment to this blog to a 2009 lecture by T. J. Winter on “The Prophet (PBUH) and his wives.” This 57-minute lecture is of interest partly because almost half of it deals with Valentine de St.-Point (see also later post), Guénon's friend and associate in Cairo, providing three answers to the question asked by a comment on this blog: why would a woman like her convert to Islam? It is also of interest because Winter is a leading non-Guénonian (small-t) traditionalist, and shows here what an excellent lecturer he is.

So, why did  St.-Point become Muslim? Winter suggests three answers. One is that she saw Islam as an “authenticity that industrial man has finally lost.” Another is that Islam provides an alternative to the “fragmentation of the human persona imposed by Christianity.” And the third answer is that St.-Point was far from being the only European artist who looked to the Muslim world and Islam for answers to questions raised by the problems of European civilization.

I think Winter is  probably right, though I am not sure that “the take on gender” follows as directly from views of sexuality as he seems to think.

The lecture is in six parts.

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).

Valentine de St.-Point

Valentine de St.-Point, Guénon's friend and associate in Cairo, was more important as an artist than I had thought--mostly for her 1917 performance of Metachorie at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and as the only female futurist.

For the 2009 PERFORMA in New York, marking the Centenary of Furturism, Adrien Sina and RoseLee Goldberg are proposing a multi-media symposium, "Valentine de St.-Point: Tragédies Charnelles. Performance, Dance, War, Politics and Eroticism."
Articles that have newly come to my attention include:

• Günter Berghaus, "Dance and the Futurist Woman: The Work of Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953)," Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 11, no. 2 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 27-42.
• Leslie Satin, "Valentine de Saint-Point," Dance Research Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 1-12.

For the start of an investigation of the relationshop between St.-Point's art and her spiritual life, see:

• Nancy Gaye Moore, "The Hermetic Dances of Valentine De St.-Point (1875–1953)," Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars Twenty-second Annual Conference, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico10–13 June 1999.
• Nancy Gaye Moore, "The Convergence of Orientalism and Parisian Occultism in the Dances of Valentine de St.-Point (1875-1953)" Supplement to the Proceedings of the Congress on Research in Dance held at NYU, October 26-28, 2001.

Tavener on the eternal feminine

During June (sorry it's taken me a month to mention it), several newspapers published reports of the premieres of "The Beautiful Names," a setting of the 99 names of God by the leading Maryami musician, Sir John Tavener. The piece was commissioned by the Prince of Wales, and performed in London at Westminster Cathedral, and then in Istanbul at Agia Eirene (see picture).

Among all the press coverage, almost the only article to note a Traditionalist element was in The Economist, which mentioned "a school of thought which maintains that all rigorously followed religious traditions somehow converge at the 'summit.'" No other report got even that far--save for The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins.

Higgins dug deeper, and in a fascinating interview (June 11, 2007) Tavener refers to a vision he once had of Frithjof Schuon and explains about the transcendent unity of religions and the kali yuga (though he doesn't use the terms). Most interesting, however, is what he has to say about "the eternal feminine."

After telling Higgins about "a visionary to whom the Virgin Mary would appear, always naked" (the visionary's name is not given, but it can only have been Schuon), Tavener remarked:

I think our society at the moment - because I am a great critic of modernism - is very masculine-oriented, and the art I see and hear around me has gone beyond masculinity, it doesn't even possess the dignity of being masculine any longer. It is very aggressive and violent. And the feminine dimension is what everyone could do with having a good dose of.

This is somewhat closer to Aristasia than most Maryamis . . .

He added:

Even the prophet Mohammed said that the things that were most pleasing to him in this world were women and perfumes. I think women actually have that effect on me. Every woman I have known has actually deepened my spiritual awareness. Even if I have been a selfish man and treated them badly.

New addresses for Aristasia

It has been pointed out that the addresses I gave for Aristasian websites in the Catalog of Contemporary Traditionalism are no longer working. This is not an isolated problem--the Catalog needs so much time to maintain properly that I may soon have to give up on it.

Anyhow, the main Aristasian address is now www.aristasia.co.uk. Enjoy! And note that sections of the key Aristasian text, The Feminine Universe, are available online.