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.

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.

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/.

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.

Black Nationalist Traditionalism: Kémi Séba

The Pan-African “influencer” Kémi Séba (see photo, originally Stellio Gilles Robert Capo Chichi) has applied the Traditionalist framework to Africa. In his Philosophie de la panafricanité fondamentale (Philosophy of fundamental Pan-Africanism, Editions Fiat Lux, 2023). Séba identifies the deceptive "progress" of modernity with the West and primordial virtue with Africa, the birthplace of humanity. The West appears superior only according to the criteria of modernity; according to Traditionalist criteria, it is the African peoples that are superior, with their knowledge of the true tradition.

Séba was born in France to Beninese parents in 1981, and first came to public attention in France as leader of the “Tribu Ka” (Ka Tribe), a Black Nationalist organization that was dissolved by the Council of Ministers in 2006 because it incited to racial hatred (primarily antisemitism). Séba was subsequently imprisoned in 2008 for reconstituting a dissolved group. He then discovered the work of René Guénon, and converted to Islam, though he does not generally emphasize a Muslim identity—he does not use a Muslim name, and on videos says “peace be upon you” in French rather than Arabic.

In 2011 he moved from France to Senegal, where in 2015 he founded an NGO, Urgences Panafricanistes (Panafricanist Emergencies). More importantly, he became increasingly well known on social media, which is his main platform—and nowadays is quite a sufficient platform in its own. In 2017, he was invited to Moscow by Alexander Dugin, with whom he has subsequently enjoyed good relations, returning to Russia several times. His French citizenship was removed in 2024. He is reported to have been expelled from Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Guinea, and to travel on a diplomatic passport issued by Niger. He has recently been active in his parents’ country of origin, Benin, where he was at first blamed for involvement in a failed 2025 coup attempt, but then stood for election as president in 2026—the election is due on 12 April.

Séba’s Philosophy of fundamental Pan-Africanism explains that the true “war of the worlds” is the war between traditionalism (sic) and modernity (chapter two). The “global black population” is the “guardian of the first tradition” (chapter three). Black peoples had a “metaphysical unity” that appears in various forms across Africa but is clearest in ancient Egyptian religion—Séba follows the model proposed by the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986), according to who the Egyptians were of Black African origin, migrating northwards. In contrast, we now have “the West, the kingdom of modern people, the elect of the age of iron” (chapter four). Humanity has passed from Zep Tepi (ancient Egyptian: first time) to the age of Isfet (ancient Egyptian: chaos)—that is, the Kali Yuga, a phrase he does not use. One result is “Negrophobia, the guiding thread of the end of times” (chapter five), given the inability of Westerners to contemplate the representatives of “the original world.” This did not apply to Guénon, given his “traditionalist initiatic spiritual reform.”

What is needed is “globalized quilombanité” to replace globalized neoliberalism (chapter six). Séba derives the term quilombanité from the Portuguese term quilombismo, coined by the Afro-Brazilian politician Abdias do Nascimento (1914–2011) from the term quilombo, used in Brazil to denote a settlement of escaped slaves. Quilombismo is a form of liberatory communitarianism based on Afro-Brazilian or African culture. Séba added to the socio-economic model of Abdias the formation of “traditionalist initiatic centers” based in the “spirit of the primordial age.” To achieve all this, a metaphysically based sociology and geopolitics are required (chapter seven): a sociology based on tradition, and a geopolitics that breaks Western global dominance. In this last point, we perhaps see the influence of Dugin.

There is surprisingly little Islam in the Philosophy of fundamental Pan-Africanism, but a lot of Traditionalism. The book has been well received on Amazon.fr, with 87% of 200 readers giving it five stars. A (badly) machine-translated English version of a talk about the book given by Séba has attracted 550,000 views on YouTube. Both Séba and the book are far from marginal, then.

The Perennial Philosophy surveyed and compared

A recent book provides a guide to the various versions of the Perennial Philosophy, including the Traditionalist one. It is Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Publishing Company, 2024), 128 pages.

Sawyer taught religion at the Maine College of Art & Design, lectured at a range of other places including the Esalen Institute, and was a friend of Huston Smith, whose authorized biography he wrote. He also wrote a biography of Aldous Huxley. He knows Traditionalism well, but is not himself a Traditionalist, placing himself half way between René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, who he sees as unusually dogmatic, and Huxley, who—in his view—held that all truths are provisional. He lists the most important influences on his thought as Huxley, Alan Watts, Huston Smith, Frances Vaughan, Stanislav Grof, and Ram Dass.

The book’s main argument is that the Perennial Philosophy is an approach to understanding “life’s bigger questions” that is a permanent part of human thought, and that although its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s has now passed, it still answers life’s bigger questions pretty well, and is still the part of what is taught by many contemporary spiritual teachers. The key concept is the UME or Unitive Mystical Experience.

The book is written in a very accessible style with short chapters and uses many anecdotes to make its points. It is divided into three parts, “Starting Out,” “Looking Deeper,” and “Exploring Specific Topics.” “Starting Out” leads up to what Huxley called the “minimum working hypothesis,” the common ground shared by so many mystics—one way of defining the Perennial Philosophy. “Looking Deeper” takes us through the nature of being and the path to enlightenment. The “Specific Topics” explored in the last part are religion, God, enlightenment, science and knowing, law, psychology, nature and art. Then comes a chapter in “The Perennial Philosophy Today” that lists some major contemporary teachers and explores their positions on particular issues. In all these chapters, Sawyer explains the perspectives of the major Perennialist writers, including the Traditionalists, as one school among others.

The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded is an excellent introduction for the general reader, especially the seeker. It is also an interesting comparative study, though the accessible style and anecdotes that make it appealing to the general reader can become an obstacle for the more specialized reader, who is evidently not Sawyer’s intended audience. Even so, an important book, and recommended.

New Book on the Reception of Traditionalism in Germany

Guest post by Moritz Maurer, University of Vienna. 

Felix Herkert has just published Die integrale Tradition. Rezeptionsgeschichte der traditionalen Schule im deutschen Sprachraum (The Integral Tradition: A History of the Reception of the Traditional School in the German-speaking world), Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2025.

With this monograph, which is partly based on the author's earlier works, Herkert aims to address a major gap in research on Traditionalism: its reception in the German-speaking cultural sphere. He focuses on what he sees as the core of the Traditionalist school, the works of René Guénon (1886-1951) and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), the latter understood as the most prominent thinker who adapted Guénonian thought in his later work. Julius Evola (1898-1974) is mentioned several times but not systematically investigated.

Sadly, it is hardly an unbiased piece of scholarship. It lags behind the current state of the art, especially in the historical field, which is often given too little space. This seems partly due to ideological reasons, as Mark Sedgwick's works are dismissed as "biased" (pp. 24, fn. 20; 49-50), while preference is given to questionable “scene” literature. 

Part 1.1 provides very brief biographies of (more or less) notable Traditionalists. The biography of René Guénon (1886-1951; pp. 11-24) provides an informative overview of Guénon's Traditionalist works. After a short discussion of terminology, part 1.3 offers a detailed overview of relevant publications, translations and relevant journals.

Chapter 2 unfolds the reception of the Integral Tradition in the German-speaking world. Probably the most interesting case is that of the German philosopher Leopold Ziegler (1881-1958; pp. 69-95). As Herkert points out, it was Ziegler who coined the term "integral tradition," which is commonly used in German, in 1936 (already on p. 45, fn. 48). Ziegler temporarily became a kind of pupil of Guénon, to whose work he was introduced by Siegfried Lang (1887-1970) and André Préau (1893-1976), most likely in 1931. Herkert describes the relationship as initially one of enthusiastic acceptance, which then gave way to appreciative distancing. In the following section, Herkert gives an interesting overview of Ziegler’s Traditionalist monographs Überlieferung (Tradition, 1936), Apollons letzte Epiphanie (Apollo’s Last Epiphany, 1937), and Menschwerdung (Becoming Human, 1948). Other noteworthy examples he touches on are Walter Heinrich (1902–1984), a member of Othmar Spann’s intellectual circle, and the New-Right author Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner (1939–2011), who drew especially on Evola and Guénon in his later Christian-perennialist writings.

In section 2.2, Herkert follows rather loose connections to Traditionalism which can be found in the work of various other intellectuals. While many of these passages are interesting in themselves, the connections remain largely at the level of vague references or rather critical contact. The sources themselves are often rather enigmatic, such as the few, if sometimes euphoric, statements by Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) about Guénon. The next section follows the so far largely overlooked relationship between researchers of Indian art history from German-speaking countries and Traditionalism.

A major weakness of the second part is the author’s neglect of essential secondary literature. For example, the recurring theme of the Reich omits any reference to Richard Faber’s extensive work: These gaps undermine the section’s scholarly depth.

In his Conclusion, Herkert notes that the few German Traditionalist writings are mainly Christian, linked to Romantic philosophy, and more philosophical than initiatory. Here, this reader is happy to follow him. Some conclusions, however, seem speculative—such as attributing the limited reception of Traditionalism to its incompatibility with the Federal Republic’s democratic consensus. Nevertheless, the study opens a valuable field for further research.

Traditionalism now available in Italian

Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Pelican Books) is now available in Italian, as Tradizionalismo: Verso un nuovo Ordine Mondiale (Rome: Atlantide), €22.

It was the suggestion of Atlantide that the English "sacred order" should become a "new world order" in Italian.

Kathleen Raine, almost a Traditionalist

A new study of the poet Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) has just been published: Jenny Messenger, Kathleen Raine: Classics and Consciousness (Bloomsbury 2025). This supplements the “authorized biography” by Philippa Bernard, No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine (Shepheard Walwyn 2012). 

Raine was almost a Traditionalist, and it is interesting to explore how she differed from the Traditionalists on whom this blog focuses. She was a perennialist and worked (in her own words) to “reaffirm the Perennial Philosophy which, like an underground river, has flowed through all civilizations and all ages, and wherever it sends up springs and fountains, Beauty and Wisdom have flowered.” She was well versed in the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, and in Messenger’s view built on their work, though it is not explained quite how. She also worked with individual Traditionalists in England. Her Temenos journal (now the Temenos Academy Review) was established with the help of Keith Critchlow, Brian Keeble and Philip Sherrard, all of whom were probably Maryamis. Speakers at her Temenos Academy have included many Traditionalists. Raine also disliked the modern world, and—like many but not all Traditionalists—was a scholar who was somewhat on the margins of the mainstream, since she insisted that the important thing about ancient texts was their meaning for people today, more than their place in the historical context.

Several things make Raine different, however. One is that although she disliked the modern world, she did not systematically attack it or develop a theoretical basis for condemning it. Another is that she admired and studied two (relatively) modern figures, William Blake and W. B. Yeats. Then come her ancient sources: Plato and the Neoplatonists, who the Traditionalists have generally ignored—wrongly, in my view, since the Sufi philosophy that Traditionalists have studied with such attention contains much that is derived from Neoplatonism. As Messenger puts it,

She did not view eastern religions and philosophies as entirely hers, however. Hinduism and Buddhism were not her culture or tradition, she felt. Plato and Plotinus, enfolded within the grand arc of Western civilization, were – despite the fact that the Neoplatonists were not at all ‘western’ and instead were from places like Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

Finally, Raine was a woman, which—for some reason I have never understand—none of the major figures in the Traditionalist movement have been.

Against the Modern World in Polish

 

Against the Modern World is now available in Polish, as Przeciw nowoczesnemu światu. Tradycjonalizm i sekretna historia intelektualna XX wieku.

It is published by Instytut Myśli Politycznej in Warsaw, and sells for 45 zł. Available here.

The translation includes a short preface written by me for the Polish edition.

René Guénon and Henry Corbin

A recent publication, New Perspectives on Henry Corbin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), edited by Hadi Fakhoury, available here, has prompted me to reflect on the relationship between Corbin (pictured left) and Guénon.

At first sight, Corbin and Guénon were very different types of people. Corbin was a scholar who spent his life within French academia, occupying several prestigious posts. Guénon was rejected by French academia, and spent his life outside it, often criticizing it. On the other hand, their paths did somehow cross, given the close relationship between Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and the Italian scholar Francesco Piraino has recently drawn our attention to their very similar contemporary impact: reading Corbin, like reading Guénon, is often important for the trajectories of French converts to Sufi Islam. The Traditionalist author Patrick Laude has written about Corbin together with Guénon and Schuon (see here).

Fakhoury’s volume helps make clear where Corbin and Guénon agreed and where they differed. Firstly, Corbin was not a self-distancing academic scholar. He was never just a historian of ideas, or even a philosopher in the normal sense. He engaged actively in the exploration of the human relationship with the transcendent, and was as interested in actual spiritual experience as in written attempts to explain it. Secondly, he was in many ways a perennialist, believing in an “Oriental” or “Iranian” “Hellenism” that included Zoroastrianism, Plato, Proclus, Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi—not as a succession of historical figures, but as ways of accessing truth. Thirdly, the distinction between esoteric and exoteric was central to his thought, as was—to a lesser extent—initiation. Fourthly, he had a low opinion of the modern West, preferring Oriental Hellenism to “Latinism,” and seeing modernity as lamentably desacralized. Finally, at least towards the end of his life, he sought for surviving transmissions of what Guénon would have called the primordial tradition in ancient orders (the Order of St Jean of Jerusalem) and Freemasonry. Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s chapter on “Henry Corbin as Knight of the Temple” in Fakhoury’s volume sheds much light on this quest.

And yet Corbin’s perennialism was not Guénon’s. Even if Corbin was never just a scholar, he worked on original texts in their original languages with considerable scholarly rigor. When it came to perennialism, Corbin was interested in Christianity and Iranian Hellenism, while Guénon was interested in Hinduism and Arab Islam. Corbin was a Protestant, and Guénon abhorred Protestantism. Corbin valued Plato, and Guénon did not. Guénon’s perennialism derived from Theosophy, while Corbin’s (perennial) Hellenism derived from the Russian Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky (1893-1979). The esoteric/exoteric pair is hard to avoid if one looks in certain areas of Islam, and while Corbin’s esoteric was located primarily in what he famously termed the mundus imaginalis, the “imaginary” between the realm of the forms and the experiential world, Guénon’s esoteric was mostly in the teachings of the primordial tradition. For Guénon, anti-modernism was primary, but for Corbin it was secondary.

In the end, the two men were also of different generations. Most of Corbin’s (1903-1978) work was published after Guénon’s death in 1951. Corbin's crucial Sohravardi d’Alep, fondateur de la doctrine illuminative was published in 1939, but—presumably because of the disruption caused by the Second World War—was not reviewed in Études traditionnelles until 1947. And even then it received only one (rather dismissive) paragraph, which can be read here.

More research on Evola

2025 is a great year for those interested in Julius Evola. First, an exhaustive biography (actually published in 2024) has become available: Andrea Scarabelli’s Vita avventurosa di Julius Evola. Una biografia (The Adventurous Life of Julius Evola: A Biography), 816 pages, in Italian. Secondly, the journal Aries has published a special edition on Evola with four excellent articles.

I have not yet read Scarabelli’s book, but hope to, and to review it in this blog. I expect it to be well-informed, as Scarabelli is deputy secretary of the J. Evola Foundation, which houses Evola’s archive, and I also expect it not to be entirely objective, for the same reason—Scarabelli’s role in the Evola Foundation. This was established by Evola himself “to reaffirm the traditional values of culture… [and] enhance and disseminate the thought and work of Julius Evola.” It is not a neutral body.

Now to the Aries special issue, available here. It is edited by Julian Strube and entitled “Far-Right Politics and the Study of Esotericism,” but it is mostly about Evola, though it includes one article (on “The German Jewish Occult: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Philosophy of the ‘Irrational’” by Ansgar Martins) that does not mention Evola, and which this post will ignore. The articles that deal with Evola are discussed in turn. It is therefore a very long post, but it makes sense to discuss these articles together.

✸ The first article is by Peter Staudenmaier, “Evola’s Afterlives: Esotericism and Politics in the Posthumous Reception of Julius Evola,” Aries 25 (2025): 163–193. It shows that Evola was closer to the Italian Fascist Party and to the German National Socialists than he later admitted.

After the end of the Second World War, Evola airbrushed his record. Distancing himself from the Fascist Party, he emphasized that he had never been a member. What he did not mention was that this was because his application to join the party was rejected, twice. The Fascists found him too abrasive, and were nervous about his strange connections. This did not stop him playing a larger role in Fascist racism and antisemitism than he later admitted, however.

The story is much the same when it comes to the Nazis. Not everyone in the SS approved of him, as has often been emphasized. Overall, however, the SS worked happily enough with him, and he was at one point on the payroll of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service, by then a branch of the SS).

This certainly modifies the general view of Evola's life, but does not require any major reassessment of his work. There was already evidence pointing in this direction, and Evola never claimed to have been an active anti-fascist or anti-Nazi, nor could anyone sensible take him as such.

Staudenmaier notes that “The persistence of profoundly distorted images of Evola for decades, including scholarly venues, should be occasion for reflection.” One explanation, he suggests, is partly that the evola Foundation has never allowed much access to its archive. Another is that many people have followed Evola’s own later accounts too uncritically. And then “difficult questions arise with Hans Thomas Hakl, whose work has molded so much of Evola’s international reputation.” Hakl (born 1947) is discussed in more detail below.

✸ Then comes Davide Marino and Milan Reith, “Pagan Imperialisms: Julius Evola’s ‘Esoteric Collaborationism,’” Aries 25 (2025): 194–225. It shows that Evola’s reading of esotericism sometimes followed political imperatives. The “collaborationism” of the title is political, demonstrated through a comparison of two different versions of Evola’s Pagan Imperialism, the Italian original of 1928 and the German version of 1933. Each is placed in its political context, and differences between them are highlighted.

The conclusion is that “Evola seamlessly shifted from one political position to another, continually finding new ‘esoteric’ justifications for his ideological stances,” and this is argued convincingly. As the authors say, “The cult of Mithra could be the herald of the ‘Mediterranean tradition’ in 1928 yet become ‘the avatâra of the ancient Aryan god of the luminous sky’ in 1933. Italians could alternatively be ‘Mediterranean and thus essentially Western,’ distinct from ‘the race of blond Germanic barbarians,’ or ‘Aryans, heirs of the sacred Caesars and the royal sons of Thor and Odin.’” Certainly, on these occasions, political logic was guiding the esotericism, not the other way round. In future, we will need to look more carefully for the political logic, and take the esotericism less at face value.

✸ Next comes Moritz Maurer, “Reading Evola in Germany,” Aries 25 (2025): 226–257. This shows that Evola’s works in German served as occasion for internal Nazi discussions. As Maurer puts it, Evola “could serve as an inspiring intellectual but more often acted as a defining foil against which differing concepts and notions of National Socialism and Germanness were negotiated.” This article is especially interesting since so little is known of the reception of any variety of Traditionalism in Germany. It is based on reviews of Evola’s works in the German press from 1933 to 1943, sources used by neither Scarabelli or Hakl

Maurer explains that “that National Socialism lacked a unified ideological doctrine” and that its success was in part due to its ability to be inclusive—within certain very clear limits. The most important of these were the rejection of anything Jewish, democratic, or Bolshevik. Evola transgressed none of these limits. His criticism of modernity could be read as criticism of the Weimar Republic and all that it had stood for. Reviews of his work could therefore, as Maurer argues, allow debates internal to National Socialist thought, notably over the relationship with the Catholic Church and with Neopaganism. This was one reason for the initial Nazi interest in Evola. Another was that his status within Italian Fascism seems to have been generally overestimated. Although sometimes welcome, his ideas were more often rejected as un-German. Despite the alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, there was little desire to incorporate Italian Fascism into Nazism. The Italians were Italians, not Germans.

The two works that led to most discussion were Heidnischer Imperialismus (Pagan Imperialism) and Erhebung wider die moderne Welt (Revolt against the Modern World), both published in the relatively peaceful years before 1940. The situation after 1940 was different, as Maurer explains, with stricter censorship and, beyond that, paper shortages and economic challenges for publishers. Given this, the 1943 publication of Grundrisse der faschistischen Rassenlehre (Fundamentals of Fascist Racial Science) indicates very definite approval within the Nazi state, and also the Italian state—Mussolini himself approved the translation, according to Scarabelli, who gives no source for this information. On this occasion, Evola’s status as a representative of Italian Fascism was perhaps not over-estimated. The book, however, did not give rise to much discussion, presumably given the circumstances of the times.

The Nazi reception of Evola tells us more about Nazism than it does about Evola, even though Evola did manage his reception in Germany, adjusting his views to the German market in his German translations, as Marino and Reith showed. Criticism of Evola’s conception of aristocracy by Bernhard Kummer, a prominent Nazi theorist and Nordicist, is particularly interesting. Kummer “counter[ed] Evola’s aristocratic-pagan ideas,” writes Maurer, “with a völkisch-Protestant conception of Germanness, contrasting aristocracy with the idea of Volksgemeinschaft.” The same position was taken in a journal controlled by a more senior Nazi ideologist, Walther Darré. Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the nationally and racially defined people irrespective of class, was not exactly a Nazi dogma, but was very close to one, and in this respect Evola’s views contradicted Nazism, being more individualist and thus, in some sense, more liberal. More on this below.

As Maurer notes, the picture of Evola in the Third Reich that emerges from his work differs from the postwar attempt by Evola to distance himself from Nazism, and from the pictures painted by his more partisan chroniclers (Hakl, Scarabelli).

✸ Finally comes Julian Strube, “Esotericism, the New Right, and Academic Scholarship,” Aries 25 (2025): 304–353. This long article (50 pages) falls into two parts, one of which complements Maurer by dealing with reading Evola in postwar Germany, and one of which looks mostly at the reception not of Evola, but of Hakl. I will deal with these two parts separately.

✩ In the first part of his article, Strube covers the relatively well-known topic of the international reception of Evola by the New Right. More importantly, he covers the postwar German-language reception of Evola, about which far less is known.

Strube clearly demonstrates the importance of Hakl in the German-language reception of Evola, both as translator and as commentator. Armin Mohler (1920–2003), the secretary of Ernst Jünger, popularized (from 1949) the idea of an interwar “Conservative Revolution” group that was distinct from Nazism and so, by implication, innocent of Nazism’s crimes. The association between Evola’s activities and the Conservative Revolution was later encouraged by Evola himself, and followed by others, including Hakl, who systematically presented Evola is the most favorable possible light. 

Strube does not inquire into Hakl’s motivations, but notes how a sanitized Evola serves the objectives of the New Right, and the number of New Right journals in which Hakl published: Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Junge Freiheit, Sezession, Neue Ordnung, Deutsche Stimme, and Criticón. Strube does not mention Hakl's explanation, that he chose these journals because they were interested in Evola when nobody else was (see interview here), nor does he mention the alternative explanation of Hakl’s favorable presentation of Evola: that he wanted to save the good esoteric content from being drowned out by the bad political elements (see Francesco Baroni, here). But whatever Hakl’s motivations, his role in the popularization of Evola in German New Right circles is clear.

Strube also covers the later reception of Evola by Martin Sellner (born 1989), the Austrian leader of the Identitarian movement and one of the leading figures in today’s German as well as the Austrian Radical Right, and by Martin Lichtmesz (born 1976, legally Martin Semlitsch), another Identitarian, and at the Institut für Staatspolitik and in its journal Sezession.

Interestingly, Strube notes in passing that the concept of ethnopluralism, central to today’s Identitarians and thus to the Radical Right as a whole, was developed not by GRECE in France as is generally thought (and as I thought myself), but by Henning Eichberg (1942–2017), a German-Danish sociologist, in 1973. Ethnopluralism, as Strube writes, “calls for separated ‘ethnic communities’ (Volksgemeinschaften).” It is unclear whether Eichberg used the term Volksgemeinschaft or whether this is Strube’s own gloss, but in either case it raises the interesting question of the relationship between today’s Identitarianism and the Nazi quasi-dogma that Evola rejected.An obvious difference is what was and is seen as the opposite to the Volksgemeinschaft: class struggle for the Nazis, and bland cosmopolitanism for the New Right.

✩ In the second part of his article, Strube turns to the reception of Evola in European academia, notably that part associated with the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). Here I must declare an interest: I was one of the founder members of ESSWE, and served on its board for many years, and I am also friends with several of the scholars who will be mentioned below. Despite this, I write as neutrally as possible.

Strube demonstrates—though he would not put it this way—that many scholars took Hakl too much at face value as a reliable source on Evola. He does not mention my own work, but he might well have done so: I drew on Hakl’s work in my Against the Modern World (2004), and asked him to write the chapter on Evola in my collection on Key Thinkers of the Radical Right (2019). In retrospect, having read the first part of Strube’s article, I was perhaps at times too uncritical, though I followed normal scholarly practice in using other, mostly primary, sources, and as a result I think that the overall picture I have painted of Evola over the years has not been too far wrong—though I admit that I was surprised, and also amused, to learn that the reason he never joined the Fascist Party was that they would not accept his multiple applications. One of the reasons that I relied on Hakl’s work twenty years ago was that there was then almost nothing else available, and even today it would be hard to identify an expert other than Paul Furlong, author of Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola (2011), who has now retired and whose former colleagues have all lost contact with him. Scarabelli of the Evola Foundation, whose book was mentioned at the start of this post, is too obviously partisan. Hakl was never that obviously partisan. This was another reason that I relied on his work: it is not actually that bad. The presentation of Evola is certainly favorable, but Hakl’s scholarship is otherwise generally good.

Strube, however, takes a different view of the academic reception of Hakl’s work. He looks at the work of Joscelyn Godwin (b. 1945), Marco Pasi (b. 1968), and Wouter Hanegraaff (b. 1961), and identifies “a hermeneutic... that actively prevents the rigorous research and possibly uncomfortable self-reflection needed. The motivations for these tendencies are most likely diverse and not necessarily ideologically driven, but they constitute a failure, if not active resistance, to reflect on the history of the field of ‘Western esotericism’ that continues to shape its scholarly debates.” He also writes of “collaborations with far-right milieus.” “It is particularly problematic” he concludes, “when such collaboration leads to the adoption of narratives and polemical rhetoric... Even when the reasons for such reactions are not ideologically motivated, they at least distort an understanding of not only the historical but also the contemporary dynamics between far-right politics and esotericism.”

This, I think, is going too far, even if he concedes that “motivations… are… not necessarily ideologically driven.” The only real collaboration with far-right milieus was Hakl’s, although Godwin did indeed collaborate with Hakl who organized the second of a series of meetings known as the Palladian Academy that had been started by Godwin, and Pasi and Hanegraaff have defended Hakl (see Pasi in Religiographies, here). Strube notes that “there is nothing to suggest that these Palladian Academy meetings were political in nature or guided by any particular ideology,” so does that collaboration really matter? 

So far as I know, the reason that Pasi and Hanegraaff defended Hakl was that they respected his pioneering work on esotericism as a whole, including his fine study of Eranos (Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Routledge 2013), and that they did not see him as an activist for the Radical Right. In which they may well have been right, despite his choice of journals for his articles on Evola. 

The only “adoption of narratives” that Strube seems to demonstrate is that Hanegraaff adopted Hakl’s narrative that “The chief source of attacks against esotericism and New Age movements was and still remains the Frankfurt School” (Hakl, quoted approvingly by Hanegraaff, quoted by Strube). This might indeed slightly “distort [the] understanding of… the contemporary dynamics between far-right politics and esotericism,” but Hanegraaff himself insists that he arrived at this conclusion independently and quoted Hakl not because he was his source, but simply because he agreed with his assessment (personal communication). Strube, then, really demonstrates no collaboration, impact, or lack of scholarly rigor.

✸ The special issue opens with an introduction jointly written by Egil Asprem, editor-in-chief of Aries, and Strube. This takes some of the positions from the second part of Strube’s article even further, suggesting that “the field of ‘Western esotericism’ has proved a hospitable environment for various misconceptions and tendentious narratives about Evola, his politics, and its relation to esotericism. This is all the more problematic because some of the esotericism scholarship on Evola that emerged in the 1990s resulted from collaboration with leading far-right stakeholders.” Certainly, Hakl collaborated with leading far-right stakeholders, and promoted some tendentious narratives. That is not, in my view, enough to condemn an entire field. The introduction also states that Evola’s status as a key thinker of the radical right is “the result of concerted efforts by far-right actors.” This is true. And the actors concerned are not part of the field of Western esotericism, a field that produced the four, or perhaps three and a half, excellent articles contained in this special edition.

Was Gandhi a Traditionalist?

Michael Allen, a philosopher at East Tennessee State University, has worked on protest movements for many years, and has just published a book about Gandhi in which he asks the unexpected question of whether Gandhi has a Traditionalist. The answer, he argues, is no, but the question still gives rise to an interesting discussion, in chapter 7 of Allen's Gandhi’s Popular Sovereignty of Truth: Devotional Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), available here.

Gandhi was, like Guénon, a fierce critic of modernity, and also a perennialist. So far, so similar. The difference, according to Allen, is that while the Traditionalist route to personal or political realization is esoteric, Gandhi’s route was exoteric: his “devotional democracy” depended on “the whole sovereign people together speaking God’s voice,” not just on an elite.

Allen also compares Gandhi to the contemporary Identitarians, who draw on Traditionalism. Here the difference is about “pluralism of ethno-cultural traditions.” While the Identitarians suppose that “each discrete culture may flourish only in its own territory of origin,” which Allen sees as “an impossible global ethno-cultural apartheid,” Gandhi rejects this idea and looks towards "a wide pluralism" instead.

I am not sure that Allen has got the Identitarians quite right, but I am certainly convinced that Gandhi was not a Guénonian. He was closer to Guénon than I had thought, though, perhaps because I have not previously thought about him enough.

Traditionalism available in paperback

Mark Sedgwick, Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (Pelican Books) is now available in paperback, at £10.99 in the UK, also available in Europe, but not in the US, where it's still $29.99 for the hardback from OUP.

Against the Modern World in Persian

 

Against the Modern World is now available in Persian, as ستیز با جهان مدرن (سنت‌گرایی و تاریخ فکری پنهان سدۀ بیستم), published by نشرنو in Tehran. Many thanks to Alireza Bashardoost and Sina Bastani, who pursued this project despite many obstacles. The translation includes a short preface written for the Iranian edition.

Copies available from https://nashrenow.com/product/against-the-modern-world/.

More on Traditionalism in Hungary

There is a good discussion of Traditionalism in Hungary in a new book on Modern Hungarian Political Thought: Ideologies and Traditions by Zoltán Balázs and Csaba Molnár (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). It comes in a chapter on “National Radicalism, Radical Conservatism, National Socialism and Traditionalism,” available here. Traditionalism is discussed along with these other trends because they are all to the right of moderate or classical conservatism. 

Traditionalism is introduced first in general terms, and then in the Hungarian context. “Much as elsewhere in Europe,” write Balázs and Molnár, “traditionalism in Hungary was never a serious political movement. However, it can boast some fascinating intellectuals.” They then discuss these: the Dialogical School of Béla Tábor (1907–1992) and Lajos Szabó (1902–1967), who attacked modernity in their Vádirat a szellem ellen (Indictment Against the Spirit, 1936), and whose group Béla Hamvas (1897–1968), discussed in earlier posts here and here, joined. 

Then we have András László (born 1984) and Tibor Imre Baranyi (born 1967), also discussed in posts already linked, and their influence on recent politics. Balázs and Molnár conclude: “In its early phase, some important politicians of… Jobbik, including its previous chairman, Gábor Vona, were heavily influenced by these traditionalist tenets. However… it has been radical conservatism… that has been the most successful in absorbing certain traditionalist arguments, mostly the modernity-criticizing ones.” It would be interesting to see this second argument more fully developed.

Between Hamvas in the first generation and László and Baranyi today, Balázs and Molnár insert Thomas Molnar (1921-2010), an American philosopher of Hungarian origin who became popular in Hungary after 1989 and who they also class as a Traditionalist. Molnar is certainly close to Guénon’s Traditionalism as an anti-modernist who regrets desacralization, values esotericism, and condemns occultism as a modern confusion, and he cites Guénon as well as Mircea Eliade and Titus Burckhardt, but his focus is mostly that of the mainstream American Right, certainty in his earlier years, before he moved in the direction of Alain de Benoist. He seems not close enough to Guénon to be classed as a Traditionalist, but I may be wrong.

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.

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.

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.