Ivan Aguéli's art

Aguéli, Landscape with tower

Aguéli, Palm grove

Although Ivan Aguéli is best known to readers of this blog as the proto-Traditionalist who introduced Guénon to Sufism (and was also instrumental in introducing the French public to Ibn Arabi), he is still best known in his native Sweden as a painter. The Museum of Art in Gothenburg, Sweden's second city, is currently exhibiting six of his works, all small format, as part of its permanent exhibition of "Nordic art at the turn of the century." Pride of place is given to "Landscape with tower" (shown above, left), which may be an imaginary landscape, as there is something of the minaret about the tower. Then comes "Palm grove," which is probably an Egyptian scene, and some European landscapes (not shown here).

The same exhibition also has a large oil by Prince Eugen, the member of the Swedish royal family whose grant to the exiled Aguéli in Barcelona arrived too late, after Aguéli's death. It was Prince Eugeen who then took charge of and preserved Aguéli's paintings, some of which were acquired by the Gothenburg museum in 1920.

Birger, Scandinavian Artists' Lunch

Bernard, Still life with jug

For a Swedish painter to go to Paris at the end of the nineteenth century was not unusual. The museum also has a large oil of the Scandinavian Artists' Lunch at the Café Ledoyen, evidently an annual event. This lunch was in 1886, and the painting does not include Aguéli, who had then only just arrived in Paris.

Finally, the museum also has an oil by Emile Bernard, the French painter in whose studio Aguéli at one point worked in Paris, who is said also to have had an interest in esotericism and in Egypt, though I have not confirmed this. One can see the influence of Bernard on some of Aguéli's other paintings, though not those in the Gothenburg museum or in this blog post.

My thanks to Göran Larsson and Henrik Bogdan of the University of Gothenburg whose invitation to lecture in Gothenburg (on "Sufism as Western esotericism") is what led to my visit to the Museum of Art there.

Dugin in Turkey

A new article covers Dugin's Turkish contacts, with Doğu Perinçek and his İşçi Partisi (IP, Workers' Party). The article is by Martin Riexinger, "'Turkey, Completely Independent!' Contemporary Turkish left-wing Nationalism (ulusal sol/ulusalcilik): its Predecessors, Objectives and Enemies," Oriente Moderno 90, no. 2, pp. 353-95.

Riexinger explains that IP is one of two major organizations on the Turkish nationalist left. It generally receives few votes in elections, but its importance comes not from its electoral activities, but from the fact that it--like Türk Solu, the other major left nationalist group--draws its support from "members of the army, the bureaucracy, the academe and the professions." Thus for the Eurasia Conference it organized in 2004 it attracted the support of Süleyman Demirel and the presence of diplomats from the Turkic republics, China and Iran, as well as of the former head of the National Security Council, General Tuncer Kılınç.

The IP was established out of the Sosyalist Parti in 1992 by Perinçek, formerly the leader of the Türkiye İhtilalcı İşçi ve Köylü Partisi (Revolutionary Workers' and Farmers' Party of Turkey), and before that a Maoist student leader. The IP's leftism now consists primarily in the use of some Marxist terminology and a "keen interest in workers' and farmers' protests" (despite its middle-class membership), and its nationalism consists primarily in its stance against the threats that the US-dominated New World Order allegedly pose to Turkish independence, and thus also in opposition to the EU. In this Perinçek needs allies, and this is the basis of his relationship with Dugin, whose stand against the US and globalization Perinçek shares and supports.

The IP is generally anti-religious, seeing religion as reactionary, and drawing on European post-Feuerbachian criticism of religions. It thus has no interest in Dugin's Traditionalism, which in Turkey is associated with the Nakşibendis and the Nurcus, the latter of whom  are among the religious groups that the IP attacks. It also attacks the Islamists, Christian missionaries, and the Gülen movement, which emphasizes dialog with non-Muslims. Given the rapprochement between nationalist right and nationalist left that has already taken place, however, Riexinger considers that a future rapprochement between the nationalist left and some Islamists is not impossible, given that they both share the same enemies--the EU, the USA, missionaries, Jews, Freemasons, and homosexuals--and "subordinate the individual to the collective and ... cannot imagine something more horrible than a culturally heterogenous Turkey."

An interesting detail: Russian nationalists have generally been supporters of their fellow-Orthodox Greeks. Dugin, however, has supported Turkey rather than Greece in Cyprus, which has the important consequence of making him acceptable to Turkish nationalists, on the grounds that the Greeks are a maritime (and so an Atlantic) civilization rather than a Eurasian one.

Dugin and "occult dissident culture"

 A new article of mine on Dugin: Mark Sedgwick, “Occult Dissident Culture: The Case of Aleksandr Dugin.” In The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, Birgit Menzel, Michael Hagemeister and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed.s (Munich: Otto Sagner, 2011), pp. 273-92.

The article argues that "A form of Traditionalism that is both distinctively Soviet and distinctively Russian ... lies at the heart of Dugin’s politics. This form of Traditionalism is, in important ways, a continuation into the post-Soviet era of one aspect of Soviet civilization, occult dissident culture."

Currently seems to be available only from the book's publisher, at www.kubon-sagner.de/opac.html?record=6019

Blog redesign

Regular visitors to this blog will notice that it has been redesigned. After almost six years, even a blog on Traditionalism and the Traditionalists needs a redesign.

Anarchist Traditionalism: Hakim Bey

Arthur Versluis's recent interview (see below) with the American anarchist Peter Lamborn Wilson, who also writes as Hakim Bey, suggests that Lamborn Wilson’s anarchism is a leftist form of Political “Soft” Traditionalism.

Lamborn Wilson was born in 1945, and after developing an interest in Sufism in New York, dropped out of Columbia University and left the US in 1968. He settled in Tehran in 1970, and stayed there until 1978, editing the journal of Nasr’s Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, Sophia Perennis. It is unlikely that someone in this position would not have been a Maryami, and although Lamborn Wilson has never described himself as a former Maryami, everything about his biography suggests this. Lamborn Wilson certainly became Muslim, and still describes himself as a Shi’i Muslim, if only on the basis that he sees himself as still being everything that he has ever been. It seems, however, that he does not now follow mainstream Muslim practice.

Lamborn Wilson left Iran at the revolution, as did Nasr, and over the next seven years moved from the Maryamiyya to anarchism, publishing CHAOS: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism in 1985 under the pseudonym Hakim Bey, which he still uses. Quite what happened between 1978 and 1985 is unclear. Part of the explanation is evidently intellectual, and Lamborn Wilson’s later views on Traditionalism are considered below. Another part of the explanation is evidently personal, as Lamborn Wilson participated in the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBA), and his first use of the pseudonym Hakim (though not yet Hakim Bey) was in 1983, when he published Crowstone: The Chronicles of Qamar, a Sword and Sorcery Boy-love Tale (Amsterdam: Spartacus). Although the Maryamiyya is reported to have tolerated some sexual behavior that mainstream Islam forbids, there are no reports of the Maryamiyya considering “man-boy love” acceptable.

Although some critics of Lamborn Wilson dismiss his work as no more than an attempt to justify his own practice of “man-boy love,” in my view that work is too substantial and influential to be so dismissed.

In the Versluis interview, Lamborn Wilson makes clear that what he now values in Traditionalism is its critique of modernity, not its “proposal” for responding to modernity. As an anarchist, Lamborn Wilson gives the state–and especially the all-powerful contemporary state–a prime position in his own critique of modernity. His own proposals lead in a number of directions, none of them revolutionary in the normal sense, given his perception that the state always manages to co-opt revolutions. He stresses that his proposals should be taken in a poetic as much as a literal sense. The most famous of them is the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ),“an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it” (TAZ, quoted in Sellars 2011). A less famous proposal, more emphasized in his interview with Versluis, is a form of “even more traditional Traditionalism” reminiscent of that of Khozh-Akhmed Noukhaev: to go back even further into the past, to before the state, to the tribe, and to the form of religiosity associated with it: individual spirituality. The tribe, Lamborn Wilson, admits, is not perfect: “Violence is real, and it will always be real, and disappointment and death are always there.” But at least the tribe is not the state.

Lamborn Wilson distinguishes between religion and spirituality, between the organized and the individual. He associates organized religion with the state, as “part of the Babylonian scam.” Individual spirituality, in contrast, is associated with the tribe, and with the ever-present rebellion of the individual against the state, which produces “countertraditions or alternate traditions,” some of them spiritual, often Hermetic. Among these  alternate traditions he counts Sufism, which is anarchist in that it  understands that “this social world is illusory.” Lamborn Wilson thus prefers Henry Corbin’s vision of “the medieval manyness of Islam” to “the rigid systems of Neotraditionalism that stem from Guénon.” Guénon, then, stands with organized religion, and so does not stand against the state, and thus Lamborn Wilson stands against Guénon and, by extension, the Maryamiyya.

Although I have described the more traditional of Lamborn Wilson’s responses as separate from the more famous TAZ, the two can in fact be reconciled: the archetype of his TAZ is the  “Republic of Salé,” an autonomous Moroccan city that flourished in the seventeenth century. Salé may be seen as a small-scale human society that resembled the tribe more than the state, and the TAZ may be seen as a transitory tribe.

Lamborn Wilson, then, is Traditionalist in his probable Maryami origins, and partly Traditionalist in the terms in which he sees the modern world–including, though this is not much emphasized, a general pessimism about the direction of history, and an apocalyptic vision of a possible future of “centuries of hideous darkness.” Rather as Evola sees the spiritual as the proper root of political action, Lamborn Wilson says that his proposals ultimately have their origin in “mystical inspiration” and “direct experiential perception.” If not the proper root of political action, the spiritual is the accompaniment of anti-state resitance.

Lamborn Wilson is furthest from Guénonian Traditionalism in the anarchism in his proposals, which derive also from thinkers in whom the Guénonians have no interest, notably Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He criticizes Guénon’s own proposals to the point of dismissing them. But even so, Lamborn Wilson can probably be seen as a Soft Traditionalist.

Leftist Traditionalism is rare, if only because the left generally stresses the practical sovereignty of the whole people, while Traditionalism stresses that the people as a whole are mostly wrong. Though a leftist more than a rightist, Lamborn Wilson does not see the whole people as mostly right, however. Membership of the TAZ is self-selecting, not universal.

Lamborn Wilson links up to two further aspects of the phenomena in which this blog is interested. One is the music scene, or rather the rave scene: for some, a rave is a TAZ. Another is contemporary Western Sufism: Lamborn Wilson is enthusiastic about the possibilities of the “Green Hermeticism” project, in which connection he has good relations with Zia Inayat Khan, who helped produce Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 2007, ed. Lamborn Wilson, Christopher Bamford, and Kevin Townley), for which he also wrote the introduction.

The main sources for this post are Arthur Versluis, “A Conversation with Peter Lamborn Wilson,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4, no. 2 (Fall 2010) pp. 139-165, from which all quotations are taken unless otherwise indicated, and Simon Sellars “Hakim Bey: Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4, no. 2 (Fall 2010), pp. 83-108. Most of Lamborn Wilson’s writings are available at http://hermetic.com/bey. My thanks to Jean-François Mayer for bringing the Versluis interview to my attention.