Legitimating Identities in Modern Culture René Guénon and the Traditionalist Polemic1

PART THREE

LEGITIMATING IDENTITIES IN MODERN CULTURE RENÉ GUÉNON AND THE TRADITIONALIST POLEMIC1

Brannon Ingram

René Guénon (1886–1951) is the principal founder of a current of western esoteric thought now known as Traditionalism.2 While there are varying degrees of commitment to the core ideas of Traditionalism, Traditionalists typically uphold a belief that there is a single universal truth, a philosophia perennis, revealed to humanity during the earliest stages of human history. Comprising what Traditionalists call “meta- physics”, this truth is expressed in the various religions of the world through myth and symbol, exoteric forms that express a timeless, ahis- torical esoteric essence. Traditionalists usually believe that the world’s religions offer relatively equal access to this truth. Other important features of Traditionalist thought include the belief that history has undergone a gradual decline from the ages when people ascertained this truth in its purest form, and that the modern West, essentially from the seventeenth century to the present, is a gross aberration from this primordial tradition.3

1 This paper is the outcome of my Master’s thesis research at the University of Leiden as a Fulbright-Netherlands America Foundation Fellow, written under the direction of P. S. van Koningsveld. I credit a number of conversations with Steven Wasserstrom of Reed College with my interest in this subject. I am especially grateful to Jean-Pierre Brach for several insightful critiques of a draft of this paper. 2 Mark Sedgwick notes in his recent study of the Traditionalists that they ‘constitute a movement in the loosest sense of the word. The Traditionalist movement has no formal structure, and since the late 1940s no central command. It is made up of a number of groups and individuals, united by their common debt to the work of René Guénon’ (Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 22). 3 By Guénon’s death in 1951, Traditionalism had gained a fairly wide readership. The most important Traditionalist after Guénon is Frithjof Schuon, who converted to Islam and established a branch of the North African Alawiyya Su order which was later renamed the Maryamiyya, explicitly oriented toward European converts to Islam and grounded in Muslim-Christian ecumenicism. In America Schuon established a community in Bloomington, Indiana, and gradually de-emphasized Islam as such and adopted Native American spiritual practices. For an insightful overview of the Maryamiyya based in part on research at the Traditionalist center in Bloomington, see J. Vahid Brown’s unpublished essay, ‘Ironic Traditionalism: A Brief History of the Maryamiyya’. Meanwhile, the controversial Italian Traditionalist Julius Evola worked to popularize the ideas of Guénon among the far Right. Other Traditionalists, such as Martin Lings and Titus Burckhardt, have become well established writers on Su sm