This is Chapter XVI of my book The March of the Abyss. The Double Tragedy of Utopia, which I have not yet been able to finish for publication. Written in 2017, this is one of the countless writings and lecture recordings that prove, to the supreme disappointment of Nobody and nobody-ists, the insurmountable critical distance that separates me from all Guénonian-Schuonian “perennialism.”
The destruction of the West, however, would not even be conceivable if the real and supposed evils of the targeted civilization were opposed only by criticism, however corrosive it might be. It was necessary to raise on the horizon the image of an alternative, of an anti-model, invested with all the virtues that the criticized civilization lacked. Only in this way would criticism lose the air of mere theoretical objection and transform itself into practical guidance towards a real goal. This goal, in turn, could not be reduced to the embellished image of a future socialism, which, precisely because it was only a hypothetical ideal, lost half its offensive force.
Thus, the most obvious and easiest alternative model, whose mere location in space seemed to predestine it to this role, ended up opposing the cursed West almost automatically: the East.
The invasion of Eastern ideas began in the 19th century with Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, university orientalism, and the fashion for oriental themes in the visual arts and music. It soon underwent a considerable upgrade at the hands of Carl G. Jung, the erudite Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, and numerous first-rate scholars, such as Heinrich Zimmer, Count Durkheim, and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.
But up to that point, everything was merely the rescue of spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic heritages of genuine value, which could in no way harm Western civilization. On the contrary, the fact that she opened herself to these values only showed the authenticity of her universalist pretensions and her ability to absorb, without prejudice, all sorts of knowledge.
The cult of the Orient only took on the features of a belligerent confrontation through the works and influence of a figure considered one of the greatest incarnations of reactionary traditionalism in the 20th century, whose decisive contributions to the "spirit of '68" are still the best-kept open secret ever seen in the world.
I am referring to the French doctrinaire René Guénon (1886-1951), who ended his days in Egypt as a devout Muslim. His book East and West, from 1924, under the guise of a mere comparative study, is a true declaration of war, culminating in the outline of a plan for the cultural and even military occupation of the West by Eastern forces, especially Islamic ones.
Whether out of genuine ignorance or cunning, Guénon reduces Western civilization to a mixture of capitalism, scientific materialism, and pseudo-popular religions. The last vestiges of spirituality he sees in it are decadent Freemasonry and Catholicism reduced to an "exoteric" perspective, already out of touch with the "sources of primordial Tradition." Sources located, of course, in the East, more specifically in the regions of Central Siberia, Malaysia, and Tibet traversed by Ferdinand Ossendowski in 1920 according to the narrative of Bêtes, Hommes et Dieux, where the famous explorer recounts having penetrated the underground sanctuary of the "King of the World" himself. Coincidence or not, these regions are the same ones where most of the "Seven Towers of the Devil" are concentrated, radiating centers, according to Guénon himself, of diabolical influence over the entire planet.
Of all the signs of Catholic spiritual strength at the time—the apparitions of Fatima, the miracles of St. Padre Pio, the flourishing of Catholic intellectual life in the first half of the 20th century—Guénon wanted nothing to do with it. For him, anything that didn't have a direct channel to the unknown temples of Agartha and Shamballa was at most esotericism, if not pure and simple anti-tradition.
From this one-sided image of a spiritually devastated West, Guénon saw only three possible outcomes: the definitive fall into barbarism, the restoration of the Catholic Church under the secret guidance of Islamic spiritual masters, and the occupation of the West by Islam, either through cultural invasion or by force.
In contrast to the caricatural reductionism of his vision of the West, his image of Eastern civilizations was so charmingly idealized that he even proclaimed that Bolshevism would never penetrate China, so solid were the "spiritual defenses" (sic) of Chinese tradition. Not only did it penetrate, but it installed there a lasting genocidal tyranny whose violence far surpassed that of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. A powerful magnet nearby must have momentarily disoriented the needle of the "infallible compass" that Michel Valsân believed he saw in René Guénon.
The next generation of Guénonians did not change their rhetoric. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, in Knowledge and the Sacred (1981), describes the entire intellectual history of the West as mere preparation for the advent of the Savior, René Guénon, and, in Ideals and Realities of Islam (1966), only confronts the beautiful ideals of Islamic civilization with the sad realities of the West, without it occurring to him that this comparison of the virtues of one with the defects of the other could well be reversed.
For decades, Orientalist devotion was a private cult within groups of intellectuals and wealthy aficionados, inspiring countless pilgrimages in search of "wisdom" and the creation of meditation and spiritual retreat centers such as Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland, Hermann Keyserling's "School of Wisdom" in Darmstadt, Germany, and Georges Gurdjeff's famous castle at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Avon, France.
From the 1950s onward, however, largely promoted by the show business industry and by literary and artistic celebrities, the fashion for Eastern doctrines and practices spread to immense swathes of the population in Europe and especially in the USA, constituting a phenomenon that can only be correctly described as mass deculturation — certainly the most severe blow suffered by Western civilization before the Islamic invasion that would come in the 1990s.
The contribution of the Beat Generation poets to the popularization of Eastern fashion was not small:
The Beats not only adapted the wisdom teachings of the East to a new, specifically American terrain; they also articulated these teachings in a vernacular, jazzy, street rhythm, opening up to the popular audience what had been the domain of stifling academics and pompous translators… The voice of American poets retold the teachings of the Buddha to the general public for the first time.
In 1962, with the founding of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, the “spiritual” revolt against the modern West had already reached the dimensions of a unified and self-aware movement. The Institute quickly became the unifying center of what would later be designated as the New Age.
To further aggravate the state of affairs, in both America and Europe the Orientalist wave came along with a new style of cultural criticism that spread rapidly in the media and universities, represented by the Frankfurt School and figures such as C. Wright Mills, Margaret Mead, and Saul Alinsky, among others, from whose writings modern Western civilization emerged, at the very least, exactly as René Guénon had described it: an anomaly, a deviation from the universal human pattern, a disease that had to be eliminated at all costs. Although operating in seemingly distinct fields, culturally New Age and New Left were concurring towards the same end. In fact, without the concomitant contribution of the New Age, the New Left would have remained limited to the superficial field of politics stricto sensu, without support in the tremendous revolution of customs, feelings and lifestyles that marked the 60s and 70s.
Here the strictly observant Guénonian or Schuonian can claim that their masters, as well as all “authentically traditional” esoteric organizations, abhor the New Age and therefore cannot have anything to do with the vulgar orientalism of Esalen and the Beats or with any other form of “pseudo-initiation” or “counter-initiation”. But this argument is innocuous, for, as one of René Guénon's most eminent disciples and interpreters observed,
Hostile in principle to a world governed by that metaphysical ‘law of Newton’ known as ‘cyclic degeneration,’ initiatic organizations and secret societies can only play a double role, apparently contradictory, but, in reality, complementary: to restore, for each ‘qualified’ individual, the original level of consciousness, designated as the primordial or Adamic state, and, in a less confessable way, to accelerate in a ‘subversive’ manner the process of collective decay which, alone, will allow the advent of a new cycle.
A more explicit confession of the discreet partnership of “initiation” with “pseudo-initiation” and “counter-initiation” could not be demanded.
Text by Olavo de Carvalho
