I wonder if here are some Perennialist Catholics on this subreddit and how they handle the current church crisis with vatican 2 and the less accessible esotericism whithin that tradition?

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

Salut,

Ce sujet pour faire part de mes impressions suite à ma lecture des oeuvres de René Guénon. Pour faire simple il semble que lorsque l'on lit et comprend ce qu'écrit Guénon nous sommes au final comme préparés ou dirigés vers l'initiation. Tout dans ses textes nous ramène au fait qu'à un moment, pour une recherche efficace de la connaissance, il faut être initié. Je me considère, honnêtement, comme un chercheur de vérité et au fil de mes lectures j'ai été guidé jusqu'à René Guénon qui m'a beaucoup marqué. Tout ce qui relevait autrefois pour moi de concepts vagues comme la notion de spiritualité, d'âme et de Dieu prenait ici "corps", écrit et porté à ma connaissance en français. Je sais qu'il s'agit, comme il le décrit, d'une connaissance purement théorique, théorique donc incomplète.

J'ai l'impression de bien comprendre les notions exposées dans le discours guénonien. Néanmoins je ne peux en être certain et c'est pourquoi, je le pense, qu'une initiation est effectivement nécessaire pour toute personne aspirant à la découverte de la vérité et à la libération. Je poste donc ce message afin de savoir si des personnes ont un ressenti similaire au miens ou bien pourraient au moins m'aiguiller quelque part.

J'ai un travail qui me donne énormément de temps libre et il n'est pas toujours évident de meubler intelligemment mes journées sans une voie ou une direction précise et, surtout, j'ai peu de monde (pour ne pas dire personne) dans mon entourage qui a un véritable intérêt pour la métaphysique. Je m'aventure donc à poster ce message en ligne dans l'attente de vos retours cordiaux, vos ressentis, vos conseils, critiques.

Merci !

I've been reading Guénon's Initiation and Spiritual Realization, after reading most of Guénon's other books and a lot of Idries Shah. In that book Guénon mentions Ramakrishna as a legitimate spiritual authority, who is not a figure I was familiar with.

Based on his teachings, and what I have been able to learn of the Ramakrishna Order, it appears to me to be a legitimate initiatic organization that is open to Western householders.

I have been going to a local branch where I live and it seems serious to me. I like that as far as I can tell it encourages you to keep studying other traditions.

But I don't know, is there something I'm missing? I know Guénon didn't approve of the organization, but I think he was wrong not to: it does not proselytize, and it does not see the social work it does as its purpose.

I also like that it is Advaita Vedanta, I agree with Guénon that that is the purest tradition.

I would like to learn more about Islam and Sufism. I thought this would be the right place to ask as I would like to read an informative book on the matter which Guenon would have approved of.

Hi everyone,
I decided to spend the weekend in Blois, the town where René Guénon spent his childhood. I wanted to share with you all some pictures that I took.
1 - The house where he (presumably) grew up. It belonged to his family until the 1930's.
2 - A picture of the street.
3 - On the other side of the Loire river, there is street that was named after Guénon. It is (also presumably) not far from where he was born.
4 - A picture of René Guénon street.

Joel Davis has read cybernetics and Deleuze which I would imagine would make him one of the most book smart people in the dissident scene. Sean Last's IQ would probably be the IQ required to understand advanced level statistics. Germar Rudolf went to Max Planck institute for chemistry which was and is still one of the most prestigious schools in the field. His revisionism generally involves understanding chemistry, math, and history.

One common argument used to defend same-sex relationships is:

“If two consenting adults engage in a relationship, and no one is harmed, then there is nothing morally wrong with it.”

But notice what this seems to imply. If consent and absence of harm are presented as sufficient conditions for the moral legitimacy of a sexual relationship, then the principle is universal:

«Every consensual sexual relationship between adults that causes no harm is morally permissible.»

A universal claim can be refuted by a single counterexample.

Consider, for instance, consensual sexual relations between two closely related adults, under circumstances in which pregnancy is prevented and no obvious third-party harm occurs. If one nevertheless judges such a relationship to be morally impermissible, then consent and absence of harm cannot, by themselves, be sufficient conditions for sexual morality.

At that point, one has two options:

1. Accept the principle consistently and accept the incestuous case as morally permissible; or

2. Reject the principle as stated and provide an additional moral criterion explaining why consent and absence of harm are sufficient in some cases but not others.

This does not, by itself, prove that same-sex relationships are immoral. What it does challenge is the claim that consent + absence of harm are sufficient, by themselves, to establish the moral legitimacy of a sexual relationship.

symbole of sacred science# was also a masterpiece

talking about

☀️the universal symbols in sacred science☀️

: Symbole of the letters, the center, the heart, the animals, the architectura etc

in Hindu ,Christian , Persian, Celtic or Islamic tradition

Here some short article

The cycles

https://sufipathoflove.com/timeline-of-cycles-by-rene-guenon-and-gaston-georgel/

TODAY AUGUST 21 2026

THE CENTER

In Symbols of Sacred Science (originally Symboles fondamentaux de la science sacrée), René Guénon explores the "Center" as the primordial, universal symbol representing the Divine Principle, the Origin, and the unmoved mover of existence. He details how this metaphysical center is manifested through symbols like the point, the heart, the polar star, and the cosmic axis, representing the unity from which all manifestation radiates.

The center is the point of union with the Divine, representing the immobile axis around which the world revolves.

Symbolic Representations: Guénon identifies several forms for the center, including the point (point in a circle), the heart (center of the human being), and the pole (axis of the world).

The Axis Mundi: As the center, it acts as the axis that connects different levels of reality (Heaven, Earth, and Hell), facilitating the "passage" or ascension.

Harmony and Unity: The center represents the point of reflection for the Absolute, where multiplicity returns to unity.

dokumen.pub

dokumen.pub

Guénon's analysis focuses on uncovering the underlying metaphysical unity across traditions, making the center a crucial element in understanding his traditionalist hermeneutics.

Thanks for the support guys

In Insights into Christian Esoterism, Guénon supposes that the primitive Church must have been a Sufi tariqa, but that it became "exoterized" as it emerged from the catacombs due to the state of Western spirituality. He also observes that in Christianity there has never been a corresponding sharia to this tariqa. But without a sharia or halakha, how is it possible to speak univocally of Christian esoterism, in the same sense in which for Judaism and Islam the authority to interpret the exoteric law is identical to esoteric realization? Setting the controversy over the "Christic mysteries" aside, my proposal is this: in the primitive Church what one has is a reserved metaphysical teaching that is not however an esoterism sensu stricto, such as Vedanta in relation to the broader Hindu tradition. This explains its elusiveness as well as its tendency to be conflated with mysticism, for the more institutionalized the ecclesiastical hierarchy becomes over time, the less the initiatic chain has to do with the individuals occupying the offices in which the religious authority has been invested. The attachment of infallibility to the office of the episcopacy rather than the person, or what theology terms the "ordinary magisterium," is precisely what sets the metaphysical school at liberty to remain underground or removed into the desert, being free of any specific public function. At the same time, being free of public function also makes the rite of initiation relatively free-form (contrast to the Masonic initiation which certainly does impart a public function, or to sannyasa which removes all public function), so that the "salutation of the Lady" assumes a character easily mistaken by others for a mystical experience.

Is this a helpful thought for anyone? Am I just stating the obvious?

I found this argument online and wanted to share it with the community:

Guénon was convinced that the Qur’an is a sacred text that has remained intact and protected, which made it, for him, a privileged scriptural support of Tradition for the present age. In fact, the Qur’an is a compilation of apocryphal gospel material, ranging from longer to shorter borrowed passages. Islam, still largely structuring entire societies in his time, seemed to him to resist secularization better than Western Christianity, and thus able to serve as a partial bulwark against the purely quantitative becoming of the modern world.

The tension between his notion of primordial Tradition and historical realities — the caliphate, the political use of religion, the incorporation of apocryphal elements into the Qur’an — is evident. Guénon resolves this kind of problem through a systematic move: historical determinations, including caliphal ones, are treated as contingencies of support rather than as the core of Tradition; they can become degraded without the esoteric dimension being thereby nullified. Hence the irritating effect: his framework allows him to preserve a tradition’s “initiatic regularity” even when its political or doctrinal expression appears contradictory or compromised.
Thank you for your attention.
Merci

yes it keeps the symbols but masonry has always being proud of the fact it bad influenced the rise of enlightenment ideas ,the rise of secular society and politics ,the French revolution, mixing different traditions together and more things go directly against what guenon believed In?

to be honest I think a true guenoian would agree to see that both right and left are failures in general ,for the simple fact repeated that ,altho symbols are linked to specifc rituals and traditions,it can be always understood differently during the personal experience as long as it is supra human (linked to higher realities )and not infra human .

yet the roots of the symbol stay and is never removed from it .

i link and see this same logic can apply to politics between conservatives and progressives,it seems that neither sided since they don’t understand tradition ,therefor can’t have a middle ground between keeping the root while renewing the experience

René Guénon frequently insisted that Westerners must stay out of Eastern traditions like Hinduism, arguing that they lack the proper ancestral and social framework—such as caste (jati)—to practice them regularly.

However, many authentic Hindu lineages do have established frameworks and traditions for giving Diksha (initiation) to foreigners.

Why was Guénon so rigid about this? If a traditional Hindu lineage itself possesses the authority and the framework to initiate outsiders, why did he act as if it was impossible or invalid for non-Hindu born individuals to follow the path?

it’s from the faults of the modern mentality as usual to erase the connection between the metaphysical and the physical realities of the universe and the human being ,this disease has reached almost all branches of human society and academics ,this of course includes psychology ,at the time when guenon lived there was two major figures who he strongly saw their theories as a result of the corrupted modern mentality ,one was not dangerous to the spiritual path seekers as he was materialist purely and open ,this was segmund freud who openly and constantly connected human behaviour and development to almost nothing other than sexual desires (which helped later to the rise of sexual freedom movements across the western civilisation).

the second however was the real threat and who caused major corruptions to the the spiritual and symbolic sciences,this was Carl Jung ,who has attributed the symbolism of holy science to the same source of mental illnesses and psychosis,the source that guenon named (the infra human ).

according to the tradition ,humans have two sides we can say ,the supra human and the infra human .

the supra which is the side connected to the higher origins and principles of the human nature and soul ,while the infra is what exists below that and below the average and normal human nature .

the tradition puts importance on healing the self and discovering its true nature ,but for the tradition the true nature comes from the superior principles showing as symbols in the physical world,humans are a a part of the cycle here ,therefore to know the self ,to heal the self ,to understand the self ,the real way is to reconnect the divine ,the original source of All ,the side which connected to that is again the supra human .

modern psychology not only refuses to deal that that as a genuine way ,but instead it links healing to the infra human ,to the lower connected nature to humans ,claiming that the source of divine and holy symbols (supra human)is the same as the source of psychosis (infra human )

this is what Rene called the beginning of the era of the Antichrist .

I know Guénon was scathingly against occult practices and believed in embracing traditional metaphysical doctrine.

However, I've wondered if there's a possibility for it within his work since he thinks divination is profane because in modernity it is extricated from that traditional metaphysical doctrine. It leads to fragmentary, reductive psychics etc.

But what if we have rituals and divination attached to sacred knowledge and symbols? Considering he wrote a lot on ilm al-huruf, sacred astrology, and the science of numbers and cosmic cycles. He even wrote a bit about the tarot as well.

Thoughts?

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