Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles (Collected Works of Rene Guenon)

Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles is a wide-ranging collection of articles that delve into traces of ancient, indeed protohistoric, traditions. Although they must remain fragments, as Guénon did not return to many of these themes, it would have been regrettable to leave such fascinating articles buried in old journals, and so this posthumous collection is now offered to Anglophone readers for the first time. The book opens with the key article ‘The Doctrine of Cosmic Cycles’, followed by two pieces on Atlantis and Hyperborea. Two sections follow, concerned respectively with the Hebrew Tradition and the Egyptian Tradition. The former comprises five articles concerned primarily with the Kabbalah and the Science of Numbers, and the latter includes three articles on Hermes and the Hermetic Tradition. Book reviews are inserted at relevant points.

Reference

GUÉNON, RENÉ

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Sophia Perennis et Universalis

Insights Into Islamic Esoterism And Taoism (paperback Or Softback)

This small volume brings together a number of Guénon's early articles relating to Sufism (tasawwuf), or Islamic esoterism. A later article, 'Islamic Esoterism', has also been included, since it articulates so well the particularities of initiation in Islam by defining the fundamental elements of tasawwuf: shari'ah, tariqah, haqiqah. The first constitutes the necessary fundamental exoteric basis; the second, the Way and its means; the third, the goal or final result. In the other chapters, Guénon expresses with his usual synthetic clarity what tawhid and faqr are, and gives examples of traditional sciences, relating angelology to the Arabic alphabet, and chirology to the science of letters ('ilm al-huruf). A number of book and article reviews give further insights into Islamic cosmology. Some may feel that the essay 'Taoism and Confucianism' here included has little relevance to Sufism and Islam. However, such writers as Toshihiko Izutsu and Sachiko Murata have drawn many parallels between the two traditions. Confucianism, concentrating on social and interpersonal norms, functions as a kind of shari'ah in the context of Chinese religion, while Taoism, like Sufism, is precisely the esoteric Way.

Insights into Islamic Esoterism and Taoism (Collected Works of Rene Guenon)

Religion & Spirituality

Islam

Guénon’s The Great Triad was the last book to appear during his lifetime. Even for his regular readers, this book contained largely new material, as did his The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus, published the same year. The author here refers especially to the Chinese tradition, principally in its Taoist form (though touching on Confucianism as well), in which the ‘Great Triad’ is defined as Heaven-Man-Earth. It is as much a cosmological as a metaphysical doctrine that is implied in this ternary of the ‘three worlds’. In spite of its Taoist title, however, the work draws heavily on Hermetic teachings, Hindu and Buddhist metaphysics, and Masonic symbolism, not to mention doctrines from Judaism, Christianity. and Islam. It is also Guenon’s most comprehensive exposition of the science of Alchemy.

The Great Triad (Works)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Perspectives on Initiation

Perspectives on Initiation presents initiation as essentially the transmission, by the appropriate rites of a given tradition, of a ‘spiritual influence’ which represents the ‘beginning’ (initium) of the spiritual journey. It is unique in giving a comprehensive account both of the conditions of initiation and of the characteristics of organizations qualified to transmit it. While most of its 48 chapters deal with specific aspects of initiation, others cover an astonishing range of related subjects, among them: Magic and Mysticism, Ceremonial Magic, Psychic ‘Powers’, The Symbolism of the Theater, The Gift of Tongues, Greater and Lesser Mysteries, Rose-Cross and Rosicrucians, Some Reflections on Hermeticism, and The Birth of the Avatara. Related articles are collected in Guénon’s Initiation and Spiritual Realization.

Christian Books & Bibles

Initiation and Spiritual Realization

Initiation and Spiritual Realization is the closest thing to a work on ‘spiritual direction’ René Guénon ever wrote, touching as it does upon such vital topics as the transmission of initiatic grace, the various types and functions of the spiritual master, obstacles the aspirant is likely to encounter, different modes of contemplation, and the degrees of spiritual realization. A companion volume to Perspectives on Initiation, where Guénon had defined the nature of initiation and of the organizations qualified to transmit it, Initiation and Spiritual Realization was the first thematic collection of Guénon’s articles to appear after his death. And one doctrine expressed in this book stands out as particularly timely: that esoterism is not and cannot be a religion in itself, since to take it as such is to reduce it to an ‘alternative’ exoterism, and a heterodox one at that. Initiatic esoterism can only be legitimately and effectively practiced within the context of one of the established, revealed religions.

Initiation And Spiritual Realization

East and West

East and West, first published in 1924, was the fourth of a series of books that cleared the ground for Guénon’s later writings. His first book, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines (1921), was an exposition of metaphysics as transmitted in the Hindu tradition, and served to establish his specific use of important terms such as ‘esoterism’, ‘tradition’, and ‘orthodoxy’. He next set about writing two extensive volumes critiquing what he called ‘pseudo-esoteric’ groups. The first of these, Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion (1921), is an exposé of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society; the second, The Spiritist Fallacy (1923), examines the current of nineteenth-century spiritism that set the stage for many occult movements that appeared toward the end of that century. Guénon’s application of traditional metaphysics to the special case of pseudo-esoteric groups was then broadened in the present book to the general question of East and West as conservators and transmitters of traditional wisdom in the modern age. The titles of its two parts, ‘Western Illusions’ and ‘How the Differences Might be Bridged’, describe perfectly the book’s intention. Later books, especially The Crisis of the Modern World and its magisterial sequel, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, further extended Guénon’s penetrating critique of the modern world.

Politics & Government

It is no longer news that the Western world is in a crisis, a crisis that has spread far beyond its point of origin and become global in nature. In 1927, René Guénon responded to this crisis with the closest thing he ever wrote to a manifesto and ‘call-to-action’. The Crisis of the Modern World was his most direct and complete application of traditional metaphysical principles—particularly that of the ‘age of darkness’ preceding the end of the present world—to social criticism, surpassed only by The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, his magnum opus. In the present work Guénon ruthlessly exposes the ‘Western deviation’: its loss of tradition, its exaltation of action over knowledge, its rampant individualism and general social chaos. His response to these conditions was not ‘activist’, however, but purely intellectual, envisioning the coming together of Western intellectual leaders capable under favorable circumstances of returning the West to its traditional roots, most likely via the Catholic Church, or, under less favorable ones, of at least preserving the ‘seeds’ of Tradition for the time to come.

The Crisis of the Modern World (Collected Works of Rene Guenon)

Anthropology

René Guénon (1886-1951) was one of the great luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of intellectual fashion. His extensive writings, now finally available in English, are a providential treasure-trove for the modern seeker: while pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, they direct the reader also to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization. Studies in Freemasonry and the Compagnonnage is both an attempt to rediscover the lost roots of Masonry and a fascinating look into the many controversies swirling around the subject of Masonry in serious intellectual circles during the first half of the twentieth century. It must also be classed, along with Symbols of Sacred Science, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles, The Esoterism of Dante, Insights into Christian Esoterism and Insights into Islamic Esoterism and Taoism-not to mention related sections in many of his other books-as one of René Guénon's masterful excursions into esoteric myth, symbolism, and secret history. Freemasonry may indeed be, as Guénon ultimately concluded, a largely degenerated and thus no longer strictly 'operative' offshoot of a true initiatory lineage; yet its symbolism, like that of the original Rosicrucians, remains profound, traditional, and therefore ultimately legitimate. And given that the 'Spirit bloweth where it listeth', it is always possible that symbolism of this order may awaken in a receptive soul intimations of the Truth and the Way, which can be of inestimable of value in 'the path to the Path', the quest for a living initiatory spirituality.

Studies in Freemasonry and the Compagnonnage

History

Europe

Collected essays on critqueing the belief in progress from a traditionalist point of view from which so-called progress oftens appears as regress.

Looking Back on Progress

Lord Northbourne

Social Sciences

What is here presented as a ‘miscellany’ of essays would in the case of most other writers on metaphysical subjects be considered a major work, both in breadth and depth. Some claim that René Guénon’s views never ‘developed’, that his knowledge of metaphysics was innate, as primordial and unchangeable as truth itself. Though clearly an exaggeration—for example, A. K. Coomaraswamy and Marco Pallis led Guénon to considerably revise his views Buddhism—there is still a remarkable degree of truth to this claim. Information must be acquired, and in the process erroneous notions will be corrected; yet the capacity for intellective insight is not an acquisition, but a gift; it is developed not by adding something, but by removing a veil. Some of the essays in the present volume could be considered Guénon’s ‘juvenalia’, yet the unerring instinct for metaphysical truth is already there, fully formed, along with the first stirrings of the author’s lifelong preoccupation with initiatic spirituality, the cosmological sciences, and the errors of modernity; there is no real incompatibility of outlook here between the Guénon of 1909 and the Guénon of 1950. Far from being a mere collection of fugitive writings, Miscellanea is an important work in its own right, worthy of its own unique place in the Guénonian corpus.

Miscellanea (Guenon, Rene. Works.)

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