The Spiritual Fascism of Rene Guenon and His Followers:
(Definitions and Comparative History)
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This essay is divided up into the following segments:
1.Why I’m Writing this Essay
2.The Question about Spiritual Fascism
3.Rene Guenon in Relation to Action Francaise, Blavatsky, Lanz von Liebenfels and the
Knights Templar4.Traditionalist Executioners: De Maistre, Krishna, Guenon, Schuon and Khidir
5.Rene Guenon and Alexander Dugin: Destroying Human Rights and Creating a
“Super-Auschwitz”6.Defining Spiritual Fascism in Rene Guenon, Julius Evola and Frithjof Schuon
7.Spiritual Fascism Today
1. Why I am Writing this Essay:
In what follows I assume the reader has prior knowledge of who the Traditionalists are, especially Guenon, Schuon, Evola and Dugin. If not they should read Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World, a very flawed book, but a good general over view, and so far the only book that tries to asses the traditionalists from a somewhat objective, academic perspective. Virtually all other books written on this subject are written by cult members or followers. (I offer a brief review of Sedgwick's book below).
Furthermore, I should state that though I belonged to the Schuon cult for a few years, when I left it, I left religion too, shortly after. I am not an advocate for religion or for orthodoxy. Most critics of Schuon, Guenon and Evola are far right fanatics of one orthodox stripe or another, fanatic Muslims, fanatic Catholics, far right nationalists etc. I'm not sure I want to call myself an atheist, if only because I'm not sure that defining myself by a negative is a good idea. But I am not a theist. Theism seems untenable to me as a historian, first because there is no evidence whatever that there is a god, and second I know how horrible have been the atrocities caused by the god idea. I see Guenon, Schuon Evola etc. as examples of the delusional ideology which tend to accompany the worship of fictional gods. But to read further on this subject of why atheism is both a moral and a reasonable way to look at the world, I would recommend the reader to Richard Dawkin's very fine and well argued book, the God Delusion, which is an excellent refutation of theism. See also Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell and Sam Harris's The End of Faith. These are all fine and well argued presentations fo the case against religions. I came to reject religion on my own, but I respect these books and recommend them to open minded readers of this essay. So at the outset fo this study of one of the 20th centuries most fanatic preacher for comparative religion it is important to state where I stand. I do not believe in gods, mystic fictions or transcendental ideologies: I believe in science and the earth and a generous effort to understand the actual. In short I am not even remotely Guenonian, Schuonian or traditionalist. I have learned about these men first hand and have rejected them because of what I experienced watching the the lies and hypocrisy of their followers. This series of essays is not written for the true believers, Islamic, Christian, or otherwise. Nor is this written for cult followers of Guenon or followers of Schuon and Evola. It is written but for those who wish to understand how religion misrepresents reality and leads to ignorance, lies and superstition. Indeed, allot of my intellectual work, since the 1990's is about deconstructing systems of knowledge that serve powerful ideologies, so I have written against Augustine, Aquinas, Plato, Sufism and so on.
In this essay, or rather series of related essays, I intend to supply a critical assessment of Guenonian traditionalism, or rather to at least begin such an assessment, outlining basic arguments against traditionalism and suggesting avenues of research others could follow. Guenonism is a reactionary, anti-intellectual system of conspiratorial thought that seeks to return to the Dark Ages, before the Enlightenment brought Church and monarchy into question. Guenonism creates a Manichean worldview in which those who side with Guenon are good and everyone else is profane or evil. But Guenonian Manichaeism is the not the sole cause of the attraction of Guenon; rather religious motivations are interwoven with economic and political factors. Guenon appeals to the "three R's" in the fascist mentality : revenge, renown, and reaction.
He appeals to those who want revenge against science and the modern world, to go back to former systems of superstition and the power it gave to ignorant priests and panderers of tall tales and fictions. Guenon appeals to the desire of his followers for renown by fostering a notion of elitism. Guenon himself has delusional notions of his own importance and passed this on to most of his followers. Guenon's hateful and elitist systems employs reactionary political views hide which are hidden behind ritual and religion. As I will show, various traditionalists have partnered with right-wing political systems, belong to various cults or employ reactionary ideologies. The messianic and apocalyptic paranoia of Guenon and his followers echoes that of the worst tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists. Guenon's rhetoric is quite commonly lofty and messianic. He actually believed the nonsense he put out and Schuon, Evola and Dugin do too. The political dimensions of Traditionalism are hidden closely, even indistinguishably, behind religious esoteric symbols and secretive rituals. This allows Traditionalism to seduce many into the far right without followers even being aware of it. The Guenonian strategy is to claim to represent the invisible truth, but never to reveal that this Truth---- capital "T"--- is a fabricated lie made up of a pastiche of religious mythologies. The "Truth" in Guenon is a lie, a delusion, or to use Richard Dawkins phrase, a "god delusion".. Guenonian Traditionalism it is a secretive or esoteric ideology which hides political interests. Because of this secrecy and claim to esoteric centrality there are very few critical assessments of the work of Rene Guenon or of traditionalism in general.
The reason there are few critical assements of these writers is not hard to find. Traditionalists writers are enclosed in a small world of their own making. They have a very small following among those who, for various reasons have decided the 'modern' world is to be hated. The inbred or hermetic insularity of the cults and groups follow Guenon results in a Manichean world view. The traditionalists by and large are lacking in real education, though many of them have read books, they tend to read only within a narrow range of like minded religious writers, and none of them have much real scientific knowledge. Because they have so little understanding of modern science, they have no concrete understanding that real progress has been made in many areas of human knowledge, from biology to medicine.
The traditionalists, reviving medieval forms of inquisitorial blacklisting, tend to accuse all those who question Traditionalism as "profane", "diabolic","satanic", or from the subversive "counter initiation". This way of speaking of others as subhuman or evil 'others' is a kind of hate speech, akin to racism. Rene Guenon's world is a world of Them Versus Us where hate dominates, though this hate is not necessarily obvious on the surface. It sublimated though cold, intellectual rationalization. Most of what has been written about Guenon is from the point of view of a supercilious certainty in Guenon's superiority,----a superiority that is adopted by those who belong to the various secretive cults, groups or loose knit right-wing associations of individuals who rather slavishly follow his work and treat it as if it were holy writ. There is little historiography of traditionalism outside these self-congratulatory or cultish sources. I begin a historiography here.
Traditionalism is a right wing, reactionary, upper-middle class and pseudo-aristocratic religion composed mostly of arm-chair, suburbanite and academic ‘metaphysicians’ (as they pretentiously call themselves) who long for a return to archaic eternal worlds of their own imaginations. Guenon’s claim to present the eternal “pure truth”, a 'super-religion', turns out to be increasingly time bound, past tense, retroactive. He pretended to desire only to express simple "traditional truths", when in fact traditions are far form uniform and where they overlap the cause is a similar devotion of aristocratic monism or polytheist monism. His false humility hides an enormous and vicious pride that wants the return of autocratic caste elitism. Guenon was a last gasp of the European aristocratic values, just as his Islamism was a last gasp of impotent rebellion against the inevitability to Enlightenment values coming to Islamic countries.[1] The whole notion of a the "transcendent unity of religions" is a romantic fabrication, an invention based on superficial correspondences between different religions. Guenon, Schuon and Evola claimed to be expositors and Prophets of the Great Tradition, when in fact they were merely inventors and manufacturers of a new mythos, a new cult, a new way to sell old fictions.
The first point that should be made is that the very notion of a "tradition" as used by the traditionalists is questionable. Traditionalism, is a "Manufactured Mythology", an invention. As Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have shown in their book The Invention of Tradition, traditions are not born like Athena from the head of Zeus or impregnated though the ear of a Virgin Mary but rather are political entities dressed up as metaphysic truth. Traditions are based on various habits and misunderstandings of the historical record, sometimes going back only a few generations, sometimes longer. Hobsbawm and Ranger's book attempts to show how many traditions have been deliberately invented often to highlight or enhance the importance of a certain institution. For instance, they try to show how Welsh and Scottish 'national culture', for instance, was a recent creation and how the elaboration of British royal rituals in Africa and India were created to justify political regimes and empire. In a similar way the Catholic Church was erected on the forged Donation of Constantine in the 8th century. The invention of the Eucharist was an ongoing event in Christian history. The Traditionalists sought to invent a new mythic history based on a pastiche of other "traditions" largely in reaction to the rise of industrialism and the enlightenment, which they not just opposed but hated with passion. Guenon and his followers wanted to advance what has been called the "endarkenment". They hate the enlightenment and seek to return to the dark ages: they want to restore superstition, restrain or eliminate science, return our schools to Church control and deny the facts evolution has amply demonstrated. The traditionalists like to deny the importance of history as part of their effort to manufacture the myth of their own perennial and eternal wisdom, a wisdom whose high, peerless eminence they never doubt.
The traditionalists have no real historical sense: they are prone to revisionist, orientalist fantasies of worlds that never really existed. Many of the traditionalists ,like Hossein Nasr, Ananda and Rama Coomaraswamy and Guenon were alienated and displaced individuals who were forced out of their parent countries or left it in the hopes of finding a romanticized and idealized culture elsewhere. They idealized the nostalgia they felt for cultures they romanticized as lost or on the brink of being lost. These idealizations are what the call " traditions". Their dreams of returning to the glory days of dying religious worlds are composed of fragments of Hindu caste systems, Taoist dreams of immortal emperors, Christian apologies for the Inquisition and other figments of their reactionary imaginations. They divide the world into specious categories, such as claiming that “modernity” is profanity and tradition is “sacred”. The historical truth is quite otherwise. They hate science and claim a pseudo-objectivity based on whether or not something “leads to god” when god, it turns out, is merely the subjective invention of the intellects of the Traditionalists themselves. Traditionalism is a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged, narrow minded and self serving men, a criticism that extends to the women in the cults as well, who by and large support the patriarchy and are willing to keep the secrets, lie, justify their submission and surrender, do whatever it takes to protect the Traditionalist fantasy.[2] What they call “metaphysics” is merely a faltering dream of fading glory stolen from dead or failing societies. In the end the Traditionalist fantasy is a self mirroring world of narcissistic symbolists who serve a far right political agenda, and in most cases, don’t even realize it. I wouldn’t know this, unless I had been such a person myself, that is to say, I was always left leaning and humanistic in my politics, but was one of those who did not know traditionalism was a reactionary political movement hiding behind a spirituality. The appeal of Guenon arose in me because I was questioning science and the destructive tendencies of the modern world. I did not realize at first how deluded and paranoid Guenon's ideas were. But I did wake up finally and escape the trap of self-delusions, and have been free of it for many years now. Thank goodness.
Within the circles of the traditionalists themselves there are only insignificant criticisms of Guenon. For instance, Frithjof Schuon (1907-98), a long time follower or Guenon, whose career as self-appointed “shaykh’ was largely a Guenonian creation[3], criticizes Guenon on the subject of Guenon’s neglect of Buddhism.[4] But Frithjof Schuon criticizes Guenon only to try to show that he is more Guenonian then Guenon, as it were. Schuon felt that Guenon was leaving out a possible avenue of exploitable data, by leaving Buddhism out of the “transcendent unity of the religions”. The whole notion of the “transcendent unity” was a Guenonian fabrication, though others had thought of it before him. The various religions are social constructions, reflecting different social conditions. Any comparison between them is accidental and merely reflects the fact that humans make similar social arrangements in different cultures. There is no “essential” or esoteric religion: the whole artifice of the so called “perennial” religion involves convincing people of the illusion of each religion being a subset of a larger imaginary entity they call “esoterism” or the “religio perennis”—the perennial religion[5]. Guenon wrote that hew as intrinsically independent and thus superior to the religions because “whoever understands the unity of traditions... is necessarily...‘unconvertible’ to anything” The fiction of such an esoterism or "super-religion" has been a potent fiction, as I will show in this essay.
In any case, my point here is that Schuon was Guenonian, through and through. Guenon made Schuon what he became, though in later years Schuon added his own unique obsessions to Guenon’s paranoid metaphysical theatre. Guenon's statement in a letter quoted in Louis Charbonneau-Lassay's Le Lièvre qui Rumine states that "I have been surrounded, all unsuspecting, with a veritable network of spying and betrayal." (p. 53). This is typical of Guenon's paranoia, so much in evidence in his work as a whole. This is paranoia I also saw in evidence around Schuon, who seems to have patterned his whole mindset obsessively on Guenon's and then later denied doing it. In any case, my point is that Schuon is not really an effective critic of Guenon, but rather a follower.[6] There are various critics of Schuon, besides myself, though most of them are unpublished.[7] But critics of Guenon are harder to find than critics of Schuon.
. Thus, within the Traditionalist school there are no effective critical assessments of Guenon, at least that I have been able to find. One reason for this is that the Traditionalist authors themselves promoted the vicious idea that any critic of theirs was necessarily evil or in conspiracy against them. They have a paranoid, cultish ‘Them versus Us’ attitude” rather like Christ or George Bush, both of whom said, “either you are with me or against me”... The following passage from a letter by Guenon illustrates how deep Guenon’s paranoia was and casts some light on the psychology behind the Reign of Quantity. Evola had written Guenon about an illness he had. Guenon replies that he was sick in 1939. “I was confined to bed for six months, unable to make the slightest move. Everybody thought this was a case of rheumatism, but the truth is we all knew who acted as the unconscious vehicle of a maleficent influence”. Supposedly the man was sent away and Guenon recovered. [8] But the story shows that Guenon was sick in a way similar to schizophrenics I have met who imagine elaborate universal plots against their persons. Anyone who spoke out against Guenon or Schuon was branded as evil or mentally ill. Guenon’s Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times is a classic of schizophrenic or Paranoid literature. Guenon's mentality and those of his followers is based on the premise that the entire world is in conspiracy against traditionalism, which itself is a tiny shrinking cult of elite persons, constantly threatened by outsiders. [9]
There are a few critics of Guenon, most of whose criticisms present complications. These critics present views that may or may not be cogent enough to be a real part of a historiography, however. This is not to say that they are false. I am not sure that they are true and finding out the truth is not easy in the case of some of these criticisms. One of these critics is Marie France James, a Canadian catholic who was connected to the University of Paris. James states in her book Esotérisme et Christianisme: Autour de René Guénon(1981) [10] that Guenon’s personal character was terrible. She states that he was an “exasperating person” prone to nervousness and instability. He was impulsive and irritable, and had an “exaggerated susceptibility” and is “strongly sexual” and that he was a drug addict ( hashish and opium) . But I’m not sure where this sort of description gets us. Like Frithjof Schuon, Guenon thought of himself, conveniently, as beyond morality, so whatever he did was beyond judgment. Neither of them were beyond basic ethical or legal norms, as much as they might have tried to exempt themselves.
But James goes too far when she says that Guenon had a “diabolical” sort of pride. Certainly Guenon was ridiculously elitist and prone to despise just about everything except his own very narrow interests; this is evident in all he wrote. But it does not help to call him diabolical. James claims that Guenon was guilty of “apostasy” from the Catholic Church and that he was an evil man--- or to more exact---- she says that for Guénon “the Spiritual Authority is the authority of Satan”. I see no point in calling Guenon evil, Satanic, diabolic or calling him an apostate. Such medievalisms are absurd in a world where humans have rights. As I will explain later I do not believe in the concept of evil and certainly do not think there is anything real about “satan” or the “Anti-Christ” or other mythic fictions promoted by fanatical Traditionalists and fundamentalists. We are beyond this sort of archaic childishness now. M.J James indulges in the same sort of cultish demonization of the other that Guenon himself so often employs. Guenon was not an evil man; he was a sick man, who probably suffered from a persecution mania, who was locked into a cultural setting that made him favor a fascist form of spirituality. He is hardly alone in this.[11] James dislikes Guenon’s affection for the Masonic organizations[12] of Europe because some of them were anti-Catholic. That is a political determination. The Traditionalists hate James for her politics too. Indeed, both groups call each other evil devils because of political determinations. Of course the standard reply of the Traditionalists to attacks such as James’ is that she criticizes “esoterism” from an “exoteric” perspective, that is, in her case, a catholic perspective. From the Traditionalist’s point of view, that invalidates her claims, because in all cases only esoterism has the superior viewpoint, they believe. This self-serving argument is regularly used by Guenon, Schuon and others. In actual fact, Guenon and Schuon were not special, chosen people and are not superior to anyone. James is trying to protect her belief system against a group of people she rightly sees are trying to raid her religion. She is correct in that assessment. The Traditionalists are raiders of other religions,, cultural vampires, to put it dramatically, perennial parasites, who sink their esoteric proboscis into the body of worn and ailing faiths and try to suck life out of them so as to increase the power of traditionalism. [13] But the parasitical dependence of traditionalism on other relgions does not mean that the religions that Guenon raided were themselves innocent victims of upstanding virtue.[14] James is herself a fanatic of the ultra right. Criticisms of the esoterism of the traditionalists from any of the 'confessional' religions' generally do not go far enough. Traditionalism fails because it is not true on a basic level. It does not fail merely because it is not Catholic or Islamic.
Another dubious critic of Guenon is an anonymous writer on a Martinist website. (Later, I will discuss the Martinist group that Guenon belonged to and which was started by Gerard Encausse) The essay in question raises similar objections to those of Marie France James, accusing Guenon of inordinate pride. The anonymous author also states that Guenon spied for the Nazis as well as the English during the 1940’s in Cairo and that he started “to accept increasingly considerable sums for the services which he rendered to the Third Reich.” [15] I have no idea if this is true or not. The anonymous author also claims various things about Guenon of a sexual nature, without real proof. In such cases, proof is very important, because otherwise the motive might be to less than honorable. [16] If Guenon had certain homosexual tendencies or smoked excessively, or had a drug problem----and all these accusations have been made--- one would have to demonstrate it and show how it had an effect on his work. It is true that Guenon worked hard all his life to obsessively hide the facts of his life behind veils of secrecy, pseudonyms and pretenses. Certainly Guenon’s need to be duplicitous and secretive is a disturbing fact and does have a bearing on his work. But more research would have to be done to determine the truth of these allegations. I won’t pursue this subject further. The main question for me in this essay is what influence Guenon has: how does he represent the world: what ideas did he push in his work. Why do people fall for his delusional conspiracy theories? What role do his followers play in the world? That is what matters.
In any case, I don’t find either James or the anonymous author of the Martinist assessment of Guenon very informative or satisfying. Yes, Guenon was a right wing fanatic, further right than the Nazis were. Yes, many Catholics were Nazis, in fact, 22% of the SS were Catholic. Yes, the Catholic Church tacitly supported the Jewish Holocaust, though Catholic apologists have spilled allot of ink trying to deny this fact . Pius 12th ( Eugenio Pucelli) negotiated a concordat (a church-state treaty) with Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy in 1929, and pursued a concordat with Germany and he struck a deal with Hitler in 1933. Hitler rightly saw the Concordat with the Vatican as representing papal endorsement of the Nazi regime. Pucelli was admired by some of the traditionalists, notably Schuon and Coomaraswamy, for his far right views and support of a conservative and authoritarian liturgy. Pucelli was an anti-semite, as was the Church in general at that time. Guenon was too. Guenon's hatred of modernism appears to have had Catholic origins since the “oath against modernism” required of Catholics by the Vatican in 1910, under Pius the 10th, appears to have influenced young Guenon deeply.
But this is not the whole story. Guenon was not a Nazi, as many have rightly pointed out. Certianly, all his life he had an affinity with the far right politics of the Catholic Church. Indeed, Guenon was even more to the far right and more of an extremist fanatic than the Nazis or Fascists. He hoped for the destruction of everyone on earth but a small chosen few, just as the fascists did. Both the writer of this anonymous article and M.J. James are right about Guenon’s excessive pride. His writings drip with a sneering superiority and elitist pride. Guenon created an excessive ideology of gnostic intellectuality which raised the subjective “intellect” up above all else. This became for both Guenon and Schuon a sort of paranoid mania of magnified and absurd self elevation. Guenon’s ideology is really a new religion, (a “NRM”)[17] and as such is another 'orthodoxy", which is why it is silly to criticize it from a orthodox perspective. People from the Islamic religion have contacted me saying how horrible it is that Guenon or Schuon thought this or that. True, but Islam is itself no standard of virtue. Islam supports horrible violations of human rights.The only just way to look at Guenonism as well as orthodox religions is from a non-religious perspective. I spent enough time in my life looking at religion from the inside. So, comparing my approach to other critics of Guenon, my point of view is neither orthodox, religious, nor based on a personal hatred of the man himself.
A more serious critic of Guenonian traditionalism is David Fideler of Phanes Press, for instance, who wrote a few essays about Guenon, one called "Rene Guenon and the Signs of our Times” and the other “Why Esoterism can lead to Fascism”. Fideler states that:
Esoterism can become dangerous if it makes a cult out of the ‘supra human Intellect’. I believe that Guenon and the Traditionalists are generally guilty of this, in addition to possessing a general tendency toward spiritual elitism. ……Based as it is on the Revealed Truth of Eternal Metaphysical Doctrine and a healthy dose of good old Extremism, it is easy to see why the Guenonian position inherently appeals to the authoritarian personality.
This is quite accurate. Another critic of the Traditionalists is Ziauddin Sardar, has written about Schuon the following, though much the same things can be said about Guenon:
Much of what Schuon has to say about tradition, metaphysics, authority, caste, race and
primordial man is taken from nineteenth century German philosophy and the Symbolist
movement of the twenties and thirties in which he grew up. The Symbolist movement which influenced his father, had a romantic attachment to the esoteric and
primordial...[and was] an eclectic philosophy which was a mish mash of all cultures and religions. In its most extreme form, this philosophy produced the volkish ideology and the rise of Hitler. Like Schuon’s thought, the volkish ideology was based on Gnosticism, Occultism, the Hermetic Corpus, Pythogoreanism, [and] neo-Platonism...[18]
This is accurate. Though most of Schuon’s far-right or spiritual fascist tendencies come from Guenon, more than from his father. But Schuon does resemble various far right Germans of his day, such as the symbolist poet Stefan George. George evidently though he was a prophet or priest and even as a messiah of a new kingdom that would be led by intellectual or artistic elites, and in this respect he resembles Schuon who had these same beliefs about himself. George was a homosexual. He hated progress. George's poetry emphasized self-sacrifice, heroism and power. Like Schuon he had an authoritarian personality. He gained popularity in National Socialist circles.... and the Nazis claimed him as a sort of National Poet in the 1930's. Some critics considered George's work to be proto-fascist, though some followers of George actually resisted Nazism. George himself rejected the Nazi's as did Schuon, and moved to Switzerland. George thus has a close affinity to Nazi ideology while yet he split away from it. As I will show later, this ambiguous relationship to Fascism is common among many of the traditionalists.
Another critic of the Traditionalists, who criticizes traditionalism as a Moslem is Hajj Muhammad Legenhausen, who writes in his “Why I am not a Traditionalist” [19] that
“traditionalism seems to be too reactionary and too nostalgic to offer a workable way to move through and beyond modernity. Its positive theses about perennial philosophy romanticize the occult aspects of the world’s religious traditions and are backed by unsupported assumptions, tenuous comparisons based on a prejudiced selection of materials, and rather wild speculations. “
Legenhausen makes a valid point here. The categories of 'modern' and 'traditional' seem specious inventions. Something is not necessarily better if it is older, or if it is newer. History is not a spiritual progression but a fact of existence. The Traditionalists pretend to embody “timeless truth” and metaphysical certainty. But in actuality they are apologists for far right institutions and policies in the modern world itself.
Mark Sedgwick is another critic who as written about Guenon in a book called Against the Modern World. Sedgwick is a Englishman turned Moslem, who lives in Cairo, Egypt. He tries to do as the Romans do, as it were. His book is weak and badly distorted in its criticism of Schuon, better in relation to Julius Evola and Alexander Dugin, but doesn’t go very far in his understanding of Guenon. The book does nevertheless provide perhaps the only relatively disinterested view of the traditionalists. It attempts to be factual and is useful in that regard. Other overviews of traditionalism are written by cult members, acolytes or propagandists. However, I was interviewed for this book and got to know Sedgwick over several years and find Sedgwick’s reporting of my witness to be so completely distorted and falsified that I feel the book should not have been published in its current form. ( see footnote 32 below for more on this).
Sedgwick’s book purports to be primarily about Guenon, which is odd, since it says little that cannot be found in any of the venues that promote Guenon. It mistakenly assumes that only Evola is a “political traditionalist”, without understanding that Guenon’s political extremism was what influenced Evola and other spiritual fascists. Like a new age gossip columnist, Sedgwick even tries to explain away Guenon’s paranoid fits as examples of attacks by magicians! He believes some fo the the superstitious nonsense taht obsessed Guenon. It might have been a good book if Sedgwick had trusted the evidence and followed the facts rather than caving in to political pressures. But as I said, it does have the merit of at least opening up more academic inquiry into investigating the Traditionalists and their relation to fascism. He shows that traditionalism is a world wide movement, connected to fascism and not merely a religious cult in Bloomington Indiana. Moreover, Sedgwick did have to show some courage to publish this book, since the Schuon cult tried to squash it and threatened Sedgwick for bringing it to print. They even tried to force him to lose his job. Thus I can’t but admire him for his courage. It is not easy to stand up against a dangerous cult.
There are a few critics of Evola, such as Roger Griffin and Thomas Sheehan, among others. But most of Evola’s and Schuon’s main ideas come from Guenon. So, in order to really understand what went wrong with Evola and Schuon, Dugin and others, critical insight must be applied to Guenon. Sedgwick failed to do this. Someone needs to assess this thinker in order to assess his followers more effectively. The Traditionalists in general followed Guenon’s mania for secrecy partly in an effort to hide morally repugnant actions. It is essential to remove the veils of secrecy as much as possible and render the Traditionalist movement as transparent as possible.
Since I had been insider involved with the Schuon cult for a few years, between 1989 and 1991, and met various Guenonians, both then and since then, and had observed Guenonians as an outsider since 1991, I thought it might be a good idea if I reflected critically on what I have learned, aware that I would not be able to say everything that needs to be said. I learned the hard way how the machinery of myth and fabrication in the Schuon cult works. I saw with my own eyes how Schuon was willing to lie, pose, create phony visions or have others lie for him, to protect his mythical delusions of grandeur. There is a similar machinery at work in Guenon inspired schools, though it is not exactly the same. My knowledge of Guenon is considerable but not encyclopedic, and some research materials, available only in Europe or unpublished, I have not seen. But I have learned enough over the years to have a well informed opinion of what he did and why.
Writing this essay is not a task I have wanted to accomplish but more one that I feel a certain duty to finish. Someone has to do it. I feel there needs to be a voice that questions the rather toxic heritage left by Guenon. So I wrote the first version of this long essay in 1996. It was then called “A Pathology of Power”. I rewrote this 1998 and 99. I then dropped it, partly because Sedgwick had claimed to want to write a critical assessment of traditionalism. I was quite happy that he wanted the job. But his book did not do what I hoped it would. Recently I looked at the 120 or more pages I had already written again. I decided this should be put in some better state so as to be available to others. So I did a lot editing, cutting out about half of what I originally wrote. A Belgian friend, Denis Constales, helped me with some of the text and translations of some quotes. What I present here, in I hope a somewhat readable form, is a version of what I wrote in 1996 and 99. I have added a few things, but the basic thesis is there.
As to my own relation to Guenon. My current view of him is that he is not worth reading by anyone who cares about the reality of our world. But since there are those who continue to be seduced by the salesmanship, proselytizing and public relations tactics of Traditionalist authors, there needs to be a rejoinder to their propaganda. Guenon and the Traditionalists are the last decadent gasp of old time religions and it is well and good that their influence die off. With the Catholic Church slowly dying, the Jewish state in question and Islam having to adapt to human rights and democracy, religion is on its way out as a major power in the world. That is to the good. No doubt religon will continue to play a role, propped up by reactionary politics. But traditionalism, which tries to hold up archaic forms of religion, is a dying ideology, sad as this might be for those who cling to dying rituals and spiritual methods. For me, Guenon is of interest only as a negative example of the dogmatic elitism and mystagogy that Spiritual Fascism ends up becoming. With a spiritual fascist named George Bush in the White House and another spiritual fascist who bombed the world trade centers in 2001 it is worth studying Spiritual Fascism more closely.
But my view of Guenon in the past was very different. I was troubled by him from the beginning. I came across Guenon’s book, the Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times in 1982 or 83 and was shocked and fascinated by its bleak air of authority and seemingly vast knowledge of other cultures. It was beyond me as far as assessing its truth or falsity. I did not want to believe it was true. But I found it profoundly depressing without being able to answer why. I was accustomed to reading material by writers such as Antonin Artaud, Rimbaud, Lautreamont and others who were thought “insane” or outsiders from the mainstream. The Reign of Quantity is a great classic in the growing genre of what could be called Paranoid literature. Guenon’s books can be seen as being as much part of the literature of outsiders and the insane as they are a part of the history of 20th century mysticism. Guenon’s book differs from the paranoid novels of Tom Pynchon, Franz Kafka, Artaud, and William Burroughs in that Guenon appears to have believed absolutely in his paranoid theory about the end of the modern world. At least Antonin Artaud understood he was sick. Guenon doesn’t have a clue. Like Guenon, Artaud adopts a radically gnostic hatred of the world as a central component of his world-view. But in Artaud this gnostic hatred of the world and existence is pictured as an element in a struggle for sanity. In Guenon all question of psychological analysis, Freudian or otherwise, is condemned as “satanic”. Rather than admit his illness, Guenon blames the entire discipline of psychology itself. [20]
The books of Guenon differ from those of Pynchon or Kafka in that the latter are ironic satires written in order to bring the oppressive, Orwellian powers of our time into question. In contrast, Guenon wants to resurrect and support the oppressive, Orwellian powers with an apocalyptic vengeance. Kafka was a great writer who wanted to stigmatize and offer protest against the arbitrary power of Church and Monarchist states. Kafka is the bad conscience of De Maistre, as it were, who loved “throne and god”. Kafka’s anti-heroes suffer under the blind injustice of “throne and god”. Indeed. Kafka’s books and stories offer metaphors that help us question unjust powers. In contrast, Guenon wants to bring back unjust powers such as the Inquisition, the caste system and the horrific injustices of the divine rights of kings. [21]
However, on the other hand, Franz Kafka and William Burroughs are very like Guenon in that Guenon was basically writing a Science Fiction novel or rather and Anti-Science fiction novel. When Guenon was a young man he outlined a novel in which the hero would use the occult to gain superhuman powers. This was a 19th century equivalent of a modern-day science fiction story. In his Reign of Quantity, Guenon has written a paranoid, apocalyptic novel outlining a spiritually fascist message of hate against the modern world. He is no Kafka. But he is fulfilling in fiction his boyhood dream of having world power, at least in a sort of comic book fashion. Guenon wants to reinstate the monarchical and mythological powers of the far distant past. He can’t do it in reality so he does it in a book. He wants to return to the Pantocrator-Christ as judge throwing lightning bolts at poor sinners. . Like Schuon, Guenon cannot accept that the age of Monarchs, Pharaoh’s, Popes, Caliphs, Shaykhs, Avataras, Prophets, Priests, Philosopher-Kings and Emperors with divine rights is gone. Like the stereotypical paranoid, Guenon and Schuon long to erect again the inflated puppets of power, the Caesars and Napoleons. The fact is that humanity has barely survived these “great men” of the past, yet Guenon wants to return to the age of mythological deceit, where Kings lord over subjects and swat them down like flies and the Church controls the thoughts of the populations. Guenon wrongly imagines that modern forms of exploitation and injustice are different than the old religious means of mind control. The ancient forms of power were far worse than what we have today. The nostalgic and romantic attempt of the Traditionalists is to extol the past as a place of greater justice and peace. This is a falsification of history.
What appealed to me about Guenon when I first read his book in 1983? He seemed to address my fear of nuclear and environmental annihilation. In fact he did not address my concerns at all, but I thought for a time that he did. I had been questioning the role of science in our culture for some time particularly atomic weapons and corporate abuses of science... I appreciated his asking the question of what good modern industry is if it destroys the earth. But I finally figured out after some years that Guenon’s understanding of what science actually is was non-existent. Nor did he have any feeling for the earth, which he saw a “lesser reality", compared to his imaginary eternal ideas and principles. I will be making some critical comments about Guenon’s absurd misunderstanding of science in this essay. But a much more thorough critical treatment of the atrocious ignorance of science by traditionalism is needed.
Guenon had some training in Mathematics.[22] But he had no real understanding of science at all. His whole notion of science leading to a to debasement, “dissolution” and “solidification” and a “Great Parody” finally arising to try to destroy tradition is utter nonsense, mere propagandistic fiction. He has it all backwards. The truth is that science renders the weight of life lighter. It has not led to ‘solidification”, “subversion” or “dissolution”. as Guenon claims. Indeed, it was religions that made life difficult and heavy and people died young without decent health care and were denied basic rights. Religious societies promoted---and still promote--- ignorance and irrational superstitions and myths. Science is clear and light by comparison. Through real science---- and I don’t mean corporate science[23] or what is sometimes called “big science”--- the earth is studied out of praise and love and there is real chance of survival for all species, not just humans.[24] Science is corrupted by power and wealth. But science is essential to understand what corporations are doing to our world. We need to be able to do science ourselves to study and defend our earth from global warming, pollution, destruction of habitats and environmental degradations of all kinds. There is no world beyond this world. All we have are these rivers, animals, plants and our own bodies.
The notion that "tradition" can do anything whatever to address the environmental crisis, the ravages of inequality and over population . Noam Chomsky point that
.....about the serious problems of "ecocrisis." They are not the result of "technology," but of the institutional structures in which technology is used. A hammer can be used to smash someone's skull in, or to build a house. The hammer doesn't care. Technology is typically neutral; social institutions are not. To the (very limited) extent that I understand what is written about these matters in the literature you are referring to, it seems to attribute to technology what should be attributed to institutions of power and privilege, and thus serves to protect these institutions, by shifting attention away from them. I've often suspected that this service to power and privilege may help account for the warm reception given to these doctrines in the ideological institutions, universities, etc. (See http://www.zmag.org/ScienceWars/forumchom.htm )
Chomsky points out that postmodernists, and the traditionalists are an extremist wing of the post-modernist movement, are apologists for unjust forms of power. Chomsky points out that:
"there is no alternative to the common sense procedures that we come to call "science" as they are pursued with greater care and reach deeper insight: try to construct explanatory principles that yield insight and understanding, test them against relevant evidence, keep an open mind about alternatives, work cooperatively with others"
It is not possible to understand the world we live in by quoting archaic Hindu texts, creating secretive elites and perpetuating myth and superstition as the patriarchal ideologies of past cultures. Guenon’s service to power and privilege is obvious. His ideas support retrogressive religious and political views that would plunge us back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance. His rabid fantasies of world destruction merely demonstrate how much he hates our world and how little he understood nature.
Guenon was a paranoid and paranoid people often project their worst fears on to what they hate. The fact is that religion is what “solidifies” ignorance, it is religion that is trying to unsuccessfully “subvert” the good of science, human rights and democracy. Guenonism is anti-intellectualism gone rampant. Traditionalism is an irrationalism. Most of the killing going on in our world today is related to religion and the ignorance it fosters. Guenon was wrong, the great ‘dissolution’ is not an approaching apocalypse, but rather the slow dying of religious superstitions. Guenon’s fevered mind imagined that a mythical "counter-initiation"—a mysterious hidden force whose sole purpose was to oppose the superior forces of true spiritual initiation in the world. Of course, there are no “true initiations”—all that is mythology too. Like Evola, Guenon also viewed these counter-initiatory or "Satanic" forces as real, when, in fact, one man’s Satanism is another man’s god, as Blake showed. Guenon saw these imaginary forces as existing on many levels; in other words, maintaining an immaterial form and intelligence as well as acting through individual human beings----- but all this is paranoid nonsense. There is no satanic force acting though anyone. Guenon himself is one of the last of the charlatan promoters of Big Myths of the religions. Guenon’s attempt to blacken science in his book Reign of Quantity and elsewhere does not stand up to the truth. Religious traditions are undermined by the fact that they are not true and this untruth has been demonstrated time and time again. Guenon thought that Hinduism was incontestably true. But the idea of karma--- that castes are formed because the moral actions of one’s ancestors determined their low or high social standing---- has no evidence to back it up whatever. These and many other myths promoted by religions are slowly unraveling as people become educated and see through the charade.
Guenon’s opposition to science as "luciferian" is extremely foolish, bigoted and misguided. The theory of evolution has enormous geological and physical evidence, both from fossils and the DNA record. Everyday more facts are discovered back up the theory of evolution. Creationism has been proven to be manifestly false with more evidence pouring in every year against it. One of Frithjof Schuon's former disciples, Wolfgang Smith devoted a book to trying to disprove Darwinian evolutionism. He does not succeed in doing so and the book is embarrassing given that the man in question purports to be a scientist. The so called "missing links" in the theory of evolution are increasingly not missing. Traditionalism shows its ignorance no place as much as in their rejection of evolution. The facts of evolution are so pervasive and extensive as to be undeniable. Few theories in science are less controversial. None of the Traditionalists know much about nature or evolution. I know from having spoken with many of them that they merely assert they do not believe in it, but none of them know anything about the actual science. This makes their writings about evolution laughable at best and tragic for those who believe the nonsense they write. Besides Wolfgang Smith’s, Cosmos and Transcendence as well as his Teilhardism and the New Religions, Titus Burckhardt , Schuon Guenon, Whitall Perry and Hossien Nasr have all written absurd, silly and empty denials of evolutionism. Their arguments are basically the same as the creationists which have been refuted thoroughly by many people, from Ernst Mayr to Stephen Jay Gould and many others. None of the Traditionalists know much about the actual facts of the evolutionary record, which are vast and extensive and become more complete every day.
It might be useful to look at a few characteristic errors of the Traditionalists on the subject of evolution. Schuon imagines, for instance, that man did not evolve from the wonderful bodies of Chimps and Apes but rather came from some undisclosed gaseous invertebrate from outer-space. Schuon writes that ” Original man was not a simian being barely capable of speaking and standing upright; he was a quasi-immaterial being enclosed in an aura still celestial, but deposited on earth; an aura similar to the "chariot of fire" of Elijah or the "cloud" that enveloped Christ's ascension.”[25] These very silly fictional fantasies are asserted without the slightest proof. Moreover they show Schuon to be human centered and demeaning towards animals. Schuon writes that “this inconceivable absurdity, evolutionism,… has the miracle of consciousness springing from a heap of earth or pebbles,” [26]. Of course, it certainly did not come from a fictional Zeus, Poseidon or Allah. In fact, precisely what is amazing about evolution is that it shows that consciousness did indeed come from pebbles and earth. That is why the earth is so lovable. Schuon, misses the whole point of the wonder of being alive on earth and the wonder of being related to Chimps and Sea-stars.
Guenon’s idea, which is the basis of most of the absurdities written by the Traditionalists about evolution, is that the "the greater cannot come from the less" , meaning that the human notion of god cannot have come form earth and cells. This is false, since in fact the monotheistic idea of a god is merely a few thousand years old and is only held by certain kinds of cultures that have certain kinds of hierarchical, patriarchal and unjust social arrangements. The god idea is not “greater” than the facts of evolution. On the contrary, the god idea is a created fiction, serviceable to certain sorts of social arrangements. Their absurd writings on evolution ultimately underscore the shallow anti-intellectuality of the Traditionalists and their inability to understand or be open to direct evidence.
I gave Guenon a healthy chance to sell me on his ideas. He tried to sell me religion the way a used car salesman sells cars. I fell for it for awhile. Guenon’s answer to the problem of modernism was to point the way to traditional religion. The problems presented by modernism cannot be solved by merely going to a church or mosque and reciting empty formulas or taking initiations.[27] However, I did not know this then. In order to explore Guenon’s answer to modernism I had to explore the religions. I did that. I went to visit boring local churches, zendos, temples and mosques, and stood above them, with my esoteric Guenonian cultural imperialistic ideology in tow I looked down on the exoteric plebeians below me. That is no way to treat others. Over the course of 5 or 6 years between 1985 and 1991 I explored the landscape outlined by Guenon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy and others. I traveled. I lived in England and studied philosophy, trying to find a way out of the desperate impasse that seemed to me to have overtaken the times I lived in. I met Huston Smith in California who got me into the Schuon cult that Smith was also a member of, though I later watched as he lied about this and covered it up. I lost my respect for him. I met many Traditionalists of many kinds and lost my respect for them too. I was amazed to so much pretense and pride but little virtue or honesty among all these people. I was amazed when I spoke with Martin Lings how willing---even eager---he was to deny direct evidence put before him and live in a cocoon of self delusions of his own making. I was even further amazed when others praised Lings for "sanctity" when I knew him personally and saw how he lied to himself, fled form the truth and hid behind Schuon's delusions of grandeur. But in the end I saw though the façade. The Emperor had no clothes; the Wizard of OZ was a fraud. In other writings I have outlined the corruptions of the Schuon cult. I won’t go into all that here.
When I left the Schuon cult in disgust, I also left Guenon, who I already doubted. I also soon left Islam[28] and eventually religion in general. I went deeply into study for many years, trying to figure out what was wrong with Plato, Christianity and Hinduism. Between 1991 and 1997 I studied at great length. It was clear to me that religion was not true is any real sense, but rather was a system of falsehoods designed to serve social needs of certain classes or institutions. Religions exploited human needs and the needs were true but the religions that used them were not true.[29] I found Guenon’s answers to the question of modernism to be all wrong. I had visited monasteries, practiced various religions and studied deeply and without ceasing. I wrote a book about my findings and eventually realized that all I had written was mistaken, since the evidence did not support Traditionalist claims. I slowly came to see that the sadness I felt about Guenon’s Reign of Quantity masked a sense of horror about just how mistaken Guenon was, and that his book was really the book of man that was mentally ill. His answers did not satisfy. Indeed, Guenon’s solution was far worse than the problem he set out to solve. There are ways to solve the problems of in industrialization and environmental destruction, but the answer was not in Guenon. The answer to the rape of the earth is not to return to the caste system or the medieval system of politics. So, since it is obvious that Guenon is wrong, why is he wrong and where did he go wrong and what appeal does he have and why are so many interested in following his ideas?. I will try to answer some of these questions here, though I doubt I will be able to cover all of this. In any case, I hope others might continue this work and expand on what I have only been able to suggest.
So, in what follows I will try to show the complex relation of traditionalism to fascism in the work of Rene Guenon and his main followers, Frithjof Schuon, Julius Evola, Alex Dugin and others. I will show that Traditionalism has some relation to the fascism or Hitler and Mussolini, which I will call ordinary fascism but is different than ordinary fascism is important ways. What Guenon created is a form of meta-fascism, as it were, or spiritual fascism.
2.The Question about Spiritual FascismWhy is the name of René Guenon (1886-1951) claimed by various neo-fascist groups and far-right individuals as a major influence or forebear? For instance Alain de Benoist, the French neo-fascist, claims him as a primary influence as does Troy Southgate, England’s resident racist and right wing hatemonger. Various far right Catholics with fascist leanings as well as some Islamists, Islamo-fascists, orientalist Sufis and far right cult leaders, such as Frithjof Schuon, also claim him. Massimo Introvigne, the Italian apologist for dangerous religious cults and far right organizer of the center for the study of new religions” (“Cesnur”) also claims him.[30] Julius Evola, a fascist connected to both the Italian and the German fascist groups claims him, as does Andreas Serrano, the Chilean writer of the Hitler, the Final Avatara. [31] The internet is full of references of the importance of Guenon to neo-fascist, New Right or far right “conservative revolution” movements. So what is the relationship of Guenon and his followers in the Traditionalist movement to fascism?
Before answering the question, let me pause on the claim of many Traditionalists to have nothing to do with politics.[32] It is very interesting, and even Orwellian, how many Traditionalist promoters and ideologues so strenuously deny the fascism of their masters or try to say that it was only Evola who was a fascist. They “protest too much” of course and use double-speak to try to deny the obvious. Some of them have even tried to say that the Traditionalists are “apolitical”, which is rather like saying the pope is not a Catholic. But then some Traditionalists, even assert the pope is not a real catholic! That is the wonderful thing about being a Traditionalist. They are subjective idealists. They can make up their own reality based on Platonic categories and live in a delusional world where evidence and science are cast to the winds. It has amazed me over the years to watch how the various Traditionalists I have known persist in believing the most ridiculous superstitions. They are “true believers” in Eric Hoffer’s telling phrase. But then Guenon wrote in a style that makes him sound reasonable even when he promotes the most absurd rubbish. People fall for the big lie.
But whatever superstitious lies they believe it is a historical fact that Rene Guenon got involved with fascism long before Evola and in some ways his involvement was much deeper. As I will show here, Guenon is the origin of fascist tendencies in traditionalism, Evola was merely his follower. Guenon created a form of what I will call ‘spiritual fascism’ that has outlasted the ordinary fascism of Hitler and Mussolini.
To use a concrete example of this double speak of which Traditionalists are capable, and the way some of them try to hide and obscure their repressive, right wing political agenda, consider the website Integral Tradition. [33] This is a fairly typical neo-fascist website, one of dozens. It also calls itself “Conservative Revolution” a term coined by Hofmannsthal and later used in Arthur Moeller’s book The Third Reich form which the Nazi’s got their concept the “Third Reich”. This webpage features a motley crew of biographies and some texts by an amazingly consistent group of extremists, right wingers, neo-Nazis, spiritual fascists, racists and hater mongers. Among them are such people as the British fascist Oswald Mosley, Ernst Junger, and Arthur Moeller. The later was a German Fascist and influence on Hitler as well as current Russian fascism. Moeller was also advocate of “Conservative Revolution”, which is one of many terms used for a Fascist, nationalist apocalyptic or revolutionary attempt to seize power. Alexander Dugin has a “Conservative Revolution” party in Russia built up on ideas derived form Guenon and others. Others listed are people like Francis Parker Yockey, an American right wing fanatic who supported the KKK, and took inspiration for the 1930’s right wing radio demagogue Charles Coughlin, a Catholic Fascist, precursor to todays' Bill O Reilly or Rush LImbaugh. There are many others, from Corneliu Codreanu to Oswald Spengler, and from Rene Guenon to Julius Evola, Charles Maurras and Frithjof Schuon.
The texts used as propaganda on this website all support various aspects of the spiritual fascist message. I select one text, a quote from Charles Upton, a follower of Guenon, Schuon and Coomaraswamy, that claims, falsely, that traditionalism is apolitical. Upton evokes Guenon’s Manichean paranoia, and writes that the “the evil of the world….the coming regime of the Antichrist” has established itself everywhere. For Upton as for Guenon, the evil of the world is the “reign of quantity” and this is science and the ‘liberal/communist/ materialist’ era, as Upton has called it. The only way to fight this, Upton says, is to express the “ principal Truth”. But the “Truth” that Upton and Guenon claim as their own is a ‘Truth’ (capital “T”) that opposes democracy, human rights, science and the enlightenment, all of which are basically good things. This is a political ideology masked as metaphysics. But Upton denies the obvious. Expressing this reactionary “ principal Truth”, Upton says, “is not and never can be a case of propaganda; it is not a social-political act, but liturgical one “. A liturgical act, for Upton is one where reason, human rights, democracy and science, all good things, are called evil. Upton is claiming that such “Truth” as is expressed in Guenon’s and Schuon’s writings are beyond politics because they are based on the “liturgical” truth of the religions. But this is based on the erroneous idea that liturgy is not propaganda and that religion is not political.[34] Liturgies are propaganda--- that is to say, a form of social control or manipulation--- imposed by institutions deep into the body and the mind—they are the politics of the ‘inner life’ as it were. The purpose of repetition of prayers is to stop thought and force conformity of outlook and belief. Eating the Eucharist is a meaningless act which only takes on meaning by being accorded meaning by an institution. Likewise, a mantra or repetition of a divine name is given as a way of ritualizing social control. Those who take the Eucharist are allegedly saved and those who do not are allegedly damned. This is pure politics as well as superstition. No one is damned or saved, but the whole propagandistic sleight of hand of religion is convincing people that this nonsense is true, that Christians are better than non-Christians, or Moslems are better than “kafirs” (unbelievers) or that the religious are better than those who love science and freedom of thought. Religion is this propagandistic sleight of hand, this system of prejudice and mental manipulations and does not have the credibility or truth of something like physics or evolution, which are proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Such books as the Koran or Bible are propaganda at their core. Metaphysics is a systematic imposition of superstition. As Noam Chomsky has said “The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history” and the irrepressible Mark Twain would agree. Twain said that “[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.” Exactly right. Traditionalism gives its addicts a sense of their own exclusive and supreme worth, over and above all the “profane people”, as Traditionalist disdainfully call everyone who is not in the various Traditionalist cults or cliques. The Traditionalists I have known, all of them ordinary folks who went to high schools or British or French or other schools, read a few books by Guenon or Schuon and think no one but themselves will ever be so eminent or full of grandiose esoteric truth. These books are like a heroin shot of pride and arrogance. Schuon claimed in my hearing that most of the world’s people, ‘profane people’ deserve to be killed. But his disciples deserved a special heaven all to themselves. That pride, that arrogant willingness to destroy others, is what Spiritual Fascism is all about. Guenon created this form of using religion as a means of escalating and inflaming political and spiritual discriminations and prejudices while putting oneself on top of the imaginary celestial heap.
Upton’s own books, which are slavish and derivative of Guenon, Schuon and others, are assumed, in the above quote, to be superior to all politics. He suffers from the same apocalyptic arrogance and proneness to narcissistic inflation that characterizes other spiritual fascists, from George Bush to Rene Guenon. Politics is nominally a lesser realm in the Guenonian ideology -- politics is merely the affairs of the temporal realm, he says. But in fact, Guenon’s metaphysical infinites, his eternal thoughts, his “beyond being” are all very ‘temporal’ creations used to ultimately fuel a politics of hate and prejudice, superiority and disdain, caste and delusions of grandeur. Guenon’s system of spirituality involves the use of traditional religions as a vehicle, and methods of invocatory prayer and metaphysical dreams of other worlds as means of realization. Guenon’s rhetorical claim to metaphysical unity and oneness in the midst of his “Intellect” is a self-magnifying mythic fantasy. On the basis of this fantasy he and his followers are assumed to be superior to all that is “worldly”. Of course this is pure hypocrisy. Guenon’s claim to be beyond all politics is a claim to define all politics— this is the ultimate political claim.
One need only read a few of Guenon’s or Upton’s paragraphs to see that these men believe themselves to be the ultimate deciders of worth and truth. I happen to have met Charles Upton once and know he is an unassuming man on the outside,-- a humble, honorable man-- but his books show him as a right wing, neo-fascist Moslem, fixated on “evil” with an ego many miles high. He was a New Age hippie for some years before moving to the extreme right. Now is is a New Age fascist who denies he is new age. He is obsessed with apocalyptic ideologies as was Guenon.[35] Guenon was a man drunk in his own self importance, hiding behind a pose of a humble man leading a simple life.[36] Upton read a few books and now thinks himself the supreme authority on truth and righteousness. Guenon and Upton claim to speak from the height of “Truth” and their words are supposed to rain down on readers head like biblical manna form heaven. Upton is claiming in his writings that Guenon, Schuon and perhaps himself are speaking by “divine right”, or because the holy spirit tells him or, like a Baptist preacher seething over the existence of evil Guenon claimed to have been initiated into the divine mysteries by secret masters. He claimed that god speaks out of him directly and that all politics must derive form this “truth”. This claim to speak out of or in the interests of the “absolute” is a spiritual form of fascism.
In fact, Guenon was obsessed with the idea of evil form an early age. One of his first pieces of writing was a poem about Satan, and notes for a novel in which he would gain tremendous spiritual powers. Guenon and Upton are writing fantasy novels presented as if they were true, rather like today’s far-right Christian novelists. Like The Christian apocalyptic novelists, Upton and Guenon and obsessed with branding all they do not like with the term “evil”, which is basically a political term in their usage. [37] The Traditionalists play on the borderline between religion, fiction and politics and they do so as part of an effort to claim global authority on the basis of all religions and not just local authority based on one religion. The claim, is absurd, of course, and can only be sustained within a small and well policed, cultish world, where disciples, cult members and true believers alone are allowed to penetrate.[38] The claim to possess the ultimate truth to which all others must submit is a claim to political and social power, however ridiculous it may be. This is the claim that Guenon made, and it is what makes Guenon sympathetic to neo-fascists. Like Guenon, Upton reduces the world into a Manichaean dualism. For Upton, as for Guenon, there is the myth of the “Antichrist” set against the esoteric Truth represented by Guenon and his followers, in an absurd battle of modernism against tradition; “Them versus Us”. [39] All the Traditionalists, Guenon, Schuon and others create their systems of thought based on a radical extension of the “Them versus Us”, idea. Christ’s statement, quoted earlier, “he that is not with me is against me”, is a paranoid statement meant to declare a war against critics. Traditionalism, like many religions or cults is systems of moral blackmail. Similar threats throughout the Koran become the bedrock of the Traditionalist movement, fueling their certainty in their superiority---- a superiority that doesn’t exist except in the minds of brainwashed followers. In their minds, the entire world is reduced to a paranoid and poisonous war between good and evil, spirit and matter, quality and quantity. For the Guenonians, metal objects ooze evil influences, coins are full of harmful Satanist forces and archeological sites are centers of harmful effluents coming from evil worlds. For Guenon the entire world is a “great wall” and evil is seeping through the cracks or “fissures” in the wall like bad thoughts infecting the mind of a schizophrenic serial killer. Only the spiritual fascist, the ‘avatara’ will triumph in the end, armed like Nazi Warriors, like Siegfried, like Saint George and the dragon, like the Templars, like Mussolini, or like Schuon claiming to be the final prophet at the end of time, will survive the cataclysm. For Traditionalists, these delusional figures of myth and fantasy are real.
I use this example of Charles Upton’s fake claim to be apolitical on the neo-fascist website Integral Tradition to illustrate how the Traditionalists can be extraordinarily pretentious. But putting the penchant of many Traditionalists for self-delusion aside, the fact is that from its inception among figures such as Joseph De Maistre or Rene Guenon, the entire Traditionalist movement was fundamentally political. Their metaphysical claim to represent and promulgate the “fundamental”, “quintessential”, “magisterial” essence of “the real”, to use their own inflated language, was itself a grandiose political claim. They wanted to turn back the good done by the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and go back to the good old days of the Caste system and the Inquisition. Even peripheral figures to the Traditionalist movement like Mircea Eliade[40] had a fascination with the Romanian Iron-Guard, a fascist organization. Michel Valsan, one of Guenon’s main followers, also had a fascination with this organization, according to Marcel Clavelle, who wrote a chronicle about Guenon’s life. Carl Jung[41] , Martin Heidegger[42] and Joseph Campbell had associations with or shared similar ideas to the fascists and like them are prone to grandiose claims. Each of these thinkers and their relation to fascism have been studied in detail. What they all share in common with Guenon and Schuon is that they are all romantic, reactionary and nostalgic for past myths and religions, prone to creating systematic theories based on essentializations, prone to patriarchy, skeptical of hateful of science or technology, and long for a system of totalist order. Like Guenon, all these thinkers are anti-rational and prone to belief in superstitious deities of whatever origin. Heidegger belonged to the Nazi Party: Jung endorsed it; Campbell was enthusiastic about Nazism in his early years, and had an anti-Semitic disdain for Judaism. Eliade was a practicing fascist in Romania. They all hated, in varying degrees individualism, modernism, rationalism, and quantification. They all wanted to smear science, in varying degrees and revive dying systems of dogmatic and irrational belief systems. Obscurantist and occultist romantics, all these men, along with Schuon and Guenon, endorse a retroactive spiritualism that has fascist tendencies without actually being fully fascist.
Martin Heidegger and the Nazis.
( Heidegger is 4th from the right, with the X in front of him)
So, back to my initial question. “Are Rene Guenon and his followers fascists?” or put more broadly, “were or are the Traditionalists fascists?” The simple answer is a definite, yes, but with with many qualifications. I could equally well say, no, but in some ways they are... The Traditionalists are not fascists of the ordinary kind, such as one refers to when one speaks of the followers of Mussolini, Franco and Hitler. They are intellectual or spiritual fascists. But to explain this will take some time. I will begin with Guenon himself and then move on to some of his followers, trying to explain the process the difference and similarities between the Spiritual Fascism that Guenon invented and the ordinary fascism of Hitler and Mussolini.
3.Guenon in Relation to Action Francaise, Blavatsky, Liebenfels and the Knights Templar
Guenon in relation to Action Francaise :
Rene Guenon created Spiritual Fascism between the years 1924-30 when he associated with ultra-right Catholics, royalists and proto-fascists in France. At this point in time fascism is still somewhat vague as a politics and includes elements of monarchism, Catholicism and other mixtures. Also during this period, from 1925-27, Rene Guenon wrote for the ultra-right, Monarchist and Royalist Catholic periodical known as Regnabit. This was a very political periodical, despite its apparent devotion to the subject of “Symbolism”.[43] The discussion of symbolism in Regnabit by Charbonneau-Lassay and others, was, in a veiled manner, primarily directed toward an overthrow of the current French government and the return of rule to the Church and the aristocracy. They longed to return to France before the French revolution, when the aristocracy and the Church were the unjust, caste ridden, self-serving guarantors of an unfair social order. The point of view of the Regnabit magazine thus reflected extreme right-wing Catholic concerns of the time, concerns that Guenon, who tended towards ultra-right Monarchist and Royalist Catholicism in many of his views, sympathized with. Guenon was eventually forced to leave the magazine by some of its editors, notably a certain Fr. Felix Anizan, because the Orthodox Catholics, such as Anizan, did not like Guenon’s pretensions to an even more totalistic, Masonic and “universalistic’ symbolism. Guenon is already leading toward a global politics in the 1920’s.Also during this period in the 1920s Guenon also got involved with “ Action Francaise “, a group which some consider to be the first fascist group to ever exist. Action Francaise was headed by Charles Maurras (1868-1952) and Leon Daudet (1867-1942). Another partisan of Action Francaise that Guenon was closely associated with was Ferdinand Gombault. [44] Action Francaise was a Catholic Fascist/monarchist group which originated to try to turn back the tide of the 20th century and return to older forms of power. Action Francaise put out a newspaper of the same name, had a large following and was widely supported by Roman Catholics, small businessmen, and professional men.[45] The movement was based on a return to the past as well as being a conservative and pro-fascist revolutionary group which advocated the violent overthrow of the parliamentary Third Republic (1870-1940).
Maurras, according to Simone Weil, was a” virulent Jew-hater”, and Maurras, “along with Leon Daudet founded l’Action Francaise, a movement and a magazine of unspeakable virulence, which prepared the ground for what was to come” when the Nazis took power in France. Weil writes:
“Charles Maurras was an anti-democratic atheist Catholic...Action Francaise occupied a position of extraordinary influence in the French hierarchy and among Catholic intellectuals—Jacques Maritain began his career with Maurras. Maurras supported Roman Catholicism as an instrument of social control, although personally he felt only contempt for Christian faith and morals…. [Maurras wrote] “Catholicism is an attenuated Christianity filtered through the happy genius of France,” ..... Maurras hated the Reformation because it released the Christian gospel from the imperial organization, and had set it free over Europe. As an atheist Catholic, he took the imperial organization without the gospel and cultivated that large group of Frenchmen who, in the tradition of de Maistre and Veuillot, had praised the Church for the same reason. ...” [46]
Maurras and Daudet were largely in agreement with Joseph De Maistre, whom Guenon had also been deeply influenced by.[47] As Isaiah Berlin points out in his excellent study of De Maistre, De Maistre is not only a throw back to the fanatic Traditionalists of the Inquisition, but he looks forward and is a precursor of Hitler and the fascist movement. He thought of the state as a divine institution, and the executioner as a divine office. He was an advocate of slavery or serfdom. Like De Maistre, Guenon despised democracy and basic human rights and wanted to return society to the “Throne and God” of Imperial religious dictators. De Maistre longs for the world of lost aristocratic privileges that were gone, and is willing to kill hundreds of thousands to get this power back. De Maistre wrote somewhere that the banner ideas of the French Revolution, namely, “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”, must be replaced with the call for “Throne and God”. De Maistre wrote that the “two anchors of society” are “religion and slavery”[48]. The “infallibility” of religion, in De Maistre’s view is bolstered by the state and both depend upon slavery or serfdom. [49] Much of this ideological position was adopted wholesale by Guenon and Schuon. De Maistre would have hated Thoreau, Lincoln or Frederick Douglas, who helpe
