Category: Articles

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 3 (June 2018)

When we think of wars, revolutions, populist uprisings, outbreaks of mass hysteria and other sudden social and political eruptions – even a popstar’s popularity or the latest fashion trend – we usually believe that at bottom there is some logical, rational explanation for them, even if we do not yet possess it. We are confident that we can understand these things through economics, psychology, race relations, religion, or as a reaction to ‘modernity’ or to some other factor that we can reason about, analyse, come to decisions on and take steps to alter and improve. 

Although the evidence sadly seems to suggest otherwise, we believe that ultimately we can learn how to control the factors that lead to these explosions. We can, if not eliminate the more catastrophic events like wars, at least minimise the disruptions they cause. In short, we believe we control our fate – or will be able to sometime soon. That is the whole modern project: man applying his intellect and will in order to make a better world, working to control events rather than be controlled by them, and steering history toward progress. We are not there yet, but it is just a matter of time.

But what if there are factors at work in these massive human events that are beyond our control? What if they are not a product of solely rational, calculable forces but are triggered by natural causes, even cosmic ones? What if the power behind these upheavals doesn’t come from the earth below but from up above, in outer space, from the moon, the stars, the planets and the sun?

We know that for a great part of human history that is exactly what many people believed. Until the advent of what we know as science in the early seventeenth century, the belief that the stars ordered our destiny was commonly accepted. Astrology, the art of foreseeing the turn of events on earth by charting the movements of the stars in the heavens, had for millennia guided emperors and kings the world over. In ancient China, India, and the Middle East, in classical Greece and Rome and throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the belief that “everything in the… cosmos was inextricably connected to everything else, no matter how great or how small” was as much common knowledge as the supposed Big Bang is today.¹ And that this arrangement was hierarchical, with changes in the heavens portending those on earth, was also accepted. It was generally agreed that the earth and everything on it was open to forces coming from beyond and that the wise men of antiquity understood these forces and benefited by them.

All this changed some four centuries ago when what we know as science began to disabuse Western man of such ‘nonsense’ – notwithstanding that millions of people around the globe still accept it.² The irony here is that some of the most significant figures in the rise of the modern scientific view of the world were well-steeped in the very ‘nonsense’ they were ostensibly freeing us from. 

Hermeticism & Astrology

The inauguration of the modern worldview is generally credited to the Polish astronomer Nicolai Copernicus. In On The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) Copernicus argued – reluctantly it seems – that, as we all accept today, the sun did not orbit the earth, but the earth the sun.³ It, not ourselves, was at the centre of things, or at least that of our solar system. 

Although Copernicus was a timid agent provocateur – and a mean-spirited one – his work nevertheless sparked a revolution among the heavenly spheres and our earthly one.⁴ Yet the idea that the sun was at the heart of things did not arrive in Copernicus’ mind fully formed. As the historian Frances Yates argued some years ago – and as has been echoed more recently by others – Copernicus was an attentive reader of the Hermetic texts in which the sun plays a dominant, we might even say, central role.⁵ 

Western astrology is one of the Hermetic sciences. It has its roots in the teachings of the great sage Hermes Trismegistus, father of magic and science and initiate of the perennial philosophy, collected in the Corpus Hermeticum and other texts, circa 200 CE. In Book XVI of the Corpus Hermeticum, Hermes calls the sun the “craftsman,” Plato’s name for the demi-urge, creator of the universe. In the Asclepius – a Hermetic text not in the Corpus Hermeticum – Hermes speaks of the sun’s “divinity and holiness” and calls it a “second god.” 

In the introduction to his work, Copernicus enlists two previous sages in support of his theory, both of whom find places in the Aurea Catena, or Golden Chain of Adepts, by whom the Hermetic wisdom, or prisca theologia, has been handed down through the ages, at least according to the Renaissance Hermeticist Marsilio Ficino. These are Pythagoras (who, we know, heard the ‘music of the spheres’) and his follower, the teacher of Plato, Philolaus. Copernicus even refers directly to the sun as a “visible god,” just as the Asclepius does. The fact that in the Hermetic cosmology the sun’s position differs from its place in the Ptolemaic system that Copernicus was ‘improving’, suggests that it was an important influence on those improvements.

Copernicus wasn’t the only one to help shape our modern universe while retaining a good amount of the ancient one. The seventeenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, devoted much time to astrology and forecast more than one dignitary’s fortune, although he was not always happy about it. He was also for a time a guest of Rudolf II, the Hermetic Holy Roman Emperor, a patron and student of astrologers.⁶ “That the sky does something to man is obvious,” Kepler said, “but what it does specifically remains hidden.”⁷ Kepler recognised that much astrology was moonshine – at least that was true of his competition. But he also knew that the genuine baby should not be thrown out with the phony bathwater. 

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Sir Isaac Newton, whose view of the cosmos was dominant until the advent of Einstein, wrote more about alchemy – a Hermetic science directly linked to astrology – than he did about gravity. And as astrology is also known as an ‘occult science’ – ‘occult’ meaning ‘unseen’ – then Newton was a Hermeticist even when he did write about gravity which is also unseen. As with Copernicus, there is much debate today over how much Newton’s Hermetic ideas informed the Principia (1687), the blueprint for the modern, Newtonian view of the cosmos, which, ironically, ousted the earlier, more ‘magical’ one.⁸

Nevertheless, even with this esteemed company, astrology suffered the same fate as the other Hermetic sciences and was relegated with other forms of ‘rejected knowledge’ to the great dustbin of ideas – and also, since the 1930s, to daily appearances in most major newspapers. But it didn’t go down without a fight. As late as 1768, the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer, soon to add a word to our vocabulary, earned his doctorate with his dissertation on ‘The Influence of the Planets on the Human Body’. Mesmer did not consider himself an astrologer or occultist. He was a scientist who had discovered the medium through which the planets and the entire cosmos influence life on earth. Yet he could not escape astrology altogether. The very word ‘influence’ itself comes from astrology. It is the name Marsilio Ficino gave to the stellar fluid that flows from the stars down to earth and informs what happens here.

The medium Mesmer had discovered – to his satisfaction and that of many of his patients, if not the authorities – was what he called ‘animal magnetism’ – ‘animal’ meaning ‘animated’, not ‘beastly’. This was, like the astral influence, a fluid permeating the universe, like the nineteenth-century ‘ether’, linking everything to everything else, its cosmic flow keeping all in balance. In living things it was the source of health and vitality, and Mesmer believed he had mastered a method of guiding and encouraging its movement in his patients, many of whom agreed. 

A side-effect of the ‘magnetic passes’ that Mesmer and the mesmerists that received his training made over patients was what became known as the ‘magnetic trance’. It was a student of Mesmer, the Marquis de Puységur, who in 1785 stumbled on to what was really at work.⁹ The ‘trance’ was not magnetic, animal or otherwise, but hypnotic – the term was coined by the Scot James Braid in 1842. When today we say someone is ‘mesmerised’ we mean they are ‘hypnotised’, not that animal magnetism is at work. 

While Mesmer might not have grasped the phenomenon of hypnosis, he may not have been as wrong about magnetism as the members of the French Academy of Sciences, who in 1784 declared his work a fraud, believed. 

Gauquelin’s Breakthrough Survey

Astrology held on in the popular mind, along with other Hermetic ideas, but as the modern age progressed science continued to dismiss it. Then in the mid-twentieth century science, of all things, seemed to come to its aid. In 1955 Michel Gauquelin, a French psychologist and statistician with degrees from the Sorbonne, published a book L’influence des astres (‘The Influence of the Stars’) based on years of research that seemed to support some of astrology’s fundamental ideas. This work, as well as the English editions of his other books – The Cosmic Clocks (1967), Astrology and Science (1970), Cosmic Influences on Human Behaviour (1974) – made Gauquelin astrology’s most persuasive scientific defender, although, like Mesmer, he did not see himself as an astrologer. Gauquelin and his collaborator, his wife Françoise, said they simply wanted to answer a basic question: does one’s birthday have any effect on one’s future? 

After submitting the 27,000 + birthdates they had gathered to statistical analysis, the initial results were disappointing. There seemed to be no substantial correspondence between one’s ‘sun sign’ (Capricorn, Aries, Pisces, etc.) – the constellation the sun is ‘in’ at the time of one’s birth – and one’s destiny. But the Gauquelins seemed to have discovered something else. There was a strong correlation between one’s future profession and the time of birth, not because of the sun, but because of the planets. The Gauquelins discovered that more famous doctors were born just after the rise or culmination of Mars or Saturn – planets related to that vocation – than chance should have allowed. Top-ranking military leaders were born just after the rise or culmination of Mars or Jupiter; again the astrological correspondence held. Professions which in traditional astrological lore were associated with the other inner planets – Mercury and Venus – showed similar correlations. As Guy Lyon Playfair and Scott Hill say in The Cycles of Heaven, “In some cases, there was only one chance in five million that such clusterings were due to chance alone.”¹⁰ 

And there was another odd fact: these significant results were true only of people who were highly successful at their work. The Gauquelins saw that large numbers of scientists, doctors, athletes, artists, writers and others, who were competent but not above average, fell outside their select group. It was as if the smaller number received the planetary influence – whatever it was – direct and absorbed it all, leaving very little for the stragglers. Gauquelin’s findings have come to be known as ‘the Mars Effect’.

Gauquelin’s results were examined by the psychologist and statistician Hans Eysenck. Eysenck, a tough-minded sceptic, had to admit that he was convinced. And when Eysenck and his colleagues examined some other astrological givens – that people born under ‘water’ signs tend to be emotional, that those born under ‘odd’ numbered signs tend to be extroverted while those born under ‘even’ ones are introverted – he and his team were surprised to find the evidence strongly in favour of them.¹¹

The question remained of exactly how the planets and other cosmic bodies can affect earthly ones? Some people working in the earlier part of the last century, and in another part of the world, thought they might have a clue.

The Role of the Moon

Whether astrology can account for it or not – I don’t have the statistics on hand – it nevertheless seems that investigating the role of cosmic forces on human life is a peculiarly Russian pursuit. At least in researching this article I came across more Russians than chance may have allowed. For example, the Greek-Armenian esoteric teacher G. I. Gurdjieff may not have been Russian – his exact nationality has always been uncertain – but he certainly started his career in Russia.¹² In 1914, with the First World War erupting, the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s most famous pupil, asked him if such catastrophes could be avoided. They could, Gurdjieff told Ouspensky, but what was necessary was to understand why they start. 

“What is war?,” Gurdjieff asked Ouspensky. “It is the result of planetary influences. Somewhere up there two or three planets have approached too near to each other; tension results… For them it lasts, perhaps, a second or two. But here, on the earth, people begin to slaughter one another, and they go on slaughtering maybe for several years.” The people involved feel they have perfectly good reasons for fighting – for king, country, national honour, lebensraum or to pre-empt an attack by a hostile neighbour. But “they fail to realise to what extent they are mere pawns in the game.”¹³ 

Gurdjieff also spoke to Ouspensky about the moon. Bookshelves are full of accounts of how the full moon affects some people; our terms ‘lunacy’, ‘lunatic’, ‘looney’, ‘moonshine’ are evidence of the popular acceptance of something that is still ‘officially’ dismissed. Gurdjieff took it a bit further. “The moon,” he said, “is the chief… motive force of all that takes place in organic life on earth. All movements, actions, and manifestations of people… depend on the moon and are controlled by the moon.”¹⁴ Perhaps the strangest thing was Gurdjieff’s insistence that the moon is a living being and that it is growing, and that its nourishment comes from the souls of ‘sleeping’ people who are not working to attain the true ‘waking’ state of consciousness.¹⁵ 

When one recognises that in the weeks surrounding the November 2016 US presidential election the moon entered a ‘perigee full moon’ or ‘supermoon’ – when it was both full and closer to the earth than it had been for nearly seventy years – one wonders if Gurdjieff knew things denied more conventional political analysts.¹⁶

Gurdjieff said that he gained his cosmic knowledge during his time with the mysterious Sarmoung Brotherhood in Central Asia.¹⁷ One wonders if he had more local sources. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, was, like Ouspensky, a full-blooded Russian. In Isis Unveiled (1877) she writes that “certain planetary aspects may imply disturbances in the ether of our planet, and certain others rest and harmony.” At times this influence promotes periods of withdrawal, of “monasticism and anchoritism”; at others frenzied action and “utopian schemes.” And where Gurdjieff speaks of the “harmony of reciprocal maintenance” operating throughout the cosmos, Blavatsky speaks of the “reciprocal relations between the planetary bodies.”¹⁸

Blavatsky got her knowledge from her Masters in Tibet. Did anyone in Russia have it too? Oddly, around the same time that Gurdjieff was enlightening Ouspensky about our place in the cosmos, it seemed someone did. But in his case, the sun, not the moon, pulled the strings.

The Role of the Sun

In June 1915, the eighteen-year-old prodigy Aleksandr Chizhevsky – scientist, musician, painter, poet – noticed something. He had become fascinated with the study of sun-spots – huge dark bodies that pass across the surface of the sun – and it struck him that at the same time as a large group of spots crossed the sun’s central meridian, certain events transpired on earth. The aurora borealis that month was unusually strong, and the magnetic storms making up the spots had disrupted more radio and telephone communication than usual. But there was something else. The fiercest battles of the war coincided with the spots. Was that a coincidence? 

In 1916, when he was fighting with the Russian army on the Galician front, Chizhevsky saw that the battles intensified when solar flares and geomagnetic storms were most active. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power, there was, he saw, another unusual burst of solar activity. Checking the records, Chizhevsky saw that there had also been one in 1905, at the time of an aborted uprising. 

By 1922 Chizhevsky had made a chart showing, he claimed, 2,400 years of “mass movements”: wars, major battles, revolutions, uprisings, migrations, from across the globe. These, he argued, came in regular cycles which coincided almost exactly with the eleven-year sun-spot cycle. (In 1843, the German astronomer Heinrich Schwabe observed that sun-spots went through a ten-year cycle; the idea was later refined by Rudolf Wolf and Alexander Humboldt and established at eleven years.)

Chizhevsky believed he had discovered a “universal cycle of historical events,” with the sun, or whatever was behind its spots, at the wheel.¹⁹ Every major outbreak in recent history, from the French Revolution to the start of World War I, was precipitated by solar excitement. Chizhevsky was even able to predict when such things would occur. In 1926, guided by the sun-spot cycle, Chizhevky predicted important flare-ups from 1927 to ’29. What happened then? Salazar’s dictatorship began in Portugal. Chiang Kai-shek captured Peking. Mussolini was on the rise as was Hitler, and Stalin consolidated his power by exiling Trotsky. And Wall Street suffered a collapse triggering the Great Depression.

Chizhevsky’s work impressed many people, like the economist Edward Dewey, who used his ideas in his own work on economic cycles. Others, like Stalin, were not so impressed. In 1942, when he realised that for Chizhevsky sun-spots and not the irresistible march of the Marxist class war were responsible for the Soviet Union, he ordered him to retract his work. By this time Chizhevsky was a prestigious scientist, with many degrees and honours. Alongside Nicolai Fedorov, Konstantin Tsilokovsky, and V. I. Vernadsky, he was one of what is known as the ‘Cosmist’ school. Chizhevsky refused and Stalin sent him to a gulag for eight years, with eight years ‘rehabilitation’ after that. He was released during the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ following Stalin’s death and today is revered as the ‘father of heliobiology’, the study of the sun’s influence on life on earth. Other Russians who were influenced by his work or shared his belief in cosmic forces affecting the earth, were Vladimir Vernadsky, mentioned above, who popularised the ideas of the ‘biosphere’ and ‘noosphere’, and the historian Lev Gumilev, whose ideas about ‘ethnoi’ and ‘passionarity’ as agents of civilisation, also depend on cosmic forces affecting human beings.²⁰

Chizhevsky believed that what was behind the intensified agitation during high sun-spot activity was an increase in negative ions in the atmosphere. The solar flares erupting from the sun during the intense magnetic storms making up the spots affected the earth’s own magnetic field, which in turn ‘ionised’ the air. Positive ions, he believed, had a ‘negative’ effect, making people dull, lethargic, and irritable. Negative ions did the opposite. They worked as stimulants; hence the effect of a ‘breathe of fresh air’ after a rainstorm. The ionisation too went through cycles and at the highest concentration of negative ions, things start jumping.²¹ Mesmer was not as wrong as his critics believed. Magnetism did have something to do with it. 

Chizhevsky died in 1964. One odd fact that he missed but others, like Edward Dewey, noticed was that often things on earth occurred slightly ahead of the sun-spot cycle, as if effect preceded cause – or as if events on earth triggered the spots. If this was the case, then something else must be responsible or at least precede both. In 1949 John Nelson, an RCA engineer who had been studying the sun to ‘predict’ when its spots would interfere with communications, hit upon an answer. Somehow, the planets had a hand in it. Although most astronomers would laugh at the idea of a planet’s weak magnetic field having any effect on the sun, this is exactly the conclusion Nelson came to, and which enabled him to predict and avoid blackouts.²² The odd thing was that the planets’ effect on the sun coincided with traditional astrological notions of ‘opposition’ and ‘conjunction’. When planets were in such an arrangement with the sun and the earth, things tended to go haywire. Otherwise, things were fine.

Some contemporary thinkers see in Chizhevky’s work an argument against free will. In The Bond, Lynne McTaggart states that “if we are essentially at the mercy of the slightest move of the sun and its activity,” then Chizhevsky’s work stands “as a gigantic refutation of our misguided belief in ourselves as masters of the universe – or even of ourselves.”²³ This is a not uncommon reflection on human hubris.But it goes against what Chizhevsky himself believed: that the sun does not compel us to do anything in particular, only to do something. It acts as a stimulant; what we do when stimulated is up to us. There may be increased belligerence during intense sun-spot activity, but there are always pacifists, conscientious objectors, and quiet people at home, sitting out the riots.

As astrological lore has it, ‘the stars incline, they do not compel’. This was something Gurdjieff knew when he told Ouspensky that one could choose which influences one fell under.²⁴ Man could escape being ‘food for the moon’ by working on himself and, in his interior planetary system – spelled out in fascinating detail by Rodney Collin, a student of Ouspensky, in The Theory of Celestial Influence – could become an ‘inner sun’, under a minimum of cosmic laws.²⁵ As its students know, this too was an aim of Hermeticism.²⁶ The stars in their courses may spark events here on earth, but we still have the responsibility of steering our way through them.

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Footnotes

1. Nicholas Campion, The Great Year: Astrology, Millenarianism and History in the Western Tradition, Arkana, 1994, 76

2. Peter Marshall, World Astrology, Macmillan, 2004

3. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, Penguin Books, 1979, 121

4. Colin Wilson, Starseekers, Hodder & Stoughton, 1980, 86

5. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971; Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Forbidden Universe, Constable, 2011; Gary Lachman, The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus, Floris Books, 2011

6. Peter Marshall, The Theatre of the World, Harvill Secker, 2006

7. Quoted in Guy Lyon Playfair and Scott Hill, The Cycles of Heaven, Souvenir Press, 1978, 256

8. Sean Martin, Alchemy and Alchemists, Pocket Essentials, 2006, 76

9. Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, Fontana Press, 1994, 7-74

10. Playfair and Hill, 257

11. Colin Wilson, Mysteries, Watkins, 2006, 582-83. ‘Water’ signs are Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces. ‘Odd’ signs are Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius, ‘even’ ones Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Pisces.

12. As his biographer James Webb wrote, “Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was born… and here all pretentions to accuracy stop.” (The Harmonious Circle, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980, 25)

13. P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1949, 24

14. Ibid., 85

15. It may have been with this in mind that Colin Wilson made the moon the base of operations of the psychic vampires in his novel The Mind Parasites (Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2005). This edition has a preface by me.

16. https://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/02/world/supermoon-november-14-2016/index.html 

17. G.I. Gurdjieff, Meeting with Remarkable Men, Penguin Classics, 2015. This edition has an Introduction by me.

18. G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’ s Tales to His Grandson, First Book, E.P. Dutton, 1978, 81; Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol. 1, Theosophical Publishing House, 1972, 274

19. Playfair and Hill, 277

20. Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism, Yale University Press, 2016, 125

21. The ‘passionarity’ that Lev Gumilev believed was the driving force behind human activity may be Chizhevsky’s sensitivity to negative ions.

22. Playfair and Scott, 46

23. Lynne McTaggart, The Bond, Hay House, 2011, 60

24. Ouspensky, 25

25. Rodney Collin, The Theory of Celestial Influence, Watkins Publishing, 1980. Collin, too, hits on planetary magnetism as the agent at work. For him, it directly affects the body’s glandular system which he sees as arranged in parallel order to planets’ positions vis-a-vis the sun. 

26. Gary Lachman, The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus, Floris Books, 2011, 135-37

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 10 No 3 (June 2016)

A question nags at everyone today: are things getting better or worse? The answer depends on the criteria you’re using. In terms of material comfort, it seems clear that life is better and easier for most people – certainly most people in the West – than they were a century ago.

Yet somehow this is not reassuring. The very forces that have created these comforts threaten to destroy us. And in any case the complexities of advanced civilisation have by no means enabled us to feel that we, individually or collectively, have any meaningful place in the universe. Indeed there would seem to be powers that are trying to thwart this sense of meaning and to stamp it out whenever it raises its head. The works of René Guénon (1886–1951) attempt to deal with this problem.

Guénon is still little-known even among the mainstream intelligentsia. But his critique of the modern world – set out particularly in his books East and West, The Crisis of the Modern World, and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times – has become increasingly influential both in the West and in the Islamic world (Guénon, a convert to Islam, moved to Cairo in 1930 and lived there for the rest of his life).

Guénon starts with the concept of the yugas, the world ages as conceived in traditional Hindu metaphysics. The first and best is the Satya Yuga; next is the Treta Yuga; third is the Dvapara Yuga; the last, shortest, and worst is the Kali Yuga, the age of darkness. This is the age we are in. It began in 3102 BCE, with the end of the great war described in the epic known as The Mahabharata. Most Hindu sources say that the Kali Yuga will last 432,000 years – in short, we are nowhere near the end of it. Guénon sees the matter otherwise. In The Crisis of the Modern World he writes: “We have in fact entered upon the last phase of the Kali-Yuga, the darkest period of the ‘dark age’, the state of dissolution from which it is impossible to emerge otherwise than by a cataclysm.”

The reasons for Guénon’s belief are complex, but they have to do with his view of the ages as a gradual movement (and decline) from a pure and direct contact with the primordial source of Tradition, which he associates with prehistoric polar civilisation known as Hyperborea. Over the millennia, contact with this Tradition has become more and more occluded so that in our time we are almost entirely cut off from it. (For more about this, see my article “Waiting for the End of the World: René Guénon and the Kali Yuga” in New Dawn 122.)

The modern West is thus, for Guénon, not the summit of progress. It is at the tail end of a long decline. Although Guénon does not specify when this age will end, he seems to think it will be comparatively soon – a few decades from the time he is writing in the early to mid-twentieth century.

For Guénon, this decline is cyclical and thus inevitable. At the same time, despite his claims of holding himself above the fray, he displays a strong animus against the era. One senses a dissociation here. If materialism and the “reign of quantity” are omnipresent, surely it is a result of the cycle; things could hardly be different in the late stages of the Kali Yuga. In that case, why be upset about it?

Years ago I had a discussion with the philosopher Jacob Needleman in which I made this complaint about the Traditionalists. “It’s as if they’re mad because it’s November,” I said. (I am speaking from a northern-hemisphere perspective.) “No,” Needleman replied. “They’re mad because people are going around saying, ‘It’s May’.”

Needleman was right. Guénon’s time, the early twentieth century, was the high-water mark of Western triumphalism. Guénon felt a powerful need to fight this attitude as well as what he considered a deluded belief in “progress” and “evolution.” Indeed the very things that the West has trumpeted as signs of progress were, for Guénon, the sign of the very opposite: “Have we not arrived at that terrible age, announced in the Sacred Books of India, ‘when the castes shall be mingled, when even the family shall no longer exist’?” Most modern people would say that the decline of the caste system is a good thing.

Besides, Guénon did not think the woes of modernity could be blamed completely on a cyclical entropy. There were conscious factors at work as well. In The Reign of Quantity, he writes, “Since all effective action necessarily presupposes agents, anti-traditional action is like all other kinds of action, so that it cannot be a sort of spontaneous or ‘fortuitous’ production, and, since it is exercised particularly in the human domain, it must of necessity involve the intervention of human agents.”

This action comes in two stages. The first is one of “quantification and mechanisation.” Quantification is the warping of the modern mind so that it only perceives things in terms of number. Statistics are one example of this trend, and Guénon has an insightful chapter in The Reign of Quantity entitled “The Illusion of Statistics.” Also, the use of quantification in industry – as opposed to the “crafts” that flourished in traditional civilisations – “had the effect of attaching men more and more completely to purely material realisations. Man ‘mechanised’ everything and ended at last by mechanising himself, falling little by little into the condition of numerical units, parodying unity, yet lost in the uniformity and indistinction of the ‘mass’.” The result? Man loses practically all contact with higher realms. He is so focused on materiality that he believes nothing else exists.

A second phase ensues: “dissolution.” Guénon explains: “After having enclosed the corporeal world as completely as possible, it was necessary, while guarding against the re-establishment of any communication with superior domains, to open it up again from below, so as to allow the dissolving and destructive forces of the inferior subtle domain to penetrate into it. It is the ‘unleashing’ of these forces, so to speak, and the setting of them to work to complete the deviation of our world and effectively to bring it towards final dissolution, which constitutes the second part or second phase referred to.” 

Guénon calls the sum total of these forces – who are, as he has emphasised, human – the “counter-initiation.” Now it is not merely a matter of being passively unaware of Tradition, but of forces that actively seek to block and divert this awareness.

Mark Sedgwick, author of Against the Modern World, an important study of Guénon and Traditionalism, observes: “Traditionalists are those who… recognise that one of the most important aspects of modernity is inversion – that the world sees the valuable as worthless and the worthless as valuable, the good as bad and bad as good. Guénon never saw a punk, but it would have made a lot of sense to him. And with that comes ‘counter-initiation’ – religious movements that are actually irreligious, that actually lead away from what religion is meant to lead to.”

Two of the most prominent “counter-initiatic” movements, in Guénon’s view, were Theosophy and Spiritualism. This is why he devoted two books to denouncing them. Theosophy was pernicious because it presented a loathsome parody of the genuine Traditional teachings of Hinduism. Moreover, in teaching the idea of the soul’s evolution – a word that was anathema to Guénon – it was presenting dangerous modern ideas in esoteric form.

Actually it is difficult to tease out the differences between Guénon’s views of the ascent of the Self through multiple states of being from the Theosophical model, which describes a very similar process. (One difference is that Theosophy posits multiple incarnations on earth, whereas Guénon denies it.) But he saw the very similarity of these views as yet another sign of the diabolical cleverness of the counter-initiation. Spiritualism too, with its séances, was stirring up “inferior forces.”

For a Traditionalist, practically every modern movement or school of thought can be – and is – seen as an example of “counter-initiation” at work. Psychoanalysis, for example, involves an excursion into the lower depths of the psyche from which the subject may well never return. “In the ‘fall into the mire’,” as Guénon characterises it, “the inferior possibilities take possession of him, dominate him, and end by submerging him completely.” Guénon makes a similar argument about the revivals of shamanism and “sorcery.” Eventually, he predicts, “counter-initiation” will lead to a “counter-tradition” – a grotesque and evil imitation of true Tradition.

Another symptom of the present crisis is syncretism: the random mixture of teachings and images from any number of traditions. For Guénon, this is radically different from synthesis, by which common themes and symbols are seen to be reflections of one universal Tradition. Someone might object that from the exterior, synthesis and syncretism are hard to tell apart. Guénon would say that is the point: from the exterior, one does not have knowledge to integrate these themes properly. It is only intellectual intuition – the possession of true knowledge – that makes this a possibility for initiates.

It does not take much imagination to see how many present-day trends fit into Guénon’s model. Mark Sedgwick mentions punk, but Guénon would have found every other form of popular music just as abominable. Similarly with the visual arts: he would have seen transgressive works such as the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe or Andres Serrano’s notorious Piss Christ as extreme examples of such degeneration – in the unlikely event that he deigned to take notice of them at all. 

He may even have a point about the penetration of “the dissolving and destructive forces of the inferior subtle domain” into world. In his 1936 essay “Wotan,” psychiatrist C.G. Jung writes about the Germany of that time: “What is more than curious… is that an ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilised country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages.” For Jung, much like Guénon, the terrible forces of the twentieth century were eruptions from the unconscious.

Guénon may even have been right about the deliberate evocation of such forces. Occultist Donald Tyson writes that the magus Aleister Crowley, a contemporary of Guénon’s, “firmly believed that he was the herald of a new age of strife and destruction that would sweep across the world. He called this the Aeon of Horus, after the Egyptian god of war.” [See article in this issue, ‘Enochian Apocalypse’ by Donald Tyson, page 43.] In 1909 Crowley conducted some magical workings to accomplish this end by opening “the four great Watchtowers that stand guard against chaos at the extremities of our universe.” Tyson writes:

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that… Crowley’s Enochian evocations of 1909… pried the doors of the Watchtowers open a crack – enough to allow a foul wind to blow through the common mind of the human race. This would explain the senseless slaughter of the First World War and the unspeakable horror of the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War. It would explain the decline of organised religions and why the soulless cult of science has gained supremacy. It would explain the moral and ethical bankruptcy of modern times and the increase in senseless violence.

Whether or not Crowley really did open up the cosmic Watchtowers, he no doubt would have liked to think he did. In any case, this description sounds very much like what Guénon is talking about.

To go back to Guénon, no one can lay out such a comprehensive denunciation of a civilisation without offering some positive alternative. He evidently hoped that his works would inspire a nucleus of Western illuminates to gain access to, and perpetuate, the Traditional knowledge, either to reverse the decline of the modern world, or, more likely, to serve as an ark for the preservation of the sacred knowledge for a better future time.

To a small extent, his hopes have been realised. London’s Temenos Academy, for example, founded in 1990 by the poet Kathleen Raine and associates including the Traditionalist Philip Sherrard, is committed to perpetuating the “perennial philosophy” – another name for Guénon’s Tradition. The Prince of Wales is among its patrons. Indeed, as Angel Millar points out in his recent book The Compass and the Crescent: Islam, Freemasonry, Esotericism, and Revolution in the Modern Age, Prince Charles is very likely a Traditionalist himself, and his ideas and programs cannot be understood without reference to Traditionalism.

The number of people sympathetic to Traditionalism, of course, remains infinitesimal. But Guénon did not believe that mere numbers were necessary to influence the course of civilisation. Numbers, after all, are merely another manifestation of the reign of quantity. He believed that certain awakened individuals, even if only a few, could extend a powerful and beneficent influence on civilisation.

Was he right? We are certainly far from anything like a “reign of quality.” But history has a way of reversing course, and the prospects for a civilisation that incorporates a sense of the sacred may not be so dismal after all.

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Sources

René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, Translated by Arthur Osborne et al. Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 2004 [1942]

René Guénon, East and West, Translated by Martin Lings, Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 1994 [1941]

René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Translated by Lord Northbourne, Penguin, 1972 [1953]

C.G. Jung, “Wotan.” www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/essay-on-wotan-w-
nietzsche-c-g-jung/; accessed April 3, 2016

Jean-François Mayer, “Traditionalism: René Guénon’s Legacy Today: An Interview with Mark Sedgwick,” ReligioScope, 2004; http://religion.info/english/interviews/article_53.shtml; accessed April 3, 2016.

Angel Millar, The Compass and the Crescent: Islam, Freemasonry, Esotericism, and Revolution in the Modern Age, Numen Books, 2015

Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2004

Donald Tyson, “The Enochian Apocalypse,” Gnosis 40 (summer 1996), 56–62

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