Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles

René Guénon (1886-1951) was one of the great luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of intellectual fashion. His extensive writings, now finally available in English, are a providential treasure-trove for the modern seeker: while pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, they direct the reader also to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization.

Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles is a wide-ranging collection of articles that delve into traces of ancient, indeed protohistoric, traditions. They could be described as fragments of an unknown history-a history reaching back through prehistory to protohistory-for they begin with the Primordial Tradition contemporaneous with the beginnings of present humanity. The book opens with a study on cosmic cycles, taking as its point of departure the Hindu doctrine of the Manvantara, although similar doctrines appear in Greco-Roman antiquity among Jewish Kabbalists, Islamic Sufis and Ismailis, and in the Hopi, Lakota, and Maya nations of the New World. Essential to this doctrine is that earlier ages differed qualitatively from ours, which may explain why our historicism and archaeology have yet to come to grips with "Hyperborea" and "Atlantis," despite the many clues embedded throughout mythology, folklore, sacred architecture, etc. That is, our own time's quality cannot simply be projected backwards into past ages. In presenting Hyperborean and Atlantean lore-the cyclical mysteries of the North and the West-as well as material on the Hebrew Kabbalah and Egyptian Hermeticism, Guénon successfully transmits the requisite sense of such "other" times, which for some may awaken the intuition of higher levels of Being.

René Guénon (1886–1951) was one of the great luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of intellectual fashion. His extensive writings, now finally available in English, are a providential treasure-trove for the modern seeker: while pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, they direct the reader also to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization. René Guénon, of whom Jacob Needleman wrote in The Sword of Gnosis that ‘no other modern writer has so effectively communicated the absoluteness of truth,’ is gradually being recognized by deeper thinkers as one of the few who have truly penetrated the seductive veil of the modern age. As an expositor of pure metaphysics and its application to the science of symbols, Guénon is without peer; and his extraordinarily prescient critique of the modern world is attracting more and more attention among cultural commentators. Little known in the English-speaking world till the recent appearance of his Collected Works in translation, Guénon has nevertheless long been recognized as a veritable criterion of truth by a vanguard of remarkable writers who evince that rare combination: intellectuality and spirituality. After a lonely childhood, often interrupted by ill health, Guénon navigated the seductive half-truths of occultism toward a deeper, unified vision offering a way out from the confusion and fragmentation of our time. Regarded by leading scholars as the first truly authentic interpreter of many Eastern doctrines in the West, Guénon never tired, in face of the seemingly inexorable process of dissolution in the twentieth century, of pointing to the transcendent unity of all religious faiths and the abiding Truth that contains them all.