apocalypsis-easter-vol.1

Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed Nomini tuo da gloriam
ApocalypsiS
Journal of Traditional Studies
Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed Nomini tuo da gloriam
APOCALYPSIS
Apocalypsis is a journal for the Dark Age, reflecting the light of the
Golden Age. Apocalypsis publishes essays on symbolism, metaphysics,
and esotericism from the view of the Primordial Tradition. It also
publishes articles on what can be considered traditional studies, including
pieces on doctrine, history, and contemporary analysis. Apocalypsis
operates primarily from the perspective of the Western Tradition, within
which the Catholic holds pre-eminence.
Our intention is to provide a place for collaboration in the field of
traditional studies, furthering knowledge of the Primordial Tradition, its
expression in the Western Tradition, and the esoteric heart of Tradition.
We also seek to provide a place to publish analysis of the modern
deviation in terms of Tradition, documenting the vectors of the
Antichrist’s action and the reign of quantity.
We accept essays on those subjects that can be considered a part of
traditional studies. Authors need not be well known or published, for in
some way Apocalypsis can be considered ‘developmental’. Pseudonyms
are welcome and encouraged, as we have no pretensions of ‘originality’
or worldly import.
For enquiries and to contribute: [email protected]
https://apocalypsisjournal.wordpress.com
CONTENTS
Editorial……………………………………………………………………………………1.
Jan de Maansnijder
On the Unity of Destruction and Transformation………….………….…….…….2.
Reinhold Wölfersheim
The Origins of Innate Social Traits..………...………………………………………..8.
Dionicio Mendoza
The Woman and the Serpent..………………………………………………………...13.
Iohannes Spinell
VISITA INTERIOR TERRAE: On Alchemy and Modern Science…………..17.
Jean Borella
René Guénon and the Crisis of the Modern World. ……………………………..33.
Editorial
Easter Issue Vol. 1
In this inaugural issue of Apocalypsis, we present essays on the general theme
of apocalypse, modernity, and transformation of the self and the world. Many things
have already been said about these things, but as we have no pretense of being
original this is of no importance. We hope that these writings will help the reader
expand their theoretical framework, so that he can be better prepared for the
performance of the spiritual work. For indeed we believe it to be a good reminder
that these words can be nothing more than preparation, and that this theoretical
knowledge is of no use on its own. These writings are then not an exercise in
creativity or a fun academic pastime, but rather true attempts at expressing profound
metaphysical truths. Let the reader take heed of this warning and proceed.
Jan de Maansnijder writes at https://esoterictraditionalism.wordpress.com/
A collection of his essays is published under the title of Noumenal Reflections.
Iohannes Spinell writes at https://sensuscatholicus.jimdofree.com/
Jean Borella is an academic and prolific traditionalist author from France.
His books can be found in some major booksellers. A small selection have been
translated into English. His essay here is previously untranslated.
1
On the Unity of Destruction and
Transformation
Jan de Maansnijder
he concepts of ‘destruction’ and ‘transformation’ are much used throughout
traditional literature, with connotations ranging from negative to neutral to
positive. Many confusions have arisen from a misunderstanding of these
concepts. Here we wish to dispel these confusions by giving a proper
exposition of the various meanings and significances of these concepts.
T
Let us begin with the concept of destruction. There are two ways to conceive
of destruction. For either we think it to be a composite thing breaking down into its
constituent parts, or we think it to be a whole thing becoming nothing. In the first
conception we consider the thing relative to its own domain, in the second
conception relative to another domain, whether higher or lower. For example, let us
consider the destruction of the human body. For we see on the one hand that at death
the body begins to decompose, and starts to become one with the earth, from which
it had come. And when the flesh is entirely gone and only the bones remain we
consider the corpse to be destroyed, although some also resort to the burning of the
bones to entirely return the corpse to dust and ash. Thus we say that the composite
body has broken down into its constituent parts. On the other hand we see that the
presence of the corpse disappearing from the corporeal domain is its return to its
principal state, which may be called ‘seed’ or ‘egg’, which is in this case present in
the psychic domain. For the psychic domain ‘surrounds’ the corporeal domain, and
thus serves as its ‘ground’ or ‘basis’. And thus the saying that things ‘return to their
elements’ may be interpreted in both of the two ways we have named. For either we
say that things return to their elements, i.e. their corporeal constituents, or we say
that elements means the incorporeal elements which combine to form corporeal
things. And it is then said that the thing returns to ‘nothing’, for the one domain
serves truly as a ‘nothing’ for another, for the thing that disappears in the one appears
in the other and vice versa. And by this consideration the saying ‘nothing comes
from nothing, nothing returns to nothing’. For by the first nothing is signified here
the corporeal, which is nothing relative to its psychic principle, and by the second
nothing is precisely signified this principle or seed, which the corporeal considers as
nothing.
To summarise then, there is a double conception of destruction, the first
considered in its own domain, the second considered in relation to another. In the
2
first the thing destroyed returns to the constituent parts of its proper domain, in the
second it returns to its seed or principle in the ‘prior’ domain. Further we might add,
somewhat needless perhaps, that we have spoken only of composite things being
destroyed, as in our interpretation simple things cannot be destroyed, as they have
neither parts out of which they are composed nor strictly speaking principles from
which they arise.
Let us then move on to the concept of transformation. There are also, perhaps
not surprisingly, two ways to conceive of transformation. For either we think it to be
a being moving from one form to another, or we think it to be a being transcending
its form altogether. Again in the first conception we consider it relative to the domain
in which the form is already present, and in the second we consider it relative to
another domain. But we have here a somewhat more limited option of domains, as
all form is properly situated in the psychic domain. For quality belongs to the
psychic, and to the corporeal belongs only quantity. And of course by ‘form’ is
nothing other meant than an assemblage of qualities. Thus in the first conception of
transformation it is always conceived of as taking place entirely in the psychic
domain (and then perhaps only in the corporeal as a derivative from this), while in
the second conception it is always a movement ‘out of’ the psychic domain, towards
the spiritual, i.e. the in- or supra-formal domain. But the first kind of transformation
is often used as a symbol of the second kind of transformation, perhaps most
famously in Apuleius’ Golden Ass. Lucius is first transformed into an ass,
representing the base, lowly human state, and is later returned to his human state by
a first initiation, by which we interpret the return to the ‘original’ human state, and
is later initiated again, by which he overcomes also this state and attains the truly
supraformal state, for he becomes a ‘shrine-bearer’, and as the shrine is considered
the house of the god, we might as well say it is equivalent to ‘god-bearer’, or the
Christopher that crosses the Waters.
To summarise this then, we have a double conception of transformation as
well. The first conception is a being first inhabiting one form, and then another, and
this takes place properly speaking in the psychic domain, while the second
conception is a being transcending form altogether, and this is properly speaking a
movement from the psychic to the spiritual.
Hoping to have given then a decent explanation of the multiple meanings of
the concepts of destruction and transformation, we shall attempt to show how they
are united and how this united concept is used throughout various traditions, both
microcosmically, i.e. concerning man, and macrocosmically, i.e. concerning the
world. First let us unite the first interpretation of the two concepts. A being can only
3
move from one form to another when its first form is broken down into its constituent
parts and then rebuilt into another form. We see then that destruction is here the one
face of the transformation, the other being the reconstruction or the rebirth (and death
is also often used as a synonym for destruction). Let us then unite the second
interpretations of the two concepts. A being can only transcend its form entirely
when its form becomes nothing (and this is also the meaning of humility). Here again
destruction is one of the faces of transformation, namely the face seen from the
viewpoint of manifestation, while the other face is only seen from the principal
viewpoint. So in both the interpretations we see that destruction becomes the face of
transformation, and then more precisely the face that we see from our conditioned
state. Thus while we are in this state, it is especially appropriate that transformation
is signified by destruction, as it is how transformation appears to us.
Now that we have shown how destruction and transformation are united, the
former being the face of the latter, we will consider some applications of this
conception, first applied to man, then applied to the world. Let us take for example
the human soul. It is a fact that some of the Fathers of the Church have used the
language of ‘destruction’ or even ‘annihilation’ to describe the movement to or even
the posthumous state itself of the damned. If we interpret these words in the sense in
which we described them in the first part of this essay, it would of course be nonsense
to ascribe to these Fathers the idiotic heresy of ‘Annihilationism’, which teaches that
the damned souls are utterly destroyed. But such a thing is idiotic, precisely because
there is no such thing as ‘utter destruction’, and this is clear when we recall the
simple truth that nothing returns to nothing. It is evident that when the Fathers use
such language they are simply referring to the ‘negative’ face of the ‘infernal
transformation’ that these souls undertake. And here we interpret transformation in
the first sense, not the sense of ‘transcendence’. For these souls in fact by this
transformation lose their opening to transcendence, and become wholly locked or
chained into their form. And we can see the reverse case also, namely where the
Fathers use the term ‘apokatastasis’, which is interpreted by some heretics as
meaning ‘universal salvation’. For indeed it is true that in the end of this world all
things will be ‘restituted’ or ‘restored’, in the sense that all things will be destroyed,
i.e. will return to nothing, or their principles. But those who have made their
principle the Devil will obviously not come to be as rational seeds in the Word of
God, but will rather serve in the infernal army. For it is the greatest freedom that is
given to man, that he is able to choose who he serves, i.e. who he makes his prince,
i.e. principle. And so some shut themselves off from the higher influences and are
transformed (in the first sense) into darkness, and some escape through the narrow
hole of their soul and are transformed (in the second sense) into light. And with this
doctrine in mind we might also properly interpret what is meant by ‘whoever loves
4
or wishes to save his soul will lose it, and whoever hates or wishes to lose his soul
(in this world) will keep it (in eternity)’. For the one that hates his soul in this world
(i.e. in its current domain, i.e. the psychic), will destroy it in that domain and thus
will be transformed into the spiritual domain, i.e. in eternity, which is above time
and thus also above form (for time is a condition only applied to the corporeal and
psychic domains). And the one that loves his soul or wishes to keep it in its current
state, i.e. in the psychic domain, will eventually lose it, i.e. close off the window of
escape into transcendence he had and be locked into the psychic, i.e. be stuck in the
mire. I suppose this is enough about the meanings of ‘destruction’ and
‘transformation’ on the human soul for now.
We will now show some macrocosmical applications of these concepts. We
have in the preceding paragraph already shortly touched on the ‘restoration of all
things’, but there it was in the connection with the individual souls of men. Now we
shall consider it in itself. All of us know that at the end of time this world will be
destroyed. And we also know that there will come a new heaven and a new earth.
From our prior considerations we now see how this all makes sense. For the
destruction or death of the old world is the one face of the transformation of the
cosmos, the other being the creation or birth of the new heaven and earth. And it is
especially proper that a transformed world is made for the inhabitation of the
transformed souls. It is furthermore no surprise that this is called a ‘restoration’,
because the world to come will be as perfect as the world which was originally
created by God, and the angelic offices now left empty by the fallen angels will be
filled with the ranks of the saints. Note also that the domain of the air, i.e. the
psychic, is not recreated, for the transformed souls have no use for this. This domain
is also called the ‘outer darkness’, which is neither destroyed nor recreated, because
it already is ‘nothing’. But lest I overstep the bounds of proper exposition I will end
this paragraph on the Apocalypse and Apocatastasis.
Let us then close our discussion by furnishing a sort of combination of the
microcosmic and macrocosmic perspectives. It is often said that the blessed are
‘dead to the world’, and in the lives of the saints we also often see that the world is
‘destroyed’ (at least, for them, in a vision or otherwise). We can easily interpret these
things from our view on the concept of destruction or death. For if the soul (indeed
it is the soul we speak of, for the body is still obviously in the world) is ‘dead to the
world’, this simply means that it is ‘destroyed in its own domain (i.e. the psychic)’,
and as this destruction is but the appearance of the transformation, we know that on
the other side it is reborn in heaven. And vice versa if the world becomes dead or
destroyed to the saint, it is because the soul has transcended it and sees it subsumed
into a single pillar of light and made into nothing. The saint and the world thus
5
become nothing for each other, because there is no longer any intercourse between
them. Of course, there still remains a great difference between these two states. For
the saint contains in himself all the lower states, and may thus choose to remain ‘in
the world’ while not being ‘of the world’, because he no longer is conditioned by it,
while the worldly man is trapped down here. May the world then be destroyed by
the consuming flames of ardent love and may our souls become wholly turned into
flame.
6
7
The Origins of Innate Social Traits
Reinhold Wölfersheim
mong so-called ‘public intellectuals’, the view that there are certain
inborn traits is quite prolific. This of course, is contrasted by the legion
of academics who seem to believe that man is born without any sort of
differentiation, that nearly all expressions that can be called traits are either
impressed upon the individual through immediate social factors or through their own
vague inclinations, a sort of neo-tabula rasa. To the latter, we have nothing to say,
for their confusion is complete. Regarding the former however, while we agree in
the existence in what is colloquially called inborn traits, we must quite sharply
distance ourselves from their use by these ‘public intellectuals’, especially in regards
to their origin.
A
To begin, it must be determined what exactly is meant by ‘inborn traits’ in the
context currently considered here. The phrase itself is extraordinarily broad and,
even from our viewpoint, can cover vast territory. In the broadest sense, it refers to
all of those characteristics of a human individual present at birth which direct the
actualization of certain potentials. This can also be applied on a larger scale to
humanity as a species. While categories of race, intelligence, and talents constitute
a form of inborn trait, we will be considering the broader social expressions of
certain traits such as the inclination towards hierarchy and roles based on sex.
It can be agreed with the ‘public intellectuals’ that man has an innate
inclination towards hierarchy, and that men and women have defined roles in any
society, especially those defined as archaic or, even more accurately, traditional. The
issue then reveals itself as being primarily in relation to the origin of these traits. The
most prominent ‘public intellectuals’ hold the view that these traits were created
through biological-evolutionary factors that have imprinted themselves on humans
as part of the practical necessities of the evolutionary process, citing the social
structures of animals claimed to be ancestors of humanity as evidence. They contend
it is primarily the genetic (which itself is mutable) that conditions the individual and
thereby society and that the genetic is derived from the process of evolution. This
accords to genetics the status of a cause in the sense of that which is the principle of
the thing, and by extension places the origin of the above-mentioned traits in the
world of becoming, specifically the bio-physiological substrate. Put summarily, the
8
thesis advanced by these evolutionist scientists views the differentiation of man and
his natural social order as arising from below.
This is clearly contrasted by the traditional perspective on the matter. From
this viewpoint, inborn social traits are derived from above. This means that social
tendencies towards, for example, hierarchy and gender roles, are both responses to
inherent differentiation of spiritual essences, as well as the reflection of principle
order in manifestation. The causes of differentiation and reflection, which
themselves are relative causes in relation to the social traits considered, find their
origin in metaphysical principles. Regarding manifestation as consisting of three
‘worlds’, the spiritual, the subtle, and the corporeal (as well as the sub-corporeal,
infra-subtle, and the infinite gradations of the psychic/subtle itself), causes can only
have their real origin in the highest world, which is spiritual, unchanging, and
metaphysical. This includes those causes behind the social expressions of hierarchy
and gender roles, which are evidently innate in the normal human state.
The traditional conception of a person is one that exceeds the current modern
understanding of what it means to be a human. The outward appearance is only the
corporeal extension of what is a psychic, and even more essentially, spiritual being.
This being, considered as a whole, is unequivocally unique and distinct, bestowed
with certain qualities derived from their spiritual nature, various factors from the
subtle and psychic domains, and the physiological conditions of their
corporeal/genetic modality (which in real ways reflect the qualities derived from the
domains above it but also can constrain the modalities of their manifestation due to
the contingency inherent in manifestation). Therefore, when two or more beings are
considered, they are by definition unequal. Beyond this, traditional doctrine asserts
the existence of castes. For each person, the caste is the outward expression of the
unique character of their spiritual essence. There are four main castes to be
considered, calling them by their functions they are: the priestly caste, the warrior
caste, the merchant-craftsman caste, and the servant/serf caste. This order reflects
how near a caste is to pure spiritual principle and means that there is a corresponding
qualification or ability inherent in the individuals that make up a caste to realize
certain knowledge. In traditional societies, caste determined one’s place in the social
hierarchy. As such, we can see how it is the differentiation of individuals based on
essentially metaphysical factors that forms the basis of hierarchy, a differentiation
based on the world of being, from above.
9
Along with the metaphysical differentiation inherent in hierarchy, there exists
an essential difference in the principles of masculine and feminine, corresponding
quite naturally to their individual and social expression in roles based on sex. Just as
one’s inner caste is a result of the unique differentiation of their being, sex is based
on a differentiation derived from spiritual principles. These principles, that of the
masculine and the feminine, correspond to the distinction between the active and the
passive. This subject can be developed to an exceptionally detailed degree and we
will refrain from doing so here.1 We will, however, mention that the passive, the
feminine, correspond most naturally to the forces of life-giving. Hence, motherhood
and the symbolic extension of the womb as the home (which begets the traditional
expression of “the heart of the home”) color all of the various traditional feminine
roles. The active, on the other hand, corresponds to masculinity. This can be seen in
any number of the traditional views of masculine roles being those of leadership,
initiative, and action in general, be it spiritual in nature or action upon manifestation.
Briefly returning to the subject of hierarchy, the hermetic axiom of “As above
so below” expresses an important principle, especially when considering the
reflection of hierarchy in nature. This is that, the world below, that of corporeal
manifestation, takes as its originator the world above, that of metaphysical
principles. In the Western tradition, the world of spirit is comprised of angels
arranged in hierarchal form. Due to the principle of analogy, the terrestrial world
cannot help but be made in the image of that angelic hierarchy. It is inherent in the
nature of reality. This is part of why animals arrange themselves in hierarchal form,
the passive nature of the substance of manifestation responds to the active
impression of the world of spirit, which itself is hierarchy. This is in no way
contradicted by the empirical observations of both animal and human hierarchies,
which see in them dynamics of power, strength, and competence. Rather, the inequal
distribution of qualities, be they strength or competence, follows the hierarchal
pattern and can be said to be a mode in which the principle of hierarchy is expressed
in the world below. We see then that, to a degree, inequality is a necessary aspect of
manifested existence, and this means that it is inevitable in the social organization
of human society.
Though inadequate in mode of expression, eloquence, and clarity, we hope to
have succeeded in presenting a traditional response to the contention that inborn
1
Refer to René Guénon’s Reign of Quantity for an explanation of the distinction between essence and
substance, as well as Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World for a treatment of the relation
between man and woman.
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traits are a result of evolutionary factors and are derived wholly from biology. Our
conclusion is that, instead, inborn traits derive principally from spiritual
differentiation2 and that the social expressions of hierarchy and gender roles are a
result of said spiritual differentiation, as well as being expressions of the principles
of hierarchy and active/passive duality, due to the law of analogy between the
corporeal, psychic and spiritual worlds. It is rather unsurprising that the former view
is so prevalent and is a result of these ‘public intellectuals’ denial of all that exceeds
the grasp of their experimentation, much of their theories on the self being based on
the psychic as opposed to the spiritual. Of course, in these times, closing off oneself
from influences from above will near certainly result in those from below swelling
up instead. We can only hope that our crude essay may contribute in some way to a
revival of Tradition and the traditional perspective of man’s relation to himself and
the universe.
2
Of course, much can be said about the role psychic elements play in determining the various expressions
of a being. That being said, before and above all other additions, a spiritual source determines the
innermost essence.
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12
The Woman and the Serpent
Dionicio Mendoza
Liber Genesis Cap. III, 14-15
A
nd our Lord God said to the serpent: because thou hast done this thing, accursed art
thou among all animals and beasts of the earth: upon thy breast shalt thou go, & earth
shalt thou eat al the days of thy life. I will put enmities between thee & the woman, &
thy seed and the seed of her: she shall bruise thy head in pieces, and thou shalt lie in wait of her
heel.
Prime matter is figured as a serpent coiled around a sphere. Originally the serpent
and the dragon are the same figure; he is cursed to creep upon his belly only after
causing the fall of Adam. His embrace of the sphere shows that he is the prince of
this world, that the flesh dominates the spirit and imprisons it within itself. He is the
inverse of the woman, and he lies in wait for her heel because his reign will not be
forever. The father of lies, in himself he has no truth and therefore no being, but he
can only inhere rather in that which is. Therefore he eats the earth all the days of his
life, corrupting all changeable substance into his own body.
Apocalypsis B. Joannis Cap. XII, 1-6
And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her
feet, & on her head a crown of twelve stars: & being with child, she cried also traveling, and is in
anguish to be delivered. And there was seen an other sign in heaven, and behold, a great red dragon
having seven heads, & ten horns: and on his heads seven diadems, & his tail drew the third part of
the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth, and the dragon stood before the woman which was
ready to be delivered: that when she should be delivered, he might devour her son. And she brought
forth a man child, who was to govern all nations in an iron rod: & her son was taken up to God
and to his throne, & the woman fled into the wilderness where she had a place prepared of God,
that there they might feed her a thousand two hundred sixty days.
Prime matter is the first mother, prima mater, thus the enmity between the woman
and the serpent is from the beginning. She is the Ark, the container of the universe,
a cosmic expanse from the first creation to the last judgment. She is B’nai Israel, the
Church, the assembled people of God. She is the shekinah, Malkuth, the City of God,
the cloud of glory, full of grace, and the God-bearer, wherefore she is clothed with
the sun. As the coiled serpent signifies matter as dominating and imprisoning the
spirit, so the woman signifies matter as justly ruled by the spirit. She is therefore
spotless, having never for an instant been an enemy of her Creator. She stands upon
the moon because she is above the corruptible sublunar realm which is coiled by the
13
serpent. Her crown of twelve stars stands for the twelve Apostles, for she is their
queen. The stars in heaven are the pontifices, the bridges to God (for they shine with
the light of the Empyrean), and the episcopi, the overseers of the world. Her manchild, destined to rule them with a rod of iron, is the Supreme Pontiff, or Him of
whom he is a figure-head. Her birth pangs are the sorrows of his passion. The death
of Christ is signified in some way by the martyrdom of a pope, but it is more
perfectly symbolized by the destruction of the papacy itself. For at the martyrdom
of any saint the Church rejoices, but in losing the ordinary and temporal means of
governing her members she grieves at a loss that she cannot herself restore. The
dragon seeks to devour her child, that is, to add the High Priest’s chair to his own
kingdom. And his tail, that is, his deception, drags a third of the stars to earth, that
is, they are no longer numbered among the successors of the Apostles, for they no
longer confess the true faith but die under his tyranny. The subtraction of one third
signifies the occultation of the mark of unity, for the two pillars of the temple are
deprived of the third, the altar that joins them. The tabernacle is removed from the
center and the head, and this makes of the temple of God a desolation. But the dragon
does not succeed in devouring the man-child. He is borne up to heaven and the throne
of God, that is, the spiritual authority of the visible head is as it were suspended
above the world of manifestation and reunited to its invisible source, where the devil
and his agents cannot reach it. The voice of the shepherd is now heard only in silence.
The woman is not to be found in the cities of men, but she flees into the wilderness,
the place of fasting and contemplation, and she is nourished alone by God. Therefore
none of the temporal powers of men assist her at this time, and she is not with them.
Although Queen, she exercises no ordinary jurisdiction; by her placement in
solitude, some hermits and religious communities may remain her obedient
company. Visible she remains, but actually unseen, hidden from the eyes of the
mundane by the blindness of their own vanity. All nations have become the enemies
of God. The heads and diadems of the dragon are seven, signifying the deadly sins
and the perfection of quality, and his horns are ten, signifying the stupendous
magnitude of his false promises and completeness of extent. By this and his pursuit
of the woman and her child we see that his arrogant claim is to universal empire over
things spiritual as well as temporal. His color is red as the night sky of January 25,
1938.
7-12
And there was made a great battle in heaven, Michael and his Angels fought with the
dragon, and the dragon fought and his Angels: and they prevailed not, neither was their place
found any more in heaven. And that great dragon was cast forth, the old serpent, which is called
the Devil and Satan, which seduces the whole world: and he was cast into the earth, & his
Angels were thrown down with him. And I hear a great voice in heaven saying: Now is there
made salvation and force, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: because
14
the accuser of our brethren is cast forth, who accused them before the fight of our God day and
night. And they overcame him by th blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony,
and the loved not their lives even unto death. Therefore rejoice O heavens, and you that dwell
therein. Woe to the earth and to the sea, because the Devil is descended to you, having great
wrath, knowing that he hath a little time.
Here we see the image of the serpent coiled about the sphere, as to seduce it. The
crudeness and heaviness of the material world, in a word, the reign of quantity, is a
consequence of the fall of Lucifer from heaven and the gradual taint of his embrace.
Woe therefore to the earth and the sea. But may heaven rejoice at the everlasting
victory and reign of Christ our Lord established hereby.
13-18
And after the dragon saw that he was thrown into the earth, he persecuted the woman which
brought forth the man-child: and there were given to the woman two wings of a great eagle,
that she might flee into the desert unto her place, where she is nourished for a time & times &
half a time, from the face of the serpent. And the serpent cast out of his mouth after the woman,
water as it were a flood: that he might make her to be carried away with the flood. And the earth
helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the
dragon cast out of his mouth. And the dragon was angry against the woman: and went to make
battle with the rest of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony
of Jesus Christ. And he stood upon the sand of the sea.
The two wings of an eagle given to the Mother of God against the persecutions of
the devil are an infused science of divine mysteries and surpassing humility. Her
devoted children also escape, preventing the total destruction of the Church, on these
same wings. Were they not preserved by these special graces, the children of Mary
would believe the lying wonders of the devil, either through ignorance or through
pride, and follow him to his end. The desert is the land of temptation. Here the devil
tempted our Lord with all his works, pomps, and false promises. Here too the sheep
of His flock must pray and do penance, consecrating themselves to His Mother’s
Immaculate Heart and remaining ever sensitive to Its pleas, despite the
unprecedented allurements of an apostate world and its illicit pleasures. Ascending
Carmel in reparation for the descent of the Watchers from Hermon, they live by the
Rosary and the Scapular. The desert is also the place of lawlessness, for in time of
persecution saints appear to be outlaws. The connection between Hermon and
Carmel is confirmed by the identity of the two witnesses of the Apocalypse, Henoch
and Elias. In the final confrontation with Antichrist these two prophets, not the
Bishop of Rome, will lead the Church, converting the Jews, uniting all men of good
will under one standard, and working miracles superior to the sorceries of Antichrist.
Henoch, or Hermes, is the last living initiate of the primordial Tradition to which all
living traditions must answer. Elias is the last living member of the prophets of
Israel, superior in authority to the High Priest of Jerusalem the Vicar of Christ on
15
Earth. Their appearance during a time, times, and half a time implies that the Church
has entered its third status, the Age of the Holy Ghost, the seeds of which can be
observed in the contemplative orders. This state is above the distinction between the
secular and the religious, above the external institutions of the Church. Its initiatic
jurisdiction is over the internal forum, that is, the hearts of men, which the prophets
rule by their wisdom, confirming them in infused knowledge and humility. Here the
devil has no power; here his attack, which has ultimately only served to purify the
children of God, is constrained to cease. Thus pursuing the woman, the serpent
spews forth the waters of chaos, but they cannot overcome her immaculate flesh or
the Heart that beats within it. For she is the true Ark of salvation, and the great eagle
that assists her is as it were the Seer of the Apocalypse whose consecrated hands
brought her divine Son to nourish her one thousand two hundred sixty days. And he
is Prester John, the bishop-king of the forbidden mountain of the prophets, that
terrestrial paradise where other sheep who are not of this flock hope to dwell in
eternity, at whose altar the witnesses sleep the sleep of contemplation until their
appointed time. The dragon stands upon the sands of the sea, for none may pass,
neither from the sea to the land, nor from the land to the sea, without his resistance
or his aid. In contrast to heaven, the earth is the place of punishment, wherefore all
who dwell upon it must endure his temptations. In contrast to the sea, the land is the
place of form and fixity, perfection and blessedness. But the soul in the state of
mortal sin is shipwrecked and adrift, thus the dragon guards the way to sanctifying
grace, discouraging the unfortunate soul from repentance by every possible means.
And those who live in grace may suffer violent temptations whenever they come
near this sea, wherefore they are counseled to avoid the near occasions of sin. For
man is frail, and the dragon’s power is greater where he stands. But to flee the
moisture of the shore for the dryness of the desert is not to escape temptation, as
already stated. Yet this holy aridity, which is called the dark night, expels all
sentimentality and fickleness from the soul and causes it to depend on God alone for
her spiritual nourishment, and for this reason it is farther from the dragon’s power
than the damp places in which men on the purgative way are accustomed to dwell.
We therefore must attend to our Lady there in the desert, as far from the passing
distractions of the world and the pleasures of the flesh as possible. And suffer that
wretched serpent to come in the night, but let him find us armed and watching.
16
VISITA INTERIOR TERRAE
On Alchemy and Modern Science
Iohannes Spinell
And Satan said: ‘A portion of Thy servants will I surely take, and will lead them astray, and will
stir false desires within them; and I will command them and they shall alter the creation of God.’
The Quran (4:118)
I
t has often been proposed that modern science (through figures like Bacon and
Newton) can trace its roots back to the alchemists of old, and while from a
purely genealogical standpoint this assertion can hardly be contested, we have
to be adamant that the spirit that enlivens the sacra scientia of authentic alchemy
could hardly be more opposed to any form of the “science” that we moderns have
come to know.
The rise of both alchemy and science is most commonly located in the
Renaissance and it’s certainly true that this period (for example through the
translation of the Hermetic Corpus and other ancient texts by Ficino, which even
lead to some attempts at a revival of neo-Platonic theurgy)1 saw an unprecedented
exposal of doctrines that are stricto sensu ‘esoteric’.
Thinking that such teachings had hitherto been completely absent from the West
and were only rediscovered (or “invented” even) by the Renaissance humanists is
simply a modernist prejudice however. Such esoteric knowledge had surely not been
lacking in earlier times but remained ‘hidden’ and thus presents itself not as readily
to the gaze of the historians which is by its very nature always limited to the most
‘exoteric’ of appearances.
In fact it is no coincidence that the sudden emergence of the alchemical teachings
and other more or less esoteric doctrines (recall in this context also Agrippa’s
Occulta philosophia) coincides with the decline of traditional medieval culture. As
soon as the exterior form of a culture dies, its esoteric ‘underbelly’ must perish as
well, and just as the psyche (or the ‘astral body’) may still linger around for a time
even after the physical body has ceased its vital functions, so too can the ‘ghosts’ of
Cf. in this context what Guénon says about the ‘psychic residues’ that haunt the remains of dead traditions
(Reign of Quantity, XXVII). The case of Platonism is certainly a peculiar one, because it presents a
metaphysical tradition without an indigenous revelatum (even the Platonic theurgists of antiquity called
unto the gods in their Egyptian, i.e. ‘barbarian’, names); its ‘providential role’ can only be understood with
regards to its adoption by early Christianity and divorced from it (as in the neo-pagan revivalisms both old
and new) it must necessarily manifest as a malefic influence.
1
17
former esoteric traditions come to haunt the ruins of a culture in decay. The
appearance of such doctrines at the end of the Middle Ages is thus not so much a
“rediscovery” but rather resembles the corpses of dead fish floating to the surface
after their water had been poisoned.2
The Renaissance was the period when western culture ‘rid’ itself of its ‘esoteric impurities’,
and therefore when these, like weeping sores on a face, appeared most visibly (Borella, Crisis
of Religious Symbolism, II).
In sum: the Renaissance marks not the “birth” of alchemy but its swan song, the final
stages of its degeneration, and its causa mortis was nothing else than its detachment
from the spiritual core of Christianity.
As Titus Burckhardt laid out in his seminal work on Alchemy (Science of the
Cosmos, Science of the Soul), the alchemical doctrines and other ‘sacred sciences’
pertain primarily to the cosmological order and are in no way ‘self-sufficient’ on
their own. They need the ambience of a holistic traditional culture (the reductione
artium ad theologiam), like a fish needs waters to breath and to distance themselves
from this ‘spiritual climate’ amounts to cutting of the proverbial branch on which
they sit, i.e. to suicide: “There can be no ‘freethinking’ alchemy hostile to the
Church” (Burckhardt, ibid. I).
However, the general decline of Christendom in the Renaissance (helped, in large
parts, by the humanist themselves) and the adoption of these sacred sciences by
factions often inimical to the Church lead to an ever greater distancing from true
spirituality which “caused them to lose, in part, their supernatural character, and
risked allowing them to imbued with the ambient vitalist naturalism, so that the
hermetic, alchemical, kabbalistic, astrological, etc. doctrines were degraded into a
common magia naturalis” (Borella, Op. cit.). And it is precisely this degeneration
of the alchemical tradition into the lowest forms of ‘magic’ that led to the birth of
modern science. As another Christian hermeticist likewise observed:
Contemporary technological science is the direct continuation of the ceremonial magic …
which flourished from the time of the Renaissance until the seventeenth century. It was
parexcellence the magic of the humanists, i.e. it was no longer ‘divine magic’, but human
magic. It no longer served God, but man. Its ideal became the power of man over visible and
invisible Nature. Later, invisible Nature was also forgotten. Visible Nature was concentrated
upon alone, with the aim of subjugating it to the human will. It is in this way that technological
and industrial science originated. It is the continuation of the ceremonial magic of the
humanists, stripped of its occult element, just as the former is the continuation of sacred magic,
but deprived of its gnostic and mystical element (Meditations on the Tarot, III).
Perhaps the best analogy is found in the ‘unveiling’ of the Platonic doctrines by Proclus and Plotinus at
the end of the Greco-Roman world.
2
18
Thus, modern science starts with the perversion of the ‘divine magic’ of alchemy;
corrupted by their ‘will-to-power’, the Renaissance magi desired to bind the spirits
of nature, but before long even the spirits were forgotten, leaving them to fix their
gaze on the material world alone (the Anti-Christ has but one eye, says a Muslim
tradition).
True alchemy can only thrive in a cosmos that is pulsating with essences, a living
cosmos in which reigns the law of universal sympathy, and it is to be counted among
the great ironies of history that the demise of this Weltanschauung, which had
blossomed to such heights under the medieval genius, was finally sealed by a man
who called himself an “alchemist”.
Newton’s ‘de-essentialized’ clock-work universe is radically closed to all
verticality, a pure mechanism ruled by the iron fist of necessity and mathematical
law. This closing off to the vertical dimension means also that God Himself is
banished from His own creation and demoted to the position of a Deist law-giver:
the God of the machine.
Nature had turned from a theophany, a “book of sign and symbols” (liber naturae)
revealing the Creator, to a mute res extensa, a life-less ‘mass’ that could be
manipulated and altered at will. What was left of the cosmological icon of the middle
ages was merely its material shell which presented truly not much more than “a kind
of decorated corpse” (Plotinus); that itself an ‘alchemical’ – or rather magical –
operation.
The spirits of nature had been transmuted into Newtonian ‘force’ and modern
technology, with its desire to “conquer the purposeless powers of the unyielding
elements” (Zwecklose Kraft unbändiger Elemente) in order to gain “dominion and
property” (Herrschaft gewinn’ ich, Eigentum!), as Faust – another ‘alchemistturned-scientist’ – proclaims, is thus not much more than the continuation of
Renaissance magic on the material plane.
Like Wagner’s Alberich, the humanist magi had renounced all love to
‘alchemically’ transmute the gold they had wrested from the Rhine-maidens into the
‘Ring of Power’ (“Ein Runenzauber zwingt das Gold zum Reif”); an exploit that
ends, as we know very well, with the ‘Twilight of the Gods’ itself
(Göttderdämmerung).3
Nur wer der Minne Macht entsagt,
nur wer der Liebe Lust verjagt,
nur der erzielt sich den Zauber,
zum Reif zu zwingen das Gold.
Recall here also the breaking of Wotan’s spear, symbolizing the break-down of divine order and a
‘flooding’ of the vertical axis.
3
19
(Only he who has renounced love’s sway,
Only he who has spurned the sweet joy of love,
That man alone may attain the necessary magic
to turn the gold into a ring)
The renouncement of love is also the divorce of the ‘heart’ and reason, of intellectus
and the cold ratio, which was now enthroned as the sole sovereign and ruler of
human affairs.4
Surely, reason in itself is of course not necessarily malefic; being the uniquely
human mode of cognition (animal rationale) and ultimately a reflection of the
intellectual light itself it might even be called ‘divine’. But reason is essentially
‘lunar’ (manas, mens, mind, moon) and always in need of illumination by intellect,
lest it become cold and barren. It has to humble itself under the supra-rational light
and closed off from this light it can also quickly reveal a dark, ‘demonic’ side,
capable of enormous destruction.
The pride of reason is the illusion to encompass everything, the false totality of
the merely-human, hence why it necessarily tends to deny all that which it
“comprehendeth not”, i.e. everything that is ‘above’ it (and thus also all intellect as
such). In its Luciferian self-absolutizing it inevitably turns against the Only
Absolute, but its denial of God must also end in an denial of nature and ultimately
of man as well (for the culte de la raison always ends in human sacrifice).
It seems thus as if here we are contemplating the archetypical representatives of
modern science as such: the alchemist Faust who, after his failure to summon the
‘Earth-spirit’ (i.e. spiritus mundi) by means of his magic arts, turns to the Devil
instead and goes on to become the first ‘engineer’ (a character trait also shared with
Milton’s Satan, another haunting personification of rebellious reason), and the
Nibelung Alberich who ‘rapes’ the spirits of virgin nature to gain dominion over
gods and men.
From just these few examples we already see that the scientific revolution marks
a turn to the ‘infernal pole’ of the being (as shown by Faust’s dealings with the Devil
and Alberich’s subterranean kingdom of Nibelheim), i.e. a movement to the ‘subcorporeal’ (recall in this context also Alberich’s Tarnhelm, the ‘helmet that makes
him who wears it invisible’, i.e. that ‘de-manifests’ his wearer; an attribute likewise
4
We are obviously far beyond anything that Wagner himself intended to say in his work; however, when
we can use modern artists like Wagner, Goethe, Tolkien etc., in the present context to elaborate on
metaphysical ideas, this is because they worked off of classical sources (Norse mythology, the medieval
Faust-myth, etc.) and thus what Guénon says about folklore also applies to them, namely that they often,
even unknowingly, preserve “elements that are traditional in the true sense of the word, however deformed,
diminished and fragmentary they may be sometimes, and of things that have a real symbolic value” (The
Holy Grail).
20
shared by Tolkien’s Ring).
Once the esprit de géométrie becomes divorced from the ‘reason of the heart’
(espirt de finesse) it is drawn to dissection, domination, and abstraction; it turns
‘downwards’, from the synthetic realities of essence and form, the pulsating life of
the cosmic dance, to the analytic grasp for the ‘unnatural’, the cold stars in the
infinite space above and the lonely atoms below. And it is this cold, ‘Saturnalian’
reason which also gives birth to the “devilish Enginrie” (Milton) of the machine.
It is as if there had developed in man new organs and cognitive powers which set him in an
almost magical rapport with inanimate nature and on which also his domination of it is founded.
With a nigh magnetic power, man is drawn to the amorphous ‘elements’: metal, air, fire,
electricity; a tendency that is also immediately observable in the products of modern art [for
example in the dominance of ‘artificial’ and ‘unnatural’ building materials in modern
architecture, such as steel, glass, and concrete]. On this magical rapport are based in the last
consequence all the triumphs of modern science and technology … The subordination of man
under these new powers, which he summoned from inorganic nature and which resemble it in
almost all regards [the machine being itself lifeless]5, end up making man himself ever more
‘inorganic’ and ‘amorphous’6; he becomes enslaved to his own creation, to the machine, which
is itself but the creation of an intelligence that is turned to the inorganic with every fiber of its
being (Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte, VII).
Not only is God cut off from the cosmos at large, but (in the Galileo-Cartesian
method which serves as the basis for all of modern science) even nature is cut in
two, such that the world of phenomena is more and more disparaged in favor of the
(supposed) “true nature”, the abstract realm of equations and geometry. The
scientific modus operandi is exactly this inexhaustible grasp for the indefinite (a
literal ‘decomposition’), which we have identifies above as the movement of
rebellious reason, the stirring in the dark mute foundation of the world in search of
the ‘gold’ hidden there, like Alberich descending to Nibelheim to forge the Ring of
Power in its infernal fires. And thus the scientist trying to harness the powers of the
‘below’ appears also as the ‘smith’ who works the subterranean forges.
The figure of the smith is traditionally depicted as a ‘peripheral’ creature (the
5
We should however remark that there is a decisive difference between the artificial materials like steel
and glass (both of which are ‘forged’ in fire) and the inorganic (mineral) life that grows in nature. Every
stone is a theophany in the way a steam engine isn’t; a stone reveals some imitable aspect of the Divine
Essence itself, the machine is first and foremost a manifestation of the discursive and rebellious reason of
man; “even the stones cry out” and they proclaim the glory of their Maker, but the machine is condemned
to silence (this failure to link back to a definitive archetype is also what characterizes the ‘monster’ – the
demons that haunt the paintings of Hieronymus Bosh – as the ‘confusion’ of many different forms).
6
It may be interesting to note in this context that the first major influx of women into the workforce took
place during the industrialization. The machine is the great equalizer, it ‘machinifies’ man himself,
removing all qualitative distinctions and turning him into a mere quantum; what was once man and women
becomes, in the industrial society (as well as in the Marxian utopia): the faceless “worker”.
21
dwarf Alberich or the giant Hephaistos, the ‘deformed god’), he is the ‘monster’
guarding the edge of the world (“hic sunt dragones”), i.e. that which indicates
(monstrare) the ultimate limits of manifestation; and like the magician who handles
the subtle (and often malefic) influences on the ‘edge’ of being, so the scientist tries
to control the peripheral powers of the ‘outer darkness’ (a fact that becomes most
apparent in the atom-bomb which can summon immense destructive powers by a
simple manipulation of the subcorporeal realm).
In fact upon closer inspection modern technology reveals a truly demonic aspect.
To quote once more from the Meditations:
The practical aspect of the scientific ideal is revealed in the progress of modern science from
the eighteenth century to the present day. Its essential stages are the discoveries and putting into
man's service, successively, steam, electricity and atomic energy. But as different as these
appear to be, these discoveries are based only on a single principle, namely the principle of the
destruction of matter, by which energy is freed in order to be captured anew by man so as to be
put at his service. It is so with the little tegular explosions of petrol which produce the energy
to drive a car. And it is so with the destruction of atoms, by means of the technique of neutron
bombardment, which produces atomic energy. That it is a matter of coal, petrol, or hydrogen
atoms, is not important; it is always a case of the production of energy as a consequence of the
destruction of matter, for the practical aspect of the scientific ideal is the domination of Nature
by means of putting into play the principle of destruction or death.
At the heart of technology there’s a true ‘satanic sacrifice’, a literal holocaust where
nature is sacrificed in order to gain ‘super-natural’ powers (i.e. the powers to
transcend natural limitations).
This Faustian bargain is of course the opposite of the benefic ‘Faustianism’ of the
saints, the struggle against the flesh, to “batter the body and bring it into subjection”
(1. Cor. 9:27). Here too the ultimate goal is the domination and even ‘destruction’
of nature (“that our old man might be destroyed”, Rom. 6:6), but this ‘sacrifice’ of
(fallen) nature does not aim at its exploitation but rather, a contrario, at its
glorification (sacrificere – sacrum facere) and it is here where the ‘divine magic’ of
the saints parts decisively from that of the Renaissance magi.
For Albert the Great, only the deified man, the one who ‘lives according to the divine Intellect
… as Hermes testifies’, through a lengthy ascesis that leads to the culminating point of the spirit
(perseverante homine in mentis culmine), becomes master of the world (gubernator),
transmutes bodies (agit ad corporum mundi transmutationem) and accomplishes, so to say,
prodigies (ita ut miracula facere dicatur). Of all that the Renaissance would often retain only
recipes for increasing one’s power, and would occasionally end up in the lowest kind of sorcery
(Borella, Op. cit.).
By ruling nature in himself, the saint attains mastery over all of creation, becoming
22
the ‘ruler at the centre of the wheel’ (chakravartin) and this ‘subjection’ of nature is
also its ‘rectification’, the restoration to its primordial state. Thus the great vision of
alchemy is the Heavenly Jerusalem: not the destruction but the transfiguration of
matter, its ‘deification’. Every saint is an alchemist, most scientists are just devils.
The whole (alchemical) Work consists in two things, heavenly and earthly: the heavenly must
make the earthly in it to a heavenly: The Eternity must make time in it to Eternity: The artist
seeks Paradise; if he finds it, he has the great treasure upon the earth (Böhme, De Signatura,
VII.73).
But the way to Heaven always leads through Hell and as such the alchemist too
descends into the ‘interior cave’ (V.I.T.R.I.O.L) to recover the ‘gold’ hidden there;
however, he does so not for his own material gain (viz. to forge the Ring of Power)
but rather to ‘unearth’ what is precious and pure in nature and to bring it to the
surface. His descent is not a ‘rape’ or a ‘robbery’, but a ‘birthing’, delivering nature
from her birth pangs in which she labours in “groaning and travailing” (Rom. 8:22).
Alchemy thus pursues the complete inverse movement as that of science; rather
than analytical decomposition, the alchemist ‘raises up’ nature, like Adam ‘naming
the animals’ (i.e. assigning intelligible meaning to unintelligent creature) or
Abraham ‘hosting the angels’ (preparing material food for immaterial guests, i.e.
‘spiritualizing’ matter).7 Only God can ‘look down’ the vertical axis without falling,
man’s job is that of unification, to raise up earth into Heaven and to bind back the
horizontal to its supernal Source (which is also why Böhme says that Adam’s Fall
already began when he ‘imagined’ into animal nature, i.e. when he turned to the
indefinite pole of multiplicity and forgot the ‘divine names’ above).
It is God who descends into the waters to “crush the head of Leviathan” (Ps.
74:14), He is the “Lamb slain from the beginning” (Rev. 13:8) who sacrifices
Himself to the demiurgic powers, but the task of man is one of ‘recollection’, to fight
the Titans, not to make common cause them.
However, to slay the dragon one has to descend into its cave, and only he can
“vanquish the serpent that is in the sea” (Is. 27:1) who has the Lord on his side; only
the man who “walks with God” can descend into the underworld without perishing:
“I will go down with thee into Egypt; and I will surely bring thee up again” (Gen.
46:4).
When Joseph went down to Egypt “the Lord was with him” (Gen. 39:2) and thus
he was “exalted over all” (Gen. 41:41); he wins the “golden ring” of Pharaoh (Gen.
41:42) and the land prospers under him, because the blessing of the Lord rested on
This idea of ‘raising up’ matter is also found in the Biblical sacrifice, for ‘sacrifice’ (“korban” in Hebrew)
means literally “to bring close (to God)”; the (quadrupedal) animal represents the totality of universal
extension and its ‘raising up’ via the axis of the sacrificial altar signifies the reunion of ‘heaven and earth’.
7
23
all the works of his hands. But he who has not the “Spirit of God in him” (Gen.
41:42) but rather “hardens his heart” will surely perish, and those who settle in Egypt
are made slaves; they do not bring good fruit, but all their children are “cast into the
waters” (Ex. 1:22).8
Whereas the Solar Hero Siegfried goes down into the ‘cave’ to slay the ‘old
Dragon’ lurking there (upon which he learns the ‘language of the birds’)9, the
scientist, like the greedy dwarves in Tolkien’s Hobbit, wakes up the dragon who
guard the subterranean treasures, leading to the Weltenbrand, the setting ablaze of
the whole face of the world (and what is the industrialization ultimately other than
such an unleashing of the infernal powers hidden in the ‘earth’?).10
The ‘people of God’ (Israel) can pass through the ‘bitter waters’ into Paradise, but
those who makes themselves henchmen of Pharaoh will surely be drowned in the
sea, and it is because of this ambiguous nature of the ‘underworld’ that it was also
said that Egypt (Kêmet, the ‘black earth’, from which later also the Arabic al-Kimiyâ,
‘alchemy’) was “the land of dung and gold”.
The alchemist is the “philosophical midwife” (cf. Plato, Theaet. 148E-151D) who
delivers the ‘golden child’ (filius philosophorum) out of the lower waters and this is
also why (as even Renaissance alchemist like Paracelsus and others still knew) the
‘outer Work’ cannot be accomplished without the ‘inner Alchemy’ of the spiritual
birth, for “even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption”
(Rom. 8:23). “One dead man does not raise another”, says Böhme, “the artist must
be living, if he will say to the mountain, arise, and cast thyself into the sea!” and
“therefore if the magus will seek Paradise in the curse of the earth, and find it, he
must first walk in Christ and God must be manifest in him” (De Signatura, VII.79).
As such the Rabbis tell us that Israel’s slavery in Egypt (mizrayim) was really the enslavement to this
world, to the samsaric ‘waters’ (mayim) of becoming, and in a similar manner the 430 years of the Egyptian
exile are also interpreted as an enslavement to the lower ‘animal soul’ (NePheSh: 50-80-300 = 430). This
symbolism is also taken up by Origen in his Genesis commentaries where he often distinguishes between
the ‘settler’ (károikos) and the ‘guest’ (pároikos): “Abraham (representing the just man) did not dwell
(katoikein) in Egypt, but only stayed as guest (paroikein), whereas the Canaanites (representing the wicked
men) ‘made their dwelling place’ (katókoun) on the ‘earth’” (cf. Fragments, E30-31).
9
The archetypical figure of the dragon-slayer (the Germanic Siegfried, St. George in Christianity, etc.) is
represented in the Arabic world by the mysterious character of Al-Khidr, who (as we might point out in this
context) is also said to be the original alchemist.
10
Recall also the Balrog, representing the ‘infernal powers’ that lie dormant in the heart of the mountain,
and who is slain by Gandalf upon which he becomes ‘Gandalf the White’ (the colour of resurrection): “The
Dwarves delved deep at that time, seeking beneath Barazinbar for mithril, the metal beyond price that was
becoming yearly ever harder to win. Thus they roused from sleep a thing of terror that, flying from
Thangorodrim, had lain hidden at the foundations of the earth since the coming of the Host of the West: a
Balrog of Morgoth. Durin was slain by it, and the year after Náin I, his son; and then the glory of Moria
passed, and its people were destroyed or fled far away” (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Appendix A).
8
24
Let this be plain to you, ye seekers of the metalline tincture: If you would find the Lapis
philosophorum, set yourselves to attain the new birth in Christ, else it will be difficult for you
to apprehend it. For it has great affinity with the heavenly substantiality (Wesenheit), which
would be well seen if it were freed from the fierce wrath. Its lustre indicates something which
we should certainly recognize, if we had paradisaic eyes. The mind (Gemüth) shows us that
indeed, but our reason and understanding are dead as to Paradise. And because we use what is
noble to the dishonour of God and to our own perdition, and honour not God thereby, and enter
not with our spirit into the Spirit of God, but abandon the spirit and cleave to the substance (of
this world), the metalline tincture has become a mystery to us, for we have become alienated
from it (De Incarnatione, I.4.10)
We see that alchemy is the exact anti-thesis to modern science/technology; the
former wants to restore nature, to liberate it from its “bondage to corruption” (Rom.
8:21), and bring out the best in it (the alchemical ‘gold’ hidden in all things as a
vestige of their Edenic beauty), the latter wants to dominate and exploit it: the one
seeks Paradise, the other profit.
The Alchemist is the true Philosopher (hence why his ultimate prize is the
‘Philosopher’s Stone’), for as Hermes Trismegistus, the mythical founder of all
western alchemy, himself defines: “Philosophy is nothing else than striving through
constant contemplation and saintly piety to attain knowledge of God”. 11 A
philosophy that refuses to be “ancilla theologiae”12 by separating itself from God
(viz. from the divine Sophia) suffers the same fate as modern science and is doomed
to lose itself in the indefinite spiraling of dianoia. It is of this philosophy that St.
Gregory says that “it is always in labour but never giving birth” and that it hides
itself “in the womb of barren wisdom”, never coming to the light of the knowledge
of God (De vita Moy. II.11).
In fact the words of the ‘Thrice-great’ have proven in many ways prophetic: “I tell you that in after times
none will pursue philosophy in singleness of heart … but there will be many who will make philosophy
hard to understand, and corrupt it with manifold speculations … Philosophy will be mixed with diverse and
unintelligible sciences, such as arithmetic, music and geometry. Whereas the student of philosophy
undefiled, which is dependent on devotion to God, and on that alone, ought to direct his attention to the
other sciences only so far as he may. .. be led to revere, adore, and praise God's skill and wisdom … For to
worship God in thought and spirit with singleness of heart, to revere God in all his works, and to give thanks
to God, whose will, and his alone, is wholly filled with goodness – this is philosophy unsullied by intrusive
cravings for unprofitable knowledge” (Ascelpius, I).
12
We take ‘theology’ here in the most elevated sense of the word, namely as it was understood by many of
the Fathers, for whom theologia denoted the highest state of mystical contemplation, the direct ‘science of
God’ (logia tou Theou). Thus for St. Gregory of Nyssa the archetypical theologian is Moses, spiritually
ascending the Holy Mountain to the ‘dazzling obscurity’ of Divinity, and Evagrius famously states that “he
who prays truly is a theologian”, ‘true prayer’ being “the peak of intellection” and “the ascension to God”,
“the naked intellect contemplating the light of the Holy Trinity” etc. – “The intellect prays through
knowledge and knows through prayer”; thus knowledge is the prayer of the intellect and this prayer
constitutes the true theology (cf. De Oratione).
11
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For the true philosopher dialectical (self-)analysis or ‘separation’ (diairetike) is
always directed at ‘re-collection’ (anamnesis), the ‘re-union’ (henôsis) with the
supreme Good itself, to “leave behind the world and become like God” (Thaetet.
176A). As such it is a necessary step in the philosophical ‘realization’ but not an end
itself.
For “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (Joh. 3:3),
but to be ‘reborn’ in this life requires also to ‘die before you die’ and thus it is rightly
said that “philosophy is the practice of death” (Phaedo, 46A), a descend into the
cave of the heart and “laying there in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in
you” (Gal. 4:19) – “Keep your soul in hell, and don’t despair” (St. Silouan the
Athonite).
I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me;
Out of the belly of the beast cried I, and thou heardest my voice.
For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas;
And the floods compassed me about:
All Thy billows and Thy waves passed over me.
The waters compassed me about, even to the soul:
The depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.
I went down to the bottoms of the mountains;
The earth with her bars was about me for ever:
Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God!
“To cleanse the soul of every taint of generation, this is the chief function of
philosophy”, says Iamblichus, and thus the true philosopher goes down into the
furnace (Athanor) of the subterranean fires, rising from it like the Phoenix (the
‘golden bird’) from the ashes.13
When the clay of our flesh has been cooked by the fire into a vessel, so that this flesh, previously
pressed down to the earth by a heavy burden, may with the aid of angels fly away towards
heaven after receiving the wings of spiritual grace, it soars to eternity (St. Ambrose, In Apoc.
XI).
The goal of philosophy (i.e. of alchemy) is nothing else but “regrowing the wings of
the soul” (cf. Phaedrus, 250E ff.) and ascending to the Highest God (“phygi monou
Cf. in this context also the traditional account of the martyrdom of St. Polykarp: “When Polykarp had
launched this Amen heavenward in completing his prayer, the pyre-men lighted the fire. A great flame burst
out, sparkling. Then we saw a miracle; and we, to whom was granted the sight, have been spared so as to
relate to others what happened. The fire, taking the shape of a vault, like a ship’s sail bellied out by the
wind, surrounded the martyr’s body in a circle. And the martyr was in the midst, not like a body being
burned, but like a loaf being baked, or like gold and silver that is purified in the furnace. As for us, indeed,
there was wafted a delicious perfume, as strong as that of incense or some other of the precious aromatics”.
13
26
pros monon”): “The soul of the philosopher alone recovers her wings”, says Plato,
and “when it is perfect and winged it journeys on high and controls the whole world”.
In becoming the ‘controller of the world’, the gubernator, the alchemist realizes
the vocation of man as the steward and ruler of creation; he is “like Adam in
Paradise” and through subjecting himself totally to God, nature becomes subjected
to him: “Pater in filio, filio in matre”. Of all this, the technological domination of
nature by modern man is only the satanic inversion; what remains is not ‘alchemy’,
but indeed magic. For what is ‘magic’ (“the perversion of the eternal Religion of the
Word”, according to Saint-Yves) other than the abuse of man’s pontifical function,
the abuse of the revealing ‘word’?14
According to Böhme: “Man was given the power, insofar as he walks as an
instrument of God in divine obedience, to introduce the earth which stands in the
curse of God into the benediction, and make of the deadly anguish the highest
triumphant joy in the outward pregnant mother” (De Signatura, XI.85); but it is also
he who can unleash the spirits that are bound in the darkness of this world (cf.
Baader, Von Segen und Fluch der Creatur). Man is the mediator and pontifex of
creation and he was given the authority to “bind and loose” (Matt. 16:19), to open
both the janua coeli and inferni. It is man who ‘reveals’ the world to God and vice
versa; if he “walks in divine obedience” and binds back creation to its supernal
Source, he can truly unearth the paradisiacal ‘gold’, but if he succumbs to the
‘infernal’ pole he also has the power make the world a living hell.
As Heidegger argues in his Essay concerning Technology, the way man ‘reveals’
(entbergen) the world shapes the very ‘essence’ (das Wesen) of it; through the
‘blessing’ of water in the ceremonies of the Church it is revealed as a ‘sacrament’,
the outward sign of an inexpressible mystery, and becomes a true channel of grace
by which the heavenly waters pass down to us. It becomes a true symbol, an
‘analogy’ (analogia) which vertically links the horizontal to its ultimate Source
through all states of the being and through which our ‘ascend’ (anagôgé) becomes
possible.
In a sense, the baptismal water is the primordial Flood from which the Spirit gives
birth to a new creation and every basin of holy water at the entrance of our Churches
is the Red Sea through which we cross from the ‘Egyptian slavery’ of this world into
the ‘Freedom of the sons of God’.
In the benediction of water it realizes its ‘Marian function’ (gratia plena) and is
To ‘reveal’ is primarily the function of the feminine (the “glory of man”), hence it should not come as a
surprise that magic is traditionally considered a feminine trait (as shown in the figure of the witch). The
witch (who literally ‘eats children’) is the woman who didn’t ‘bring fruit’ and used her God-given powers
of ‘production’ for her own gain instead of “pro-creating”, i.e. producing in accordance with God as an
instrument (adjutor) of the divine Will.
14
27
revealed in its ‘essentially’ reality; as the pure receptivity of prima materia
(“sor’Acqua, la quale è multo utile et humile et preziosa et casta” – St. Francis) and
ultimately as the Infinity of the Divine Essence itself, the supreme Referent of all
and the boundless Ocean of Felicity into which all rivers flow (Eccl. 1:7).
The water of the river that is ‘cursed’ by being integrated into the Gestell of a
hydroelectric plant (to use the example given by Heidegger) is turned into a mere
‘inventory’ (Bestand), a resource to be used and harvested at will: “What the river is
now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power
station”, says Heidegger, meaning that it is ‘revealed’ by the (un- and anti-natural)
machine and even though the machine is of course ultimately man-made, the modus
of its ‘disconcealment’ (Entbergung) – or ‘unveiling’ (apocalypsis) – is essentially
anti-human; it is a dark, ‘infernal’ revelation that overshadows its natural theophanic
quality and turns the water from a pure mirror of Divinity into an icon of Anti-Christ.
However, the remedy for this crisis lies not in a ‘divinization’ of nature, as many
have thought in the past (and still do today), the flight back into a pantheistic idolatry
of “mother earth” or “the spirits of nature” (a tendency which is also not wholly
foreign to Heidegger when he advocates for a poetic reenchantment of the world in
the spirit of romantic poets like Hölderlin).
The romantic pantheism of Hölderlin, Goethe, and many other noteworthy figures
of the European intelligenzia is merely the dark flipside of Enlightenment
rationalism, the ‘shadow’ that the cold light of reason cast on the modern psyche.
Whereas the Deism of the rationalists had banished God from the world to the realm
of absolute transcendence, the romantic reaction tried to lock Him into the prison of
pure immanence by elevating nature on the empty throne of Divinity. For as the
universal testimony of history only shows too well: when man stops worshipping
God he doesn’t merely believe in nothing at all but starts creating idols for himself,
and for a time modern man felt that the “Idea of God” (Hegel) or the pantheistic
“Deus sive Natura” (Spinoza) presented a more exalted, more pure and ‘reasonable’
view of the Divine – without, however, perceiving that the ‘deanthropomorphization’ of God would necessarily also lead to ‘de-theomorphization’
of man.
As soon as the ‘Centre’ is lost (which is also the loss of ‘intellect’) man becomes
labile; whereas the Enlightenment presents an excess of (masculine) ratio, the selfabsolutizing of man, leading to a movement to the ‘unnatural’ (inorganic) powers
and the violent subjection of nature by means of technology, Romanticism15 is in
We use the term ‘romanticism’ here in a quite narrow manner to refer to the ‘cult of nature’ that was
popular among many western intellectuals of the 18th-19th century, like for example Goethe, Hölderlin, and
the early Schelling. There is of course also a more specifically ‘Christian’ romanticism as represented in
Germany by poets like Eichendorff, Brentano, and Schlegel (even though the delimitations between both
15
28
many ways an excess of the (feminine) psyché, a purely passive ‘subjection to
nature’ that leads to the enslavement of man to the “purposeless powers of the
elements” (which, ironically, makes the romantic ‘return to nature’ deeply
unnatural).
These two tendencies have of course their roots likewise already in the
Renaissance. The Prometheanism of the humanists forgot that man is only a divino
insofar as he carries the image of God and (because a denial of the Urbild necessarily
leads to the denial of the Abbild as well) it simply follows a rigorous logic that the
trajectory of modernity leads from the divinization of man to the outright denial of
the human form.
But the Renaissance not only brought the cult of man and reason, but also the
return of the ‘old gods’ in the revival of a heavily corrupted “Greek paganism”; a
paganism that had, by the time of late antiquity, already degenerated so far as see in
gods nothing more than representations of natural forces, but which yet captured the
imagination of a large part of the Western elite for centuries to come.
The worship of nature entails a horizontal ‘democratization’ of the whole chain
of being and consequently the ‘dethronement’ of man; he is demoted from his
exalted position as the divinely appointed steward of creation to just another of the
many children of “mother earth”. In this ontological egalitarianism man becomes
equal to the beasts and is stripped of his dignity, which also means that he may
consequently be treated like cattle, as for example seen in the more radical currents
of modern environmentalism that aim at nothing less than the ‘abolition of man’
(depopulation, genetic engineering, abortion, etc.). Like the cold god of reason, so
the pantheistic Chronos-Saturn ends up devouring his own children – “Where there
are no Gods, there the ghosts roam” (Wo keine Götter sind, walten Gespenter), says
Novalis, for once the spirits of nature have been summoned it is quickly they who
come to dominate the unwitting magi; a story as old as time: “Die ich rief, die Geister
/ Werd ich nun nicht los!”
We see that the root-cause of our ecological crisis is not “Abrahamism” (as so
often claimed today) but precisely the decline of the Christian worldview, for how
man relates to God determines how he relates to himself and all other living beings
and a denial of God must always turn into a denial of man, His image, and vice versa.
In the ‘egalitarianism’ of the pantheistic paradigm man’s relation to nature turns
into a purely passive one, as for example witnessed by the rise of the English
currents are often rather fluid). However more often than not the relation to Christianity in these thinkers
remained a purely ‘aesthetic’ one that didn’t manage to transcend the ‘psychism’ inherent in all romanticism
and to recover an authentic ‘spirituality’ (or a ‘sacred intellectuality’) properly speaking.
29
landscape garden which, in its heyday (ca. 1760-1830)16, even ousted architecture
(symbolizing the ‘masculine’ erection of space/order) as the dominant plastic artform in Europe.
The landscape garden is exactly the opposite of the Garden Eden; Adam was
tasked with “tending and keeping the Garden” (Gen. 2:15), i.e. with imposing order
over chaos and raising up all of creation to its divine Source. The English garden on
the other hand represents a re-descent into primal chaos; it is ‘artificially natural’,
specifically designed to look as if untouched by human hands: the abolition of man.
Man becomes a pure bystander, the passive observer and subservient worshipper
of nature. In the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich nature is often clothed in an icy
loneliness and man is as if lost in it, a ‘de-centered’, small shadow, almost merging
in with the background colours (cf. The Monk by the Sea).
Enthroned on the seat of Divinity, nature becomes the great ‘other’ and the source
of the ‘sublime’, the mysterium tremendum inherent to everything sacred (cf. The
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog). The unbridled forces of nature (often framed as
the ‘divine wrath’) become the favorite subject of many romantic painters, but this
god is not the God of Love and Light, but terrible and incomprehensible.
The more man is ‘naturalized’, the more nature becomes ‘dehumanized’ and by a
tragic necessity man’s divinization of nature turns into an ever greater alienation
from it. Without God, nature (being His manifestation) is mute and cold, for a
symbol deprived of its semantic referent is literally ‘meaningless’.
Nature is enveloped in the silence of the grave; in romanticism it appears not only
in its divine ‘sublimity’ but also as the source of death, sickness, and decay, as the
dark and unintelligible ‘womb’ to which all things return and for which there
develops, in many romantics, a strange and morbid longing (the “sympathy for
death” which, according to Thomas Mann, characterizes the romantic spirit as such).
This turn towards the demonic and irrational (which Goethe himself perceived so
clearly in Kleist and Hölderlin), to the strange and ‘monstrous’, madness and death,
reveals the other side of the Enlightenment project, its ‘suppressed truth’.
It is thus no surprise that the great symbol of the period is the moon, sung about
in so many of its hymns. For the deification of the transitory material world is a
denial of all eternal values of all stability as such, a fall to the ‘lunar side’ of Being,
the ever-changing flux of things, which, deprived of its ‘solar’ counter-pole, cannot
but lead into darkness.17 What romanticism ‘discovers’ in the cavern of nature is
16
It is no coincidence that this time frame coincides almost exactly with the period that Toynbee later
termed the ‘industrial revolution’ (1760-1840); once again the technological subjection of nature and its
romantic divinization go hand-in-hand.
17
This is also the symbolism of ‘selling Christ for 30 pieces of silver’ (“SheKeL”: 300-100-30 = 430). The
metal silver is obviously related to the ‘moon-and-water-side’ of existence (becoming), whereas Christ, the
divine Sun, corresponds to gold and the ‘solar side’ of being. Thus ‘Judas’ is also he who prefers the
30
precisely the ‘curse’, the “thorns and thistles” (Gen 3:18) and the “corruption” (Rom.
8:21) to which it lies in bondage. And so the romantic return to nature is also a
“return to the mothers”, as Goethe called it (cf. Faust 2, II.5), the ‘surging up’ of the
(feminine) substantial pole in all areas of live; the great flood.
Even God Himself becomes ‘passive’, for the denial of the Trinitarian God (by
both Deists and pantheists alike) carries with it also the denial of his (masculine)
power to act in the world, a denial of the ‘miraculous’, i.e. of all verticality. The
‘emasculated’ god of Spinoza is a pure ‘substance’ without will or intellect, itself
subjected to the ‘lunar’ cycles of the samsâric vortex.
Contrary to this inversion of Substance and Essence (which manifests today with
particular clarity), the Christian vision posits the image of Assumption of the Virgin
Mary, i.e. the reintegration of Substance into the Essential Pole, the hierogamy of
Purusha and Prakriti which is also that of Christ and the Church on the Last Day;
not the pantheistic divinization of matter, but rather its ‘transfiguration’, matter
transmuted into the gem stones the Heavenly Jerusalem, a perfectly translucent
receptacle for the Divine Light.
St. Francis could call the sun ‘brother’ and the moon ‘sister’, because he knew
they shared the same ‘Father in Heaven’. He truly was “like Adam in Paradise” and
spoke the language of the birds, but Adam was not common to the beasts but a
mighty ruler and shepherd. Many of the Holy Fathers say that even the sun and the
moon were in obedience to Adam (as we also see in Joshua) and thus the true
alchemist can say with Blessed Joseph: “the sun and the moon and the eleven stars
made obeisance to me” (Gen. 37:9).
“When man is not, Nature is barren” (Blake), for the fate of nature and that of
man are most intimately intertwined: the wound of the Grail King turns his whole
kingdom into a waste land. But when man closes himself off to Transcendence and
refuses to call down the living waters it must stay a ‘valley of tears’ indeed.
Let us not be deceived then. The solution to the ecological crisis lies neither in a
false environmentalism that abolishes man by deifying nature nor in a sterile
scientism, but in ‘true alchemy’, the alchemy of the saints. The regeneration of
nature is inextricably linked to the realization of the human form, and thus, as a
friend of ours once rightly observed: “The only species of anti-tech revolution left
available pertains to the pursuit of spiritual perfection by the grace of God”. Amen.
transitory world of appearances over what is Eternal, the “treasures which moth and rust corrupt” over the
“treasures in heaven” (Matt. 6:19), or (microcosmically speaking) he who sells the intellect for the pleasures
of the lower psyche (nephesh = 430).
31
32
René Guénon and the Crisis of the Modern
World
Jean Borella
Translated by Iohannes Spinell
A
society is in crisis, not when it experiences internal tensions or external
aggressions, but when the institutions and rules that constitute it and
which are responsible for ensuring the life of the human group are
themselves a source of difficulties and opposed to the satisfaction of the
needs to which they had to respond.
The state of crisis arises for two major reasons: on the one hand the principles or
values which inspire the institutions lose their force and their obviousness as time
passes; on the other hand and correlatively, any institutional or legal structure tends
to harden and generate structures responsible for remedying the shortcomings of the
primary structures. The specific force of the law is in fact inversely proportional to
the intrinsic force of the principle, that is to say to its immanence in the hearts and
the intelligence of men when they spontaneously submit to the norm. In the
terrestrial Paradise, the rule or the law is almost non-existent and the immanence of
the norm in the Adamic being is almost total. However, through original sin, man
has lost the grace of this immanence and thus institutional society becomes necessary
in order to make up for the loss of this grace by the constraint of legal obligation.
And as the fall continues until the lower possibilities of the earthly state are
exhausted, society is forced to increase the binding constraints. Laws proliferate,
trying, without succeeding, to fill by their reticular multiplication the increasingly
gaping void generated by the erasure of principles in the human heart. However,
with the increasing regulations the contradictions that they maintain between them
proliferate too. The moment comes when the contradictions specific to the
institutional system outweigh the satisfactions it was supposed to provide. All social
energy is devoted to remedying the faults of the system and no longer to meeting the
permanent needs of human life.
Three essential consequences result from this implementation of the concept of
crisis. The first is that a crisis is always internal to a given society. External events,
cataclysms and wars, can destroy it completely, but they have no relevant meaning
in relation to the state of crisis. Harsh living conditions can even, by the
simplification they impose, promote the healing of a sick society and help it to find
33
the sense of the essential. The second consequence is that a crisis is also a judgment.
This is the meaning of the word Krisis in Greek, which also means: sorting, choice,
discrimination. It is a kind of immanent judgment: a society in crisis necessarily
reveals the truth about itself. The veil of illusions is torn because the lie of declared
intentions and pretensions turns out to be untenable, so that it becomes more and
more easy to see clearly – if at least one has the doctrinal light which makes it
possible to bring the simple contradiction of facts to the truth of the intelligible,
because the meaning of history is never given as it is and always asks to be
deciphered and recognized. Finally, the third and last consequence is that the crisis,
considered in itself, occurs when the balanced tensions that society had established
between its inspiring principles and its instituted rules are transformed into active
conflicts, like in the dialectic of Heaven and Earth, of Love and Law, of inspiration
and discipline: The principles no longer carry the law, its yoke becomes heavier on
the shoulders of revolting men, at the same time as its force is diluted in the
proliferation of prescriptions.
The three Moments of Guénonian Criticism of the Modern World
Remarkably, we see that these three consequences correspond exactly to the three
axes of the Guénonian criticism of the modern world. This criticism was, in fact,
expressed essentially in three works: East and West in 1924, The Crisis of the
Modern World in 1927, and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Time in 1945.
Each of these works is built on an opposition: the spatial opposition of East and
West, the temporal opposition of the traditional world and the modern world, and
the ontological opposition of quality or essence and of quantity or matter.
The spatial opposition of East and the West aims to make evident the internal
nature of the Western crisis: the East lives in the balance and harmony of the
principles governing human life since time immemorial. Everything is in order there
because each man occupies the place for which his nature intends him. On the
contrary, the Western space is a scrambled, disturbed, disordered. Western society
should seek only in itself, in its internal contradictions, the causes of its difficulties.
No external danger threatens it. Eastern space ignores Western space and it is rather
the East which must fear to see its own space entirely invaded by the West.
The second book, The Crisis of the Modern World, built on the temporal
opposition between a traditional past and an anti-traditional modernity, corresponds
to our second consequence: every crisis is a judgment, it is the truth of the cyclical
moment which emerges when internal tensions have had enough time to fully
develop their nature of potential contradictions and make it effective. Now, how is
34
this passage from tension to contradiction possible, if not by the appearance of an
imbalance between the tendencies whose oppositions were canceled out in the
synthetic unity of an equilibrium?
The social edifice can then only crumble, just as the vault of the church crumbles
if the thrust exerted by one of the halves of the arch prevails over the other. This
image is all the more exact as the course of time is carried out, like the course of a
cycle whose origin is located in the divine Principle and whose movement consists
basically in successively exhausting all the possibilities of an estrangement away
from this Principle. There comes, therefore, a time when the sattvic force of
attraction that the Principle exerts on manifested realities gradually ceases to prevail
over the tamasic force of estrangement, these two forces acting in opposite directions
on the rajasic diameter of the cosmic wheel in order to make it turn. Then its
movement accelerates more and more, the sattvic form slowing down less and less
the attraction downwards. But, of course, the cosmic wheel comes to a standstill
when sattva becomes zero. Such is the general diagram of the cyclical doctrine that
Guénon exposes precisely in the first chapter of The Crisis of the Modern World, a
chapter entitled, moreover, “The Dark Age”, that is to say, in Sanskrit: The Age of
Kali. In truth, the word kali means dark or black color, when written with a long a.
But in the expression Kâli-yuga it is most often found written with a short a, and
then it means “the age of conflicts”, a time when all contradictions are sharpened
and become destructive, which responds very exactly to the second conclusion of
our initial analysis.
With The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Time, what was a general cyclical
pattern, and thus considered according to the temporal dimension, is now considered
from the point of view of the cosmological principles which govern our world and
all that it contains. Everything happens as if the two preceding descriptions,
according to space and to time, were combined to arrive at a general description,
made this time from the point of view of being, and under the highest doctrinal light.
This light is provided by the dialectic of the essential pole and the substantial pole
of Universal Manifestation, and more particularly of form and matter, or of quality
and quantity, which are its expressions at the human level. This dialectic concerns
all beings, all the productions of this world and all the forms that human activities
can take. It is here, we believe, that Guénon gave the measure of his genius. The two
preceding works, mainly the second, justly famous, contain rigorous and convincing
analyses. But, in a way, they are not without analogues in the literature of the time.
If Guénon published The Crisis of the Modern World in 1927, it was in 1928 that
Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents, in 1931 that Valéry published The
Crisis of the Mind and Bernanos The Great Fear of the Right-Thinking, and finally
in 1935 that Husserl published The Crisis of European Sciences, to name just a few
35
of the works in which the lively awareness of a dead end for all of Western
civilization is expressed. Some of these studies are not without merit, although the
way in which Guénon treats his subject in his first two books already stands out
through its uncompromising rigor, its intellectual mastery and an unusual synthetic
power. But in the third he offers his reader glimpses of time, space, trades, money,
the solidification of the physical cosmos, ideological fashions, etc., that to our
knowledge we do not meet with anywhere else. This book is truly the crowning
achievement of his critical work.
Meaning and Function of Guénon’s Critique
After having set up the concept of crisis, we recalled the three essential moments
of the description given by Guénon relative to the modern world and strove to make
its coherence manifest. But this criticism is not art for art’s sake, or science for the
sake of science. However masterful and impressive the picture may be, it has a very
precise meaning and function that we should now ask ourselves about. Moreover,
what interest would there be in repeating the Guénonian analyses? They are known
and we can only invite the reader to refer to them. If our own inquiry has any
purpose, it can only be to ask what the meaning and function of a critique of current
society might be. A request which proves more difficult than it may seem and that
theoretical discourse alone is probably powerless to satisfy.
The first answer we can give to this question is that Guénon’s criticism is a
struggle. The Sheikh Abd El-Wahid is not a sociologist abandoning himself to the
charms of his theoretical constructions, he is a slayer of idols. The goal pursued is
not thinly veiled but even plainly admitted: it is a question of making the modern
world disappear. He writes, in the last pages of his second book, this extraordinary
sentence: “if all men understood what the modern world is, it would cease to exist”.
And it is certain that the author pursues no other end than to bring us to this
understanding. In this regard, the last sentence of the book sums up all its content at
the same time as it assigns to the reader of good will the task which henceforth
incumbent upon him and the hope which animates him; this is the ancient initiatory
motto: “Vincit Omnia Veritas”, a motto primarily suited for a chivalric order. The
truth, here, is not considered as the repose of intelligence in the peace of being, but
as a weapon, and even as the only victorious weapon.
It seems that this part of the Guénonian work was unanimous. Even those who
refuse the metaphysical doctrine or the theses on the primordial Tradition readily
recognize that this fight was led masterfully by Guénon. There is also always
something cheerful in a game of slaughter: idols are only really pleasant when turned
36
upside down. However, and more particularly to those who really subscribed to the
work of the iconoclast, the effect of such criticism is probably not without danger.
The unanimity of adherence is perhaps based here on some misunderstandings. This
is what we must examine, from the double point of view, objective and subjective,
and, of course, without challenging the necessity and the salubrity of such a
criticism, because, for whoever understands it, the prestige of modernity becomes
powerless.
From an objective point of view, it is a question of knowing whether the
discriminations or radical oppositions formulated by Guénon always correspond to
the nature of things. Surely, a certain simplification is inevitable in this area,
especially given the importance of the issue. But the patient should not be killed by
dint of medication either. As is, for example, the case with the almost absolute
opposition that Guénon establishes between East and West. Without questioning the
intrinsic superiority of the eastern contemplative spirit, it is yet permissible to
observe that the East also has its imperfections and shortcomings. We will cite only
one example, an example that no Guénonian could dispute: it is a fact that almost all
Hindus believe firmly in the doctrine of reincarnation, which is, for Guénon, a
metaphysical heresy; it is another fact that almost all Christians do not believe in it,
and therefore that on this point they are at a doctrinal level higher than that of the
Easterners. In general, one has the impression that, in the comparison between East
and West as presented by Guénon, all Easterners are pure Shankarians, followers of
the Vedanta at its highest level, while Westerners are, as a whole, at the most obtuse
level of exoterism, and, at best, at the most irremediable level of onto-theology. This
is obviously untenable. Shankarian Vedanta is only one of the five schools that are
traditionally distinguished in the interpretation of the Vedanta and the Neo-Platonic
current of Origen and St. Augustine, of St. Dionysius the Aeropagite, St. Anselm,
St. Albert the Great, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Gallus, Nicolas of Cusa and even St.
Thomas Aquinas, has illumined many minds.
Moreover, since Guénon’s criticism and his rejection of the West is addressed to
Westerners, does it not run the risk of making them despair about themselves and
about the possibilities offered by their own tradition? Does not Guénon take away
with one hand what he gives with the other? Here we are led to the second point we
wanted to examine.
It is a question of appreciating the subjective effects that such a criticism cannot
fail to have on those who become aware of it. Surely, as we have said, it is able to
free our intelligences and heal them. But it must be admitted that it also places its
reader in a somewhat strange situation, which, moreover, is not at all due to Guénon
himself, but to the nature of any criticism of modernity, and which it is important to
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be aware of.
All criticism is knowledge of illusion. But knowing the illusion does not mean its
disappearance. Certainly, the modern world would disappear if all men saw its true
nature. But this assumption will not come true. This knowledge will only enter a
small number of minds. And that is precisely why it is as frightening as it is salvific.
To gain possession of the truth, even in a field as contingent as the errors of
modernity, is an inestimable good. But the world from which one is then
irremediably and definitively separated, continues to be what it was. Our glance at
it does not reduce it to ashes. The idols seem to laugh at our lucidity. Great is the
strength of the present, tirelessly attested to every minute of our life, as the signs of
the Transcendent with which Tradition had mercifully surrounded us fade away one
after another.
Acquainting ourselves with the knowledge of the Kâli-yuga does certainly mean
protecting ourselves, but by means of an invisible and immaterial fence; it is erected
within us, while our daily and outer life continues to unfold in the midst of the
impious.
Of the Good Spiritual Use of the Guénonian Criticism
We can see that the knowledge of modernity, like all authentic but theoretical
knowledge, only tears the veil of Mâyâ with regard to the mind. And perhaps we
have not sufficiently noticed the deep analogy which unites the path of metaphysical
discrimination between the Real and the illusory, and the path of the critique of
modernity which frees the mind from the errors of the present. In fact, the second is
only an extension of the first, or rather it is only an application made necessary by
the misfortune of the times. This is the real meaning of this criticism which presents
itself as the first moment of a jnana-yoga which ancient centuries undoubtedly had
no need of.
But then it follows that it cannot have its end in itself. Unfortunately, this is what
we are almost invincibly trained to forget, on the one hand because the effort
required for such an awareness is already considerable, and on the other hand,
because the lucidity conquered installs us in a situation of superiority with regard to
all the blind subjugated by the Baal of Modernity; it even offers us the supreme
satisfaction of being able to consider ourselves legitimately as martyrs of the
traditional cause. And because of that, we only tend too easily to surrender ourselves
to an anger and a bitterness that has been rewarmed a hundred times over. Having
awakened us to the awareness of the miserable indigence of the present time,
Guénonian criticism allows us to measure, with the smallness of what remains to us,
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the greatness of what we have lost. And this consciousness is already, by itself, such
a miracle that it can quickly fill our need for truth. All the more so, modernity is not
stingy with decadence, constantly reviving our critical sense, provoking our
prophetic bile with pleasure and gradually leading us to lose sight of the essential.
When, in the peace of a traditional civilization, a man sets out on the journey of the
Spirit and seeks to rid himself of the illusion of a world that pretends to be the only
reality, what remains when he has crossed the veil of Mâyâ, is Atma, the divine Self.
But when the man of today enters into the knowledge of the modern world, what
remains, when he has gone through the illusion of modernity, is still the world. And
too often, forgetting that the journey has not even started, and that we must let the
dead bury the dead, we return to this modernity that we have just left to accuse it
again. Let us fear then, like Lot’s wife fascinated by Sodom and Gomorrah under
sulfur and fire, to be petrified into a pillar of salt.
As we can see, the proper use of a critique of modernity is less obvious than it
seems. To warn us of this, it suffices to recall this astonishing saying of the Prophet
Muhammad: “Do not insult the century, for the century itself is God”. In other words,
what is required of us is an effort of objective and subjective discrimination: to reject
error without hating men. This world whose lies and impostures we relentlessly
reject is also ours, it is the time in which we live, that which God has given us for
our happiness and sanctification.
Thus, to conclude, we must integrate the criticism of modernity into the spiritual
path and attempt to define what a spirituality of criticism could be. Only in this way
is it possible to escape the illusory sufficiency of a critique of illusion.
The first point that must be emphasized is that the fight is one for the truth. If, by
its first term, the motto that Guénon conferred on us refers to chivalry, by its last
term, veritas, it refers to the priesthood. If the truth conquers all, it is not because it
is stronger, but because it exceeds all opposition and all planes of existence. By itself
and the simple reality of its essence, it goes beyond them without having to provide
any effort. It is us, we useless servants of the truth, who fight. Truth does not fight,
it is Victory. And that is also why the Guénonian criticism is unlike any other. One
could object, in fact, that in a world in crisis, i.e. in conflict, this work is itself only
one of the forces present in this conflict and therefore increases the disorder. But this
is not so, because it does not place itself on the very plane where the combatants face
each other, but perpendicular to it, like a lightning bursting from Heaven. And
undoubtedly this is what the doctrine of Evola did not understand. We have no tigers
to ride. We don’t have to go down into the arena, and if only for the simple reason
that we’re already there. In short, Guénon does not enlist us under any banner. First
and foremost, we have to make the truth exist in ourselves, in our intelligence. Our
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fight is against our own darkness. By the simple fact that the light becomes manifest
in a spirit, the whole modern world is wavering.
The second point is that the critique of modernity establishes us as prophets of the
present. The light that we receive through it, and under which the figures of
modernity reveal themselves for what they are, immediately places us in the axis of
the origin. It takes us back speculatively to the dawn of time, where the truth of being
lies.
Contemporaries, through knowledge of the eternal beginning established in the
invariable permanence of the Principle, we contemplate the unfolding of the cycle
in the exhaustion of its last possibilities, while at the same time being liberated from
the surprises of the constant ‘today’. By a consequence which is only paradoxical in
appearance, to perceive the emergence of the present in the timeless light of the
Origin, makes it intelligible and familiar to us, because we understand its meaning
and its reason for being. And so our rejection of modernity is not the result of hatred
or ignorance.
But the third point is the most secret and the most interior. Any spiritual path leads
back to the Origin, back in time, reminiscence, to the very heart of the becoming of
which we are the fruit, of the creative act by which God gives birth to us. This is
what the critique of modernity introduces us to by converting our whole soul, by reeducating in us a spirit, a sensitivity, a memory, a sense of reality and beauty to
ourselves unknown, by digging out the new man out of the sediments of the present,
by offering us the presentiment of the green man1 in his original grace.
Guénon’s criticism of modernity is itself a sign of the time. Its truth is such that it
has broken, for many of its readers, the most powerful charms of everyday idols. But
if we want it to be anything other than an ideology of rejection in the face of
ideologies of acquiescence, other than a lucid bitterness in the midst of dark
intoxication, we must let it teach us its deep truth, which is to restore us to our most
transcendent youth.
“L’homme verdoyant”: can possibly mean here both the primal man, the man of Paradise who is still “green” so to
speak, as well as the virile man, the “blossoming man”, man at the height of his capacities. We might also note in
passing that “the green man” is an almost exact translation of the Arabic name Al-Khidr [translator’s note].
1
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