This article is about the confusion of the Perennialist movement inspired by metaphysician René Guénon with other forms of ‘traditionalism’ that he was in fact deeply opposed to, including certain political movements. The confusion has so taken root within academia that the wrong idea about perennialism is now broadly accepted as fact. The second part of the article deals with the pervasive influence of Neo-Buddhism in the Western world.
The works of the only master metaphysician of the Western world René Guénon (1886–1951) were not understood even at the time he wrote them. As he accurately predicted, the ongoing degeneration of human intelligence means that even fewer persons have a chance of understanding what he wrote about now. There are signs that a wilful subversion of ‘traditionalism’ is taking place to an even more degraded level than that which was taking place when Guénon inspired the perennialist movement of a century ago now. The whole matter of what perennialism even is has by now become deeply confused, owing to completely contradictory schools of thought claiming to be perennialist. In this article we are interested in the Perennialism founded by René Guénon, which now has to be disambiguated by linking it with Traditionalism—which is also very unsatisfactory.[1]
Left: René Guénon (1925)
René Guénon himself said that there is a difference between tradition and ‘traditionalist’, and he would not describe himself as that. He never even described himself as a perennialist as such, though his works inspired the movement. His purpose was to be on the side of tradition, that is, to defend it with all the (considerable) intellectual means at his disposal as all tradition—which is a word cognate with initiation—was being vigorously eroded at the time, erosion that has only continued today, and that has even accelerated. Confusion is always the favourite means of the counter-initiatic movement, so today we have a form of ‘perennialism’ that has links (in education and arts) to the neosocialist political movement, something that could not be further from the intentions of either Guénon or ourselves to propagate. Those opposed to tradition and real spirituality will not hesitate to make use of such confusions.
René Guénon and Schuon
Of these strange hybrid tendencies within the obfuscating, anti-spiritual movement, which include the popularisation of such unlikely bedfellows as Frithjof Schuon and Carl Jung, we can clearly see a trait that usually only afflicts those who have made a very superficial study of René Guénon’s works. And this is to assume that Guénon, or even us, or anyone else coming from a metaphysical point of view, is actually interested in some kind of social (or even political) reform. Guénon, when very young, thought there might be some very small chance of an intellectual élite averting the coming catastrophe by influencing the West in some subtle way and bringing about a return to a traditional, regular order. This is made clear in the first book he ever wrote, An Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, and then later in The Crisis of the Modern World. He was aware however, even then, of the near impossibility of this. He soon realised that such a return would never take place, and by the time he wrote The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times in 1946 he was only writing for a very few people in a future time (our time now) that might be helped by knowing the truth.
At this advanced stage of the Kali Yuga, any thoughts of social change or reform are deluded fantasy.[2] What is worse is that the person who has such thoughts clearly has no idea of what has taken place in our world even since 2020. They cannot see what is right in front of their eyes, let alone any metaphysical principle. Let us state clearly that it is never the concern of (real) esotericism to change anything in the exoteric domain.
René Guénon always said that his reasons for writing social criticism at all were because we always have to start from the physical and individual realm, and so we need to understand the conditions that we must work under when esotericism is nowhere in any way supported.
While Frithjof Schuon is described as a metaphysician, it is clear from some of his remarks about René Guénon that he did not understand metaphysics in the way that Guénon meant the word and, as with Carl Jung, whom Guénon described as a direct agent of the Antichrist, his mind was strictly limited to reason.[3] This is nothing compared to the degradation that has subsequently taken place, for we have seen professional psychics lately describing what they do as ‘metaphysics’! In fact, in today’s world whenever the limits of vulgarity seem to have been reached, someone always comes along to exceed those limits.
Finally, the confusion about metaphysics is so persistent that we will briefly repeat here what we mean by the term:
Metaphysics is meant here in the etymological sense of the word, which is to say, ‘beyond the physical’, and so nothing to do with the chemical state of the body or brain, or the psychological domain. Metaphysics refers to the infinite, unlimited universal doctrine that can only be known metaphysically. As it depends from a supra-human source, it can never be a branch of philosophy or some other science. Indeed, philosophy and the other modern theoretical sciences were originally derived from metaphysics and not vice versa.[4]
Subversion of René Guénon Perennialism: Buddhist Influence
Buddhism, since more than a century ago, has been denatured and used by those with a hidden agenda to subvert the whole world towards long-term acceptance of the anti-traditional, anti-spiritual movement. Since the Theosophists held their first ‘Parliament of the World Religions’ on the 11th September 1893 the campaign has been remarkably successful. It was the aim of the Theosophists to introduce a new world religion that would homogenise all orthodoxy, ultimately replacing revealed religion with a counterfeit designed to propagate Western values and idealism. From there emerged Neo-Advaita or Neo-Hinduism, which is defined by its subversive propagation of that same idealism under the cover of its teaching Hindu studies to the West. This disguised anti-traditional movement first gained popularity through the very lucrative alliance between Swami Vivekananda and the Theosophists.
Let us go back to the beginning. Once a new, psychologised Buddhism had been introduced as a viable support to the ambitions of the Theosophists, the de-natured, tranquilised Buddhist panacea was eagerly taken up by psychologists in all areas of the theoretical science. According to an article by Seth Zuihõ Segall, ‘Buddhism and Psychology’,
Over the past century-and-a-half psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts have analysed, pathologised, misinterpreted, appreciated, assimilated, adapted, and or converted to Buddhist ideas and practices. At the same time, psychological approaches to Buddhism have led to ‘naturalised’ and ‘psychologised’ forms of contemporary Buddhist practice, especially in ‘convert’ Buddhist communities.[5]
Picture: Allan Bennett, friend and mentor to Aleister Crowley
The powerful though intensely negative Shunyavada or No-Self ‘void’ theory all but swept away first the occultists, already willing to play host to any attack on tradition.[6] Our story begins in the late nineteenth century, while Vivekananda was taking centre stage in the anti-traditional campaign of the Theosophists.
The notorious black magician and drug addict Aleister Crowley at first rejected Buddhism on the grounds that it is pessimistic as demonstrated by the Four Noble Truths, which he summed up as ‘Existence is Sorrow’. Allan Bennett, his friend and spiritual mentor in the Neo-Rosicrucian Order of the Golden Dawn, also a Theosophist, sensibly refused to accept Crowley’s absurd claim to be the New World Teacher of a ‘New Aeon’. Bennett, who was ordained with the Buddhist monk name Bhikkhu Ananda Metteyya, continued to campaign along with his Theosophist friends to establish Buddhism in England and Ireland.[7] It is curious to relate that later in life Crowley leaned increasingly to an orientalist interpretation of his Book of the Law, which was produced by means of spiritism when it was not simply fabricated by one who sought fit to personally identify himself with the Antichrist. This is so much so that one might even say Crowley became a crypto-Buddhist.
This ‘secret Buddhism’ was facilitated quite early on when another friend of Crowley contrived to interpret certain lines from the aforesaid book with the mathematical pseudo-formula 0 = 2. Put in more exact terms, this is expressed as the formulaic (+1) + (-1) = 0. The problem with this affirmation of ‘nothing’ or Buddhistic ‘emptiness’ is that it is not correct—the equation does not work, as any mathematician will tell us. The formula actually adds to 1 and that is all. A positive (+1) is not negated by having a negative value added to it.[8] The error is very much in keeping with the arguments of Buddhism though, which is where Crowley derived the false notion that two equal and opposite things cancel each other out leaving zero. However, they do not cancel out—which is a metaphysical impossibility otherwise they would both be nothing to start with. Instead, two equal and apparently opposite things are resolved in their transcendent, unitive principle. The false ‘cancelling’ argument has been used in Buddhism as a refutal of all else but the human mind. While insisting that the mind, as with everything else, is nothingness or ‘emptiness’, as with the Shunyavada ‘void’ theory, integral to that path in all its manifestations, Buddhists use this empty notion to deny that anything exists as a higher principle to the mind. Thus, in the denial, they actually affirm the mind as sole reality, even if it is ‘empty’. So according to them, it really is all nothing. Crazy as it sounds, this is the essence of Shunyavada Buddhism, though we will freely admit that in no tradition, even a heterodox one like Buddhism, should the teaching be confused with the goal.
In more recent times than those of Crowley and his disciples, the same erroneous lines of thought—ideas that nonetheless have great appeal to the ‘men of reason’ who cannot reach any further than the narrow limitations of their modernist ideologies—was a considerable influence on the occult fantasist and orientalist Kenneth Grant. No doubt for reasons of gaining an easy influence over his would-be followers, he applied the ubiquitous Shunyavada ‘void’ theory to the classical Qabalistic qliphoth or ‘shells of dead matter’, as moderns have interpreted this. The idea is that demons are ‘masks of emptiness’. It is therefore worthwhile to conjure demons, according to this thesis, with names taken from any source imaginable or available so as to acquire some sort of knowledge concerning reality or space—or ‘something’, as the goals of Grant’s invented tradition were always placed in extremely obscure and usually self-contradictory terms. When he was most clear on the great purpose of his peculiar brand of occult experimentalism, he defined it for members of his Typhonian Order as the ‘dissolution of all world governments’. Laudable as that might seem, the plan actually involved facilitating cracks or ‘fissures’ in the psychic or subtle defences of the world so that demonic forces or the Qliphoth as they are termed in the Qabalah could claim the earth and return it to conditions resembling the most nightmarish fantasies of the horror fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft. Owing to this deliberate (or strategic) obscurity—for there is in fact really ‘nothing’ at all behind Grant’s skewed reasoning—those who followed Grant have tended to pursue very ordinary, profane fetishism, which came about through the heavy sexualisation of all Grant’s fantasies, usually focussing on onanistic voyeurism
Others have watered down the pseudo-doctrine until it becomes no different from New Age popular psychological theories such as ‘exploring your dark side’ for the purpose of becoming a better human being; such simplistic morality lurks wherever bourgeois manipulation gains a hold on the kind of minds susceptible to it.[9]
Notes
1. For further information on the Guénonian Perrenialism read here (PDF).
2. We are in the final phase of the last Dark Age on earth in an entire Cosmic Cycle, although those who speak and write within the Neo-Hinduism movement either never mention it or even lie about it.
3. Schuon made the—very personal—remarks in his book René Guénon: Some Observations [Sophia Perennis], proving his total misunderstanding of Guénon’s metaphysical point of view.
4. ‘Concerning Metaphysics’, Metamorphosis—Hermetic Science and Yoga Power [Ordo Astri]. See the book here.
5. University of St Andrews, 6th June 2024:
https://www.saet.ac.uk/Buddhism/BuddhismandWesternPsychology/
6. Occultism is a field that was once marginalised but that has recently been declared acceptable by the new generation art establishment. To do that, they have subverted and misrepresented the work of historical artists, to make it seem as if they were pioneers in the Neo-Socialistic idealism that now pervades the fields of both art and literature. See our article, ‘Art and the Occult’:
https://www.ordoastri.org/colquhoun-ithell-surrealism-occult/
7. The anti-traditional plans of Bennett’s Theosophist cohorts included the ‘liberalisation of Christianity’. See René Guénon, Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion.
8. Curiously, the formulaic 0 = 2 can be made to work but none of its advocates have understood how because they wanted to affirm the Buddhistic ‘void’. If the Zero is taken as metaphysical Zero, which means it does not represent quantity but is an analogy for the supreme principle, which is unmanifest, then it may be understood that the unmanifest contains all manifest and unmanifest possibilities.
9. See the third section of our book, Thirty-two paths of Wisdom [Ordo Astri].
© Oliver St. John 2026
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