GIVEN the title of René Guénon’s La Crise du monde moderne (The Crisis of the Modern World), a work that was designed to address the shortcomings of a particular historical epoch, it is worth taking into account the precise context in which it appeared.

When the book was first published, in 1927, Europe was still recovering from the physical, psychological and existential catastrophe of the First World War. Those untold millions who had been slaughtered on the battlefield were still fresh in the memory, cities which had lain in ruins were still in the process of being reconstructed and nation upon nation slowly sank into the ignominious quagmire of financial recession. The imperialist sabre-rattling that had plagued the Continent since the late-nineteenth century had led to a huge re-organisation of economic forces and, in the wake of Europe’s first technological conflict, her spiritual and cultural heritage was under serious threat.

The architects and schemers of the Enlightenment had ensured that the age of divine kings, powerful emperors and dominant papacies was at an end and that new parliamentary ‘democracies’ had been founded on the principles of mercantile greed, liberal relativism and atheistic secularism. At the same time, Marxist-Leninism had wormed its way into the diseased cadaver of the West by taking advantage of growing hostility to the ravages of industrial and agricultural capitalism. Inevitably, the threat of International Communism was quickly met by the rise of reactionary totalitarianism in the guise of Fascism and National-Socialism.

Raised as a Catholic in a family that had its origins in the French regions of Angevin, Poitou and Touraine, René Guénon was used to the day-to-day paraphernalia of religious custom and soon developed a keen interest in various other forms of spirituality such as the mystical Christianity of Martinism and Jules Doinel’s (1842-1903) Gnostic Church. Elsewhere, Guénon was busy immersing himself in the Eastern traditions of Taoism, Hinduism and Sufism.

Although, for some, this broad spectrum of esoteric interests might suggest that the Frenchman was both a syncretist and ecumenicalist who yearned to create a single world-religion from a select panoply of contradictory ideas, something he came to oppose in the form of the Theosophical Society, Guénon was not at all interested in formulating a transient and unsustainable unity at the uppermost levels of religion but sought to ascribe far more value to the actual core. In other words, the founder of what is now referred to as the Traditionalist School believed that religions are similar to the branches on a tree and that at the root of them all lies a more sacred and primordial reality.

It is this belief which led Guénon to devote his life to defending the philosophia perennis and railing against those agents of the ‘counter-initiation’ who threatened to undermine it. The Crisis of the Modern World, therefore, much like Julius Evola’s (1898-1974) Revolt Against the Modern World several decades later, was an attempt to identify the main features of the ‘age of darkness’ that had plunged humanity into chaos.

Needless to say, almost a century later things have worsened considerably and this – in accordance with Guénon’s own astute observations – is what this series aims to explore.