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One of the great wonders of life, for me, is the way in which certain books find their way into my hands without me having actually looked for them – indeed, it feels as if it were they who were looking for me!
Such was the case earlier this year when, after going for a walk beside the Vidourle river, [1] I found myself wandering, for the first time, into a small warehouse filled with second-hand books for sale.
I emerged clutching two tomes – the book on the Druids by Jean Markale that was to inspire me to pen a series of essays on the subject [2] and a work devoted to organic radical inspiration René Guénon (1886-1951). [3]
The latter is in fact a special edition, from 1970, of a journal called Planète, which boasted an address in the very up-market Champs-Elysées in Paris.
There was plenty in its 140 pages to confirm and complement my understanding of Guénon’s life and thinking.
I was delighted to learn, in an extract from a book of Guénon’s that I have not yet read, that he had a positive view of the subject matter of the other book I bought that day.
Writing about the legend of the Holy Grail, he says that we do not know in whose hands this vessel was supposedly held before being filled with the blood of Jesus Christ, “but its recognised Celtic origin undoubtedly implies that the Druids would have played a role and must be numbered among the legitimate curators of primordial tradition”. [4]
I was also interested to learn how, as a maths student in Paris, young Guénon got involved with various strange “spiritual” and Freemasonic groups, before finding his own path.
If you are not lucky enough to unerringly identify the right tradition for you, from an early age, exploring the wrong ones has the advantage of teaching you what you are not, and thus clearing the way for you to become what you are.
I can identify with the way in which Guénon’s position, on any subject, always seemed to sit between or astride entrenched outlooks.
He argued, for instance, that although the Freemasonry of his time was a degraded version of the original, it could still serve to transmit authentic tradition – and he urged the Catholic Church to work with it to that effect.
But, at the same time, he was writing under a pseudonym for a review called La France Antimaçonnique (‘Anti-Masonic France’), which led to some Freemasons condemning him as a “Jesuit agent”. [5]
With regard to the Church, Planète Plus explains: “For René Guénon (pictured), Christianity was just one link in the chain of Tradition”. [6] He did not recognise the unique and totally unprecedented nature of the religion on which its adherents insist [7] and found it lacking in the esoteric aspect, being almost entirely exoteric. [8]
However, he also stressed the “perfect orthodoxy of Christianity” with regard to the primordial tradition which he sought to nurture and restore. [9]
Guénon was initially attracted to Hinduism, but since this was not a religion that accepted converts, in 1912 he became a Muslim, receiving the new name Abdel Wahed Yahia (‘Servant of the Unique’), which linked him to the Sufi tradition in Egypt, where, from 1930, he was to live out his days. [10]
Guénon was not involved or interested in the political sphere, but, as Planète Plus notes, he was introduced into the Sufi world by Swedish anarchist artist Ivan Aguéli (1869-1917), another organic radical inspiration. [11]
With his traditionalist outlook, it is perhaps not surprising that he should have had friends and contacts within the royalist Action Française, [12] but his interest in Eastern metaphysics did not go down well with everyone in that movement, not least its leader Charles Maurras, who openly mocked him in print on that account. [13]
What first attracted me to Guénon was his deep critique of industrial society in La Crise du monde moderne (‘The Crisis of the Modern World’), another “chance” discovery in a second-hand bookshop, in fact.
Looking back over the centuries, he did not see the “progress” that we are conditioned to identify today, but rather a civilizational decline ever further into the Kali Yuga and the darkest stages of that darkest age.
Writes Jean-Claude Frère: “There are so many contrasts between the traditional world that Guénon illustrates and the desacralised world in which we still now subsist – no knowledge is ever sought without designs on material power or money”. [14]
“For him, these were obvious signs of an immense and irreversible crisis, which would sweep civilization down into the abyss”. [15]
Guénon saw an important step in this descent as having occurred in the sixth century BC, when in China the old doctrine split into two distinct parts, Taoism and Confucianism, the Jews were stuck in Babylon and in Greece there began the “classical” civilization in whose “rationalism” he identified the first symptoms of modern decadence. [16]
While Christianity and the flowering of the Middle Ages temporarily reversed this decline in Europe, it began again with the so-called Renaissance, [17] said Guénon – and he identified a physical aspect to this descending and degrading process.
He wrote: “If we observe that, in our era, metal tends more and more to take the place of stone in construction, as stone previously took the place of wood, we are tempted to think that we are looking at a characteristic symptom of a more ‘advanced’ phase in the descending course of the cycle; and this is confirmed by the fact that, generally speaking, metal plays an ever greater role in ‘industrialised’ and ‘mechanised’ modern civilization, including from what we might term a destructive, as well as a constructive, point of view, the consumption of metal involved in contemporary wars being truly phenomenal”. [18]
Human existence has thus been drawn down towards the lower mineral realm of existence occupied by machines, in which natural diversity is replaced by industrial uniformity.
Argued Guénon: “For uniformity to be possible, it requires beings lacking any qualities and reduced to nothing but simple numerical ‘units’; such uniformity is never in fact achievable, but all the effort put into bringing it about, notably in the human sphere, can only have the result of more or less completely stripping beings of their proper qualities and thus making them into what look very much like mere machines, for the machine, a typical product of the modern world, is indeed that which represents, at the highest degree that we have yet reached, the predominance of quantity over quality”. [19]
Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998), yet another organic radical thinker, [20] explains in the journal that Guénon regarded himself as living in “a world which lacks intellectuality and tradition as determining features”. [21]
Guénon condemned “the mental deviation of the modern world” [22] which was typified by the disastrous attempts to impose a uniform education on one and all.
He remarked: “If it is incapable of giving to certain individuals qualities that they do not possess, it is on the other hand very capable of stifling in the others all possibilities which go beyond the common level; it is in this way that ‘levelling’ always operates downwards and indeed cannot do otherwise, because it is in itself only an expression of the downward tendency, in other words towards the pure quantity that is situated lower than any physical manifestation, not only below the degree occupied by the most rudimentary living beings, but even below that which our contemporaries like to call ‘raw material’, which, because it manifests itself to our senses, is however still far from being entirely lacking in any quality”. [22]
The reign of quantity, including the monetary kind, meant great importance was given to statistics – “the pure and simple accumulation of facts” [23] – and an object was judged only for the price it would fetch or cost, said Guénon.
“The Americans have gone even further in this direction, to the point of saying that a man is ‘worth’ such and such a sum, to indicate the size of his fortune; or of saying, when a man does well in his business, that he is ‘a success’, which amounts to completely identifying an individual with his material gains”. [24]
Guénon’s metaphysical outlook was built on completely different premises to that of our contemporary world.
For example, as readers will have gathered, he did not adopt the linear and historical view of time shared by Judaism and Christianity, but embraced a cyclical perspective.
Thus Paul Sérant stresses that although he regarded us as living within an ever-accelerating catastrophic process, the conclusion would not be the “end of the world”, but “the end of a world” and a rebirth into a new golden age. [25]
Schuon, for his part, judges that the great merit of Guénon’s approach “is to remember that which modern thinking, like ‘classical’ thinking, has forgotten or wanted to forget, namely the essential distinction between intellectual intuition and mental operation or, in other terms, between intellect, which is universal, and reason, which is individual and even specifically human…
“To reach the truth, we have to awaken in ourselves, if possible, the faculties of the intellect and not just try to rationally ‘explain’ realities that we cannot see”. [26]
Schuon (pictured) adds that Guénon’s thought was also very much based on symbols – “the natural and universal expression of metaphysics”. [27] He says symbolism goes deeper than mere argument because it presents us, simultaneously, with several aspects of one reality in multiple metaphysical and spiritual contexts, making possible the contemplation of numerous “dimensions”. [28]
Guénon himself insisted that traditional metaphysics had to be clearly distinguished not only from what we today call “philosophy”, which is really just the study of philosophers and their systems of thought, but also from those systems themselves.
“Pure metaphysics essentially excludes any system, because any kind of system is presented as a closed and limited conception, as a more or less narrowly defined and limited whole, which is in no way compatible with the universality of metaphysics and, furthermore, a philosophical system is always somebody’s system, in other words a construction whose value is regarded as entirely individual”. [29]
The core of Guénon’s traditional, or perennial, metaphysics was the unicity of the cosmos and he accordingly rejected dualism as an ultimate reality – he argued that although duality in terms of oppositions or complementarities existed at certain levels, these were necessarily resolved within the One.
But at the same time he criticised thought systems whose monistic approach blinded them to the necessary reality of duality on a lower level – such as those which declared that all matter was really spirit, or that all spirit was really matter.
He said that we instead needed a kind of non-dualism which did not try to reduce one concept to the other, but “pictures both of them simultaneously in the unity of a common principle, of a more universal kind, and within which they are moreover contained not so much in opposition as in complementarity, by a sort of polarisation that does not in the least affect the essential unity of this common principle”. [30]
This idea is most obviously represented by the Taoist yin-yang symbol, although Guénon also identifies it in the black and white “tessellated pavement” of the Freemasonic tradition. [31]
With regard to the former, he points out that it may be regarded as the synthesis of yin and yang, “but on the condition of being quite clear that this synthesis, being the first Unity, is anterior to the differentiation of its elements, and thus absolutely independent of them; in fact, there cannot properly be any question of yin and yang except in relation to the manifested world which, as such, entirely proceeds from the ‘two determinations’… all beings come from the foundational Unity, but their modifications during the ‘becoming’ are due to the reciprocal actions and reactions of the ‘two determinations’”. [32]
Guénon rejected the idea of a “profane domain” which was in opposition to the “sacred domain”. He wrote: “There exists only a ‘profane point of view’ which is actually nothing other than the point of view of ignorance.
“This is why modern ‘profane science’ can, as we have already said elsewhere, justifiably be regarded as ‘ignorant knowledge’: knowledge of an inferior order, which remains entirely at the level of the lowest reality and is ignorant of everything which surpasses it, ignorant of all ends superior to it and of any principle which could provide it with a legitimate place, as humble as that might be, among the diverse orders of integral knowledge; irrevocably locked inside the relative and limited domain in which it wanted to declare itself independent, having thus itself cut off all communication with transcendent truth and supreme knowledge, this is no longer anything but an empty and illusory science which, in truth, comes from nothing and leads to nothing”. [33]
Sérant makes an important point regarding the way that Guénon’s warning about our societal descent goes further still than the restricted scientific and industrial thinking of the modern age.
Quoting phrases from the metaphysical master, he explains: “If materialism, or more precisely, ‘the negation that it represents’, has served to deny humans access to possibilities of a superior order, it was not capable of unleashing the inferior forces which alone can bring the work of disorder and dissolution to its final point.
“In other words, there is something worse than the refusal of all spirituality, and this is pseudo-spirituality, back-to-front spirituality. It is this pseudo-spirituality whose principal function will be to introduce into the world ‘the dissolving and destructive forces of the inferior subtle domain’, those meant to provoke the ‘subversion’ announcing the end of our cyclic period”. [34]
“The essential character of this ‘pseudo-spirituality’ is to be ‘parodical’; it will imitate aspects of real spirituality, but not without this imitation including ‘a grotesque element’…” [35]
In his time, Guénon saw such ‘pseudo-spirituality’ in the “Theosophy” of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), born in Russia as Helena Hahn von Rottenstern [36] – the manufactured religion she and then Annie Besant (1847-1933) promoted drew heavily on Indian religions, mixing them with European elements.
Theosophists predicted the arrival of a spiritual master, a kind of “Messiah” who would unite the world’s religions into one faith. [37]
Sérant reports that Blavatsky (pictured) said her aim was to “sweep Christianity from the surface of the Earth”. [38] He adds: “It is true that later Mrs Annie Besant [39] was to advocate a so-called ‘esoteric Christianity’, but Guénon wondered whether this was not rather a tactic aimed at duping Christians, since Mrs Besant had previously declared that above all they should ‘fight Rome and its priests, struggle everywhere against Christianity and chase God from the heavens’”. [40]
Guénon regarded pseudo-spiritual ‘subversion’ and ‘parody’ as satanic in nature, but his ‘Satan’ differed markedly from that of classical theology, not being personified.
He wrote: “What is to be pictured is, on the one hand, the spirit of negation and subversion into which ‘Satan’ resolves himself metaphysically, whatever the special forms which he can assume to manifest himself in one domain or another, and, on the other hand, that which properly represents and ‘incarnates’ him, so to speak, in the earthly world where we examine his actions, and which is none other than what we have called the ‘counter-initiation’”. [41]
Sérant comments: “Let us simply keep in mind, for the moment, that, for him, the counter-initiation was the conscious point of departure for the state of disorder and confusion whose product is the pseudo-initiation. Confusing ‘counter-initiation’ and ‘pseudo-initiation’ would amount, said Guénon, to confusing ‘the counterfeiter with the counterfeiting’”. [42]
Part of this phoney spirituality, warned Guénon, involved so-called prophecies announcing a “new age” of spirituality, whereas our societies are moving in the opposite direction into a new phase in our descent, conducted under the false flag of a “spiritual restoration”.
Explains Sérant: “After the ‘egalitarianism’ of our times, there will again be a visibly affirmed hierarchy, but an inversed hierarchy, that is to say in fact a ‘counter-hierarchy’, at the top of which will be the being who, in reality, will reach down closer than any other into the very depths of the ‘infernal chasms’”. [43]
I think I can identify the current instruments of the infernal force behind the slow and then accelerating civilizational descent, the degrading of lands and minds, the permanent war on tradition and authentic spirituality.
We are now all too familiar with the imitation, grotesque parody [44] and inversion practised by the upside-down global hierarchy.
These liars and counterfeiters, these dark magicians of money, metal and machines, these debased corruptors and imperialist warmongers, these crazed messianic criminocrats, [45] these enemies of the people [46] whose satanic and supremacist mafia rules the world, [47] can be regarded as the earthly embodiment of the archons [48] who relish plunging us all into a future hell of destruction and despair.
But their evil efforts will be in vain because the cycle will soon take us into renewal.
As Guénon stressed, the benign and malefic aspects of the cosmic process are not equal in strength. Sérant explains: “The malefic aspect of the course of the world is only ever partial, expressing merely ‘something unstable and provisional’, whereas the benign aspect ‘possesses a permanent and definitive character’”. [49]
Life wins in the end!
[1] Paul Cudenec, ‘In search of the source: a personal journey against the flow’,
https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/04/21/in-search-of-the-source-a-personal-journey-against-the-flow/
[2] Paul Cudenec, ‘For a future inspired by the past’ and subsequent essays, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/07/13/for-a-future-inspired-by-the-past/
[3] https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/rene-guenon/
[4] René Guénon, ‘Le Symbolisme de la Croix’ (1931), cit. Planète Plus, ‘René Guénon, L’Homme et son message’, Planète 15, April 1970, p. 86. All translations are my own and all subsequent page references are to that journal.
[5] Jean-Claude Frère, ‘Une vie en esprit’, p. 12.
[6] ‘Réticences chrétiens’: entretien avec Cardinal Daniélou, p. 127.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Frère, p. 14.
[9] p. 127.
[10] Frère, p. 13.
[11] https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/ivan-agueli/
[12] Frère, p. 22, p. 27.
[13] Frère, p. 27.
[14] Frère, p. 26.
[15] Frère, p. 21.
[16] Paul Sérant, ‘Ce monde condamné’, p. 97.
[17] Sérant, p. 98.
[18] René Guénon, cit. Sérant, pp. 99-100.
[19] René Guénon, Le Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps (1945), cit. p. 71.
[20] https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/frithjof-schuon/
[21] Frithjof Schuon, ‘L’esprit d’une oeuvre’, Etudes Traditionnelles 293-4-5, cit. p. 36.
[22] René Guénon, Initiation et Réalisation Spirituelle (1952), cit. p. 56.
[22] Guénon, Le Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps, cit. p. 71.
[23] René Guénon, cit. Sérant, p. 99.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Sérant, p. 107.
[26] Schuon, pp. 35-36.
[27] Schuon, p. 36.
[28] Ibid.
[29] René Guénon, Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindoues (1921), cit. p. 59.
[30] Guénon, Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindoues, cit. p. 63.
[31] René Guénon, Symboles Fondamentaux de la Science Sacrée (1961), cit. p. 77.
[32] René Guénon, La Grande Triade (1946), cit. p. 84.
[33] René Guénon, La Crise du monde moderne (1927), cit. p. 64.
[34] Sérant, p. 100.
[35] Ibid.
[36] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky
[37] Sylvain de Wendel, ‘Vive la Résistance’, p. 50.
[38] Sérant, p. 104.
[39] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Besant
[40] Sérant, p. 104.
[41] René Guénon, cit. Sérant, pp. 105-06.
[42] Sérant, p. 106.
[43] Ibid.
[44] Paul Cudenec, ‘A grotesque spectacle of lies and abuse’,
https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/03/26/a-grotesque-spectacle-of-lies-and-abuse/
[45] Paul Cudenec, ‘A cult both crazed and cruel’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/08/28/a-cult-both-crazed-and-cruel/
Paul Cudenec, Converging Against the Criminocrats (2023), https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/convergingagainstthe-criminocratsweb-1.pdf
[46] Paul Cudenec, Enemies of the People (2022), https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/enemiesofthepeopleol.pdf
[47] Paul Cudenec, ZIM Unzipped: Investigating and Opposing the Zio-Satanic Imperialist Mafia (2025), https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/zuonline.pdf
[48] Paul Cudenec, ‘Choosing sides in the war for life’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/05/29/choosing-sides-in-the-war-for-life/
[49] Sérant, p. 107.
