Thursday, November 18, 2004
MORE ON GUENON
When Lee Penn recommended reading Rene Guenon's _The Reign of Quantity & The Signs of The Times_, I wish that he had suggested I begin with Chapter 25, "The Fissures in the Great Wall". In this chapter Guenon starts to apply what he learned from his days in the French occult milieu.
In Chapter 26, "Shamanism & Sorcery":
There can therefore be no doubt that 'shamanism' is derived from some form that was, at least originally, a regular and normal traditional form; moreover it has retained up to the present day a certain 'transmission' of the powers necessary for the exercise of the functions of the 'shaman'; but as soon as it becomes clear that the 'shaman' directs his activity particularly toward the most inferior traditional sciences, such as magic and divination, a very real degeneration must be suspected...disquieting indictions in that direction, one of them being the connection established between the 'shaman' and an animal...
At last he is defining a differentiation between sound traditionalism and this debased form.
In Chapter 27, "Psychic Residues", he describes this in more depth:
...it must be made clear that the case of the persistent vestiges of a degenerate tradition that has lost its superior or 'spiritual' part is fully comparable to the case of the psychic remains left behind by a human being in passing to another state, for these remains can be used for any purpose once they have been abandoned by the 'spirit'. Whether they be made use of consciously by a magician or a sorcerer, or unconsciously by spiritualists, the more or less malefic effects that can accrue obviously have nothing to do with the inherent character of the being to whom they belonged before; they are no longer anything but a special category of 'wandering influences', to use the terminology of the Far-Eastern tradition, and they have kept at the most a purely illusory likeness to the said being.
I'm poised to start Chapter 28, "The Successive Stages in Anti-Traditional Action."
Using Guenon, organizations may be pushing the limits of Traditionalism to encompass quite diverse beliefs including Luciferianism, but Guenon would not have done so. Chapter 27 makes it quite clear that he makes distinctions.
