Saturday, July 15, 2006
PERENNIALISM
is unpacked over at the La Floch Report. Mostly the description matches what I've read on the subject, but I think they went rather too soft on Evola. I also don't have the impression that the Perennialists are nearly as anti-feminine as they are presented over there.
In the area of differences between Catholicism and Perennialism, La Floch doesn't compare it, but Catholicism is linear, meaning we start with Adam and Eve at the beginning of planet earth and move forward to the end of the world in a straight line, while Perennialism is cyclical. Manvantaras are repeated cycles of birth, growth, then degeneration, and death of the world culture; that death coming as a result of cataclysm. While Perennialists believe that we are near the end of our present Manvantara, I didn't get the impression they were happy about it. Just the opposite, in fact, though they are resigned to it.
In any case, it's a good description of why Traditional Catholicism and Perennialism are uneasy partners. The fact that Perennialists don't believe that any one religion is better than any other, and that all religions at the esoteric level are equal, is much closer to Freemasonry than it is to Catholicism, and that is why one lodge in the Swiss Grand Orient obedience is named for Rene Guenon.
