Introduction

Born in 1886, René Guénon, was the son of an architect in the conservative French Catholic milieu of Blois. The young Guénon proved to be a precocious if frail scholar, who by his twenty-first year was to abandon an apprenticeship in philosophy and mathematics and pursue instead, through the leadings of a former instructor, an acquisition of the kind of knowledge proffered in the labyrinths of Parisian occultist circles, at this period in full ferment.

It was just three years later that the opening numbers of a review called _La Gnose_, started in November 1909, presented the first article published by Guénon, entitled 'Le Demiurge'. This writing manifested a profound grasp of metaphysical principles, especially but not uniquely as related to the Hindu Advaita Vedānta. We know, however, from other articles of his that appeared in _La Gnose_ until its demise in 1912, and from the titles of lectures (later to become titles of his books) he proposed to give at this period, that the French metaphysician was already essentially in possession of the life work to flow from his pen over the next forty years.

How can this be explained? Guénon, to be sure, benefited from an uncanny genius for relating back to their archetypal sources the shreds and fragments of traditional teachings seized upon by the occultist societies he frequented, whose errors were to be the target of his refutations in the years to come. But the catalyzing agent that would polarize his pneumatic disposition for the Truth into a real metaphysical adequacy was the contact Guénon had around the year 1908—and of which no details are known—with Hindus of the Advaita school. The crux of the message, presumably, which it was their destiny to transmit to the young Guénon as the providential receptacle for it, is what constitutes his own legacy to the West, being summed up by Frithjof Schuon as that of 'intellectuality, universality, tradition', the content of which subdivides into 'four great subjects: metaphysical doctrine, traditional principles, symbolism, critique of the modern world'.

Guénon felt only too clearly his isolation from the prevailing mentality, but he also knew still more clearly the inability of the 'opposition' to gain final ascendency over the Truth. 'All that we shall do or say', he wrote, 'will amount to giving those who come afterwards facilities which we ourself were not given; here, as everywhere else, it is the beginning of the work that is the most painful.'

He also wrote of himself that 'what we are intellectually we owe to the East alone'. Besides his contact with Hinduism, Guénon had direct access to Islamic esoterism and also certain connections with Taoism. He himself saw fit for manifold reasons to take Islam as his personal commitment to a spiritual form; but to the end of his days he wore a gold ring inscribed with the Sanskritic sacred monosyllable AUM, this being the highest _mantra_ form of the Divine Name in Hinduism.

The first great response to Guénon's preparatory work came in the early thirties in the synthesizing effect it had on the vast erudition of Ananda Coomaraswamy, whose writings from there on would be the diffusion of manifold doctrines relating to the _philosophia perennis_, and whom Guénon would henceforth refer to as a 'collaborator'.

The second and integral fruition of his groundwork came with the arrival on the scene of the young Frithjof Schuon at about the same time as Coomaraswamy—the eldest of the three—and it was he who would give the message its quintessential form.

Whitall N. Perry