EDITORIAL NOTE

THE PAST CENTURY HAS WITNESSED an erosion of earlier cultural values as well as a blurring of the distinctive characteristics of the world's traditional civilizations, giving rise to philosophic and moral relativism, multiculturalism, and dangerous fundamentalist reactions. As early as the 1920s, the French metaphysician René Guénon (1886–1951) had diagnosed these tendencies and presented what he believed to be the only possible reconciliation of the legitimate, although apparently conflicting, demands of outward religious forms, 'exoterisms', with their essential core, 'esoterism'. His works are characterized by a foundational critique of the modern world coupled with a call for intellectual reform; a renewed examination of metaphysics, the traditional sciences, and symbolism, with special reference to the ultimate unanimity of all spiritual traditions; and finally, a call to the work of spiritual realization. Despite their wide influence, translation of Guénon's works into English has so far been piecemeal. The Sophia Perennis edition is intended to fill the urgent need to present them in a more authoritative and systematic form. A complete list of Guénon's works, given in the order of their original publication in French, follows this note.

René Guénon's Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines can serve as an introduction to all his later works—especially those which, like Man and His Becoming according to the Vedānta, The Symbolism of the Cross, The Multiple States of the Being, and Studies in Hinduism, expound the more profound aspects of metaphysical doctrines in greater detail. In Part One Guenon clears away certain ingrained prejudices inherited from the 'Renaissance', with its adulation of the Greco-Roman culture and its compensating depreciation—both deliberate and instinctive—of other civilizations. In Part Two he establishes the fundamental distinctions between various modes of thought and brings out the real nature of metaphysical or universal knowledge—an understanding of which is the first