Miscellanea

Ren© Gu©non (1886-1951) is undoubtedly one of the luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of recent philosophies. His oeuvre of 26 volumes is providential for the modern seeker: pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, at the same time it directs the reader to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization. Miscellanea gathers together for Anglophone readers various articles by Ren© Gu©non and by 'Palingenius', his pseudonym during the time of La Gnose, a journal he founded in 1909. These articles have been divided into three categories: 'Metaphysics and Cosmology', 'Traditional Arts and Sciences', and 'Some Modern Errors'. A sampling of chapters: 'Monotheism and Angelology'; 'Spirit and Intellect'; 'Silence and Solitude'; 'The Empiricism of the Ancients'; 'Gnosis and the Spiritist Schools'; 'The Origins of Mormonism', 'On the Production of Numbers', 'On Mathematical Notation'; 'Initiation and the Crafts'; and 'The Arts & their Traditional Conception'. In the latter two chapters the author explains why initiation became necessary in the measure that humanity receded from the 'primordial state', explaining the reasons for the degeneration of the arts and crafts due to the 'fall' or descending trajectory of the present cycle. He nonetheless points out the possibility of an initiation into the 'lesser mysteries' based upon the craft of building which still exists validly in the West.

What is here presented as a miscellany of essays would in the case of most other writers on metaphysical subjects be considered a major work, both in breadth and depth. Some claim that Gu©non's views never "developed," that his knowledge of metaphysics was innate-as primordial and unchangeable as truth itself. Though clearly an exaggeration (for example, A.K. Coomaraswamy and Marco Pallis led Gu©non to considerably revise his views Buddhism), there is still a remarkable degree of truth to this claim. Information must be acquired, and in the process erroneous notions will be corrected; yet the capacity for intellective insight is not an acquisition, but a gift; it is developed not by adding something but by removing a veil. Some of the essays collected in this text could be considered Gu©non's "juvenalia," yet the unerring instinct for metaphysical truth is already there, fully formed, along with the first stirrings of the author's lifelong preoccupation with initiatic spirituality, the cosmological sciences, and the errors of modernity; there is no real incompatibility of outlook here between the Gu©non of 1909 and the Gu©non of 1950. Far from being a mere collection of fugitive writings, Miscellanea is an important work in its own right, worthy of its own unique place in the Gu©nonian corpus.