THE ISSUE OF THE ELITE

In Ren Gunons WORK

Excerpts

(nn 1-2-6-7-8-10)

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The devil says in the Antichrists ear the words which unleash the explosion of the world. From Luca Signorellis: Fatti dellAnticristo,

Orvieto, Cappella di S. Brizio

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A note from the Author

This edition has, as Introduction, a short essay in English, entitled Return to Basic. This Introduction contains in itself a Summary of The Issue of the elite (in Italian: La Questione delllite). In Return to Basic I also wrote some observations about the state of the problem in present times and the enormous errors committed by the ones who cultivated in themselves wrong attitudes. To start changing these attitudes would be the first step towards the right direction, even if its highly improbable that this step will be done. I also must say that the Summary in English is a good Introduction for the Italian speakers too, even if Italian language is required to read the whole La Questione delllite. In fact I chose not to translate into English the entire Italian version.

Then it follows the English adaptation of the Italian version. These are Excerpts which may be able to give the essential messages of the writing itself, even if they cannot substitute the Italian original version, because some paragaphs of the parts I chose to translate (nn 1-2-6-7-8-10) have been changed. Actually, these paragaphs have been sometimes only simplified but in other cases really changed. This has been made in order to make some message clearer.

Finally: in the last part of the booklet I have added some posts I wrote in October 2005 in a small Internet community I founded.

Mr. Fundador

(2005 A.D.)1

[Pictures in this essay are different forms of the same Jerosolimitana Crux, the Jerusalem Cross. There are also images taken from Buddhism and Christianism2. The Horse 1 A series of problems didnt allow me to make this brief writing concretely available immediately, but I had to wait much time. So it is vavailable years after the date here. 2 The images are in oder of appearance -: an image of Bishamon Ten, one of the Four Guardians of the Orients, named here in Japanese language (he owns a trident in his hand and this reminds us Poseidon-Neptune and even Shiva, in other words dangerous deities); two images of Kshitigarbha-Jiz (respectively in Sanskrit and Japanese language); finally, last but not least, St. Judes image. Kshitigarbha is considered the one who has a role of Saviour between the nirvna of Sakyamuni Buddha and the Advent of the (real) Maitreya (not the pseudo-Maitreya of B. Crme). The role of Bishamon is to remind and partly exorcise Neptune-Shiva. St. Jude is the protector of impossible things and lost causes. Gunonism is a lost cause. As I say for joke but not much really -: Gunonists are hidden discordianists. You know the ironic movement of Discordianism that worships goddess Discordia-Eris. This movement was born from the book (of the late Fifties of the last passed century of the last Millennium): Principia Discordia. In this book it is ironically said: Hardly a discordianist agrees with another discordianist. We could say instead: Hardly a Gunonist agrees with another Gunonist In more serious terms, this means: There is no more Gunonism as such. And this is the truth. Nothing less, nothing more. The incapability of constructing even a seed of a School signed the end of Gunonism. The diaspora came then, as a consequence of the incapability of finding a common goal, a centre to which make reference to. The aim of the Internet community whose name is quoted in the last part of this booklet (Posts from Internet community) is to express this centre, which is and can only be the other milestone of Gunons Work: the inevitable decadence of Occidental civilization and the End of this present Human and Cosmic Cycles. Orient as an individual choice and Orient as the cure of the deseases of Western civilization do not coincide but they are both

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is a stylization of the White Horse of Uffington, England, as seen from the space by a Satellite. Source: Wikipedia. The background, from the colour green, has been changed into Red. (I must thank Maria Gagliardi for the help to change its background)

Then, to introduce the Posts from the Internet community, there are a Celtic Shield and the Chinese character Tao, D, The Way. ]

present in Gunons Work, in which we have two pictures: the Orient as a cure in general not merey an individual choice, individual choice that showed all its insufficiencies in last decade of the XX Century and the End of the Cycle and fatal decadence of Western civilization, decadence that dragged and drags along like a water drake in a dirty lake the whole world and all the civilizations till remaining on Earth surface. But the situation dragged on too much time along. Time is arrived at the point in which it is necessary, finally and in the end, to cut the Gordians Knot. A last question: Was it a mere chance that Gunon chose to unite the theme of initiation and Tradition with that of the decadence (which he called deviation and then dissolution) of Western and potentially of the whole world civilization? NOT AT ALL. NOT AT ALL. Having forgotten this main theme is one of the main causes of the final dispersion (or diaspora). The theme of the decadence was not only put in evidence because it was an argument strongly debated in the Thirties of the last century of the last Millennium. It is still the defence against deviation of para-pseudo-traditionalism. Kali-Yugas theme is fundamental. On the contrary the traditionalists must think that the actual religions which, by the way, they understand in a poor, very poor way - are the cure of the desease, a thing that Gunon never, never and really never believed possible. The other main cause of the dispersion-deviation of passed and finished Gunonism is in fact that it has been lost the sense of the fundamental qualitative distinction between esotericism and exotericism-s. THE TWO ERRORS BIND EACH ONE WITH THE OTHER ONE EXACTLY AND PRECISELY IN THE LACK OF THE THEME OF DECADENCE. If the traditionalists-wrong exotericists accept that theme it is only and merely as moral decadence, while Gunon always, really always, underlined that decadence was above all intellectual and only as a consequence moral. In fact we saw moral decadence happening many times in history in the phases of decadence of a civilization. On the contrary an intellectual deviation as the one started with the modern world we never saw as such in the course of human history as known today.

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RETURN TO BASIC

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Part OneSummary of La Questione dellelite. The essential of the thesis

Here we will summarize the central thesis expressed in La Questione dellelite (The Question of the elite in Gunons Work, 2000-1, corrections of 2004). We go back over the proceeding of the writing in question (waiting for its eventual translation into English). Even if there are many observations that referred to the situation of 2000-1, the very essence of the thesis remains.

The Issue of the elite is at the centre of a long controversy among the scholars of Gunons Work. This is because Gunon expounded different scenarios of the question itself in the course of the development of his Work. To spread light upon the question its necessary to turn back to the first book of Gunon (Introduction) and to analyze the three possibilities he expounded there, in the late Twenties of the former century (the XX). Gunon expressed these pictures as hypotheses that dealt with the fates of the West. We consider these hypotheses like schemes, and schemes do exist but are what they have to.

The first hypothesis affirms that the West will return to the barbarity, as it is happened to many civilizations in the past. The second affirms that the help of the East (of course, traditional East) will avoid this fate of the West, but, in order to act in concrete Western context, there is the necessity of a spiritual elite. The third possibility is (but we must definitively say: was) that the West, finding in itself the necessary spiritual force, would react and prove to be capable of returning to its own Traditional form by its own means. In both the second and the third hypotheses the spiritual occidental elite is necessary. In the first hypotheses the final fall is due because of the absence of the elite itself.

With Vlsan we considered the two possibilities of mediation between the first and the second one and between the second and the third. We excluded this last mediating possibility, and so we are practically left with the first hypothesis and the possibility between the first and the second Gunons hypotheses. Also with Vlsan, we considered that Gunons Work is quite a complete, even if not exhaustive (for systematization is always to be fought, and the tendency to systematize is very spread among readers and scholars of Gunons Work: in this way they prove not to be ready for it and not to be ready for real esotericism). The continuation of this Work cannot stand on the level of expounding, but on a very more practical level.

The second problem we had to face is related to the means by which it is possible for the Occidental elite to be built. At the beginning, Gunon considered Catholicism to be the only possible way, later he kept this idea no more as a possibility to construct elite, but only to give it the possibility to impact the Western society. The problem is the concrete formation of Occidental elite. Catholicism proved not to be apt to this aim, but elite must remain Occidental (this has been underlined by J. Robin), so it is impossible the East, even the near East of Islm, to concretely build the elite itself. Its role is fundamental, but only as Gunon pointed out after the elite has been already built.

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The aim of the Oriental help (Gunon) is not at all to construct the elite, but to give it the opportunity to have access to spiritual forces that still exist in the East. Behind this way of reasoning there is a postulate not openly expressed by Gunon but implicit in his discourse: that in its expansion-explosion, modern West consumed great part of the spiritual energy that Christianity accumulated in the past, especially in the Middle Ages. Therefore, even if the elite would be built and effective, it would run the big risk to have no chance for action at all, because the elite necessarily needs sufficient energies. In fact, energies of Christianity have been greatly reduced, as they were wasted in the process of the expansion of the modernity to the whole world.

This last point helped us not to consider the other possibility contained in Gunons hypotheses, that the East concretely invades modern West and this is the way by which the Occidental deviation (Gunon) arrives at the end. The same Gunon would have left this idea in the development of his Work, in which he will point out the nature of exception that our age has, for it is the end of a Great Cycle (Manvntara, 64.800 years). Therefore it is impossible to resolve the problem of the crisis of the modern world (that is to say the crisis that modern world represents for the whole mankind) by means of a mere substitution of a Traditional form by another one.

Of course this point has become a reason of strong quarrels between scholars and readers of Gunon belonging to different exotericisms, that is to say Christian and Islamic (a concrete negation of the famous Transcendent Unity of Traditional forms..., just to mention the coherence of certain individuals absolutely not ready to really understand Gunons Work). And another point has become a reason to quarrel: according to Gunon, even if the Orient will be always more Occidentalized, a complete separation from the Centre cannot happen for the simple reason that Centre is actually in the Orient. But this is not the case for the Occident. So, has Occident already broken the link with the Centre or not?

As it often happens it is possible to quote portions of Gunons Work that seem to say one thing while other quotes seem to indicate the opposite. As always the problem is to consider the single sentences in their proper context. When Gunon wrote that modern Occident broke the bonds with the Centre, he meant Occident as general civilization, not Occident as initiation. In other words: Occident as exoterism, not as esoterism (of course, real esoterism). And so there are those passages that speak about the fact that Catholicism was far from the Centre, and other passages that say that the true Rose-Crosses retired in the East, that is in the very Centre of the world, where all the initiatic forms retire when they have no means to act any more.

This point is very important. In fact if Catholicism proved to be incapable of constructing the ark and Eastern help can intervene only after the elite has been constructed (there can be mediators, but its another question), it remains only one way: that the initiatic path, always existing potentially in the Centre, manifest itself again thus giving birth to the elite.

This is very, very difficult possibility. Only a great reason can justify things like these.

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Therefore we return to the basic picture that the last Gunon expounded: there is no possibility that one Traditional form whatsoever can solve the problem of the crisis of modern world for the whole mankind by its only means. It is necessary a help from Above, from Heaven. But, tocome to this point, it is necessary that modern world continues in its path, passing from the stage of anti-Tradition to the stage of counter-Tradition. This last stage must continue up to its final end: the Reign of the Antichrist or the Great Parody. For J. Robin this time, not far from us, means also that no Occidental elite is necessary any more. On the contrary we considered that this inevitable inverse Advent can leave Occident completely dismantled, considering also the crisis that is going on in the East; therefore there is such a difficult situation that can justify the use of great means.

This is the essence of the thesis. Of course, one should read all the original sources, but this is sufficient.

Part TwoMethodological Considerations

If things do not function properly, at the very base there is always a lack of knowledge, a fundamental incomprehension that makes us go on a wrong path. So, the continuous polemics and the attempt to strictly Islamize Gunons Work prove, beyond any possible doubt, that there is a lack in knowledge and a strong narrowing of vision. So it has become difficult to find a real defence against the attempt to make Gunons Work be dragged by the dragon of so-called integralism and therefore dragooned into that maelstrom and so destroyed in the wreck of integralism itself. The recently appeared article on newspaper like N.Y. Times is a clear sign of this tendency.Integralism is not at all to take the traditional matters in its integrality, that is as one. On the contrary, it is the definitive autonomization of exotericism, but an exotericism that has become political and therefore interested in a lost fight against the remnants of modern world. This happens just when modernism is at the end and the second stage of the crisis of modern world arrives at its necessary goal: the coming Great Parody. Of this parody of traditional realities, integralism is a great example. Gunon is the greatest enemy for integralists of every kind for the basic doctrine of the Unity of the Traditional forms, absolutely unacceptable by this kind of individuals. Gunons Work is not at all Islamistic. The author became Islamic, but not the Work, in which Islamism objectively plays a secondary role face to face to the importance of Hindu tradition and Chinese tradition.

But how did we arrive at this situation of lack of defence? This is the key question. There is a diffuse bad situation in which it has become quite usual to see the tree but not the forest. An enormous importance is given to mere words but a lack of attention towards the basic parts of the vision. The general vision is taken for granted while this is not true at all. Lots of criticisms about you told x at page y, but its impossible to completely share ideas. There is no perfect author as too many people think of

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Gunons Work. If we can find problems in Sacred Texts, how could we not in a Work like that of Gunons, a Work that belongs to smriti level? And, notwithstanding all this incomprehension, Gunons Work still remains unique in its capabilities of opening unlimited possible developments.

There is an essential coherence and a formal coherence. This last can go together with the betrayal. The other cannot. So it is fundamental to consider carefully the state of the things today. We have to consider properly the direction were going. The greatness of Gunons Work in the past is not at all a visa for the future. Were at a turning point.

Unilateralism and superficiality: these are the real inner enemies. But how diffuse are them!

Unilateralism is to see only a small thing but to forget the whole. I saw this too much spread among the scholars of Gunons Work. Lets consider this: Dis Gunon speak about great perspectives or little ones? A great Work NEEDS, CALLS FOR, URGES, And IS THIRST OF GREAT PERSPECTIVES. Isnt it true that everything in modern world tends to transform into a sect? And to conftont with Gunons Work with a sectarian perspectiveis a good or bad deal?

On these bases well never be able to respond to challenges that do exist. Gunons Work can never be sectarian, for he opened a path of indefinite developments. Modern man sees all at the opposite; even in the case in which he accepts the truth, his tendency is to remain close from the Above and to look for a space of his own. This attitude is typical of modernity. Its not right to believe that after reading Gunon one is free from the modern way of thinking, for modernity is more a style of (pseudo-)thinking that a precise expression and this style can be applied to everything. Gunon always often repeated: what you consider comprehension is only the possibility to have then comprehension itself. That is to say: you have to look inside deeply and work hard to arrive at a real comprehension. Real comprehension is always a victory upon us. Its an inner fight to transcend the limits of the mental, as Gunon called them.

So, for instance, it is reductive to just to relate two passages on Gunons Work only because the author himself says this in a footnote. The whole Work must be considered as a unity. You need to look deeply inside to understand all the connections, the mediating stages and the inner coherence, more important than the outer coherence that so much impressed too many exteriorists. Gunons Work must be considered as a whole. One needs to have in mind a sort of hierarchic precise pyramid of relations and not a flat platitude with some rocks somewhere, rocks around which fights for appearances happen.

The second enemy is called superficiality. It is the tendency to minimize, as I say. It is false sense of security that falls on the volcanic poisonous rock of modernity. You know the tale of the fox and the raven? The fox minimizes the cheese the raven has in the mouth for the fox cannot have it...! And so they tend to minimize the danger of the Adversary, while Gunon always thought and acted in the opposite way.

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So, in these cases, too frequent to be casual, I think this: Gunons Work is like wine, you must not drink too much of it or you get drunk. Wine must be sustained by the individual; on the contrary it will have counter-effects. This means that wine must never be drunk alone, always on food. Gunons Work has the sense of giving light both to Traditional data and to the flow of the world, the signs of the Times (Gunon). It cannot be understood but in this complex picture. The whole Work is superior to the sum of its parts. And I say superior but not major for it is not a quantitative bond but a qualitative connection. Gunon told and retold it many and many times, using different symbolisms, but it seems that it rained on a glass of a window: all disappeared... The final integration is always a synthetic operation that cannot be on the same level of the mere sum of the steps that brought to it. It is a direct insert, an operation acted in a moment of synthesis. This has enormous consequences in order to really understand the final synthesis of our cycle.

But, to return to the methodological questions about Gunons Work, the main mistake committed by too many people is just to consider this Work analytically, but not at all synthetically. The excess of analytical proceedings is arrived at the point to cover the real proportions of Gunons Work.

All these wrong views can only fail to face the fundamental question we have in front of us.

I insist and underline: we have in front basic essential knots. The excess in analyzing, the excesses in being unaware of the true nature of the End of the Cycle wont change the essence of the problem. God wont be deceived. Real comprehension claims to recognise the true nature, the true Message from God hidden in the knot of this present world. He cannot be deceived.

Part ThreeReturn to Basic

If things do not functionproperly, at the very base there is always a lack of knowledge, a fundamental incomprehension that make us go on a wrong path, as I told above. But its not sufficient to point out the errors, what really matters is to find the way out. The way out is to return to the basic of the vision Gunon expounded, really very far from sectarianism and from fanaticism. If someone is making a hole in the hull of a ship and trying to make it wreck, are the colours of the little tents upon the windows of a cabin so important? I dont think... We have seen in Part Two that the fundamental things that lack are a sense of proportion (that is harmony) and the awareness to look for the real inner connections. This last mental attitude should be normal for an esotericism, but we know that this term is misused very much today. At their essence, the lack of harmony and profundity is lack of knowledge, oblivion of the main milestones, of the fundamental pillars of Gunons Work. In this situation it is vital to point out the bases

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of the construction, bases that tremble by the continuous earthquake our world is in. If we point out and maintain still these main pillars, it will be more difficult to misuse Gunons Work. Having been sunk in oblivion the bases is the real cause of the situation were in. In fact only the general picture can unite what is dispersed, while lots of little questions can only divide. Its important to point out two milestones.

The Tradition is the main pillar. What is the Tradition? It is the flow of the Divine into the human, the River of the Divine into the human. Initiation and religion are in the Kali-Yuga (6.480 years), especially its last half the two paths of the Tradition. But they are consequences, not causes. In another cyclical situation things could have been different and though Tradition would have been all the same. As consequence, this brings the affirmation of the Unity beyond the differentiation. This has as consequence that there must exist a Primordial Tradition at the origin of all the other Traditional forms. But not at all in the sense of Perennialism, that is an academic term to indicate the teaching of Gunon. What really Gunon taught is more subtle. He did not say that there is only one light, that all the colours of the light are one, but, and its very different, that all the colours remain as they are, but are a peculiar form of the light itself, that is white. Light is white in this sense: it contains all the colours. And it has no distinctive colour in itself.

An object is red (or blue, yellow and so on) not for the light in itself, but for the object. An object is red for it absorbs all the spectrum of the light but the red. What makes the colour of the object that colour is its being, and not the light itself. So, the difference among the traditional forms comes from their being (sat, ontos) and not by the light; that is only ONE.

The second pillar is the destiny of the cycle. When, at the end of our cycle, which is now very very near to us, the Traditio Primordialis will manifest itself again also in the apparent part of our world, it will be as an unveiling, a thing we never knew in known history. Therefore: there is no possible example to follow. Our age is an exception, but finds its sense considering the whole of our cycle.

Before the Traditio Primordialis appears again in the concrete part of the world, there will be, necessarily, the Reign of the Antichrist (even if conceived very differently from usual conception of it). This Reign is the necessary end of the Reign of Quantity that is the modern world. What Gunon taught - he conceived the Antichrist in a different way from the usual re-known ways, different especially from the American ways of conception of him - allows to think about the classical ancient Christian (especially orthodox, in the sense of Greek Orthodoxy) ways of conceiving the Antichrists Reign is the question of the Third Temple in Jerusalem, question that is beyond the whole turmoil in Middle East. In 2001 they put the First Stone of the Third Temple in the middle of Jerusalem, even if this Temple wont be the mere reconstruction of the Second Temple of Herod. And the time of the end started. Its not at all a chance this coincidence. Reconstruction, by the way, wont be a mere fact of archaeology. Its meaning does not mean the fact that it will be philologically reconstructed as it was in the times of Jesus. This is impossible. The central idea is to reconstruct the

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situation in which Jesus existed, but a parodist reconstruction. The idea is to do as if Jesus never was on Earth. But the result is a parody: a parody of Roman Empire in the American Empire of the Bush family and a parody of the Reconstruction, a parody of the Third Temple itself, where perhaps the faade will be the same but into a modern style building. On the contrary the interiors will be correctly done and also the instruments of the cult. In other words: whats fundamental is the cult that will done inside of it again. As if Jesus never was on Earth.

Firfis Conan 27 September - 4 October 2004 A. D.Corrections: 11 November 2005 A. D.

P.S. A thanks to the ones who gave me a hand for te translation and corrected the Summary, the Introductive Part, and up to N6 of these Excerpts. On the contrary, I paraphrased the second part, for I had too few time to revise the translation as it would have been right to do and, on the other side, I could not disturb the ones who helped me for the first part up to N6 of these Excerpts. I was forced to do so in order to arrive at the goal. O wrote a Summary of the remaining time (in 2010), again with the aim of arriving at a definitive form, even if uncomplete and briefed.

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THE ISSUE OF THE ELITE

IN

Ren Gunons WORK

Excerpts

(nn 1-2-6-7-8-10)

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AN ANCIENT STRATEGIST SAID:I DO NOT DARE TO BEHAVE MYSELF AS A HOST

I PREFER TO BEHAVE MYSELF AS A GUESTI DO NOT DARE TO ADVANCE BY AN INCH

I PREFER TO RETREAT BY A FOOTTHIS MEANS

TO PROCEED WITHOUT TO PROCEEDTO TUCK THE SLEEVES

WITHOUT TO COME TO HANDSTO FIGHT WITHOUT ARMIES

TO FIGHT WITHOUT OPPOSING NOTHINGS WORSE

THAN TO UNDERESTIMATE THE ADVERSARYWHO UNDERESTIMATES THE ADVERSARY

PUTS UNDER RISK JUST HIS OWN TREASUREWHEN THE CRASH COMES

ALSO THOSE WHO WINS CRIES.

TAO-TE-CHING [DAODEJING], LXIX

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NOTICE

It is a partial translation of the first part of La Questione dellelite (nn. 1-15), an essay in Italian language. This essay is part of a wider Work entitled Firfis. This part (1-15) is from years 2000-2001. As I told before (in the Advertise) I translated only the numbers 1-2-6-7-8-10. No revision or editing of this writing has been done and I must apologise for the errors I can commit in the translation, even if I simplified some passages of the sections I translated, other passages have been really changed. Gunons books quoted have been translated from the Italian version. For this reason its very probable that English speaking individuals could find sometimes hard to recognize the text as it is in English in available translations, but unfortunately it could not be otherwise. By using this sign, , I mean the point from which a part of the sections translated from the original Italian version is not reported, usually some excursus.

Fundador, End of 2006 A.D.

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N 1

The Issue of the elite is embedded in all Gunons work, but in some of his books the question is dealt with more thoroughness and richness: East and West, The Crisis of the modern World, but also in some chapters of Considerations on the initiatic way and the Conclusions of Introduction to the study of Hindu doctrines. In this last chapter of the last quoted Gunons book the issue of the elite is inserted in its full picture: the destiny (or doom) of modern West as being bound to the destiny of the whole world. The original Gunons aim was that the Western spiritual elite should change this fate. Of course, it is necessary to point out that comments on this question of the elite can be found both in other Gunons books and in his private correspondence: for instance in the letters to Evola, when Gunon expresses opinions on the idea of Evola to found an Order, called by him Order of the Iron Crown, name particularly badly chosen. Well, Gunon did not agree with such idea. However this fact shows that there exist other passages beyond those to which here we will refer to.The first book in the above list, East and West, is from 1924 (with addiction, short but meaningful, of 1948, one of the last expressions of Gunon); the second book is of 1927, and the third book is of 1946 (while Introduction is the first published Gunons book, it is of the now very afar from us in glimpses and glamour - 1921). Therefore, our speech will hold always very firm the aim to weigh the pros and cons of this issue all. As ulterior contributions to the study of this complex and articulated issue , lets consider only those interpreters of Gunons Work who was been able to give an interpretation of their own, without merely repeating Gunons. Therefore we wont consider even the ones who only exposed Gunons Work (like Srant, for example, in his biography of Gunon).It is since a long time ago that we condemned the sectarian, even pharisaic attitude of great part of those who had tried, for good or for worse, to follow the Work of Gunon, so it is useless for us to return on this point and to return to this topic: we give this view for accepted. And for those who disagree with this view, I do not know what to do or say more, everyone will remain on their own. Coming to the contributions of more serious reflection, I consider practically only two contributions (which is saying a lot about how are indeed these issues as a matter of fact): they are the works of M. Vlsan and of J. Robin.Among all the books in which the idea of the western elite has more weight and importance, of course there is East and the West that is the one where the topic of the elite finds more space. And it is starting from this book that we will leave for our travel around and within the Work of Gunon...If we want indeed to have light on this problem, without to behave like an ostrich that hides the head under the sand, we mustput in comparison the ideas opportunely expressed by Gunon with the cyclical situation which we are in, and to see what comes out from this comparison.As I said before, Ill repeat here that we entered the sandhya, by now, and that the

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Reign of the Antichrist is indeed next, the Reign of the great deceit, of the counterfeiting.And when one looks at how vulgus vult decipi (we come from that famous obscene (= of bad auspice) thing called elections, of the democracy that Gunon abhorred, and therefore we know as the things go), and how much are swarming today those people which add: ergo decipiatur, it is evident that there are clear and definitive signs the way the things will go indeed...But lets return to us, always remembering that we live hic et nunc ... If then to all this degenerated heap the formless neospiritualism joins, than we can understand how the situation exceeded the things Gunon saw when he was alive. And so we have seen in recent years the construction of true and real psychical cults (like that of the UFO, but also like the so-called Wicca, Anglo-Saxon word from which it comes the English word witch), whose dangers are very underestimated today by too many. We express our though firmly and clearly against these sects, we are anti-sect. and Gunon is fundamental to follow on this point for only Gunons Work can give the awareness of what these movements really are. I could say that the real enemy of all these false movements is Gunons Work. But you need to change radically your preceding views to understand what the forces back these movements really are. For they are incapable of doing this that both state authorities and the authorities of the exterior common religions are incapable of doing something real on this question. And protests and speeches cannot but remain sterile. You need to change the way you think, you need to change many things in you and start to think on a different level3.The general picture from which we start is always the same, which is: the modernity has deviated radically from the line of Traditional civilizations, and this is under everyones eyes. But this is not the end of the process: and here Gunon changes all, because deviation then becomes degenerescence, that is to say that the antitradition of modernity turns more and more towards the counter-Tradition, passing from the deviating line to degenerescence. And, as degenerescence cannot stop itself, once we enter into the path of the degenerescence, degenerescence itself starts to become true and real subversion (as it is well explained in Gunons The Reign of the Quantity and the Signs of the Times). From the beginning of the process of modern deviation, begun in the Autumn of the Middle Ages (XIV sec.) starting from the dies nefastus of the end of the New Temple of the Knights Templar, a true cut of the bonds with the Centre produced. After the end of the Templars, the contacts with the Centre were maintained by the true Rosicrucians, but then also this last hidden bond was broken off fatally (for the influence of the counter-initiation, to tell the truth). With the XVIIth century Western civilization entered indeed and irreversibly in the first phase of modern Times (in order to follow the division of the modern times in two phases, as Gunon made of it The Reign). We must now explain a point that is very characteristically misunderstood by modern followers of Gunons Work. The bond with the Centre must be maintained for an entire civilization can be called traditional. That the fact of this bond is esoterical and so the greatest part of men

3 Anyway Gunons Work, in the parts in which he spoke about the starting in his historical period age of the sects should be an important, never lacking reading for the anti-sect movements.

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wont ever even imagine of its existence does not deny the point that this contact must exist. First of all we can say that this criterion of traditionality absolutely is out of order for the so-called (by themselves) traditionalists of newmind of present day. Secondly we arrive at the other consequence of this point that it is almost never underlined when someone speaks about Gunons Work: the bond with the Centre can be maintained in some closed and very very small group and notwithstanding this the course of civilization can continue as it never was. In other words: there is a contact with the Centre and a constant bond with it. This last is necessary to have a true traditional civilization. The first, the contact, is not continuous and cannot exceed the small group in which it happens. The contact is necessary to have the continuous bond, but this last is the aim. What Gunon meant speaking of the intellectual (= spiritual) Western elite was to have the contact first and then construct the bond. If the contact was not evident in what remained of the Western initiatic ways which Gunon did not deny it had to be reconstructed, but the aim remained to stop the modern Western deviation. That was the original aim. But lets not anticipate the results of this little essay.Having the bond with the Centre broken means that there is no more a Western elite as such. But not having an elite does not mean that you cannot find any initiatic form in the West from the XVIIth century, because it is not this what it means. It means instead that the traditional West does not have any representatives in the Centre of the World. In other words: this means that exoterism and esoterism are definitively separated in the West. It remains the religion but with no bonds to the Supreme Centre, and it can be that some possible contact with the Centre could always be re-opened, but its not possible to re-attach the two parts of the unique sword. So, the fact that the traditional West does not have any representative in the Centre of the World does not mean at all, as someone understood, that in the Supreme Centre there exist no more representatives of Western esoterism is a complete misunderstanding of my words. I also know very well what Gunon said, that is when an esotericism cannot exists anymore in its determined context it is re-absorbed into the Centre where all the forms do exist (but as a synthesis, like the white that has all the different colours: and this understood by very few). They interpret this way my words because they think that only esotericism matters, and this is wrong. Religion has a great importance, the importance of binding the esotericism whose summit (that is not all the esotericism) must be in contact (continuous) with the Supreme Centre to the common people, thus making the entire civilization Traditional. They are also very wrong interpreting true Gunons Work, where he spoke about the intellectual elite, and its original aim to stop the deviation of modern West, that is to contact the Centre, reconstruct a continuous bond with It, and then make this contact vital for the entire civilization binding the Western spiritual elite I mean with the religion. In this sense, very coherently, Gunon thought that Catholicism had to be the base for the action of the elite and it could not be Masonry or other organizations. Even exoterism has its place when the fate of the world is in question. They heavily misunderstood Gunons words. The problem, then, has been aggravated from the cut that the Catholicism, refusing every esotericism, has more and more operated in the relations with the Supreme

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Centre, and, for this reason, Catholicism is becoming more and more a gigantic psychical body, but that is going away and irreversibly departed from the Spirit. A phase of crisis without precedent has been opened in the Catholicism (as in many other religions, by the way, because if West weeps East does not rejoice). Anyway those two groups are both wrong, the ones who refuse every esotericism and the ones for whom if there is a binding with the Centre, a contact on the esoteric level and they think it is enough, it sufficient, it is quite all is needed. They are both wrong. Every one of them chooses a piece of the sword, but its a broken sword, broken in two parts. And a sword in two parts is only a broken sword and not at all a sword4.This is the fundamental picture we can find in the books of Gunon, with their little limitations and the facts due to the historical period in which Gunon lived, even if we must underline that this does not touch the basic Principles contained in Gunons Work. In those books it is given for granted that the East is quite immune from such fatum of the modern West. On the contrary the world of the period after the world-wide Conflicts of the XX century (A. D.) has shown, with overabundance of confirmations, than the East is not at all immune from the virus of modernity, and today we have among them some hybrid civilizations, hybrids between traditional survivals and the modernity. This is the real, concrete and historical East, today.Gunon himself examined again the picture and returned on this point in the Introduction of The Reign, admitting that the East (historical, of course) was not immune from the virus of modernity, and so that the East would be modernized for sure, but it would have been issue of Westernization, Occidentalization (and the term is not sure accidental). The growing serious degenerescence that has taken Islamism and those, less serious but still very true, that got Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, all in nationalistic sense, are an illustrious sign of the fact that the degenerescence of the religious side of the traditional forms now has extended well beyond the borders of Catholicism. And this too means something.Now, to come back to our topic, even if oriental elites continue to exist, they also turned out from the concrete complete management of their countries. And so we return, in a weaker less heavy state, to the sword problem. Anyway it remains that an elite, in the sense of a more complete construction that has some influence on the religion, even if way less than in other times, still remains in the East. In the West this influence is now reduced to almost nothing, restrained in very small spaces, closed in some short corner. Why this difference? For a fact that we have not decided, and for which I pray indeed to make a bonfire of all those speeches and all those affirmations of parochial type between the East and the West. The fact is this: everywhere it can be found the formal affirmation that the Primordial Tradition of the cycle has come from the hyperborean regions. Later on, there have been several secondary currents, correspondent to various periods, among which one of the more important - among those, at least, whose vestigia are still recognizable - turned incontestably from the West towards East.4 Sure, its true that the hilt is the part of the sword that is handled by the hand, that is the superior esotericism that has with aim to maintain a continuous contact with the Supreme Centre. But if you have the hilt and a mere half of the blade have you a sword? Not at all. The sword is the hint and the whole blade. But the very secret of the Graal lies in the way to re-unite the two arts of the blade to reconstruct the true sword.

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But all this goes back to the farthest ages, commonly said prehistoric and we do not have in sight such horizons.What we say is, first of all, that the deposit of the Primordial Tradition has been moved since long time ago in the East and that there it can be still found the more directly derived traditional forms; secondly that, at the present state of the things, if you still want to find some authentic representatives of the traditional spirit with all that it implies, is in East that, in spite of all, you have to seek them (Gunon: The crisis of modern World, Mediterranee 1972, p. 44, Gunons italics). Said otherwise: the Centre, to the beginning, had an Hyperborean, Nordic Centre, and then, as we can read into Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles, it has been moved to the West (and this is confirmed from the amazing analogies with the pre-Columbian traditional forms). Then, there was a shift from the West towards the East, following to the fall of Atlantis; finally this current one, joining to the one now descending from the North, to go to the East. This last was the definitive movement (and sealed the definitive abandonment of the Hyperborean Earth). From the beginning of the Kali-Yuga at least (actually, to tell the truth, even from before), that is to say from approximately 6480 years ago, it is in the East that lies the Centre of the World, that is where the Lord of the World resides. There is someone who says that the Centre is in Tibet or in the Himalayas, but it is not so: these are extensions; it is worth to say that the fall of Tibet did not touch the Centre. By the way we also have to consider that there are (were) another extension of the Centre, and among the more important, in the Irns orients, the Bactrian (the zone of Balkh, among the Uzbekistn, the Tadzhikistn and the Afghanistn put together); in historical age, the place of outer extension of the Centre would have been taken by the zone of Afghanistn, a zone of the earth that not for chance has been theater of wars and destructions.Indeed, if it we look at the pitiful state in which it has been reduced the Afghanistn, we can become aware of the game that is going on in the world, a game guided by the counter-initiation: to stop at all the still existing extensions of the Centre. The modern Western, become the instruments of the dominion of the Adversary, as in The Reign Gunon clearly spoke of, then spread their virus to all the globe, even the East.The deviations in Muslim religion, the wahhabite Arabia before, then the Shiite Irn, finally, the lowest level, the Afghanistn of the Talibn, re-enter easily in such a complete subversion... It is necessary that the scandal is, but troubles to those who make to happen the scandal, says the Gospel, and by purpose this passage was quoted by Gunon in Crisis.By the way, and this idea can perhaps surprise someone, Tibet was less important than Afghanistn, as bonds with the Centre, because it was the land of important groups, among which the famous, if one may use this expression, Brotherhood Sarmoung, with which Gurdjieff asserts to have had contacts. This last point must make us to vanish our negative judgment on the same Gurdjieff, who had incontestably contacts with the Ahl-i-Haqq, the Yezid and the Al Elah (an extremist Shiite group that deifies literally Al Ibn Ab Tlib, cousin of the Prophet and first Imm of the Shiism). The Al Elah are also called Alevi, and carry the red turban in honour of the First Imm. The Alevies deify the First Imm, like the Christians

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Christ. The Alevies are called in Syria Alaw, that is Alawites, that, according to some sources, are considered crypto-Christians, but in effect they are only extremist Shiites. During the Crusades, in that labyrinth of relationships between Crusaders and Assassins, these last were in part accepted as Christians, and then they returned to be Muslims again. They were considered in a half-status also in the opinion of some Crusaders themselves.In order to understand these labyrinths, it is necessary to understand how Shiism is. As Schuon stated, Shiism can be considered the entering of the Christian perspective in the Muslim perspective. The central problem of Shiism was always the problem of the relationship between the Imm and the Prophet: where the Imm is only partly beyond the limit of Sunnism, we have the Iranian and Lebanese Shiism, in their pre-khomeinist forms (from Khomein it began the political drift and the ominous politicization); where the Imm is pushed beyond the limits of Sunnism, even beyond Iranian Shiism itself, we have Fatimite Ismailism. Where the Imm is clearly superior to the Prophet and quite eclipses the figure of the Prophet himself we have the Assassins of Syria, the Druses, and the Alawites.

While the Alawites are extremist Shiites who deify Al, the Yezid, on the contrary, are extremist Sunnites. Now, apart the importance that these divisions can have inside the Muslim world, the true point of these sects is another very different issue: these sects conserved uses and doctrines that belonged to previous substrata: precisely to Zoroastrian and Zurvanite strata. This last stratum was in magical degenerescence and it came directly from the Babylonian age. Now, Gurdjieff was famous for his connections to such Babylonian substratum. The counter-initiatic possibility that is put into effect in such groupings is the use of psychical residues of real ancient traditional forms, but now in dissolution. The fact that Gurdjieff was in contact with the extensions of the Centre in Afghanistn and, at the same time, he was part also of counter-initiatic groups is not contradictory, for who has tried to enter in contact with the Centre in the course of the history did not do this always for good reasons. Therefore to enter in contact with the Centre does not imply necessarily that he did not belong to the counter-initiation.And we also have to consider another point, very important: that just for these counter-initiatic contacts Gurdjieff fell in a serious crisis, and in order to exit from this crisis (if we read attentively the unsaid in the lines of Gurdjieffs book Life is real only then when I am) he had to renounce to his powers and to leave the way of the powers (siddhis), way that Gurdjieff followed until then. After said this, the Gurdjieffs issue has engaged us even too much, and what really matters to us is that there were, and still are, those people who entered in contact with the Supreme Centre for aims of (psychical) power, kind of power that in the Centre is especially contained.

An excursus. Lets return to the Afghanistn issue: we cannot hesitate to say that the invasion of the Afghanistn contributed much to the fall of USSR. The end of USSR, then, was an other sign of the next advent of the Antichrist that is the definitive end of what withholds him. In fact, for many Fathers of the Church, what did hold the

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manifestation of the Antichrist was the Christianized Roman Empire. This last one in the West ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, and survived only very partly in the Habsburg Empire until its end decreed by Napoleon in the beginning of the XIX sec. Instead, after the fall of Constantinople in 1454, the translation of the imperial idea happened, and this idea passed into Russia. Now, when the revolutionaries of the 1917 pulled down the Republic that pulled down the czar, so to say they cut the head of the old Empire, and stuck over it in a rough bad way a very different head which had a very different nature. But they safeguarded the body of the Russian Empire, and, by the way, Stalin made it even bigger. With the 1991 it was definitively dismembered that body: here is the sign. Of course, from our point of view the Bolshevik doctrine is not at all acceptable, but: After the Vaishya are now the Shdra to aspire to the power: it is this, exactly, the first meaning of the Bolshevism (Gunon: Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, Rusconi 1972, p. 115). So the Western block defeated the Bolshevik block no more as bourgeois, Vaishya, but by the unchainment of the lowest passions of man, looking for the material success at all costs, that is the doctrine of the chandala, the under-caste.Indeed, the under caste is, following the Hindu Tradition, a son of a Shdra and of a female daughter of a Brhmana; so the under-caste joins the thirst for the material things only, typical of his father, with the intelligence of the mother. Said otherwise: his intelligence is totally enslaved to the matter. The under-caste is ingenious, but lacking in values. Look at the world today: it is the world of the search of material success at every cost, and this is no more bourgeois, because the bourgeois replaced the values of the honour of the warrior caste (Kshatriya) with the values of the material production, of progress and of the material success, but obtained following certain rules, reached within some sure values. And are precisely these last values that the whole world is seduced today in every aspect. But Gunon was right also on another argument: he thought that after the stage of the decadence of these values a successive stage would have been the stage of the false return to the Traditional values. Precisely what we saw starting form the 80s of the last century! HE WAS COMPLETELY RIGHT, AND HE WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO SAW THIS. All the other weepers of the end of values failed completely to understand this very fact. So they were wrong and Gunon was and still is right. This danger, more subtle and therefore much more dangerous of the plain and open fight, was called by Gunon traditionalism; he distinguished with much rigour and clear-cut words between the Tradition and the traditionalism. Therefore today the real danger comes not at all from the modernist but precisely from the return to the values and the return to the identity. Lets not forget for a moment the great lessons of History, the great lesson given us from Protestantism, the only religious creation of modernity (Gunon). Protestantism did not claim that we should go into the modern, but that Protestantism was the real return to the purity of Sacred Writings (Sola Scriptura). In other words: it was the dream to return to the purity of the origins. The origins were surely purer of the more aged parts of the History of Christianism, but their return was extremely poor: their return was the return to a very aged idea of the origins themselves. The origins of Christianism were not at all so simple as the Protestants thought and still think. Into the Origins, as Gunon taught,

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there are all the possibilities, both the ones that will develop and the ones that wont ever develop. But they are contained synthetically, Gunon added. ...

Lets return to us. The last fragment of the Christianized Roman Empire, though become unrecognisable, however has been destroyed, and so the path for the total domination, therefore the way for the Reign, was definitively opened to the Antichrist. The Centre, then, does not take place in Tibet, and not even in Afghanistan. It is important to say clearly that the Centre is not bodily, even if IT has corporeal moorings that should correspond to a place on the earthly surface, the place where, to say it in language of the West Medieval age, the Priest John resides, Priest John called in Latin Presbyter Johannes. This place walked for all Central Asia, and then went even in the land correspondingly to present Ethiopia. We see, instead, what can be read into Marco Polos The Million, where the author reported some traditions that he listened but clearly did not understand, for Marco Polo thought that Priest John was a temporal sovereign not Christian but friend of the Christians, or that he was the Nestorian Ung Khan that Genghis Khan defeated. Well, Marco Polo said, without being aware of the contradiction to put in a desolate place a Prince that would have had lands and splendid palagi, that the lands of the Priest John are those of the river that he called, with Mongolian name, Caramorn, that is the Black River, the Huang He (or Huang Ho, it is the same), the Chinese Yellow River (yellow because of the loess of the zone). The Huang He is born between the Tibet and the Chinese region of the West Sichuan. Then it goes to North, towards the Mongolia, turning finally to East into the Chinese plains. The river contributes to form a large bend around the region between China and Mongolia, region called the Ordos. Then it returns towards the South and takes the definitive road for the sea, after having gone through the immense and very populous Chinese plains.The Ordos region takes place in the so-called Inner Mongolia, that is part of todays China, different from the Exterior Mongolia, that was also Chinese in the age of Qing [Ching] Dynasty, but that today is independent for it was Russian Mongolia before the end of Russian Czarist Empire (the Inner is also called Chinese Mongolia). Beyond the northern part of the bend there is the Gobi, the smaller part in the Inner Mongolia, the bigger one in the Exterior Mongolia. Since Marco Polo then does not talk about the source of the river, but of the zone of the Ordos and beyond, that is the Gobi. The Gobi is an uninhabited place above 500m of altitude, with an impossible weather, characterized by furious and crazy winds, winds that the Mongolian stories want full of malicious spirits: the hordes of Gog and Magog. By the way, Marco Polo places not very distant from the Gobi the Dry Tree (in his Million he met two of them, in the Khorasn and in the zone of the Ordos). The Presbyter Johannes is considered the one who owns the mastery on the hordes of Gog and Magog, as we can read in the Letter of the Priest John, that really was sent to the Emperor of Byzantium, to the pope of Rome, but also to Federico II of Swabia in Sicily. These last important individuals, especially the pope, tried to recolleague themselves with Him but the mission, that was really sent therein, never came back,

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lost in what then was called Iscurit (Darkeness). If the Lord of the World owns mastership on Gog and Magog, He has a large power on the psychological and vital forces; how could it be astonishing in itself that lots tried to recolleague with Him, with the Centre (Gunon), precisely for such purposes? If, however, in Asia really the Centre has its seat, this is not corporeal, even if it has a corporeal anchorage in those mysterious towns that some legend says that exist in the Gobi. Of these mysterious cities speak the stories both Mongolian and of Islamic Chinese Trkistn. What can be seen in the hidden sense of these stories is that in Asia, in the East, it can never be lacking the intellectual spiritual elite, in a way or in another. But I want to say that, even if it still exists, it can become incredibly hidden, however it cannot vanish, for metaphysical necessity. On the contrary, in fact, all connections between the reality of the Spirit and the bodily world would vanish. As consequence corporeal world would have to be of destroyed completely, entirely. If every recolleaguement to the Centre in the East disappeared totally we would not be at the conclusion of one cycle, but we would be at the conclusion of all the cycles, of every mankind. On the contrary we are at the end of one cycle and of one mankind. Therefore we can also speak of the reconnection of a cycle with the following and this speech has some sense to this point. So it exists Eastern spiritual elite until the conclusion of the cycle, inevitably, also in the most difficult conditions. Though I remark that Eastern elite is today very very closed and hidden. In other words it does not at all correspond to the Eastern and Oriental things that go on currently today. On the contrary, in the West the cut with the Centre happened, even if some much hidden rivulet still exists. In this precise point resides the difference between East and West on the issue of the elite as Gunon presented it. It is very important to point out the following issue. Even if there still exists a rivulet of the Tradition in the West the difference between East and West lies in this: in the West it happened a break, an abruptness between this rivulet and the religion of the majority. This did not happen at the same level in the East. Again this does not imply that religions in the East are completely in the control of the elite: it is the precise opposite that we see today. These speeches are so difficult, people interested in them so easily misunderstand and attribute to the others affirmations they did never do just for the peculiar incredibly imbecile way of thinking they have. They have their idea and they do not interest at all if things match, if affirmations can correspond to a certain reality. Reality must follow what they think, and not the opposite. They affirm they can walk but have no legs and have not the problem of legs. In other words: they dream. If there had been the elite in Gunons sense in the West the whole flow of modern world would have been different. But this never happened.

The West must return to have its representatives in the Centre of the World, and that not only as particularly elect individualities, because this is not sufficient (there always was and still are the exceptions and the privileged individualities, but the exception confirms the rules). This as civilisations in other words. Western civilization must return to the Tradition. This is the goal of Gunons original project, lets call it so in its etymological sense, pro-jectum, something put outside for the benefit of a certain purpose. The elite, in Gunons original sense, meant

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that Western civilization stopped to be modern, even if this action the elite itself had to act in a hidden sense but with the help of Catholic Church. This help never came. So the intellectual (=spiritual) elite Gunon thought of had this aim. In the flowing of time not only in the West no elite in this sense, and notwithstanding some exceptional individuals, was not but also in the East spiritual decadence, especially but not only in Islamic world, grew much. The only difference is that in the East, even if religions are no more in complete control of the elite, no definitive break happened, while in the West it happened. This difference is not at all a question of greater spiritual sensibility as Gunon said in his age and on this he was wrong - but of the Presence in the East of the Supreme Centre. Nothing more nothing less than this.

Having reached this point, three issues come under limelight. 1) How can Western spiritual elite reach more influence in the West . 2) How can intellectual Western elite constitute in the West . 3) The purposes of the construction of the elite links us immediately to the problem of the difference between the cyclic situation in which Gunon made the proposition of his projectum of the intellectual elite and the actual cyclic situation, the situation which we currently are.

As I said many times, the real and true problem is the third one not because the other two problems are trifles, but because the third one is the intractable problem, the real stumbling-block, the rock, the quite unseen reef, where individual dowries, even special recolleaguements can nothing. There is, in other words, one truly damned (in all the senses...) difficulty on the third point. And it is that it exists both the opportunity and the true impasse, the true reef on the surface of the water, the perilous passage, the true Cape Horn. But lets not run too fast. For now lets go slowly dealing with the first two problems that, I repeat, are not so little things of small account. Moreover, an important warning: the three points will not be examined here as three separate points and subsequently ordered to the reader. Instead we will deal with them in the course of the writing itself.

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N 2

The general picture that Gunon will develop in The East and the West, in The Crisis of modern world, and in some passages in Considerations, was sketched from the beginning in the first book of Gunon: Introduction to the study of Hindu doctrines. And it is from there that we will start, always after having again emphasized that our situation is very much worse than the situation of Gunons time... Therefore some of the things said by Gunon at its age are clearly dated, but not the problem he saw. As I said many times, what really matters is the big picture. Indeed, it is the direction that counts, it is the spirit of the Work that really matters, a spirit today still alive and that they wont succeed to capture.The religions are in a deep serious crisis, the Great Wall is has now holes in many points, and the Adversary invites to the return to the spirituality. Such an invite comes from the ones who would have always fought the spirituality! It becomes more and more difficult to separate the false from the truth because the false has respectable appearances ... The wicked jinns are in holiday... Even if Gunons individuality had his limits, this point takes a backseat if we have the clear mind to ponder attentively these phrases: We enter in an age in which it will be particularly difficult to distinguish the grain from the bad weed, to go ahead with what the theologians call the discrimination of the spirits; because the disordinate manifestations will intensify and multiply, and also for the lack of true knowledge in those people, whose normal function would have been to guide the others, while today too many are often nothing else but blind guides. We will see then if in such conditions the dialectic sharpness is of some usefulness and if philosophy, even if the best possible, is enough in order to arrest the manifestation of the infernal powers (Gunon: The Crisis , cit., p. 160). Who reads those phrases must have very clear the knowledge of such a situation. Sure, one can also not want to see it, but whats the use? What does this blindness incline, cause, and bear? On the contrary to see this point has a cathartic value, and ktharsis is purificatio by means of the fire.The truth is that those Gunons words were written but it is as they were never said. However, the purificatio with pr, the fire, has sense if and only if you know how to resist to the impact of the suggestions of the Adversary, to his descensive and depressive influence. A winning army from about nearly six hundred years has on its side the most important thing: the aura of invincibility.The battles are fought in the heart of the men like the first Kurukshetra, and it is precisely there that they are lost. The issue of the elite is not an issue that has no consequences. What can be only imagined by us would have happened in the world if the western elite had been indeed formed and made operating and would have operated indeed. The true key of the issue is in fully understand why the constitution of the elite was never made something of vital importance. The existence of the elite would have had incredible consequences that the one who watches from the outside these things can hardly perceive . Indeed all metaphysical things are likewise and who watches them from the outside literally does not know what he believes are only words, does not comprehend the incredible consequences on all the levels

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consequences that make the metaphysics the most serious thing that exists. In comparison with metaphysics the rest is indeed a poor thing. We say that not taking the resolution to constitute the Western elite , even if Gunon always said that it was only a possibility and not a necessity (that is to say that it was not obligatorily to happen) has had devastating consequences into the Traditional world and consequently onto and into the whole terrestrial globe. This also means that a small change in relation to this issue is potentially bearer of large consequences.We need to become acutely aware of this precise point; on the contrary it seems that we are dealing of a nonexistent issue, like the thread of a cobweb passing for the air. Lets deal with the picture sketched in Gunons Introduction, picture that is always necessary to consider as the basic for the simple fact that every other development had its roots here. Another important point has been said, whose decisive importance has perhaps not been comprised, and it is a point that prevents the concept of an Islamization of the idea of Gunons elite because in itself everyone can think anything but those who attribute the Islamization to Gunon himself are in bad faith.For Gunon the construction of the elite must be Western, while in East there is a different case. The justifications that Gunon gave of such difference made some torrents of ink flowing on the Orient/Occident issue in the Work of Gunon. Gunon gave to the East an advanced role in comparison to the West, even Traditional Western (that is Medieval in his idea). On the contrary modern West was a different thing. This does not mean that Gunon denied the Traditionality of Medieval Occident but he objectively overestimated the Traditional East and its civilizations. Anyway we must remember two things: 1) he himself was the first to return on such issue and to readjust the shooting, accepting that the East could waste itself with the only difference that the Supreme Centre was in the Orient from the beginning of Kali-Yuga, the Dark Age, till the end of our cycle; 2) the metaphysical necessity of this difference had not to be confused with a superiority of the historical East, even if there is a certain superiority that characterized it.It cannot be put on the same level a Dante with an associate to some Muslim brotherhood who only has begun virtual initiation or real initiation but on the lower levels. However, it cannot be denied that in the work of Gunon, before the very opportune rectification he himself operated, two real errors can be found: 1) the error on Buddhism, 2) the overestimation of the historical Traditional East of the XX century d.C., not of the metaphysical East and not even of the East as the residence of the Supreme Centre from the beginning of the Kali-Yuga. The first point, is something secondary: one banal lack of reliable information, as Coomaraswamy demonstrated to Gunon, with worthy traditional data, and Gunon rectified, as one can read in On Buddhism, in Introduction, where he wrote: We take the opportunity in order to add that we are always disposed to recognize the traditional value of every doctrine, wherever it can be found, if we have sufficient proofs; but unfortunately, if the new informations we have obtained are entire favorable to the doctrine of Shkya-Muni

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(that it does not imply the same for all the Buddhist schools indifferently), it is very different for all the things we have denounced the anti-traditional character of (Gunon: Introduction to the study of the Hindu Doctrines, Adelphi 1989, p. 140).It is a remarkable change but it is a sign of the mental agility and of the objectivity of Ren Gunon The change is meaningful, and the Buddha will figure like the Avatar par excellence in the final part of The Great Triad.

Though such an error is indeed little thing [id est: the under-estimation of Buddhism], and has been easily readjusted: I mean that it does not touch in some way the essential thing, because everyone can commit errors for lack of reliable information, as omniscience is not a human possibility. More seriously, on the contrary, as it touches more closer the very bases of the same Gunons Work in themselves, it was the over-appreciation and the over-estimation of the state of the historical traditional East, as it can be read in East and West, even if there Gunon rectified some of his affirmations in the Addiction of 1948. The Reign, on the contrary, starts from the point of view that also the traditional historical East can deviate, so not the symbolic East-Orient, even if the two do correspond. But in this last Work of his the second (symbolic) is not merely the first (the historical Orient): and it is a deep meaningful change. The key point is in correctly understand these two points: such an over-appreciation touch the very bases of the Gunons speech; and, if so, then why Gunon operated such an over-appreciation? In fact such an overestimation is contrary to the other bases of his Work itself. Such an over appreciation touches the bases of the Work because one of the firmest positions of Gunons Work has always been to consider our age as the last part of the Kali-Yuga. Now, if it is true that the Centre must exists until the End of the Cycle (and, as I said it more times, we are entered into the sandhya between two cycles), and is equally true that from the beginning (at least) of the Kali-Yuga the Centre is in the East (Central Asia), nevertheless it is also true that this existence in Asia of the Centre itself cannot and could not prevent that even the historical Orient entered and it is now totally in the age of most serious darkening that we are living, even if with modalities different and less intense than those of the modern West. But to say that one has the fever to 38 while the other to 40 does not remove the fever to who has it to 38. So, as indeed a fever is there, then we cannot think that the historical East can in some way escape the fatum of the whole Earth. Thinking this would mean to assert that the historical East, as a human entirety, not like islands that remain here and there in immense perilous sea full load of jaws and monsters, a perilous sea in which there could be the Great Wave (like that of Hokusais in the half of XIX the century in Japan) of the Western invasion, the historical Orient I meant did and does not make part of the Kali-Yuga.On the contrary to the same premises of Gunons Work that the whole world is into the end of Kali-Yuga -, the same Gunon too many times wrote affirmations that can make us resemble the untouched and pure Orient. ... It was a subjectivist element of illusion that characterized here Gunons Work though an element that we must not overestimate for it does not touch the very bases of the Work itself. Division between East and the West, according to Gunon, and as expressed in

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Introduction, must be compared to the shunting line of a branch from a tree, for it is the West that started moving from the East, not vice versa. This phenomenon Gunon calls the divergence, than it is not still the shunting line, but it is the base without which the ollowing shunting line could not have been. After having to haclearly said that the historical traditional East is made up of several civilizations and races, while the West, plural in its composition, is composed by Greco-Roman, Germanic and Jewish (the Christianity) cultural currents, we must also underline that the West comes from even the composition of these races. So this is a difference in the beginning between West and East. On the other hand the West has stiff to amalgamate them in an unstable composition, and this is another fundamental point. Gunon adds, returning to outline the divergence, than its main defect [of the outline], however unavoidable in every outline, it is to simplify things rather too much, because this represents the divergence as if it were increased in continuous way from the antiquity to the days of ours. In reality this divergence has been taken place in one moment and indeed, in less far ages, the West has newly received the direct influence of the East: we allude above all to the Alexandrine period, and also to that the Arabs gave to Europe in the Middle Ages, and of which a part belonged to them, while the rest reached from India (...). The divergence returned to emphasize itself in the Renaissance, where the cleanest breach with the previous age was produced, and in reality in Renaissance was the end for many things above all from the intellectual point of view (Gunon: Introduction to , Adelphi , pp. 25-26).Particular researches demonstrated that in the Renaissance, and with tails that will reach until the French Revolution, there were conserved elements of the previous age: but new dawn must not be taken for the Glory of the sunset ... The Reform gave birth to the Protestantism, according to Gunon the only religious produced of the modern spirit when it was still religious. This last point is fundamental for it demonstrates that between religion and modernity there is not an absolute incompatibility, as there is between the Tradition and modernity5. It was however with the French Revolution that, more than with the American Revolution, more moderate, it will inaugurate the precipitation of the modern times from the starting point of initiatic lvel onto the social-political level. All that would have been impossible without the modern science-technics, and without that this last one was applied to economy by the Industrial Revolution and its machinism. It was made more for the Industrial Revolution and its triumph, today concluded, applauded and stable, by the modern science-technics, that is the Reign of the Quantity as Gunon called it, than the applications of the industry made for the science-technics. Its the idolatry of science and the technics, the economy and the exchange, that I have always considered obscene. Its the psychical cult of what Shr Aurobindo called the vital Barbarians of the modern world. Barbarians because deprived of a clear light, of a traditional note, that may give order to their chaotic activities. But,

5 The absolute, incredible, total incapability of undertsanding this very precise point makes the traditionalists failing in re-balancing the modern world (even to think this, though, was and still is too much for their feeble minds), that these integralists are Islamic or Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or everything else.

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differently from the old Barbarians, these last ones move on the vital plan, that is the plan of passions, of production, rather than only on the mere corporeal plan of the historical Barbarians Gunon considered these last ones, the classical Barbarians, not at all as they were nearer to the origin, but only populations which one time had their own tradition, tradition that now they lost. The western world, in Gunons idea, went and goes more and more towards a renewed state of Barbary, but by means of the scientific-economic activity and by means that it produces, not by means of the forfeiture. This last is the way commonly accepted to understand and conceive the degenerescence, rather on the model of the end of the Roman Empire, for giving an image impressed with the fire in the social sub consciousness of the West. This degeneration happening by an excess of activity rather than by classical barbarism is the shunting line of which it Gunon spoke, this active process of degenerescence, that he skillfully illustrated in The Reign of the Quantity and the Signs of the Times. This picture was in nuce already present in the Conclusion of Introduction, and developed partly in East and the West and Crisis. In reality, Gunon spoke of these arguments also in the books here quoted, but above all in The Reign. In this last work he said that, behind all this process of degeneration, there is the counter-initiation. Modern science is an ignoring knowledge (cfr. Gunon: East and West, Ediz. Traditional Studies Italy 1965, p. 51). The base of modern science is this: the idea that exist pure material things, conception exclusively proper to such mentality, does not correspond to anything else, (...) cleared up from all the secondary complications over placed above them by the particular theories of the physicists, but to the idea that there exist only corporeal beings and things, whose existence and whose constitution would not involve some element of other nature (Gunon: The Reign of the Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Adelphi 1982, pp. 173-174).It is just this basic kernel of the modern science-technics, whose belief is simply this: only that which is measurablewith my means is true, recognized as really existing; the rest for me does not exist. If every thing is only body, if therefore only corporeal beings and things exist, ergo, says their belief, following again The Reign of the Quantity, every thing can be manipulated. Modern science potentially begins the reign of the absolute manipulability. The limit to the manipulability depends on the liability and the limits of the instruments themselves, that is to say by the means. Theoretically, basing on the premises of the same modern science-technics-economy, all is under potential manipulability. If this manipulabilty has to be arrested to the humans and to the living beings it must be only for lack of tools. But now these tools exist, and so all the speech about the ethics, the most fashionable word from the Eighties (80s) of the last century, vanish ...The ethical limits? They are exactly external to modern science. In fact the technical power deprived of compromises in order not to hit too much a society would have made the society to react very badly, even if this same society is accustomed to the superpower of the technical power itself It is a compromise and an external limit, not ever a truly substantial limit. This mentality for which there exist only corporeal things is a necessary condition because if it admitted that the things are in an other way, it would have meant to recognize that the true nature of its

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object escapes to its comprehension (ibid., p. 174). The quotations made hereon come from the CAP. XXVI of The Reign, entitled Shamanism and witchcraft. In such vision-of-the-world (Weltanschauung), Gunon wrote about the Shamanism, and, in order to speak of this ast, he had to examine the idea of the so-called animism, an idea frontally opposed to the idea that only corporeal things exist. According to Gunon, it would be better, by the point of view of the language, to assert that every object or living being has a psyche: there is a psychical aspect, of the beings and the world. If we want to use the term animism it would not be a problem, for to the Greek word psych it corresponds the Latin term anima. The true problem is to understand the true meaning of the terms, and to speak of the psychic character, that is animism, practically refers to the existence, for every thing under Heaven, and for same astral skies, of a subtle aspect. A conception of this kind is primitive, but that simply because it is true, which is quite exactly the opposite of what evolutionists mean when they characterize this conception in such a way. At the same time, (...) this conception is a common necessity for all the traditional doctrines; we can say that it is normal, while the opposite idea, that is that of the inanimate things (which found one of its extreme expressions in the Cartesian theory of the animals-machine), constitute a true anomaly (...). But it must be very clear that this is not at all a personification of those natural forces that the physicists study in their way, and even less this means theirs adoration, as they think those people for which animism constitutes what they believe they can call the primitive religion; truly this is a conception that only belongs to the domain of cosmology, conception anyway which can find its application in different traditional sciences. It is also axiomatic that when psychic elements inherent to the things enter in argument, or forces that are expressed and manifested through them, we must always underline these forces have absolutely nothing of spiritual. Confusion in these two realm is also a characteristic of modern thought, and undoubtedly this confusion is not stranger than the idea to make a religion of what is science in the most exact sense of the word. Notwithstanding their claim of clear and distinctive ideas (direct inheritance even this of the mechanicism and of the universal mathematicism of Cartesius), our contemporaries mix in the strangest way the most heterogeneous things and most essentially distinguished. What is important to us here to underline, is to point out as the ethnology usually considers primitive forms what on the contrary are degenerated forms in a more or less variable proportion, even if, many times, they are not to such a low level as it would have been supposed following the ethnologists interpretations (ibid., p. 176).

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N6

In Introduction, in the Conclusions, Gunon returns to speak about the divergence between East and West. He said that the divergence, everything considered, began with Ancient Greece, and that, without divergence, then there would not have been the Western shunting line, but he said also that the divergence between East and Wets is not merely the shunting line itself (important point). In other words, Ancient Greece, even if being the starting pointed Western deviation itself, was not that same deviation and moreover still was a traditional civilization though in spiritual decadence from a certain moment of its history. The first task of the Western spiritual elite, according to Gunon, is therefore to sign an end or, said in better way, an abruptness to that same divergence, become, in the modern world, very very greater than in the so-called classical world (Greco-Roman civilization). The means to arrive at this goal are the agreement on the Principles (as he wrote in East and the West), where the Principles are rigorously the metaphysics. This last one is not merely religion, as it is asserted clearly in Introduction, and developed both in East and West and in Considerations. As a result of that, the mere return to the Christianity (conceived exoterically, cfr. East and West, cit., pp. 179-180) on one hand would meet with not easy difficulties and on another hand would not have been able to reach that agreement on the Principles that Gunon has always said to be the main goal. The true point, here, is to understand well what he meant when he spoke about agreement on the Principles. He wanted to say that the Western elite, definitively formed, would have placed itself on the metaphysical plan, therefore beyond the religious points of view. This is the most important point of the elite as seen and conceived by Gunon, usually not well understood completely in its implications: It is the very core and here lies the very root of the difficulties for the elite. It also contains in nuce the difficulty to find individuals with these exceptional qualifications necessary to even see this goal. Let us remember the two ways: The metaphysic way and the religious way, the first ending into the metaphysical realization, or realization of the Supreme Unity, or in whichever other way we can call it; the second way brings instead to the salvation, that is the stop of the second death in a post-mortem state, that its called paradise or dewachn in another religious Kosmos. Anyway, both ways are valid in themselves. But what really matters for our aim is to notice that, in order to form the elite, there is the fundamental need of individualities who are, from the beginning, capable of putting themselves on a relatively esoteric plan, even without arriving at the realization of the goals of the metaphysical way. We know, from Gunon, that the way of the Small Mysteries, in which the top of the Cosmic Mountain of the Purgatory (in order to say it with Dante) lies, is the Real Unity of the different Ways possible on this Earth. Well, these individualities must try to get nearer to this goal, to see it at least from afar but perceptibly, really, conretely. In other words, from the beginning they must see this Unity, even if they wont really arrive at its realization in themselves. Only in such case, in fact, the understanding on the Principles Gunon spoke of could effectively be realized. This vision, from the beginning on a relatively esoteric plan, the only

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one on and in whic