Rene Guenon was a Frenchman who went East and discovered Islam. The timing was perfect: his beloved French wife (Venus in the twelfth in the house of loss) died just as Pluto was being discovered, (In his sixth house next to Neptune ). Guenon decided his faith in Catholic Christianity was misplaced and he moved to Cairo following the Sufi path of love and the 12th century mystic Rumi. Once there he became the Sufi mystic, Abdul Waheed Yahya.

Our header picture is from Anvari’s Divan via the preservation efforts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York by Annemarie Schimmel and Stuart Cary Welch and is titled “The beloved comes at night”. ¹ Anvari’s Divan: A Pocketbook for Akbar. The Divan literally a pocketbook of Moslem aphorisms, was created in 1588 for Auhaduddin Anvari, the Mughal Emperor in Lahore India c. 1588 . They attribute this painting to Shiva Das.

As William Chittick, the major scholar of Sufism in the West, writes in the second edition of Titus Burckhardt’s Introduction to Sufism ² originally published in 1959 and considered the authority , “academic knowledge is only secondary and indirect to assimilating the intellectual content of oriental doctrines as the scientific method which approaches all from the outside and looks in, and thus understands the idea of assimilation that can only be understood by going beyond the limitations of discursive thought.” ³ ibid. Preface, page xviii . But as all religious came East to the West, that is not an unusual thought , but lost in the West’s pre-occuptation was “plainness” and destruction of mysticism after the Reformation where adherents of Luther, though not Luther himself, thew out the symbolic baby with the bathwater in a too critical reaction of all things Catholic.

Guenon wrote over 24 volumes in his native French, on Du Soufisme, though few have been translated into the English most likely because French translators would prefer to keep his wisdom to themselves. ⁴ This is not my thinking but my French Canadian’s comment, when he While Guenon first toyed with the Vedanta through the works of Swami Vivekananda, the Indian mystic Annie Besant, Charles Leadbetter (correspondent to Marc Edmund Jones), and Alice Bailey followed, he did not pursue it,

Sometimes we are hidden, other times revealed.

Rumi from the Divan

Where we are now

Pluto led him to Islam because of its strong ties to revelation — a philosophical idea that Guenon obsessively devoted his life.

Departments

• Line of Vitality. Absent.
• Line of Efficiency. Absent.
  • Mental Chemistry.
    • Average Moon, Fast Mercury.
    • Not much self-confidence in what comes so easily to him.
• Line of Motivation. Squared.
• Line of Culture. Absent.

Footnotes:

• This post was updated with a better header picture. Instead of a generic Sufi painting, I chose one from the Met Museum’s 1984 exhibition on Anvari’s Divan.
  • The next change was including the preface from Burckhardt’s Introduction to Sufiism that I finally got a hold of via the Philadelphia Free Library interlibrary loan, and was able to learn more about the faith other then the few glib sites on the internet.

Footnotes:

• 1
  Anvari’s Divan: A Pocketbook for Akbar. The Divan literally a pocketbook of Moslem aphorisms, was created in 1588 for Auhaduddin Anvari, the Mughal Emperor in Lahore India c. 1588
• 2
  originally published in 1959 and considered the authority
• 3
  ibid. Preface, page xviii
• 4
  This is not my thinking but my French Canadian’s comment, when he While Guenon first toyed with the Vedanta through the works of Swami Vivekananda, the Indian mystic Annie Besant, Charles Leadbetter (correspondent to Marc Edmund Jones), and Alice Bailey followed, he did not pursue it,
  
  

  Sometimes we are hidden, other times revealed.
  
  Rumi from the Divan

  The crux of his arguments are against the modern faith of positivity of progress; Guenon did not agree but felt that human kind reached a zenith and then fell backwards from that apex, which is based on the Hindu Yugas or yokes where each cycle gets shorter and shorter once it hits its zenith. Mircea Eliade was greatly, influenced as this site explains Guenon’s “Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles.” This is similar to the Athenian Plato who also responded to Hesiod’s Theogony. Roman Catholic Robert Bolton in his The Order of the Ages: The Hidden Laws of World History also by Sophia Perennis Press, and he uses Sir Isaac Newton’s cycles to support this.
  
  

  Where we are now

  According to Guenon we are currently in the age of the “rejection of the sacred,” where not just one country or culture rejects the idea of God and sacredness but it permeates all of humankind. This unfortunately is obvious during the Great Lockdown that has permeated every aspect of our life, controlling it to an unprecedented degree ⁴ See the post on the Robert Court allowing Churches to be closed subsequently overturned after Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in that is of any not.