By René Guénon
Pub Date: 08/01
Publisher: Sophia Perennis 
Binding: Paper, 320pp.
ISBN: 0900588322
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Related Books:  Initiation,  Comparative Religion
Related Audio/Video: Martin Lings, Frithjof Schuon and Rene Guenon

From Chacornac’s The Simple Life of René Guénon…

The second major work to appear after the war, Perspectives on Initiation, expounds the conditions and means necessary to pass from the domain of theoretical knowledge to that of spiritual realization. As a matter of fact, the content of this work was not entirely new in its essentials, Guénon having contributed a series of articles on initiation in Le Voile d’Isis (and, later, in Études Traditionnelles) at intervals between the end of 1932 and 1938. The author sets himself the task in this work of describing the nature of initiation, which is essentially, the transmission, by appropriate rites, of a spiritual influence that allows the being presently in the human state to reach the spiritual state described by various traditions as ‘edenic’,  and to rise thence to the superior states, attaining finally what is known as ‘liberation’,  or the state of ‘Supreme Identity’. Guénon clarifies the conditions of initiation, as well as the characteristics of organizations qualified to transmit it; and along the way he illustrates the distinction between the initiatic and the mystical path.

We find ourselves here in the presence of a work truly unique in the literature of all times, and of all traditions. Never before, no matter how far back we go in the world’s ‘bibliography’,  had questions relating to initiation been the subject of a comprehensive public account. Ignorance regarding this subject must assuredly have become general even at the core of the esoteric organizations scattered throughout the Western world—and in certain parts of the East—for a public account of this kind to become necessary. One may recall here the rabbinical adage that ‘it is better to profane the Torah than to forget it’. Perspectives on Initiation clarified Guénon’s position on the particular but important point of Masonry, which he describes as the only widespread organization in the West that can, along with the Compagnonnage and the vestiges of some Christian esoteric groups from the Middle Ages, lay claim to ‘an authentic traditional origin and a real initiatic transmission.’

Editorial Note