René Guénon - The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

The predictions of Nostradamus provide the most typical and the most important example; the more or less extraordinary interpretations assigned to them, particularly in the last few years, are almost numberless.

‘Fashion’ itself, an essentially modern invention, is in its real significance something not entirely devoid of importance: it represents unceasing and aimless change, in contrast to the stability and order that reign in traditional civilizations.

Much could be said in this connection about the use of the Tarot in particular. It contains vestiges of an undeniably traditional science, whatever may have been its real origin, but it also has some very tenebrous aspects; no allusion is intended here to the many occultist fantasies to which the Tarot has given rise, for they are mostly negligible; the concern is with something much more effective, making its handling really dangerous for anyone not sufficiently protected against the action of the ‘underground forces’.

Anyone who may be desirous of learning some details of this aspect of the question might usefully consult, in spite of the reservations that would have to be made on certain points, a book called Autour de la Tiare by Roger Duquet, the posthumous work of a man who had been fairly closely involved in some of the ‘underground’ work referred to above, and who wanted at the end of his life to give his ‘testimony’, as he himself says, and to contribute to some extent to the unmasking of these mysterious undercurrents; the ‘personal’ reasons he may have had for doing this have no importance, and in any case clearly do not detract in any way from the interest of his ‘revelations’. [Full reference: Roger Duquet, Autour de la Tiare : Essai sur les prophéties concernant la succession des papes du XIII e siècle à la fin des temps : Joachim de Fiore , Anselma de Marsico , St . Malachie , le ‘Moine de Padoue’ , etc . (Paris: Nouvelle éditions latine, 1997). Ed.]

The Great Pyramid is in truth not so very much bigger than the two others, especially than its nearest neighbor, so that the difference is not very striking; but without any very evident reason all the modern ‘seekers’ have been as it were ‘hypnotized’ almost exclusively by this one; to it are always related all their most fanciful hypotheses, many of which could better be described as ‘fantastic’, including, to give only two of the queerest examples, one that attempts to find in its interior arrangements a map of the sources of the Nile, and another that makes out that the ‘Book of the Dead’ is no more than an explanatory description of those same arrangements.

Before leaving the subject of the Great Pyramid, attention should be drawn to another modern fantasy connected with it: some people attach much importance to the fact that it was never finished; the summit is in fact missing, but all that can be said for certain about it is that the most ancient authors whose evidence is available, but who are nevertheless relatively recent, all describe it as truncated, as it is today; but it is a long step from this to the claim, as expressed word for word by an occultist, that ‘the hidden symbolism of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is directly related to events that took place in the course of the building of the Great Pyramid’; indeed, this is another assertion that seems singularly lacking in plausibility on all counts! It is a strange fact that the official seal of the United States bears the truncated pyramid, and over it is a triangle with rays, separated and isolated from it by a surrounding circle of clouds, but apparently intended to replace the summit. There are other decidedly strange details in this seal as well, and the ‘pseudo-initiatic’ organizations rampant in America try to make good use of them by interpreting them in conformity with their own ‘doctrines’; they certainly seem to indicate an intervention by suspicious influences: thus, the number of the courses of the Pyramid is thirteen (this number reappearing somewhat insistently in other features, notably that of the letters of which the motto E pluribus unum is composed) and is alleged to correspond to the number of the tribes of Israel (the two half-tribes of the sons of Joseph being counted separately), and no doubt this has some connection with the real origin of the ‘prophecies of the Great Pyramid’, which, as we have seen, tend to treat the Pyramid as a sort of ‘Judeo-Christian’ monument, for reasons that are somewhat obscure.

To this truth is really related the formula ‘when everything seems lost, then it is that everything will be saved’, repeated in a sort of mechanical way by a considerable number of ‘seers’, each of whom has of course applied it to something he can understand, usually to events of comparatively minor importance, even to such as are quite secondary and merely ‘local’, by virtue of the ‘minimizing’ tendency already mentioned in connection with the stories about the ‘Grand Monarch’, leading to his being seen as no more than a future king of France; needless to say, real prophecies are concerned with affairs of quite different dimensions.

The sixth chapter of Genesis might perhaps provide, in a symbolical form, some indications relating to the distant origins of the ‘counter-initiation’.

The symbolism of the ‘fall of the angels’ can be applied analogically to the matter in hand, which corresponds exactly thereto in the human order; and that is why the word ‘satanic’ can be used in its most precise sense in this connection.

The last degree of the ‘counter-initiatic’ hierarchy is occupied by what are called the ‘saints of Satan’ ( awliyā’ al-shayṭān ) who are in a sense the inverse of the true saints ( awliyā’ al-Raḥmān ), thus manifesting the most complete expression possible of ‘inverted spirituality’ (cf. The Symbolism of the Cross ).

A finality so conclusive of course represents only an exceptional case, which is that of the awliyā’ al-shayṭān ; the fate of those who have gone less far in the same direction is only that of being abandoned on a road that leads nowhere, to which they may be confined for the indefinity of an ‘aeon’ or cycle.

From the initiatic point of view this domain is that of what are known as the ‘lesser mysteries’; on the other hand, everything connected with the ‘greater mysteries’ is essentially of a ‘supra-human’ order, and is thereby out of range of any such opposition, since it belongs to the domain which is by its very nature absolutely closed and inaccessible to the ‘counter-initiation’ and to its representatives at all levels.

Al-Tadāb r al-ilāhiyyah fi’l-mamlakat al-insāniyyah, title of a treatise of Muḥyi ’d-Dīn ibn al-‘Arabī.

The extent to which the expression ‘new age’ has in these days been spread about and repeated in all quarters is almost unbelievable, with a significance that can often appear to be different in different cases, but it always tends positively to the establishment of the same persuasion in the mentality of the public.

Matt. 24:24.

On the subject of the Chakravartī or ‘universal monarch’ see The Esoterism of Dante , and The King of the World . The Chakravartī is literally ‘he who makes the wheel turn’, and this implies that he is situated at the center of all things, whereas the Antichrist is on the contrary the being who will be situated furthest from that center; he will nevertheless claim to ‘make the wheel turn’, but in a direction opposite to that of the normal cyclic movement (incidentally, this is ‘prefigured’ unconsciously in the modern idea of ‘progress’), whereas in fact no change in the rotation is possible before the ‘reversal of the poles’, that is before the ‘rectification’ that can only be brought about by the intervention of the tenth Avatāra ; moreover the Antichrist will parody in his own way the very function of the final Avatāra , who is represented as the ‘second coming of Christ’ in the Christian tradition.