The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

by René Guénon

  However that may be, the thing that makes it possible for affairs to reach such a point is that the ‘counter-initiation’ (and this is something that must be said) cannot be regarded as a purely human invention, such as would be in no way distinguishable by its nature from plain ‘pseudo-initiation’; in fact it is much more than that, and, in order that it may really be so, it must in a certain sense, so far as its actual origin is concerned, proceed from the unique source to which all initiation is attached, the very source from which, speaking more generally, everything in our world that manifests a ‘non-human’ element proceeds; but the ‘counter-initiation’ proceeds from that source by a degeneration carried to its extreme limit, and that limit is represented by the ‘inversion’ that constitutes ‘satanism’ properly so called. A degeneration of this kind is obviously much more profound than is that of a tradition merely deviated to a certain extent, or even truncated and left with only its lower part; something more is involved even than in cases of dead traditions so completely abandoned by the spirit that the ‘counter-initiation’ itself can make use of their ‘residues’ for its own purposes, as explained earlier. This leads logically to the thought that this extreme degeneration must go a very long way back into the past; and, however obscure the question of its origins may be, there is some plausibility in the idea that it may be connected with the perversion of one of the ancient civilizations belonging to one or another of the continents that have disappeared in cataclysms occurring in the course of the present Manvantara.[159] In any case it is scarcely necessary to say that as soon as the spirit has withdrawn itself it is no longer possible to speak of initiation; the representatives of the ‘counter-initiation’ are in fact as completely ignorant as ordinary profane people, and more irremediably ignorant, of the essential, in other words, of all truth of a spiritual and metaphysical order, for this truth has become completely strange to them, even in its most elementary principles, ever since ‘heaven was closed’ to them.[160] Since it can neither lead beings toward ‘supra-human’ states as can initiation, nor confine itself exclusively to the human domain, the ‘counter-initiation’ inevitably leads them toward the ‘infra-human’, and the power to do so is precisely the only effective power left to it; it is only too easy to see that this is something quite different from the comedy of ‘pseudo-initiation’. In Islamic esoterism it is said that one who presents himself at a certain ‘gate’, without having reached it by a normal and legitimate way, sees it shut in his face and is obliged to turn back, but not as a mere profane person, for he can never be such again, but as a sāher (a sorcerer or a magician working in the domain of subtle possibilities of an inferior order).[161] It would be impossible to put the position more clearly; it is a question of the ‘infernal’ way trying to oppose the ‘celestial’ way, and actually achieving the outward appearances of opposition, although such appearances can only be illusory; and, as was pointed out earlier when speaking of the false spirituality in which some beings, who are engaged in a sort of ‘inverted realization’, lose themselves, this way can only end at last in the total ‘disintegration’ of the conscious being and in its final dissolution.[162]

  Naturally, in order that the imitation by inverted reflection may be as complete as possible, centers are likely to be established to which the organizations appertaining to the ‘counter-initiation’ will be attached. These centers will of course be purely ‘psychic’, like the influences they use and transmit, and in no sense spiritual, like the centers of initiation and of the true tradition, but they will be able, for the reasons given, to assume up to a point the outward appearance of spiritual centers, thus producing the illusion characteristic of ‘inverted spirituality’. But there need be no cause for surprise if these centers themselves, and not merely some of the organizations that are more or less directly subordinated to them, are found to be engaged in struggles one with another, for the domain in which they are placed is the nearest domain of all to ‘chaotic’ dissolution, and therefore all oppositions are given free rein in it, and are not harmonized and reconciled by the direct action of a superior principle, necessarily lacking in such case. The result often is an impression of confusion and incoherence in everything connected with the manifestations of these centers and their offshoots, and that impression is certainly not illusory; it is even a characteristic ‘mark’ of such things; they can only agree as it were negatively, in the common struggle against the true spiritual centers, insofar as the latter are situated on a level at which such a struggle can take place, that is to say only insofar as they are concerned with a domain that does not extend beyond the limits of our individual state.[163] It is here that what can properly be called the ‘stupidity of the devil’ becomes apparent: the representatives of the ‘counter-initiation’ who act in this way are deluded into thinking that they are opposing the spirit itself, though nothing can really be opposed to it; but at the same time, in spite of themselves and unknown to themselves, they are really subordinated to it and can never cease to be so, just as everything that exists is submitted, albeit unconsciously and involuntarily, to the divine Will, from which nothing can escape. Thus they too are in fact being made use of, though against their will, and though they may themselves hold an exactly contrary belief, for the realization of ‘the divine plan in the human domain’;[164] like all other beings they take the part in that plan that suits their nature, but instead of being effectively conscious of that part, as are the true initiates, they are only conscious of its negative and inverse aspect. Thus they themselves are dupes, and in a way that is much worse for them than is the mere ignorance of the profane, since, instead of keeping them as it were at the same point, it has the effect of driving them ever further away from the principial center, until finally they fall into ‘outer darkness’. But if the affair is looked at, not in relation to these beings themselves, but in relation to the world as a whole, it must be allowed that they are necessary in the place they occupy as elements in that whole, like all other beings, and as ‘providential’ instruments (to use theological language) in the passage of the world through its cycle of manifestation, for all partial disorders, even when they appear in a certain sense to be the supreme disorder, must nonetheless necessarily contribute in some way to the total order.

  These few considerations should make it easier to understand why the constitution of a ‘counter-tradition’ is possible, but also why it can never be otherwise than eminently unstable and almost ephemeral, but this does not prevent its actually being in itself, as was said earlier, the most redoubtable of all possibilities. It will also be understood that this is the goal at which the ‘counter-initiation’ really aims and has always aimed throughout the whole course of its activity, and that the merely negative ‘anti-tradition’ only represented a necessary preparation. It now only remains to investigate rather more closely what can be foreseen, with the help of various concordant indications, of the modalities in which the ‘counter-tradition’ is likely to be realized in the future.

  39

  The Great Parody: or Spirituality Inverted

  From everything that has been said so far it is easy to deduce that the setting up of the ‘counter-tradition’ and its apparent momentary triumph will in effect be the reign of what has been called ‘inverted spirituality’; this last is of course only a parody of spirituality, imitating it so to speak in an inverse sense, so as to appear to be its very opposite; it appears to be its opposite, but is not really so, for whatever may be its pretensions no symmetry or equivalence between the one and the other is possible. This point must be insisted on, for many people allow themselves to be deceived by appearances, and imagine that there exist in the world two contrary principles contesting against one another for supremacy; this is an erroneous conception, identical to that commonly attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the Manicheans, and consisting, to use theological language, in putting Satan on the same level as God. There are certainly nowadays many people who are ‘Manicheans’ in this sense wi
thout knowing it, and this too is the effect of a ‘suggestion’ as pernicious as any. The conception concerned amounts to the affirmation of a fundamentally irreducible principial duality, or in other words, to a denial of the supreme Unity that is beyond all oppositions and all antagonisms; that such a denial should be made by adherents of the ‘counter-initiation’ need cause no surprise, and it may even be sincere on their part, since the metaphysical domain is completely closed to them: it is therefore all the more evidently necessary for them to propagate the conception and to impose it on others, for in no other way can they succeed in getting themselves taken for what they are not and what they can never really be, namely, representatives of something that could be put on a level with spirituality and might eventually prevail over it.

  This ‘inverted spirituality’ is thus in very truth only a false spirituality, but it is false to the most extreme degree conceivable; false spirituality can be spoken of in every case in which, for example, the psychic is mistaken for the spiritual, without necessarily going as far as total subversion, and that is why the expression ‘inverted spirituality’ is certainly best suited for designating total subversion, provided that the way in which it must be understood is precisely specified. It is in fact identifiable with the ‘spiritual renewal’ the near approach of which is persistently announced by people who are often quite unaware of its real nature; or again, it is the ‘new age’, into which the present humanity is being driven by all available means,[165] and the general state of ‘expectation’ created by the diffusion of the predictions alluded to above may well contribute effectively toward hastening its arrival. The attraction of ‘phenomena’, already taken account of as one of the determining factors in the confusion of the psychic and the spiritual, may also play a very important part, for most men will be caught and deceived by it in the time of the ‘counter-tradition’, since it is said that the ‘false prophets’ who will arise at that time shall ‘show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.’[166]

  It is particularly in this connection that the manifestations of ‘metapsychics’ and of the various forms of ‘neo-spiritualism’ may even now be taken as a sort of ‘prefiguration’ of what must happen later, though they only give a very slight idea of it. In principle, the action of the same inferior subtle forces will be involved, but those forces will be set to work with incomparably greater strength; and when one sees how many people are always ready blindly to place complete confidence in all the divagations of a mere ‘medium’, simply because they are supported by ‘phenomena’, it is not surprising that seduction will then be more general. That is why it can never be said often enough that ‘phenomena’ by themselves prove absolutely nothing where the truth of a doctrine or of any sort of teaching is concerned, and that ‘phenomena’ are the special domain of the ‘great illusion’, wherein everything that people so readily take to be signs of ‘spirituality’ can always be simulated and counterfeited by the play of the inferior forces in question. This is perhaps the only field in which the imitation may be really perfect, because the very same ‘phenomena’ (the word being taken in its proper sense of outward appearances), will in fact be produced in both cases, the difference lying only in the nature of the causes engaged in each. The great majority of men are inevitably unable to determine the nature of these causes, so that there is no doubt that the best thing to do is not to attach the slightest importance to anything ‘phenomenal’, or perhaps better still to regard it a priori as an unfavorable sign; but how can this be made comprehensible to the ‘experimental’ mentality of our contemporaries, a mentality first fashioned by the ‘scientistic’ point of view of the ‘anti-tradition’, and finally becoming one of the most potentially effective contributing factors in the success of the ‘counter-tradition’?

  ’Neo-spiritualism’ and the ‘pseudo-initiation’ proceeding from it are also from another point of view as it were a partial ‘prefiguration’ of the ‘counter-tradition’. Reference has already been made to the utilization of elements authentically traditional in origin, perverted from their true meaning, and then to some extent brought into the service of error; this perversion is only a move in the direction of the complete reversal that must characterize the ‘counter-tradition’ (the case of the intentional reversal of symbols dealt with earlier being a significant example); but at that time there will no longer be only a few fragmentary and scattered elements involved, because it will be necessary to produce the illusion of something comparable, indeed of something intended by its authors to be equivalent, to that which constitutes the integrality of a real tradition, including its outward applications in all domains. It may be observed in this connection that the ‘counter-initiation’, although it invented and propagated for its own purposes all the modern ideas that together represent the merely negative ‘anti-tradition’, is perfectly conscious of the falsity of those ideas, and obviously knows all too well what attitude to adopt with respect to them; but that in itself indicates that the intention in propagating them can only have been the accomplishment of a transitory and preliminary phase, for no such enterprise of conscious falsehood could be in itself the true and only aim in view; it was only intended to prepare for the ultimate coming of something different, something that should appear to constitute a more ‘positive’ accomplishment, namely, the ‘counter-tradition’ itself. This is why one can already see sketched out, in various productions of indubitably ‘counter-initiatic’ origin or inspiration, the idea of an organization that would be like the counterpart, but by the same token also the counterfeit, of a traditional conception such as that of the ‘Holy Empire’, and some such organization must become the expression of the ‘counter-tradition’ in the social order; and for similar reasons the Antichrist must appear like something that could be called, using the language of the Hindu tradition, an inverted Chakravartī.[167]

  The reign of the ‘counter-tradition’ is in fact precisely what is known as the ‘reign of Antichrist’, and the Antichrist, independently of all possible preconceptions, is in any case that which will concentrate and synthesize in itself for this final task all the powers of the ‘counter-initiation’, whether it be conceived as an individual or as a collectivity. It could even, in a certain sense, be both at the same time, for there must be a collectivity that will be as it were the ‘exteriorization’ of the ‘counter-initiatic’ organization itself when it finally appears in the light of day, and there must also be a person who will be at the head of the collectivity, and as such be the most complete expression and even the very ‘incarnation’ of what it will represent, if only in the capacity of ‘support’ to all the malefic influences that he will first concentrate in himself and then project onto the world.[168] He will obviously be an ‘imposter’ (this is the meaning of the word dajjāl by which he is usually designated in Arabic) since his reign will be nothing other than the ‘Great Parody’ in its completest form, the ‘satanic’ imitation and caricature of everything that is truly traditional and spiritual; nevertheless he will be made in such a way, so to speak, that it will be entirely impossible for him not to play that part. His time will certainly no longer be the ‘reign of quantity’, which was itself only the end-point of the ‘anti-tradition’; it will on the contrary be marked, under the pretext of a false ‘spiritual restoration’, by a sort of reintroduction of quality in all things, but of quality inverted with respect to its normal and legitimate significance.[169] After the ‘egalitarianism’ of our times there will again be a visibly established hierarchy, but an inverted hierarchy, indeed a real ‘counter-hierarchy’, the summit of which will be occupied by the being who will in reality be situated nearer than any other being to the very bottom of the ‘pit of hell’.

  This being, even if he appears in the form of a particular single human being, will really be less an individual than a symbol, and he will be as it were the synthesis of all the symbolism that has been inverted for the purposes of the ‘counter-initiation’, and he w
ill manifest it all the more completely in himself because he will have neither predecessor nor successor. In order to express the false carried to its extreme he will have to be so to speak ‘falsified’ from every point of view, and to be like an incarnation of falsity itself.[170] In order that this may be possible, and by reason of his extreme opposition to the true in all its aspects, the Antichrist can adopt the very symbols of the Messiah, using them of course in an inverted sense;[171] and the predominance accorded to the ‘malefic’ aspect, or, more accurately, its substitution for the ‘benefic’ aspect by the subversion of the double meaning of symbols, is what constitutes his characteristic mark. In the same way there can be and must be a strange resemblance between the designations of the Messiah (al-masīḥ in Arabic) and of the Antichrist (al-masīkh);[172] but the latter are really only deformations of the former, just as the Antichrist is represented as deformed in all the more or less symbolical descriptions that have been given of him, and this again is very significant. These descriptions indeed particularly emphasize the bodily asymmetries, and this implies essentially that they are the visible signs of the actual nature of the being to whom they are attributed, for such things are in fact always signs of some interior disequilibrium; this is why certain deformities constitute ‘disqualifications’ from the initiatic point of view, but at the same time it can easily be imagined that they are ‘qualifications’ in the opposite sense, that is, from the point of view of ‘counter-initiation’. The very name of the latter implies that it moves in opposition to initiation, consequently in the direction of an increase in the disequilibrium of beings, leading finally to the ‘dissolution’ or ‘disintegration’ previously referred to. The Antichrist must evidently be as near as it is possible to be to ‘disintegration’, so that one could say that his individuality, while it is developed in a monstrous fashion, is nevertheless at the same time almost annihilated, thus realizing the inverse of the effacement of the ‘ego’ before the ‘Self’, or in other words, realizing confusion in ‘chaos’ as against fusion in principial Unity; and this state, as represented by the very deformity and disproportion of his bodily shape, is actually at the lower limit of the possibilities of our individual state, so that the summit of the ‘counter-hierarchy’ is indeed the place that really befits him in the ‘world upside down’ that will be his. Furthermore, even from a purely symbolical point of view, and inasmuch as he represents the ‘counter-tradition’, the Antichrist is no less necessarily deformed: it has been explained that the ‘counter-tradition’ can only be a caricature of the tradition, and caricature implies deformation; moreover, if it were otherwise, there would be no outward means of distinguishing the ‘counter-tradition’ from the true tradition, but the former must bear in itself the ‘mark of the devil’, so that at least the ‘elect’ may not be seduced. Besides this, the false is necessarily also the ‘artificial’, and in this respect the ‘counter-tradition’ cannot fail, despite its other characteristics, to retain the ‘mechanical’ character appertaining to all the productions of the modern world, of which it will itself be the last; still more exactly, there will be something in it comparable to the automatism of the ‘psychic corpses’ spoken of earlier, and like them it will be constituted of ‘residues’ animated artificially and momentarily, and this again explains why it can contain nothing durable; a heap of ‘residues’, galvanized, so to speak, by an ‘infernal’ will: surely nothing could give a clearer idea of what it is to have reached the very edge of dissolution.