Guenon’s masterpiece on initiation is a tour-de-force to be reckoned with by anyone interested in discerning The Ancient Tradition.  Drawing from a cadre of ancient wisdom traditions spanning the globe (shaman, Indian, Chinese, Hellenic, Judaic, Christian, Islamic, Hermetic, etc.), Guenon demonstrated that a primordial religious tradition characterized by initiation, or an initiatory path of spiritual rebirth reserved for the spiritually qualified, was visible among the major religious traditions of the past- and of today, and constituted a core doctrine, if not the core doctrine among them.  Although we find Guenon’s research absolutely compelling and foundational to our own contentions, we strongly contest Guenon’s claim that this primordial initiatic tradition was valid under “diverse forms” (pg. 65, Perspectives on Initiation), a claim which we find internally inconsistent with his argument that, “in principle there is but one unique Tradition…there can be only one initiation” (pg. 65, Perspectives on Initiation).  Unlike Guenon, we argue that such “diverse forms” are evidence of corruption at its worst and degeneration at its best, of an authentic, pure, initiatic religious tradition- which we coin, The Ancient Tradition.  In this light, we contend that either none of the initiatic traditions of today are truly orthodox due to the high probability of degeneration over millennia, or, that one tradition was, against all odds, able to triumph over temporal entropy and perfectly preserve the primordial initiatic tradition in orthodox form- a prospect we find highly doubtful.  In our view, most initiatic traditions today are remnants of the original, not the original.  Considering, however, that the divine revealed the initiatic tradition in its pure form to human beings in the beginning, a point that should not be underestimated (because it implies the divine considered it of supreme importance, even essential to the full realization of human potential), we find it much more probable that the divine would, from time to time (because of it’s essential nature) need to reveal The Ancient Tradition anew to human beings depending on the degenerative state of society and/or the degenerative state of the initiatic form itself.  This should not surprise human beings considering ALL spiritual “knowledge”, by its transcendent nature, comes, and can only come, via revelation.  Anyone who claims otherwise does not understand the true constitution of the spiritual.  Therefore, we contend that it is completely possible that the pure initiatic tradition- The Ancient Tradition– is alive and well in the present day, however, we would expect that the adherents of that tradition would claim divine revelation to be the source rather than person-to-person transmission over millennia.

“…we have said that affiliation with a regular traditional organization is not only a necessary condition of initiation but even constitutes initiation itself in the strictest sense as defined by the etymology of the word, and which is everywhere represented as a ‘second birth’ or as a ‘regeneration’: a ‘second birth’ because it opens to the being a world other than that in which the activity of its corporeal modality is exercised, a world that will provide the field for the development of its higher possibilities; and a ‘regeneration’ because it re-establishes for this being the prerogatives that were natural and normal in the first ages of humanity, when man had not yet fallen away from his original spirituality…it will lead to the restoration in him of the ‘primordial state’, which is the fullness and perfection of human[s]…”