The Great Triad

Rene Guenon (1886-1951) was one of the great luminaries of the twentieth century, whose critique of the modern world has stood fast against the shifting sands of intellectual fashion. His extensive writings, now finally available in English, are a providential treasure-trove for the modern seeker: while pointing ceaselessly to the perennial wisdom found in past cultures ranging from the Shamanistic to the Indian and Chinese, the Hellenic and Judaic, the Christian and Islamic, and including also Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other esoteric currents, they direct the reader also to the deepest level of religious praxis, emphasizing the need for affiliation with a revealed tradition even while acknowledging the final identity of all spiritual paths as they approach the summit of spiritual realization.

Guenon's The Great Triad was the last book to appear during his lifetime. Even for his regular readers, this book contained largely new material, as did his The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus, published the same year. The author here refers especially to the Chinese tradition, principally in its Taoist form (though touching on Confucianism as well), in which the `Great Triad' is defined as Heaven-Man-Earth. It is as much a cosmological as a metaphysical doctrine that is implied in this ternary of the `three worlds'. In spite of its Taoist title, however, the work draws heavily on Hermetic teachings, Hindu and Buddhist metaphysics, and Masonic symbolism, not to mention doctrines from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is also Guenon's most comprehensive exposition of the science of Alchemy.

The Collected Works of Rene Guenon brings together the writings of one of the greatest prophets of our time, whose voice is even more important today than when he was alive. Huston Smith, The World's Religions

Guenon is an unsurpassed master of the science of symbolism. Martin Lings, The Eleventh Hour

Rene Guenon was the chief influence in the formation of my own intellectual outlook.... It was Rene Guenon who taught me to seek and love the truth above all else, and to be unsatisfied with anything else. Fr. Seraphim Rose, Not of This World

The classical Triad of the Chinese tradition is Heaven-Man-Earth. Rene Guenon places this ternary in the context of universal metaphysics by identifying Heaven with Essence and Earth with Substance, the mediator between them being Man, whose cosmic function is to embody spirit (Heaven) while simultaneously spiritualizing matter (Earth). Exploring Chinese cosmology further, Guenon sheds light on such archetypal polarities as Heaven and Earth, Yin and Yang, Solve et Coagula, Celestial and Terrestrial Numbers, the Square and the Compasses, the Double Spiral, and the Being and the Environment, while pointing to their synthetic unity in terms of ternaries, such as the Three Worlds, Triple Time, Spiritus, Anima, and Corpus, Sulfur, Mercury and Salt, and God, Man, and Nature. Perhaps more completely than in any other work, Guenon demonstrates in The Great Triad how any integral tradition is both a mirror reflecting universal themes found in all other intact traditions and an entire conceptual cosmos unto itself, unique and incomparable.

If during the last century or so there has been even some slight revival of awareness in the Western world of what is meant by metaphysics and metaphysical tradition, the credit for it must go above all to Guenon. At a time when the confusion into which modern Western thought had fallen was such that it threatened to obliterate the few remaining traces of genuine spiritual knowledge from the minds and hearts of his contemporaries, Guenon, virtually single-handed, took it upon himself to reaffirm the values and principles which, he recognized, constitute the only sound basis for the living of a human life with dignity and purpose or for the formation of a civilization worthy of the name. Philip Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition

Rene Guenon, the extraordinary French metaphysician of whom Jacob Needleman wrote in The Sword of Gnosis that `no other modern writer has so effectively communicated the absoluteness of truth,' is gradually being recognized by deeper thinkers as one of the few who have truly penetrated the cloying veil of the modern age. As an expositor of pure metaphysics and its application to the science of symbols, Guenon is without peer; and his extraordinarily prescient critique of the modern world is attracting more and more attention among cultural commentators. Little known in the English-speaking world till the recent appearance of his Collected Works in translation, Guenon has nevertheless long been recognized as a veritable criterion of truth by a vanguard of remarkable writers who evince that rare combination: intellectuality and spirituality. After a lonely childhood, often interrupted by ill health, Guenon navigated the seductive half-truths of occultism toward a deeper, unified vision offering a way out from the confusion and fragmentation of our time. Regarded by leading scholars as the first truly authentic interpreter of many Eastern doctrines in the West, Guenon never tired, in face of the seemingly inexorable process of dissolution in the twentieth century, of pointing to the transcendent unity of all religious faiths and the abiding Truth that contains them all.