21.09.09
Danielou and the open secret
The discovery of Danielou may seem a bit odd to some here: it is something that is only clear to someone who has devoted long study to the subject of Indian religion, and failed to penetrated its very simple riddle, which is shunted aside the moment people get close.
Danielou’s scholarship is a bit treacherous, and one needs to ‘get the point’ without accepting all his facts. The exact nature of the relationship of Shiva to Dionysus is not so simple, nor is the pattern of cultural diffusion and interaction in the Neolithic in any way clear.
But the issues raised by Danielou will explicate what is often unfolding in Indian and/or New Age groups behind a simple disguise.
Consider Rajneeh with his emphasis on tantra, almost to carry out the project indicated by Danielou.
Our concern here is history, not becoming converts to another historical fiction. Shaivism was not fiction, but its exemplars deal in fictions, we can be sure. Reviving the past is problematical.
With splendid naivete Danielou reveals the secret and the scandal where more tight-lipped poker players (and scoundrels) are plying this theme of the one and true ancient teaching, and doing shadowy things that the ancient Shaivism did in the open. Thus Danielou warns us of human sacrifice in the ancient tantric religion! Sufis, Gurdjieffians, et al. are not so talkative.
Thus, the somewhat thin quality of Danielou’s material nonetheless contains a set of keys to religious archaeology, and to what must have been the lost ‘religion’ of the Neolithic Indians, millennia before the rascal Aryans.
We don’t wish to be conned into another round of derivative new age tantra, but we can appreciate the historical value of Danielou’s key, so obvious, so out in the open, something we have read a few times before without it registering. After many confusing way stations on the road to Indian religion his most obvious analysis suddenly becomes clear (if incomplete, and riddled with possible scholarly errors)>
We cannot revive the past, and must beware of the crooks and con men who will recycle this material.
It all sounds suspicious reminiscent of Gurdjieff and his con, the ancient teachings, their secret, etc…
Use the historical clue, one the more useful from this naif, but beware of the conmen selling antiquities as spiritual paths.
mybrainisafleamarket said,
23.09.09 at 7:33 am
‘Guenon also acquired some new readers during (World War II), including Alain Danielou, a French musician and convert to Hinduism then living in Benares, India, who began the translation of some of Guenon’s works into Hindi. His elder brother, Jean Danielou, who at the end of his life was a Catholic cardinal and member of the Academie Francaise, became interested enough in Traditionalism to write occasional articles on the subject. (In his footnote to this sentence, Sedgwick cites three published sources for those who wish to go further).
Page 119-120, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, by Mark Sedgwick.
mybrainisafleamarket said,
23.09.09 at 7:53 am
Mircea Eliade, who became famous for his works on shamanism, was also a soft Traditionalist scholar. He had been active in Romanian Traditionalist projects and groups and after the communist take over, went into exile.
Rene Guenon’s Ph.D thesis was rejected because ”it made light of history and historical criticism’ a criticism of Guenon’s methodology that was in many ways justified. Guenon made no pretense of following the standard scholarly methods of Indology; for reasons examined later, his approach was theological rather than anthropological or sociological. For Guenon, Hinduism was a repository of spiritual truth, not the body of beliefs and practices modified over time that late 19th-century Western scholarship recognized. While this approach obviously disqualified Guenon’s work for Levi’s purposes (Sylvain Levi was Guenon’s dissertation advisor), it did not for the Roman Catholic philsopher (Jacques Maritain).’
‘Levi’s second objection to Guenon’s thesis was that it left out anything that did not fit Guenon’s theory that Hinduism could be reduced to Vedanta. Vedanta is one of six darshanas or philosophical schools of Hinduism, …for Levi and for later Indologists, therea re many varieties of Hinduism other than Vedanta; that Guenon chose to ignore these was a consequence of the context in which he had first encountered Vedanta, discussed later.
‘Levi’s third objection to the thesis was that Guenon was ‘quite ready to believe in a mystical transmission of a primal truth (un verite, primiere) that appeared to humanity in the first ages of the world’ (Ibid, page 22-23) a belief that was not acceptable within a university context, but would have been fine in a devotional context–which Ph.D work is not.
Even at the end of Guenon’s life, when he had become Muslim and lived in Egypt, ‘Guenon remained not only a universalist in his beliefs, but a Traditionalist, rather than a Muslim in his writings. There are few references to Islam in his work before 1930, and despite a slight increase in references after 1930, Islam never became an important source for him. Nor was it an important element in his reading; his private library contained some 3,000 volumes at teh time of his death, but four times as many on Hinduism as on Islam and few or perhaps none in Arabic.”
Page 77, Against the Modern World.
(This reference to Guenon’s library is also carefully footnoted by Sedgwick and takes the reader to a survey of Guenon’s library by someone who inventoried it. Sedgwick cannot rule out that some books were sold before the library was inventoried. )
(MBTF note: Guenon’s mistake was to take a devotional and personally subjective approach to his Ph.D work, in a university context that demanded an objective approach–thats the idea of a university. It shows a fragile personality unable to shift gears and attain objectivity in relation to a subject in which emotional investment runs so deep that objectivity is impossible, even when career success demands it)
And this was the author, some of whose works. Alain Danielou sought to translate into Hindi.
nemo said,
23.09.09 at 11:07 am
MBFM, welcome back, we need some expose material on Danielou. There are a lot of shadows here.
He is useful for a few of his insights, but much of his work is highly speculative, and of dubious quality.