GuÉnon, RenÉ
GUÉNON, RENÉ (1886–1951), French traditionalist, metaphysician, and scholar of religions. René Guénon was born in Blois, the son of an architect. He carried out his early studies in his place of birth and went to Paris in 1904 where he pursued the field of mathematics and then philosophy, which he was later to teach. During his youth, Guénon was attracted to various occultist circles and to Freemasonry; he entered several of these orders, including the Hermetic Ordre Martiniste and the Église Gnostique. As a member of this "gnostic church" he adopted the name of Palingenius (under which he wrote several articles in the review La gnose) and encountered Léon Champrenaud (who had been initiated into Sufism under the name of Abdul-Haqq) and Albert de Pounourville (who had received Daoist initiation and was known as Matgioi).
Guénon left Parisian occultist circles as he became more and more aware of Eastern doctrines. In 1912 he embraced Islam, receiving through Abdul-Hadi, a Swedish initiate, initiation and the blessing of the Egyptian Ṣūfī master Shaykh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ʿIllaysh al-Kabīr. Guénon continued, however, to be deeply involved in the intellectual life of Paris, encountering such well-known figures as Jacques Maritain, René Grousset, and others; in 1921 he published his first book, Introduction générale à l'étude des doctrines hindoues, a work originally prepared as a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, a work that marked a major turning point in the study of Eastern doctrines in the West.
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