One of the most successful European attempts to introduce Traditionalism to the general public was sponsored by the English poet and literary critic Kathleen Raine. While Raine was an undergraduate student at Cambridge in the late 1920s, an interest in William Blake led her to Blake’s sources, which she found included the original Perennialists of the Renaissance, including Marcilio Ficino. She also identified similar sources behind Coomaraswamy’s friend William Butler Yeats, whom she held to be “not a great poet ‘in spite of’ his studies in esoteric fields, but because of his great knowledge and learning in these fields of excluded knowledge.” These conclusions were received unenthusiastically by British academics, and Raine might have been dismissed as a crank were it not for the stature given her by her own poetry, the first collection of which – Stone and Flower – was published in 1943, with illustrations by Barbara Hepworth. Eighteen more volumes were published over the rest of the century, and in 1993 she was awarded the prestigious Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
Raine’s academic researches were accompanied by a spiritual search that led her through ritual magic (a group she identifies only as being descended from Crowley’s Golden Dawn, to which Yeats had belonged) and finally to Hinduism.39 Traditionalism seems to have played no major part in her search: Raine preferred the original Ficino to the later Guénon. She read the works of Guénon and other Traditionalists with interest, though, especially Coomaraswamy and Le règne de la quantité. The combination of Ficino, Hinduism, and initiation led her to much the same conclusions as it had Guénon: that her age was the last age, the kali yuga. She also reached the same conclusion about East and West as Guénon. “The materially poor East lacks what we in the West can provide,” she told an Indian audience; “while our spiritually destitute materialist civilization looks to the Orient.” “It is not in the streets of affluent London- or New York or Dallas – that faces of radiant beauty and the joy of life are to be seen. The rich … take their quiet desperation to the psychiatrists.” Raine stressed that here she was referring to India as “a state of mind,” not “political, economic and industrial India.” On economics she echoed Schumacher, condemning technology in “the service of the profit motive, creating wants where none exist, in order to sell the products of the machines it has brought into being. Whereas every spiritually based civilization has placed the highest value not on multiplying wants but on reducing desire for material possessions.”
In 1980 Raine and three apparently Schuonian Traditionalists (Keith Critchlow, Phillip Sherrard, and Brian Keeble) together established Temenos: A Review of the Arts of the Imagination. “We did not use the word ‘sacred,’ since had we done so no-one would have taken us seriously,” explained Raine later, but the clue was there in the title: temenos in Classical Greek denoted the sacred center, usually of a place of worship. Temenos was from the first a somewhat Traditionalist journal, but never exclusively so.
Temenos attracted the attention of Sir Laurens van der Post, a South African friend and follower of Jung, and an early environmentalist. Van der Post was for many years a close friend of Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, and has been seen as Prince Charles’s spiritual mentor. In 1992 van der Post showed Temenos to the prince, who liked it enough to ask to meet Raine. Prince Charles then encouraged her to establish a Temenos Academy, which he housed within the Prince’s Foundation, a body that acts as an umbrella for his cultural projects.
Prince Charles is more of an anti-modernist than a Traditionalist, though he evidently reads Burckhardt with approval and Traditionalist influences are increasingly visible in some of his speeches. […]
Traditionalism may also lie behind an approach to Islam that is significantly more sympathetic than is normal in British public life. In a 1993 speech given at the opening of the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, of which Prince Charles is patron, he spoke powerfully against Western misunderstandings and fears of Islam, stressing the “common monotheistic vision” of Islam and Christianity and speaking of the need for “a metaphysical as well as a material dimension to our lives.” The reaction to this speech is evocative of the difficulties encountered by soft Traditionalism elsewhere: the mass circulation Evening Standard reported the speech under the headline, “Charles blasts lies of Saddam Hussein,” concentrating on a passing topical reference and ignoring the substance of Prince Charles’s speech almost entirely. Not all British news papers took this line, of course, but in the end Prince Charles’s speech probably did more for his own image in the Islamic world than for the image of Islam in Britain.
The most important organization within the Prince’s Foundation that houses the Temenos Academy is the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture (established in 1992), which, like the prince himself, is more anti-modernist than Traditionalist. The other educational organization, however, is entirely Traditionalist. This is the Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts Programme (VITA), which was established in 1984 by Keith Critchlow and joined the Prince’s Foundation in 1993. VITA offered M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. courses, attracting about twenty students a year. These courses are primarily practical, teaching students to produce impressive work – miniatures following Mogul patterns, tiles following Ottoman patterns, and calligraphy and geometric mosaics of Islamic inspiration. To the extent that there is a theoretical element, it is purely Traditionalist – the works of Guénon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy, and other such authors. Visiting “tutors” include Nasr and Lings. The reactions of VITA’s students to the Traditionalist component of their course vary: some feel that they have been tricked (this is not what they signed up for), some accept a Traditionalist approach to the arts to a greater or lesser degree, and some are sufficiently interested to go further, occasionally joining the Maryamiyya, which is well represented among the VITA faculty.
More important than VITA, though, is the Temenos Academy, with its wider role. Traditionalists have been among the Temenos Academy’s most frequent lecturers, but most lecturers have not been Traditionalists. Lectures have dealt with the arts (mostly poetry) and Islam (mostly Sufism) in about equal proportions, and then with Western esotericism (mostly Perennialism), and various other religions. Seyyed Hossein Nasr spoke at the Temenos Academy, of which he is a fellow, on three occasions between 1992 and 2000. Nasr and royal patronage are not the only connection between the Temenos Academy and the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. Like its Iranian predecessor, Temenos is a successful attempt to introduce Traditionalism into the intellectual mainstream, to include what Raine calls “excluded knowledge.” There could be few better lobbyists for a neglected cause than Prince Charles. Lord Young (a prominent British businessman and friend of Prince Charles), talking of his work for a more fashionable issue – the environment – remarked of a conference in North Carolina attended by 100 leading businessmen: “Probably they just wanted to be photographed with him, but the results were good. … People going to private dinner parties at his London home or Highgrove (his country residence) end the evening by volunteering for all sorts of things they never intended. … He is living proof there is no such thing as a free lunch.”
There are limits, however, to what even Prince Charles can do for Traditionalism in the contemporary West. Much of the British popular press routinely greets his views and activities with a mixture of hostility and ridicule, and even a highly sympathetic article on him may end: “Of course, some of his subjects are convinced Prince Charles’ theories are outlandish, if not barking mad. The spiritual and philosophical aspect of his crusade [against materialism] is considered either embarrassing, or half-baked in some parts of the realm.”
– Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2004), pp. 213-6