The Feminine Universe by Alice Lucy Trent is the first systematic exposition of the Perennial Wisdom. It is an attempt to express in the clearest possible terms and in the smallest possible space the Primordial Philosophy accepted and understood in all times and in all places before the aberrations of the modern world. It gives this philosophy in its feminine form – that being the earliest known on this earth.
Ananda Coomaraswamy described traditional societies as “unanimous societies”: that is societies not fragmented by conflicting factions and opinions, but united by a single, essential Truth. And this unanimity exists – though often unrecognised—not only within all traditional societies, from the red Indian medicine lodge to the Chinese temple, from the Siberian shaman to the Indian guru, from the Platonic West to the Confucian East, but between all traditional societies. Each one is founded upon the same essential, unchanging truths, even though they may express these truths in superficially different ways. Each one is a unique expresion of the Sophia Perennis, the primordial, changeless and eternal wisdom that is the common heritage of all humanity.
While many books have been written about this Primordial Tradition, this is the first one to expound it systematically in its salient features. That alone would make it a book of the greatest significance, but, within an extraordinarily short space, this book does much more than that. It also discusses the essentially feminine nature of the earliest traditions and shows the importance of this in the development of the historical cycle and its special relevance to the developments of the last few decades.
Writers such as René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy have expounded the Sophia Perennis in many volumes. They have done so from a purely metaphysical and Traditional perspective (which is necessarily the highest and truest). While this book certainly expounds metaphysical Truth. which is indeed its very core, it also examines the consequences and ramifications of traditional thought from a lower, more ‘human’ perspective. It takes a fresh look at post-Enlightenment culture, analysing both its faults and its virtues, and shows how, even up to the earlier 20th century, the Traditional spirit remained vital in the aesthetic and cultural life of the Western world. What is necessary is to distinguish between those ‘modern’ developments that are legitimate Final Fruits and those which are truly malignant aberrations.
In the light of this, the book examines phenomena which Guénon and Coomaraswamy did not live to see and comment on: the cultural collapse of the 1960s with its complete inversion of normal values, and most terrible of all, the destruction of femininity and the creation of an unbalanced world in which the Masculine Principle has come to dominate the culture absolutely, extirpating femininity even from the heart of woman herself. This book explains the traditional value of femininity and its essential superiority. It exposes the modern attack on femininity and the absurd doctrine that this cosmic Reality is the result of ‘social conditioning’. It shows how what is being lost by the totalitarian imposition of an all-masculine culture is something of immeasurable importance to our spiritual health and our very survival.
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