[Bhairava]

Guénon remarks the irony in materialism and its vocabulary. Archaic and historical societies through the medieval period in the West understood that the earthly and worldly existence acquires its reality through its participation in a vertical dimension, the dimension of transcendence. Spirit belongs to transcendence and spirit is more real than matter, which lies at the lowest level of manifestation. To call the dispensation that has blinded itself to transcendence, real life, opposing itself to an unreal life lived supposedly in the shadow of superstition, involves not just an inversion, but an obliteration of values. “The thing so named,” Guénon argues, “is on the contrary nothing but the worst of illusions.” The victim of the self-imposed illusion increasingly conceives his own, human domain as having been healthily pared down to pure corporeality. Guénon writes: “It is enough to notice how our contemporaries constantly make use of the word ‘real’ as a synonym of ‘sensible’ without even thinking about it, in order at once to become aware that they have indeed fully reached the final stage, and that this way of looking at things has become so completely incorporated into their very nature as to have become so to speak almost instinctive to them.” It is a case then not of evolution, of which Homo modernus considers himself the culmination, but rather of a type of devolution that is too stupid, having systematically stupefied itself, to recognize its own deficiency, its own impoverishment, and its own vulgarity. Every institution of modern Western civilization promulgates this illusion, which has become universal.