Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century by Mark Sedgwick Oxford University Press £25, 370 pages

A quest for ancient mystical wisdom leads a cast of colourful and kooky characters to exotic locales, from Egypt to rural Indiana to the Swiss Alps. They are often in competition with each other but occasionally find common cause; many of them dress funny; and several are Nazis. It’s Raiders of the Lost Ark minus the stunts.

Mark Sedgwick sets out to chronicle this disparate group of thinkers, each in his own way engaged in the most fascinating intellectual project that you have never heard of: the search for the original “tradition” that they were certain pre-dated world religion, and contained its singular irreducible essence.

As a group the original Traditionalists were westerners, or had a western upbringing, but virtually all had been drawn to the philosophy through the study of eastern religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, or in the majority of cases Islamic Sufism. They were disaffected with western forms of Christianity, science and modernism and saw the future in the east, which they believed was the repository of primordial “tradition”.

They believed that myths of traditional societies can be read like a language, and that modern-day science is simply another set of runes or hieroglyphs and will ultimately be “demystified”.

They painstakingly catalogued the universality of many religious symbols, asserting that this was evidence of a common origin that could not be explained by ordinary “diffusionist” historical theories.

They believed evolution to be seriously flawed, that modernity is a disease, and that history does not equate with progress as it does in dominant philosophies of the west. They taught that each of the world’s major religions expresses the “truth” to its believers and therefore must be studied “on its own plane of reference”- in other words, as if a believer.

This literature has been confined to a very narrow group of intellectuals for the better part of a century, but deserves a wider audience now that the problem of religious pluralism has become central to the future of world security. Few would dispute that a global regeneration of religious identity is under way, from the Middle East to Asia to the US, to eastern Europe, which lends interest to Traditionalism as it does to any universal theory of human religiosity.

Many Traditionalist theories were originally the “property” of mainstream academia. Structuralist anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, and phenomenologists -who would never dream of considering themselves Traditionalists - made many of the same arguments first.

Traditionalism’s contribution is to have co-opted this work into something akin to an ideology whose fundamental tenet, as put by author Huston Smith, is that “religion be treated in global terms”.

The Traditionalists are not the only ones working in this direction. Analysing religion “on its own plane of reference” has become accepted within wider academic and policy circles.

Influential scholars, from Princeton University’s Bernard Lewis to Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, have theorised that religion has become the fundamental determinant of human collective identity. According to Huntington, the era of the nation state is being replaced by the age of civilisations, defined by the boundaries of the major religious traditions (Exhibit A: the eastern boundary of the European Union, which near-perfectly conforms to the boundary of Catholic Europe; Exhibit B: the US war on terror).

In many ways, Traditionalism is the mirror image of Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations” paradigm. It is based on the same postulates - the irreducible quality of religion and the division of the world into the major religious traditions. But while Huntington takes the side of the west, the Traditionalists take the side of the east, preaching a profound distrust of liberalism and modernity.

Against the Modern World is a valuable and comprehensive effort by a non-Traditionalist to chronicle this fascinating and often troubling movement in its entirety.

Traditionalism has its roots in various spiritual movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from the London-based Theosophical Society to various occult groups. The writings of Rene Guenon (1886-1951), whose disaffection with spiritualism led him to convert to Islam, found ready followers, eventually spawning the movement that was based on Guenon’s Sufi circle.

The Traditionalists believed that each religion is divided into an “exoteric” and “esoteric” plane - the “exoteric” being the surface doctrines, while the “esoteric” formed the mystical core of each religion, such as Islamic Sufism, Zen Buddhism, Jewish Kabala, or the Hindu Vedanta. The deeper that one delved into the esoteric, they believed, the closer one came to the essence of religion and to the timeless primordial truths that gave birth to them all.

Some searched for the esoteric among isolated “primitive” groups such as American plains Indians or Australian Aborigines, seeking an intact present-day tradition with an uninterrupted lineage. Others looked inward, for the “fossils” of the primordial tradition lodged in the human subconscious. They believed that unlocking the wisdom required mystical means, including meditation, trances and mind-altering drugs.

Of course, this ended up getting weird. A few Traditionalist groups came to resemble cults, and one of the most celebrated practitioners, Frithjof Schuon, was indicted by a US grand jury for child molesting and sexual battery during one of his “primordial gatherings”, though the charges were later dropped.

Perhaps more troubling was the involvement of several noted Traditionalists in right-wing and fascist politics. Some of the movement’s best-known exponents, such as Italy’s Baron Julius Evola, let their hatred of modernity and obsession with “origins” drive them to ultra-nationalism.

Evola was an adviser to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and worked briefly for the German SS. Several Traditionalists are still to be found among Europe’s “new right”, and in rightwing politics in Russia. Aleksandr Dugin, a rightwing Russian intellectual, has done much to popularise Traditionalist doctrines as part of an audacious plan for reviving Russian geopolitical power.

Concentrating exclusively on the negative aspects of Traditionalism does it a disservice, however. The declared goal of the movement, after all, is a transcendence of religious dogma.

Sedgwick does fall into a trap common for analysts (and several Traditionalist authors), often lumping Traditionalism in with the broader field of the history of religions. He makes several controversial claims, most notably that the work of the late Mircea Eliade -one of the most famous and erudite scholars of religion in the 20th century, and former chairman of the department of comparative religions at the University of Chicago -represented Traditionalism “dressed up in secular clothes”. Although Eliade was a Traditionalist in his youth, few of his students could agree with this assessment of his later work.

Against the Modern World also suffers from the brevity of its explanation of Traditionalist theories, but it makes up for this with a wealth of information on the lives of the Traditionalists themselves. This book is a valuable companion to their works, a comprehensive and neutrally presented archive of the personalities and authors, along with their political activities and personal lives. The theory, meanwhile, is probably best left to them.