Premodern man was too deeply immersed in the world created...

Premodern man was too deeply immersed in the world created by tradition to have the need of having this concept defined in an exclusive manner. He was like the baby fish who, according to a Sufi parable, went one day to their mother and asked to have explained to them the nature of water about which they had heard so much, but which they had never seen nor had had defined and described for them.

The mother answered that she would be glad to reveal the nature of water for them provided they would first find something other than water. In the same way, normal humanities lived in worlds so impregnated with what we now call tradition that they had no sense of a separate concept called tradition as it has been necessary to define and formulate in the modern world.

They had an awareness of revelation, of wisdom, of the sacred and also knew of periods of decadence of their civilization and culture, but they had had no experience of a totally secularized and antitraditional world which would necessitate the definition and formulation of tradition as has been the case today.

In a sense the formulation of the traditional point of view and the reassertion of the total traditional perspective, which is like the recapitulation of all the truths manifested in the present cycle of human history, could not have come but at the twilight of the Dark Age which marks at once an end and the eve preceding a new morning of splendor.

Only the end of a cycle of manifestation makes possible the recapitulation of the whole of the cycle and the creation of a synthesis which then serves as the seed for a new cycle.3 The concept of tradition had to be brought forth and traditional teachings expressed in their totality; and this is exactly what has taken place during this late stage of human history. But the traditional writings are far from being widely known in the modern world.

In fact had the writings of those who belong to the traditional point of view become well-known, it would hardly have been necessary to redefine here and now the meaning of tradition to which so many pages, articles, and even books have been devoted.4 One of the remarkable aspects of the intellectual life of this century, however, is precisely the neglect of this point of view in circles whose official function it is to be concerned with questions of an intellectual order.

Whether this neglect is deliberate or accidental is not our concern here.