I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of time travel.
As someone of Traditionalist leanings, I suppose I should consider that as something of an intellectual vice, and eschew it as stringently as possible. The same could be said for the “literary” genre whereof time travel is a signal theme—namely, science fiction, which is perhaps the purest expression of the puerile and anti-metaphysical nature of the modern, counter-traditional, and thoroughly materialistic mentality.
Nevertheless, we all have our vices, and mine is a more than passing fondness for the idea of being able to shunt one’s mind or even body through time and behold ages past or not yet to come. It’s undoubtedly a holdover from my own materialistic and evolutionistic past, when the prospect of beholding the myriad wonderful changes and mutations wrought by the simple passage of time—and the further implication and involvement of life and matter in Becoming—was a thrilling one to my own puerile imagination.
So I think about it often, and wonder frequently whether time travel—as understood by the modern, scientistic mindset—is truly a possibility, or is purely and simply a metaphysical impossibility, a dream that was only conceivable in an age as irrational and confused as our own.
More to the point: what do the Traditionalists think about the feasibility of time travel? In this, we are in luck, for no less an authority than René Guénon himself has pronounced an opinion on the matter, and it is both cogently argued and incontrovertible.
In the second part of his bravura masterpiece The Spiritist Fallacy, in a chapter entitled “The Limits of Experimentation,” Guénon expounds at some length about the metaphysical impossibility of what we would call time travel. And perhaps surprising to some, the eminent metaphysicist also demolishes the notion from a purely mathematical—one might even say “scientific”—standpoint.1 His arguments are not easy to follow, but let’s look at some of what Guénon has to say about the matter of time travel:
“As for effectively returning to the past, this is something as manifestly impossible for the individual as is his being transported into the future. This notion of travel into the future can obviously only be a completely erroneous interpretation of the facts of ‘prevision’… If we were not familiar with the theories of the psychists in question, we would certainly never have thought that the ‘time machine’ of H. G. Wells could be considered as anything but pure fantasy, nor that there could be serious talk of the ‘reversibility of time.’ Space is reversible, that is to say any one of its parts, having been traversed in a certain direction, can then be traversed in the opposite direction; and this is because space is a system of coordinates envisaged in simultaneous and permanent mode; time on the contrary, being a coordination of elements considered in successive and transitory mode, is not reversible, for such a supposition would be the very negation of the point of view of succession, or in other words it would amount to the suppression of the temporal condition…Moreover, we should observe that the concept of the ‘eternal present,’ which is the consequence of such a suppression, cannot have anything in common with a return to the past or a transport into the future, as it suppresses precisely both past and future, freeing us from the point of view of succession, that is, of what constitutes for our present existence all the reality of the temporal condition.”2
In the last part of that quote, Guénon refers to certain metaphysical and spiritual conditions, whereby the temporal perspective is destroyed and the universe is viewed sub specie aeternitatis; this, however, as Guénon is at pains to stress, is not to be confused with travel through time, for in this condition there is only simultaneity, and neither a past nor a future to travel to.
After a lengthy mathematical consideration of the impossibilities imposed by time travel, Guénon concludes:
“The past never becomes the future for all that, and the future never becomes the past except in virtue of the normal and natural law of succession such as is produced at each instant. In order for there to be true correspondence between the two series it is necessary that in the system under consideration there be no changes other than simple changes of position. These latter alone can be reversible because they involve space as the only consideration and space is in fact reversible. For every other change of state this reasoning will no longer apply.”3
Therefore, at a stroke, and using both metaphysical and mathematical reasoning, René Guénon destroys any illusions we may have about the feasibility and possibility of time travel and the future construction of “time machines” by some more advanced—in the technical sciences, at least—race or civilization.
He also demolishes some of the more absurd and outlandish speculations of the theoretical physicists and astrophysicists of our own day, who have evolved elaborate but ultimately ridiculous hypotheses whereby time travel could be possible—typically involving the use of astrophysical “black holes” or other spacetime anomalies (the evidence for the actual existence of which is dubious at best, thus safely removing these speculations to the realm of unprovable fantasy). These hypotheses are very little different from the purely abstract mathematical exercises which Guénon disproved in his body of work; those at least had the virtue of never being considered a real possibility, even by those who posed them.
So although the use of wormholes held open by threads of hypothetical negative energy, as posited in Kip Thorne’s charming book Black Holes & Time Warps, and used to such fascinating fictional effect in films like Contact and Interstellar, may be a brilliant mathematical construct, that is in the end all it is. And that further discredits the very clever and intriguing hypothesis put forth in Dr. Michael P. Masters’ book Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon, in which UFOs are held to be actual time machines, and their occupants not extraterrestrials but “extratempestrials”—our own far-future descendants, evincing every sign of evolutionary advancement, both physically and intellectually.
From the Traditionalist perspective, this hypothesis suffers from two egregious errors: the fallacy of evolutionism, and the delusion of time travel.
Nevertheless, Guénon and other Traditionalists do not completely close the door on the possibility of possessing or acquiring special knowledge of, or even affecting in some way, either the future or the past.
In his essay “The Conditions of Corporeal Existence,” Guénon explains:
“…since actual movement supposes time and its coexistence with space, we are led to the following formulation: a body can move according to one or another of the three dimensions of physical space, or following a direction that is a combination of these three dimensions, for whatever the direction (fixed or variable) of its movement, it can always be reduced to a more or less complex series of components related to the three axes of the coordinates to which is linked the space under consideration; but in every case this body moves always and necessarily in time. As a result, time will become another dimension of space if one changes succession into simultaneity; in other words, to suppress the temporal condition amounts to adding a supplementary dimension to physical space of which the new space thus obtained constitutes a prolongation or extension. This fourth dimension thus corresponds to ‘omnipresence’ in the domain considered, and it is through this transposition in ‘non-time’ that we can conceive the ‘permanent actuality’ of the manifested Universe. While noting that all modification is not assimilable to movement, which is only an exterior modification of a special order, this also explains all the phenomena commonly regarded as miraculous or supernatural…”4
Perhaps it was to those favored few who are able to “suppress the temporal condition,” and thereby “conceive the ‘permanent actuality’ of the manifested Universe,” that Guénon was referring when he wrote: “For no other reason than that manifestation is ruled by cyclical laws, the past and the future are in analogical correspondence, so much so that, whatever the ordinary person may think, previsions [of the future world] have not really any ‘divinatory’ character whatever, but are founded entirely on what have been called the qualitative determinations of time.”5
There is another essay, called “Freedom, Precognition, and the Relativity of Time” and written by the pseudonymous “Ea” of the Italian Gruppo di UR,6 to which I refer anyone who is interested in these matters; the essay delves rather deeply into the issues of precognitive faculties, the power of auspices, and the ability to influence the future and even perceive time from an atemporal perspective.
It is especially fascinating to me, who has good reason to believe the veracity of its claims. I have had the great privilege, on several occasions, of witnessing magical chains performed by a certain chapter of the Order of Janus, in which the future was foreseen, and what might be called a “magical influence” was exerted to change the course of historical events to either obviate or assure that future. Without question, the ability to foretell and reach through time—both past and future—to change or assure outcomes constitutes one of the most potent disciplines of the great traditional sciences that have been lost to the majority of us men of the Dark Age.
Although the Traditionalists seem to have pretty well discounted the possibility of physical time travel, such as is expounded in science fiction, still they have not forbidden trans-temporal knowledge and interactions altogether. Even the most sober scientific minds of the present day, if there are any, are compelled to agree with the first point—though the second eludes their understanding and intellectual remit completely.
Nevertheless, there are counter-arguments to the Traditionalist position, and some of these are quite vehemently maintained by very important and influential occult and paranormalist organizations. The members of the College of Seth, for instance, not only believe in the reality of time travel, but regard it as a fundamental principle—a sine qua non if you will—of their entire historical and cosmological scheme.
I’ll probably discuss some of these arguments, and even some putative historical instances that are said to prove the existence of time travel, in a future essay.
Anyone familiar with the great Traditionalist’s background, however, would know that his comprehensive mathematical knowledge was the foundation of his metaphysical erudition. It is surprising to many that one of the founders of Traditionalism was not only familiar with, but technically well-versed in the great scientific and mathematical discoveries of his day.
René Guénon, L’Erreur spirite (Les Éditions Traditionelles, 1923). [The Spiritist Fallacy (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001) pp. 220-1.]
Ibid., pg. 224.
René Guénon, Mélanges (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976). [Miscellanea (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001) pp. 102-3.]
René Guénon, La Règne de la Quantité et les Signes des Temps (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945).[The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), pg. 44.]
Julius Evola and the UR Group, Introduzione alla Magia quale scienza dell’Io, Vol. I (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1971). [Introduction to Magic, Volume I: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus, trans. Guido Stucco. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 2001, pp. 304-14.]