I have known about Sacred Web for quite some time, but for some reason I never got myself a copy. When the latest issue was announced on the Traditional Studies forum and my eye fell on the title: “Hermetic Wisdom in Islam” I thought that it was high time to order that issue of this long running “journal of tradition and modernity”. It appears to be an expensive journal for a European. It is $ 20,- per issue plus $ 15,- shipping, also when you order more at the same time. Also the journal seems only available from the editor and not, like Sophia, through Amazon. For these $ 35,- you get a speedy delivery and a well-printed 170 page booklet on A5 format which contains six essays, two book reviews, an introduction and letters to the editor. Something that I notice when slowly rolling into more ‘serious’ Traditionalistic circles also applies to this journal, it is a highly scholarly work and most contributors are academics. There is even one article about “metaphysical order in evangelical doctrine” that is so much over my head that I have no idea what the author tries to tell me. Fortunately this only goes for this article. What we have more is often about Islamic traditions, one article opens with a spiritual biography of René Guénon and continues with gnosis and gnosticism. There is also an investigation of contemporary literature and it’s Traditionalistic background (“Blood Meridian”) and a nice example of ‘applied Traditionalism’ in an ecological essay. The most interesting piece, though, is the one that caught my attention, the article about Hermeticism and Islam. Indeed, “Sacred Web” is nicely varried and it was a nice read. I have also got two issues of “Sophia” on the way, let us see what that journal is like.
2012 Sacred Web, issn 14806584