Biography, Page 2
Frithjof Schuon was born in Basle, Switzerland, on June 18,
1907. His father was a native of southern Germany, while his mother came
from an Alsatian family. Schuon's father was a concert violinist, and the
household was one in which not only music but literary and spiritual
culture were present. Schuon lived in Basle and attended school there
until the untimely death of his father, after which his mother returned
with her two young sons to her family in Mulhouse, France, where Schuon
was obliged to become a French citizen. Having received his earliest
training in German, he received his later education in French and thus
mastered both languages early in life.
From his youth, Schuon's search for metaphysical truth led him to read
the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. While still living in
Mulhouse, he discovered the works of the French philosopher and
orientalist Rene Guenon, which served to confirm his intellectual
intuitions and which provided support for the metaphysical principles he
had begun to discover.
Schuon journeyed to Paris after serving for a year and a half in the
French army. In Paris, he worked as a textile designer and at the same
time began to study Arabic in the school of the mosque. Living in Paris
also brought the opportunity to be exposed to a much greater degree than
before to various forms of traditional art, especially those of Asia, with
which he had had a deep affinity since his youth. This period of a growing
intellectual and artistic familiarity with the traditional worlds was
followed by Schuon's first visit to Algeria in 1932. It was then that he
met the celebrated Shaykh Ahmad al-'Alawi. On a second trip to North
Africa, in 1935, he visited Algeria and Morocco; and during 1938 and 1939,
he traveled to Egypt, where he met Guenon, with whom he had been in
correspondence for 20 years. In 1939, shortly after his arrival in India,
the Second World War broke out, forcing him to return to Europe. After
having served in the French army, and after having been made prisoner by
the Germans, he sought asylum in Switzerland, which gave him nationality
and was to be his home for forty years.
Through his many books and articles Schuon became known as the leader
of the traditionalist or perennialist movement, and during
his years in Switzerland he regularly received visits from well-known
religious scholars and thinkers of both East and West. In 1949 he married,
his wife being a German Swiss with a French education who, besides having
interests in religion and metaphysics, is also a gifted painter.
While always continuing to write, Schuon and his wife have traveled
widely. In 1959 and again in 1963, they journeyed to the American West at
the invitation of friends among the Sioux and Crow Indians. In the company
of their Indian friends, they visited various Plains tribes and had the
opportunity to witness many aspects of their sacred traditions. Schuon and
his wife were solemnly adopted into the Sioux family of James Red Cloud in
1959, and years later they were similarly adopted by the Crow medicine man
and sun dance chief, Thomas Yellowtail. Schuon's writings on the central
rites of Indian religion and his hauntingly beautiful paintings of their
lifeways attest to his particular affinity with the spiritual universe of
the Plains Indians. Other travels have included journeys to Andalusia,
Morocco, and a visit in 1968 to the home of the Holy Virgin in Ephesus.
In 1980, Schuon and his wife emigrated to the United States, where he
continued to write until his death in 1998.
Used with permission of World Wisdom Books
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