Whitall Perry

Whitall Nicholson Perry (January 19, 1920 - November 18, 2005) was an American author born in Belmont, Massachusetts, member of the Perennialist School, which is based primarily on the work of René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon.

Perry’s major opus, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, is a compilation of thousands of quotations from all the great religious and esoteric traditions, supported by commentaries.

According to Harry Oldmeadow, Whitall Perry is one of the leading perennialist writers of American origin.

Initially interested in Plato and Hindu Vedanta, he traveled to the East before settling in Cairo in 1946 with his wife.

There he developed close ties with the French metaphysician René Guénon, which led him to join the tariqa of Frithjof Schuon.

He left Cairo in 1952, a year after Guénon's death, and settled in Lausanne, Switzerland, near Schuon, of whom he became a close associate.

It was Perry who accomplished this monumental task, which took him 17 years, and which resulted in the publication in 1971 of A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom.

This collection of more than 1,100 pages gathers thousands of quotations from all the great religious and esoteric traditions, supported by commentaries referring largely to the writings of Guénon, Coomaraswamy and Schuon.

In 1978, an English publisher commissioned him to write a study on George Gurdjieff in order to "help clear up the confusion surrounding the Armenian thaumaturgist"; the critical work was entitled Gurdjieff in the Light of Tradition.

When Schuon emigrated to the United States in 1980, Perry and his wife followed him.

He is also the author of The Widening Breach: Evolutionism in the Mirror of Cosmology (1995) and Challenges to a Secular Society (1996), a collection of essays on the pseudo-mysticism generated by drugs, reincarnation, psychotherapy, modern gurus, Shakespeare, cosmology, and psychology.

Perry has also published some twenty articles in the English journal Studies in Comparative Religion on a variety of metaphysical and religious topics.

He died in 2005 in Bloomington, Indiana.

The metaphysician and art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, whom Perry had known while studying at Harvard, had launched the idea of an encyclopedia that would collect wisdom from around the world.