Is it because Westerners have come to lose their intellectuality by over-developing their capacity for action that they console themselves by inventi… - René Guénon

Thus the sedentary peoples create the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the arts consisting of forms developed in space; the nomads create the phonetic arts (music, poetry), the arts consisting of forms unfolded in time; for, let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries.

If the 'priesthood' is in essence the depository of traditional knowledge, this is not to say that it has a monopoly on it, since its mission is not only to conserve it integrally but also to communicate it to all who are fit to receive it, to distribute it hierarchically, so to speak, according to the intellectual capacity of each.

Patiens quia æterna [patient because eternal] is sometimes said of spiritual authority, and rightly so; not of course that any of the external forms it may assume will be eternal, for every form is only contingent and transitory, but because in itself, in its true essence, it partakes of the eternity and the immutability of the principles; and this is why, in all conflicts that pit temporal power against spiritual authority, one can rest assured that, whatever the appearances may be, it is always the latter that will have the last word.