Traditionalism is the name of a movement of rather nebulous character. Scholars like Ananda Coomaraswamy, Huston Smith, Mircea Eliade, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr developed an intellectual tradition within America that arose out of the post-war disillusionment in Europe – the loss of faith in Christian spirituality and ethical authority, along with a rejection of the modern man as the direction for the future. It cultivated a shift to Eastern religions, and it valorized the notion of a secret Perennial Philosophy held to be expressed more or less in all religious traditions. The Perennial Philosophy was based roughly on ideas developed by the French writer René Guenon (1886-1931), the Sufi convert who moved to Cairo and established his own order. Through primordialization, religion and thought of the so-called primitives were incorporated into Religious Studies. A range of ideas and terms were introduced into religious studies analyses by this notion, but it was particularly obvious in the use of terms like „archaic religion“, that had a certain aura of antiquity and grandeur about it, or „primitive religion“, which really could not be applied to the people down the road because they did not seem to fit and it would not be proper to refer to them as primitives – after all they were living alongside other modern religions without apparent difficulty. So, too, the term „traditional“. This word seemed to account for the religions that did not fit the evolutionary pattern. At the same time, tradition itself seemed anything but unchanging among these peoples – that made the meaning of the term even more suspect, even false.