From the Editorial:

The analysis and predictions of Twentieth century traditionalists have, to a large extent, been vindicated. The decline of the West has indeed continued unabated. Traditionalists have become experts at accurate cultural criticism but have been unable to make any significant impact in the objective world. Several broad schools of Traditionalist thought have emerged, as a result of different intellectual responses to changing social trends and philosophies. The Evolian/Guénonian School of 'Perennialist' Traditionalism gives a conservative critique of the modern world whilst looking for evidence of innate or universal forms lying behind the diverse expressions of different traditional societies. The Radical Traditionalist movement bases its approach on a reconstruction of folkish pre-Christian social ethics and religions as an antidote to the dissolution of the modern world and the non-European focus provided by Christianity. The 'New Right' identitarian movement seeks the revolutionary rebirth of European identity and culture from a post-modern position.br>
This brings us, at the start of the new traditionalist project that The Initiate represents, to the vexed question of 'Tradition' itself. What is this concept we understand as Tradition? What are its defining features and, more pressingly, why do we feel that it is important to protect, extend, rediscover and/or reinvent it? Can there, in fact, be any definable sense of Traditionalism or Traditionalists, when the term has meant, and continues to mean, so many different things to so many different people?

Is Traditionalism to be understood as a cultural movement, a primarily political concern or an antiquarian interest in social anthropology, linguistics or crafts? Is the exclusive focus of some identitarian and New Right groups on 'metapolitics', or cultural struggle bringing about the brave birth of a new culture from within, a tacit realisation of their profound political impotence? What is a Traditionalist stance on the pressing concerns of our age in the West: immigration, the Muslim Question, capitalism, alienation from the land, biotechnology, the welfare state, Europeanism and Nationalism and so on? What do self-styled '(Radical) Traditionalists', '(Revolutionary) Conservatives', 'National Anarchists', 'Nationalists', 'Third Positionists', 'Odinists', 'New Rightists', 'Identitarians', etc., have in common, if anything, beyond a general opposition to modernity? Are these coherent positions, and to what extent do they overlap, complement or contradict each other?

In the course of its life, The Initiate aims to field these questions, strip them, debate them, and maybe, just maybe, find some resolution.