In Memoriam Algis Uždavinys (1962-2010) and his Antipodean Sojourn Picture a seminar room in a provincial Australian university where we find twenty-odd students, postgraduates and staff members listening to a talk on ancient theurgy. Out front, a large, bearish man with a booming voice, a shaggy beard and unruly hair, energetically gesticulating as he answers a question about some recondite aspect of ancient Egyptian cosmology or Pythagorean mathematics or Babylonian funerary rites. Each question or comment from his interlocutors sets off a phosphoric chain-reaction of coruscating ideas, dazzling his listeners with the fizz and sparkle of his insights, his discourse punctuated with rumbling laughter. The talk endlessly ramifies in many directions as the speaker explicates his subject with the most infectious enthusiasm. In late 2007 Dr Algis Uždavinys joined the Philosophy & Religious Studies Program at the Bendigo campus of La Trobe University, in central Victoria. He was appointed through the beneficence of a private donor who wanted to encourage the study of Tradition in all its manifold aspects. In this small but lively program Algis was able to find some kindred spirits who shared his unyielding conviction that there could be no more noble intellectual task than inquiry into the perennial wisdom which informs all integral mythological, religious and esoteric traditions. In Algis’ case this primarily meant the study of the metaphysics, cosmology and occult religious practices of antiquity, a field in which he was already recognized as a leading authority and in which he published his major works: Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Platonism (2008), The Heart of Plotinus (2009) and Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity (2010). More than half a century ago, Ananda Coomaraswamy, the great art historian and perennialist, wrote this: …there is a universally intelligible language, not only verbal but also visual, of the fundamental ideas on which the different civilisations have been founded. There exists, then, in this commonly accepted axiology or body of first principles, a common universe of discourse…We need mediators to whom the common universe of discourse is still a reality. (The Bugbear of Literacy, 1979 edition, pp.80 & 88.) Algis was just such a mediator, an extraordinarily gifted one. He followed in the footsteps of such path-finders as René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon and Titus Burckhardt as well as Coomaraswamy himself. And how appropriate it is that he is sometimes referred to in the sub-continent, where his work is widely celebrated, as “the new Coomaraswamy”: we think of Algis’ prodigious erudition, his pioneering work in art history, his intuitive penetration of the most dense and arcane symbolisms, his extraordinary facility with languages, his intimate familiarity with the sapiential movements within the great traditions of the East as well as the West, his ability to make accessible the most abstruse reaches of ancient metaphysics and cosmology, his boundless intellectual energy and vitality. Indeed, it will not be remiss to recall the tribute paid to Coomaraswamy by another Lithuanian-born art historian, Meyer Schapiro, one which could no less fittingly refer to Algis Uždavinys: