Gurdjieff in the Light of Tradition (part 1)

by

Whitall N. Perry

Source: Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 8, No. 4. (Autumn, 1974). World Wisdom, Inc.
www.studiesincomparativereligion.com

This fellow doth not cast out devils,but by Beelzebub.

St. Matthew XII. 26

Understood from all sides not only different deep-rooted minutiae of the common psyche of
man, suspected by me and intriguing me all my life, but constated unexpectedly many such
delicacies, which, had they been known to Mr. Beelzebub, would, I dare say, grow the horns
mentioned by meeven on his hooves.
Gurdjieff

If I had bared myself, I should inevitably have betrayed my tail which there on your planet I
skillfully hid under the folds of my dress.
Beelzebub, Ch. XXXIV

WHY Gurdjieff? Because despite Ren Gunons warning to flee Gurdjieff like the
plague, and although the man died a quarter of a century ago reportedly saying to his intimates,
Vous voil dans de beaux draps (Youre in a fine mess), many people not infrequently
endowed with real intellectual and spiritual potential continue to follow his groups in France,
England, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Australia, the Argentine, and
elsewhere, considering him as precursor of the New Age.

Three errors almost invariably crop up when Gurdjieffs name is mentioned. First, that his
work is acroamatic and cannot be properly evaluated except by those on the inside: His
science belongs to the knowledge of antiquity, writes Margaret Anderson, and this knowledge
is transmitted by word of mouth, never written about except in general terms. This is nonsense,
and her nephew, Fritz Peters, rightly debunks what he calls the almost beatific secrecy of this
unknowability cult. Revelation, the source of all basic religions, is by nature revelatory, while
the last thing esoterism in its limitless universality can mean is the exclusivism of clique; schools
of philosophy likewise exist for the dissemination of ideas, whatever their relative merits, and to
claim that there is an indefinable somethingboth ancient and yet newwhich only an inner
circle of adepts can grasp is to subjectivize all possible approaches to understanding.
Intelligence is by definition intelligible, and languageif words have senseis the vehicle of
communication. This observation is essential, since Gurdjieff/Ouspensky followers insist that the
words can mean other than what they say, which if true would cast a grave responsibility on
these authors for misleading countless readers. Tantra, Yoga, Hesychasm, Zen, Taoism, Vedanta,
Platonism, Scholasticism, Hermeticism, the Kabbalahlet alone Freemasonry, occultism, secret
societies, and pseudo-religionsample documentation is there for all who care to find it; the
only things hidden are the particular techniques and formulas a master may give a disciple
(although these are generally known grosso modo), and the extent of a persons inner
comprehension and realization (though here again Ye shall know them by their fruits).
Naturally, if a thinker hoodwinks his thought in dark conundrums, riddles, mystification, and
sundry obscure sophistries, then one is justified in brushing it off as just that. But when Peters
goes on to say that the emotional experience that most people had with Gurdjieff and his work
is not something that can be explained in a logical, convincing manner, this is altogether
different, for here we are in the domain of pure subjectivity, and there is no question but what the
personage under study had an emanation that was powerfully contagious to the individuals in his
entourage.

The second error is one of perspective, that it is impossible to pierce through the aura of
mystery and arrive at an objective assessment of the man since there are preponderantly two
mutually exclusive views of equal validity each to the persons concerned: some claim to see a
saint in him while others find a devil. Au choix! Somewhat as though there could be two schools
of thought on whether London is nearer to Paris or Tokyo. Spiritual sciences on their level obey
laws no less rigorous than physical sciences, and the criteria are there for those qualified to
judge. This in no way means overlooking what we shall see to be Gurdjieffs enigmatic and
contradictory character.

The third fallacy hinges on the idea that since Gurdjieff claimed to be the recipient of
teachings transmitted from antiquity, all depends on being able to determine whether or not the
spiritual organization(s) involved and the line(s) of transmission are authentic, valid, and
orthodox; whereas the whole crux of the matter is contingent on whether he was himself a
legitimate representative and faithful purveyor of any truths to which he may have been exposed.
Mahesh Yogi, for example, stems from a spiritual lineage tracing back to Sankarchrya and is
2
none the more orthodox for that, having perverted the practices of his order while pretending to
be the first to reveal the heart of the Vedanta. It goes without saying that anyone purporting to
come from the fastnesses of Central Asia with a teaching for the West about the regeneration of
mankind could simplify matters enormously by presenting clear and unequivocal credentials.
Gurdjieff, however, has a reply to this: if things were to be made too accessible it would draw
unwanted elements into his path and obstruct the initiatic ends of his missiona strange
condition on the part of a scientific philosopher (who practically considered himself an avatar)
with a manifesto to humanity.

Documentation for this condensed study is drawn mainly from the following sources:

The Unknowable Gurdjieff. By Margaret Anderson (Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff. By Thomas de Hartmann (Penguin Books).

Gurdjieff Remembered. By Fritz Peters (Samuel Weiser).

In Search of the Miraculous. By P. D. Ouspensky (Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Witness: The Story of a Search. By John Godolphin Bennett (Coombe Springs Press).

Gurdjieff: Making a New World. By J. G. Bennett (Turnstone Books).

Monsieur Gurdjieff. By Louis Pauwels (ditions du Seuil).

The Herald of Coming Good. By G. Gurdjieff (Samuel Weiser).

It may be well to add that the seven works on Gurdjieff are far too unanimous in the portrait
depicted to leave any doubt as to the intrinsic veracity and authenticity of the reporting; while the
last book differs from the others only in that it reads like a caricature of this portrait.

Finally there is Gurdjieffs major opus: Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively
Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man (All and Everything), First Series (Routledge and Kegan
Paul); and also the Second Series, Meetings with Remarkable Men (Routledge and Kegan Paul).1

The Background

Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was born according to his passport on the 28th of December,
1877 (although he claimed to be much older), at Alexandropol (formerly Gyumri and now

1
The Third Series, Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am, still awaits publication.

3
Leninakan) in northwest Armenia, of a Greek family originally named Georgiades from a
peculiar culture anciently established in Asia Minor. He says his aged fatherfor whom he had a
remarkable veneration and whose maxims he enjoyed repeating, such as If you wish to lose
your faith, make friends with the priest was originally a wealthy cattle owner who lost his
(and others) herds in a plague and had to turn to carpentry. This man was gifted as a local bard
or ashokh (he apparently knew the Gilgamish epic) and raconteur; and certainly Gurdjieff
inherited in no small degree the concomitant capacity for invention, which could explain in part,
at least, his notoriety as a spinner of contradictory stories. On this point, moreover, his
protagonists admit of no inconsistency, construing the trait as an allegorical lever for didactic
purposes, while serving also as a consciously applied shock technique or trial to render the
physical, emotional, and mental substance of his disciples more resilient and aware. The truth
probably falls somewhere between, Gurdjieff exploiting an idiosyncrasy of character as a tool for
rectifying the characters of others. Whatever the case, since the clues to his early training
apart from a few official documents and passportslie solely in what he saw fit to divulge in his
allegorical or what he calls legoministic manner, those determined to identify the sources of
his message will have in large extent to decode the lineal tree(s) of his investiture by the fruits
which were to drop in later years.

This does not mean, however, that all must be left to conjecture: Gurdjieff was by his lights
a logicalhence practicalman, and much too real a personality to countenance total
duplicity. Already in his childhood he was fascinated by magical phenomena of diverse kinds,
including religious miracles, and he realized forces were at play that could not be explained by
the known laws of physics and biology. By the age of eleven, at which time he says he started
drinking, having all his life an irresistible urge to do things not as others do them, he was
frequenting the Romanys and Yezidis; when finally we find him organizing his own circle in
Tashkent around 1911, he had behind him a private training by the dean of the Kars Military
Cathedral, for both priesthood and medicine, and some twenty years of prodigious peregrinations
throughout Turkestan and the surrounding regions in pursuit of occult wisdom. Alone or with
other Seekers of the Truth he had penetrated more particularly Afghanistan, Kafiristan, Chitral,
Kashmir, Sinkiang, Siberia, and Tibet or lands adjacent. He was brought up as much on Turkish
as Armenian, which gave him a lingua franca for many of the places visited. He had likewise
combed through Turkey, gone to what he claims was an Essene Jewish monastery near
Jerusalem where he would have learned ritual dances based on a cycle of seven, studied
Hesychasm at Mount Athos, and explored archeological sites in Crete, Egypt, Abyssinia, and
especially in the ruins of Babylon searching for traces of the Sarmn Brotherhood
Assembly of the Enlightenedor Inner Circle of Humanity said in an Armenian book
Merkhavat to have been founded there some four thousand, four hundred years ago. The word
Sarmn or Sarmoun appears in certain Pahlavi texts to designate the custodians of Zoroasters
teachings. He learned more about Zoroastrianism from his contacts with the Yezidis of Kurdistan

4
at Sheikh Adi and Mosul, who in addition would have divulged their traditions inherited from
Mithraism and Manichaeism.

* * *

Gurdjieff writes that he had the possibility of gaining access to the so-called holy-of-
holies of nearly all hermetic organizations such as religious, philosophical, occult, political and
mystic societies, congregations, parties, unions etc., which were inaccessible to the ordinary
man, and of discussing and exchanging views with innumerable people who, in comparison with
others, are real authorities. He even professes to have made the Pilgrimage to Mecca and
Medina with Sart Dervishes, although nothing came of it, as orthodox Islam held little attraction
for him. He believed, however, that northern Sufi orders could well be under the hidden direction
of the Khwajagn Masters of Wisdomthemselves in turn delegated by the Sarmn Inner
Circle, the Assembly-of-All-the-Living-Saints-of-the-Earth. We know how people were
haunted at that period with the idea of a spiritual World Centre concealed in the heart of Asia
(Saint-Yves dAlveydre with his Argattha and Madame Blavatsky with her Shambala)2 from
which an Elite directs the destiny of humanitysomewhat in the way that people earlier were
intrigued right into the Renaissance with the idea that the Terrestrial Paradise might possibly still
exist in some unattainable region on earth. Anyhow, Bokhara and not Mecca was for him the
secret centre of Islam, where the Naqshbandya Sufissupposedly infiltrated by the
Khwajagnwere concentrated until the close of the nineteenth century; and it is from them that
J. G. Bennett thinks Gurdjieff adopted many ideas and techniques. The programme for the
movements demonstrations which his group was to give in Paris and New York meanwhile
attributes the sources of the dances and rituals to monasteries in Sari in Tibet, Mazari Sherif
in Afghanistan, Kizilgan in the Keriya Oasis in Chinese Turkestan, and Yangi Hissar in Kashgar.
Gurdjieff also writes that he had access in Central Asia into a monastery well known among the
followers of the Mahometan religion where he became absolutely convinced that the answers
for which I was looking can only be found in the sphere of mans subconscious mentation;
again, that he went to a certain Dervish monastery, situated likewise in Central Asia, where he
spent two years in the study of hypnotism and the mechanism of the functioning mans
subconscious sphere. Bennett guesses that this must have been a tekki (community centre) of
the Yesevi order, a fraternity founded by the shaman-raised Ahmed Yesevi (born about 1042)

2
Thanks to information supplied by a Hindu friend and scholar, we know that these two Sanskrit terms
have a venerable origin, appearing in an ancient Tibetan text, The Road to Shambala. This latter word
designates Abode of Siva, while Agarttha means ungraspable; and in the context Shambala
represents a transcendent Centre, Agarttha being the same Centre hidden in the earth.
5
the first of the Turkish Khwajas and called by the Turks Bab-Arslan, or Lion Fatherat Yesi
which was to become Tashkent. Because of their affiliations with shamanism the present-day
Yesevis are said to be unfavorably regarded by other Sufi orders, but this affinity is just what
would argue favorably with Gurdjieff, given their stress on cosmology, and the use of music,
rhythm, magic, shock techniques, and perhaps also the stop exercise3 which was later to
feature in his method. Another clue dropped by Gurdjieff refers to the religious exercises of the
Matchna monks in the eastern Gobi desert who had connections both with the Yesevis and with
Tibetan tantric Buddhism. All this is very complicated; but then, Gurdjieff was not a simple man.

* * *

A word must be inserted here on the subject of shamanism. In his chapter Shamanism and
Sorcery in The Reign of Quantity, Gunon explains that the religion practiced by various
Mongol peoples is essentially primordial4 in origin with rites comparable to those of the Vedic
tradition; in certain sectors, however, there has been an over-development of the cosmological
sciences, leading to a pre-occupation with the animic domain and the manipulation of powers
belonging to the inferior psychic realm with the attendant accumulation of magical forces which
can present a realif localdanger to the shaman himself, but which is nothing compared to the
generalized danger that accrues when these potent magical residues are captured by people with
quite other ends in view than the shaman himselfa mere instrument for condensing these
forcescould ever dream of. Whether or not in writing these passages Gunon had someone like
Gurdjieff in sight, it is certain that Gurdjieff for all the doors he may or may not have been able
to open did not leave these monasteries with his bags empty. He even told Bennett in later times
about acquiring powers: If you wish to acquire something of your own, you must learn to steal.

How, meanwhile, did he maintain himself throughout those years? By trading in antiques
and carpets and corsets, for one thing, and manufacturing bric-a-brac, repairing broken
machinery, and organizing various rural enterprises of a rather questionable character;5 for

3
Discussed in the next section.
4
It is noteworthy that followers of Gurdjieff take pride in belonging to a primordial current that
transcends the different religions.
5
This cunning old bladeas Gurdjieff described himself at that periodtells how he was resting in
the shade of trees in New Samarkand devising schemes to finance his travels, when he observed a
number of sparrows in the branches above. Knowing the fondness of the Sarts in this region for
songbirds, he forthwith searched out the nearest cabstand, where the drivers were dozing in the afternoon
heat, and surreptitiously plucked from the horses tails the hairs needed to make snares for the sparrows.
6
another, by serving very probably as an agent for the Russian government. He says he was
almost mortally wounded three times in quite different circumstances through being
punctured by a stray bullet. The first time was in Crete in 1896 just before the outbreak of
the Graeco-Turkish War, where he may have arrived as a member of the Ethniki Etaireia, a
subversive society supported by the Russian government to foment trouble in Macedonia. The
second time was in Tibet in 1902 on the eve of the Anglo-Tibetan War. Gurdjieff talked of his
Tibetan marriage and how his eldest son had been appointed the abbot of an important
lamasery. He could well have been in Tibet as a Russian political agent, where his name would
have been pronounced Dorjieff since according to himself there is no g in Tibetan, but Bennett
says the inference that he might have been the famous Lama Dorjieff who was a tutor of the
Dalai Lama and later his emissary to Tsar Nicholas II crumbles before the photographic
evidence.

The third stray bullet was plunked into him in 1904 in the Trans-Caucasian region near
Chiatur, by some milashka from among those two groups of people the so-called Russian
Army, chiefly Cossacks, and the so-called Gourians. These remarks heighten the hypothesis
that he was both running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, being caught up in the
revolutionary movement, possibly in the same group with the Georgian Djugashivili, later to be
known to the world as Joseph Stalin. It has recently been conjectured that Stalin at that time was
playing the double role of Tsarist agent in the secret police (Okhrana) and revolutionary.
Gurdjieff, of course, claims to have known Stalin and to have studied with him in the seminary at
Alexandropol. He grants his propensity during this period for trying to place myself
wherever there proceeded sharp energetic events, such as civil wars, revolution, etc., always
in view of gaining more information about mans hidden motivations, and to discover, at all

With the first bird netted he repaired to his lodgings and clipped its feathers to the semblance of a canary,
which he then colored fantastically with aniline dyes he had on hand for painting artificial paper flowers.
This rara avis was peddled off in the markets of Old Samarkand for two roubles as a special American
canary, the proceeds paying for several cheap painted cages, soon to lodge more luckless canaries. By
the end of a fortnight our habile huckster had made a small fortune with the sale of some eighty caged,
clipped, and painted sparrows, whereupon he took the next train out of town before a sudden rain or an
inadvertent bath in their drinking troughs should expose the birdsand histrue colors.

Editorial Note. An expert on Tibet states that in Tibetan G is a particularly common letter. Witness
such words as gon-pamonastery, gangwho? which?, ge-longbhikkufully ordained monk, gur-
nzahymn same initial syllable as Gurdjieff!); how could a person who had studied in Tibet be ignorant
of such a fact? On the other hand, F is absent from the Tibetan alphabet; the final letter of Gurdjieff
could not be reproduced exactly. (It is possible that if he said he had visited Tibet, he meant Ladak,
sometimes known as Little Tibet, which, forming part of the state of Kashmir at that time, would have
been relatively accessible; but even so, this does not explain his alleged statement that G is wanting in
the language).

7
costs, some manner or means for destroying in people the predilection for suggestibility which
causes them to fall easily under the influence of mass-hypnosis.

The solution he sought flashed upon him during a transformation of character that he would
have undergone during convalescence in an eastern retreat from one of his bullet wounds, a
transition leading to what Bennett calls liberation from the pairs of opposites that Gurdjieff
supposedly achieved in his thirty-second year. His autobiographical account of this insight is
given in the Third Series of his writingsnot yet publishedentitled Life is Real Only Then,
When I Am.6

He had developed by this time highly concentrated psychic and hypnotic powers, and was
frankly becoming something of a menace: people called him the Tiger of Turkestan. For all his
mental prowess, he was haunted by the terror of inner emptiness, and felt it urgent to attain a
permanent awareness that would free him from the tyranny and conditioning of automatic
hereditary factors,to have outside myself, so to say, A never-sleeping-factor, a reminding-
factor. Namely, a factor which would remind me always, in my every common state, to
remember myself. But what is this!!! Can it be really so??!! A new thought!!! Why could not I,
in this instance also, look to a universal analogy? And here also is God!!!

God represents absolute goodness; He is all-loving and all-forgiving. He is the Just Pacifier
of all that exists. At the same time, why should He, being as He is, send away from Himself one
of his nearest, by Him animated, Beloved Sons, only for the way of pride proper to any young
and still incompletely formed individual, and bestow upon Him a force equal but opposite to His
own? I refer to the Devil. This idea illuminated the condition of my inner world like the sun,
and rendered it obvious that in the great world for the possibility of harmonious construction
there was inevitably required some kind of continuous perpetuation of the reminding factor. For
this reason our Maker Himself, in the name of all that He had created, was compelled to place
one of His Beloved Sons in such an, in the objective sense, invidious situation. Therefore I also
have now for my small inner world to create out of myself, from some factor beloved by me an
alike unending source

I came to the conclusion, that if I should intentionally stop utilizing the exceptional power
in my possession which had been developed by me consciously in my common life with people,
then there must be forced out of me such a reminding source. Namely, the power based upon
strength in the field of Hanbledzoin or as it would be called by others, power of telepathy and
hypnotism. And so, if consciously I would deprive myself of this grace of my inherence, then

6
The extracts which follow are given in Bennetts New World.

8
undoubtedly always and in everything its absence would be felt. Never as long as I live shall I
forget what state of mind resulted then.

Translated, this means that Gurdjieff resolved to forego the role of thaumaturge for his own
aggrandizement and glory, and to transmit instead to those whom he considered qualified, his
high-energy hanbledzoin as a reminding-factor for the good of mankind, in view of ultimately
awakening humanity from its mass-hypnosis; and to judge from the state of things, it appears
that a good deal of this force remains in circulation twenty-five years after his death. Bennett
writes that Gurdjieff was, more than anything else, a Sufi The true way transmits a spiritual
power, baraka or hanbledzoin, which enables the seeker to do what is quite beyond his unaided
strength This transmission of a higher energy that can be assimilated to the energy of the pupil
is a vital part of the whole process, and in this sense it certainly can be said that Gurdjieff, at all
times, was a teacher. Everyone who met him reported the sense of mastery, of a power which
acted upon them Sometimes, when the people could not perform the difficult tasks which he
set them, he would tell them to draw on my Hanbledzoin and you will be able to do this
work. He also, though not so specifically, referred to himself as being in contact with a higher
source, and said that by drawing upon this higher source, the work for which he was responsible
would be able to spread and gain strength in the world. I think he wished to convey to us that
we should, after his death, become a means for the transmission of this higher energy.

The reader will not fail to notice in the long citation from Gurdjieff above, his divergence
with Christian theology as to the identity of the Beloved Son sent into the world to redeem
mankind; for him, in fact, the Logos without the participation of a Neutralizing third force
(fagologiria) is purely sterile.

Gurdjieff, incidentally, called psychoanalysis nonsense, but there is notwithstanding an

inescapable similarity in the remedial techniques developed by him and Sigmund Freud: both
men made the contribution of turning magic into a therapeutic device; what Freud calls the
inhibitions of instinct that have to be eradicated corresponds with what Gurdjieff calls the
influence of mass-hypnosis; the transference operated by the psychoanalyst through playing
the Devil or acting as a counterwill (the suspended superego) to his patients will in order
to cure the neurosis7 corresponds with Gurdjieffs transmission of hanbledzoin as a
reminding-factor or counterhypnosis in order to cure man of the psychosis of his
propensity to suggestibility, namely, the automatic manifestations of his naturethe Devil8

7
An intensive study on Freudianism, its background and ramifications, is given in The Revolt Against
Moses: A New Look at Psychoanalysis, by Whitall N. Perry, published in the Spring 1966 number of
Tomorrow.
8
Peters writes that Gurdjieff called himself a devil. Freud likewise said: Do you not know that I am
the Devil? All my life I have had to play the Devil, in order that others would be able to build the most
9
(reminding source) being forced out to exorcize the demon (hereditary factors)
mercilessly, without any compromise whatsoever, to extirpate from the mentation and feeling of
man the previous, century-rooted views and beliefs about everything existing in the world.9

* * *

Back to Tashkent: it is in this Uzbekian oasis of Eastern and Western cultures, where
shamanism, Buddhism, and Islam were practiced alongside Nestorian and Russian Orthodox
Christianitywith a sprinkling of occult and theosophical societies on the fringethat Gurdjieff
first set himself up around 1910 as a mage, professional hypnotist, healer, and wonder-worker.
He frequented the divers occultist organizations, which served for him as ready-to-hand
workshops-for-the-perfection-of-psychopathism where he could observe and study various
manifestations in the waking state of the psyche of these trained and freely moving Guinea-
Pigs, allotted to me by Destiny for my experiments. Results were rapid, and within six months
he was becoming well known as an expert and a great maestro. But his workshops
proved too narrow in scope, affording him no more than three or four human types out of the
needed 28 categories-of-types existing on Earth, as they were established in ancient times.
He thus founded his own circle on quite new principles, with a staff of people chosen
specially by me, and from which was later to emerge the Institute for the Harmonious
Development of Man. His efforts to introduce the hidden teachings of the Masters of Wisdom
to mankind at large were claimed to have been sanctioned through a certain definite agreement
that he secured from a brotherhood or kind of monastery existing in the very heart of Asia
for their future co-operation; by different clues that were dropped, Bennett takes this to be a
Sarmn sanctuary in the Keriya Oasis (Sinkiang) that presumably proffered guidance for the
remainder of Gurdjieffs career.

Apart from the money he sheared from disciples, Gurdjieff tells how he kept himself in
funds at this time, by arranging contracts for road and railway construction; buying and selling
stores, restaurants, and cinemas; driving cattle; participating in oil wells and fisheries; and
dealing in rugs, Chinese porcelain, and cloisonn. Then in emergencies he could always fall back

beautiful cathedral with the materials that I produced (R. Laforgue, Persnliche Erinnerungen an
Freud, Lindauer Psychotherapiewoche, 1954, p. 49).

9
From the preamble to All and Everything, as given in The Herald of Coming Good, p. 47.

10
on his healing powers: There was not a single book on neuropathology and psychology in the
library of Kars Military Hospital that I had not read and read very attentively. Bennett saw him
cure drug addicts and drunkards in Turkey in 1921, and says that he repeated this later in Paris
to help finance construction on the Prieur at Avon near Fontainebleau, the final home of the
Institute. And Peters tells how he witnessed the same thing in New York around 1935, when
Gurdjieff was without other resources: I became acquainted with a stream of patientsat least
they were not the usual followerswho came to him regularly for treatments of various
kinds. Most of them were afflicted with something: they were alcoholics, dope-addicts, just plain
neurotics, homosexuals, and what could be called adult delinquents of one kind or another. I
gathered that they paid him well to cure them of whatever disease or manifestation happened to
be afflicting them. I do not know in what the cures consisted, 10 except that all of them required
long and frequent visits with him at all hours of the day or night. The effect on the individuals
was the usual one: they worshipped him, at least temporarily.

This period of having to earn money did not last very long, and it was a relief to me when it
was over [and] he emerged from this rather woebegone characterization of a kind of quack-
doctor living in shoddy circumstances. The derelicts also vanished from the scene.

In 1911 Gurdjieff took a special oath binding himself in conscience to lead for the next
twenty-one years in some ways an artificial and, for me, absolutely unnatural life. This may
have helped in the accumulation of hanbledzoin; it certainly helped give a rationale to his
eccentric and somewhat licentious behavior which was to confuse his disciples when he came to
Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1912 in search of a wider range of personality-types for his
expanding workshop. Thus, when Gurdjieffs illustrious disciple, Peter Demianovitch
Ouspensky, first met his master in Moscow in 1915, he was discomfitted by the strange,
unexpected, and almost alarming impression of a man poorly disguised, the sight of whom
embarrasses you because you see he is not what he pretends to be and yet you have to speak and
behave as though you did not see it Many people got the impression that he was a gourmand, a
man fond of good living in general, and it seemed to us that he often wanted to create this
impression, although all of us already saw that this was acting In any other man so much
acting would have produced an impression of falsity. In him acting produced an impression
of strength, although not always; sometimes there was too much of it. And Thomas de
Hartmann, who at that time was a reserve Guards officer, writes: I must say that my first
reaction was anything but one of rapture or veneration. He was constrained to meet Gurdjieff in
a caf of such character that if anyone were to find out that I had been there, I would have had
to leave my regiment. At one point, Mr. Gurdjieff said, There are usually more whores here.

10
In Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff says it was through hypnotism: After bringing a man
into a certain state, [I] could influence him by suggestion to forget any undesirable habit.

11
Everything, including this coarse observation, was supposed not to attract but rather to repel a
newcomer. Or if not to repel him, at least to make him hurdle the difficulties, holding fast to his
aim in spite of everything. It is not at all uncommon, as is well known, for spiritual masters to
test the mettle of potential disciples through rude ordeals of one kind or another, but there are
limits and degrees and modalitieseven so.

Gurdjieff, inevitably, found his way into the ill-starred court of Nicholas (whose person he
respected, if not his polity) and Alexandra from whose entourage he took to wife a lady-in-
waiting, the Polish-born Countess Ostrowska. He was not the first wonder-worker to arrive,
having been preceded by such luminariesgiven entrance through the spiritualist salon noir
of the Countess Ignatievas Matre Philippe, the former butchers boy from Lyon become
hypnotist and healer, and named through the Tsarinas insistence Russian military doctor (not
recognized by France) with the rank of army general and membership in the Council of State
presided over by the Tsar, and who before he was expulsed foretold the immanent coming to the
Romanoffs of a messenger of God; Papus (Dr. Grard Encausse), the celebrated magnetizer,
occultist, Martinist-Freemason, and disciple of Philippe, who the same as Rasputincorrectly
predicted that his own death would coincide with the outbreak of the Revolution; Mitia Kobita,
the one-armed hunchback and fool in Jesus Christ, a stutterer only able to pronounce Papa
and Mama and yet considered an oracle, who in one or another fashion served as a secret
counsellor to the Tsar; the sorceress Dania Ossipova who counseled Nicholas II on the war with
Japan; the magician and illumin Antoni, who was likewise a political counsellor; and then
again, the skilled thaumaturge Dr. Yamsarane Badmaev (called the owl and the bug) who
was initiated in his native Mongolia to Tibetan medicine and magic, and was later to attend the
University at St. Petersburg for a polishing in politics and diplomacyTsar Alexander III
consented to be the godfather of this personage who, while directing a laboratory and clinic for
healing neurotics with Tibetan elixirs, was destined to become the most powerful of all secret
counselors to Nicholas II: no high post was filled by the Tsar except upon his recommendation.
The stage was thus thoroughly set for the grand entrance of Rasputin, who would soon far
eclipse all these minor precursors,excepting, of course, Gurdjieff, said to be canvassed by the
moderates in the court as a foil to the dreaded machinations of the mesmeric monk. Too late,
however; the die was cast.

* * *

Rasputins assassination and the death of Papus both happened in 1916, and as predicted, all
hell broke loose. It broke loose in the soul of poor de Hartmann also, who gives a graphic and
excruciating account of the trials endured by Gurdjieff and his loyal band of followers to
12
maintain the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man amidst the crossfire of the
Cossacks and the Bolsheviks. Nor was Mr. Gurdjieffas de Hartmann always refers to him
ever one to pass up an occasion for entangling (his expression) things even further. Thus one
evening in Essentuki in the Caucasus where they took refuge in 1917, at a time when the rouble
was disastrously devalued, Gurdjieff maneuvered the impoverished de Hartmanncut off from
his monthly fundsinto hosting a banquet at a restaurant, where five-hundred roubles were
needed to cover a meal that formerly cost two or three, and the bill came to about one thousand;
a waiter had to be tipped to rouse a frightened Mme. de Hartmann from bed, who surrendered
what amounted to half a months living expenses. Gurdjieff reimbursed his victim the next
morning, while simply saying, What happened was done for your sake. On another occasion,
the hapless composer was first obliged to sacrifice precious music paper reserved for the
orchestration of a ballet, by stripping it into reels for winding skeins of silk, and then was
ignominiously sent to sell the silk to his former acquaintances from St. Petersburg now living in
Kislovodsk. He naturally enough avoided his friends, slipping at dusk into a large shop owned by
his landlord,where he found Gurdjieff awaiting hint. The silk was disposed of, and they
returned home. De Hartmann saw this as a wonderful lesson in surmounting the sense of class
pride. His wife was also given a lesson in selflessness when forced to hand over all her family
jewels to Gurdjieffwho then replied, Now take them back. Inspired by this magnanimity,
another lady offered up her valuables. That was the last she saw of them. Everything that could
repel, even frighten, in de Hartmanns words, was integral to his masters methods.

Civil war soon rendered life in Essentuki intolerable, and Gurdjieff devised a scheme for
escaping into the Caucasus mountains by proposing to organize an archaeological expedition in
search of dolmens while at the same time planting a rumor that he knew of vast deposits of gold
and platinum in the same region that could bring enormous wealth to the Provincial Government:
people, as he wished to demonstrate to his pupils, will believe any old tale. The Essentuki
Soviet forwarded the request to the higher Soviet in Piatigorsk, who offered unlimited faculties,
including two railway wagons to take the party to Maikop in 1918 when rail travel was almost
exclusively reserved for troop movements. Ouspensky, who did not accompany the expedition,
said that a large amount of alcohol would be needed for washing the gold. Gurdjieff got the
message, and the government came through with gallons of pure spiritsotherwise
unobtainablewhich was divided among the party in bottles labeled Medicine for the treatment
of cholera, while another portion that was denatured was rendered potable by filtering through
hot bread and baked onions and then put into bottles marked Medicine for the treatment of
malaria.

Gurdjieff was able to get the necessary papers and new Soviet passports for the group of
some thirty persons; he trained the men and women to carry seventy and fifty-pound packs
respectively by practicing with stone-weighted rucksacks; he taught them navigation by the stars
and how to walk in mountains at night. The rules were Draconian, writes de Hartmann: we
13
were no longer to be husbands or wives, or brothers, or sisters, to one another: we had to accept
for the duration of the expedition unquestioning obedience to the leader, Mr. Gurdjieff. As the
expedition would involve us in deadly perils, we had to fulfill every order exactly; disobedience
would be punishable even by death, and saying this Mr. Gurdjieff put a large revolver on the
table.

From Maikop they journeyed southeastward with pack animals over the mountains,
crisscrossing the Bolshevik and White Army lines at least five times, and having little but faith in
their leaders experienced resourcefulness to hold them together through every conceivable
difficultyincluding a foray with highwaymenuntil finally they reached the Black Sea town
of Sochi. The day before, in the hills above, they had triumphantly discovered a dolmenthough
no goldwith the help of some hunters who were dumb-founded when Gurdjieff took
measurements and revealed still two more that were completely unknown to these men of the
region.

Then in January, 1919, they continued to Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, where the old regime
yet existed. The Municipal Council lent a hand in getting the Institute re-established, and it was
here in this community still flourishing with cultural life that the painter Alexander de Salzmann
and his wife Jeanne, who was then teaching the Dalcroze system of dancing, joined the group,
where their expertise was exploited for the choreography.

We next find the groupnow reshuffledin Turkey on their way to Europe, in June
1920,a country easier of entry than exit for Gurdjieff, since the authorities had received a
dispatch from New Delhi warning that he was a very dangerous Russian agent, with the result
that he was considered suspect and thus unable to obtain permission to leave the land. Not one to
sit on his hands, Gurdjieff responded by opening a branch of the Institute in Constantinople,
where he went hard to work on his master ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians, and had his
troupe stage among other things supernatural phenomena such as hypnotism, action at a distance,
and thought transference.

In 1921 Gurdjieff was able to move on to Germany, where he thought of taking over the
idled Dalcroze Institute of Eurythmic Dance at Hellerau near Dresden; but an invitation from
Lady Rothermere and other rich friends of Ouspensky who was now in London tempted him to
come to England, and there might he have stayed had not the Home Office refused him and his
group visas extending beyond one month.

* * *

14
 The following phase of this indefatigable career opens at Avon near Fontainebleau, forty
miles from Paris, in the summer of 1922, where Mme. de Hartmann in the role of secretary to
Gurdjieff came upon an abandoned mansion with weed-infested park, that had been remodeled
from a seventeenth century monastery for Priors and now called the Chteau du Prieur, said to
have once been the residence of Madame de Maintenon. It was presently the property of the
widow of Matre Labori, the famous lawyer who defended Dreyfus and who received as
recompense from the Dreyfus family this estate. The asking price was a million francs, and
although Gurdjieff had exhausted his funds in getting his pupils moved from Germany to France,
he gave out the order from Paris to have the place purchased, sight unseen. Olga de Hartmann
practiced on the widow the persuasion techniques learned from her Master and was able to
secure some sort of lease with the option to buy. A call for help was then launched to the
wealthy, while Gurdjieff with his usual acumen opened a clinic in Paris for drunkards and dope
addicts, ventured in Azerbaijan oil, and aided Russian migrs in starting restaurants in
Montmartre which later paid off handsome dividends. All this, moreover, with the initial need
for interpreters, thus rendering more difficult of achievement that instant psychic grip which he
counted on establishing with clients.

By November the Prieur was aswarm with disciples and visitors of many nationalities and
callings, both rich and poor, artists, writers, doctors, professors, and musicians, from bejeweled
American widows to ragged poets, all of whom except the transients and decrepit were put to
Herculean tasks from dawn to sundown, building, felling trees, sawing timber, caring for a
multitude of domestic animals, toiling in the kitchen, house, and laundry, tending the flower and
vegetable gardens, and then at days end, changing for dinner, followed by an evening of Sacred
Gymnastics, or perhaps a lecture by Gurdjieff, or some old tunes on his little accordion-piano.
Around midnight he would disdainfully call out: Kto hochet spat, mojet itti spat, or Who want
sleep go sleep; but few would leave, knowing that the real teachings were reserved only for
those who persevered to the breaking-point of endurance.

The grounds featured a Study House constructed from a surplus Zeppelin hangar obtained
from the French Air Force for the cost of removal; it was before long converted into a kind of
pseudo-Oriental pavilion replete with priceless Asian rugs, hangings, cushions, goatskins, raised
divans, visitors benches, a stage with the Enneagram11 figured above and a special box or
Kosshah for Mr. Gurdjieff, fountains with fish (or on exceptional occasion champagne),
colored lights, and of coursea grand piano. All pupils had to remove their shoes before
entering, and the men were grouped separately from the women. For de Hartmann it
created2010063 the impression of a mosque, although in place of Qurnic inscriptions, the cloth
ceiling featured aphorisms by Gurdjieff painted and embroidered in a special script of his

11
Explained in the next section.

15
invention which read vertically and suggested a jumble of Oriental alphabets disincarnate as a
dream. The disciples were required to learn this lettering and ponder such arcane platitudes as: I
love him who loves work; The best means of obtaining felicity in this life is the ability to consider
externally always, internally never (sic); Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge
of the West, and then seek; The highest achievement of man is to be able TO DO; and so forth.

Gurdjieffor G. as his intimates referred to himchristened his quarters on the second

floor of the Prieur The Ritz, where he set up in the manner of a pasha. Photographs taken at this
period portray a stocky Levantine character with dome-like shaven head, huge baleful eyes, and
a fierce moustache tucked between cheeks that hide a sarcastic glimmer of the mischievous and
comic.

He drove his charges like a Turk to wake them out of their inherited stain of complacency,
sauntering through the grounds tarboosh aslant and puffing at long black cigarettes (although
smoking was discountenanced for the others less advanced in their Harmonious Development),
cajoling, praising, and cursing by turns. His rages, however simulated, were terrible to behold,
for his entire body would shake, his face grow purple and a stream of vituperation would pour
out, to cite Bennett. But he was also capable of dispensing sweetsboth literally and
figuratively; and yet if a disciple mastered a chore or betrayed pleasure in his task, he risked
being promptly reassigned to something disagreeable. No one dared complain; even the flies
infesting the kitchen were tolerated as a test. Without Gurdjieffs organizational skill and
mastery of every art and craft from musical composition and Eastern cooking, to animal
husbandry, masonry, stonecraft, agronomy, tailoring, carpentry, and the repair of electrical
equipment, the place would have come apart at the seams; and yet precisely because of his
Asiatic miscomprehension of Europeans capacity for effort, there were those who cracked
physically, emotionally, and psychically, with more than one death and suicide. Peters absolves
him of responsibility for Katherine Mansfields death, however, arguing justifiably that she was
already wasted with tuberculosis when she arrived at Fontainebleau, and that it was her affair if
she chose to shorten her days there rather than prolonging them in a sanatorium. Still, it seems
rather excessive having this frail creature quartered in the stable over the cows in the damp cold
of winter, purportedly to benefit from the bovine exhalationsphysical and spiritual.

Life at the Prieur was not entirely Spartan; there were diversions, such as the motorcade-
picnics, a joy to all but those who had to be in his huge open landau when Gurdjieff instead of
the Russian chauffeur took the wheel. Provided plans did not change at the last moment, and
provided the car could make the steep uphill run leading into the forests of Fontainebleau, and
provided one of the frequent mechanical failures did not materialize, the cortege of his calves
cruised into the country, hampers charged like cornucopias with caviar and melons, and awash
with champagne, armagnac, and vodka. Then a halt might be called in some tumble-down
village, the party trooping into a caf, where Gurdjieff flourishing a wallet stuffed with thousand-

16
franc notes would order drinks for all present, and maybe treat the local citizenry with an air on
the single-handed accordion, or, on later excursions, write a few snatches of Beelzebub at a
sidewalk table.

And Peters remembers his joy as a child at Fontainebleau the day Gurdjieff on a whim
bought two hundred bicycles and ordered everyone out riding them. But the biggest occasions
were the Saturday feast days, when the Forest Philosophersas the devotees were called
gave public evening demonstrations of their dances and staged pseudo-magical phenomena.
These evenings also featured a special banquet dedicated to the Science of Idiotism, said to be
derived from an ancient Central Asian institution called the Chamodar, or Master of the Feast.
Gurdjieff had learned from a Sufi community that there are twenty-one gradations of reason or
idiotism in mans evolution from his natural reasonless state to the highest state of Our
Endlessness, or God. As the last three states are reserved for God and his sons, that left open
within the generic category of All Hopeless Idiots eighteen specific grades to choose from,
each person being free to decide what type of idiotism best accorded with his nature,the
compassionate idiot, the squirming idiot, the zigzag, doubting, swaggering, or enlightened idiot,
as the case might be. The ancient sages taught that alcohol was used to actualize ones degree
of idiotism. Dr. Christopher Evans has amusingly if not very flatteringly described this event in
his Cults of Unreason: At these sessions Gurdjieff, who was a great tippler, would call a long
series of toasts to various kinds of idiot, in which all, whether teetotallers or not, were obliged
to participate. It was a great evening for those who liked alcohol, and a nightmare for those who
didnt. The Russians many biographers, great and small, have made numerous attempts at
explaining the significance of the idiots toast, and most have come to the conclusion that the
not particularly ambiguous word had some symbolic significance. No one, it seems, has ever
seriously contemplated the possibility that the idiots in question were those seated at the table,
though one suspects that Gurdjieff, with fez awry and flushed, beaming face, had a pretty good
idea of whom he was thinking as he raised his glass on high.

* * *

By December, 1923, the dances and music were perfected to the point that a performance
was able to be given at the Thtre des Champs Elyses. This in turn led to an invitation for the
Master impresario and his troupe to demonstrate their theatrics in America. Here again Gurdjieff
showed his organizational skill, arranging for complete outfits of clothing, and getting passports
validated for the Russians, Lithuanians, Armenians, and Poles in the group. Early in 1924 they
sailed to New York on the Paris, Mr. Gurdjieff occupying a first-class cabin, the others
berthed in second; the company was allowed the use of the first-class lounges, however, in
17
exchange for a performance of the Movements on behalf of the crew. The crossing was
particularly rough, and de Hartmann recalls the night of the spectacle with Gurdjieff in the front
row suddenly shouting, Stop! and the dancers in frozen contortions slithering to starboard, then
to port, while the piano slowly, but steadily, slid from one side of the stage to the other, myself
following it on my chair.

With the help of rich admirers, concert halls were hired in New York, where Walter
Damrosch himself attended a performance, in Philadelphia and Boston, where they played to
Harvard University professors and students, then Chicago, with finally a gala demonstration
given at Carnegie Hall in April before the company returned to France to prepare a second
American tour for the following autumn.

These plans were shattered by an automobile accident in July that almost cost Gurdjieff his
life, and brought the Institute to a jarring halt. In his words: As a final chord, this battered
physical body of mine crashed with an automobile going at a speed of ninety kilometers an hour
into a very thick tree alongside the road in Fontainebleau forest one week [it was actually
several] after my return to Europe from America. From such a promenade, it was discovered
that I was not destroyed and several months later, to my misfortune, into my totally mutilated
body there returned in full force, with all its former attributes, my consciousness. He must have
had a premonition of this accident, for it was imputed to a faulty steering wheel on his Citroen,
which he had just had checked at a garage before taking the calamitous drive. He anyhow saw
the mishap as the manifestation of a power hostile to his aim, a power with which he could not
contendin Bennetts words.

Gurdjieff was transported almost immediately from the hospital at Avon to the Prieur,
where he regained consciousness after five days, but recovery came very slowly. De Hartmann
writes that as soon as he was able to get up and stroll about with the help of his wife or one of
us, he began to ask to have tall trees cut down to make big bonfires in the park almost every
day. Fire evidently pleased Mr. Gurdjieff; we thought that he drew a kind of force from it, and
we tried to provide him with as many as possible. But the felling of the trees was a difficult
matter. Did it not occur to de Hartmann that there might also have been an element of
vengeance here against a very thick tree?

This was a bad time for the founder of the now paralyzed Institute. His mother was dying,
his wife was dying, the Russianshelpless refugees in a land where few knew the language and
their one idol lay strickensat huddled, crushed, in the corridors of the chteau; virtually all of
the English departed, with their tails between their legsin Gurdjieffs idiom, and about the
only financial support remaining for the heavily indebted Institute was from the journalist and
critic, Alfred Richard Orage, then setting up groups in New York, Chicago, and Boston.
Gurdjieff was outraged at being abandoned by Ouspensky and his English group, although he in
part at least had himself to thank, already having badly wounded this aristocratic mathematician-
18
thinker back in Essentuki in 1918 by the incomprehensible artistry with which he managed to
alienate the most loyal disciples: Ouspensky logically began reasoning that there might be more
than one way and one man for putting the priceless teachings of the Masters of Wisdom into
practice.

Indeed Ouspensky, a dry, precise, and somewhat humorless intellectual whose one fatal
limitation was the inability to see beyond the psychic domain, was except for this limitation the
very antithesis of his Rabelaisian guru, who modeled himself after the fabulous Mull Nasr ad-
Din. He nevertheless visited Fontainebleau from time to time in an effort to maintain harmony
between the two groups; and it was only when Gurdjieff sailed for America that the rupture
possibly provoked by money mattersbecame established. Just before this, Winifred Alice
Beaumont (soon to marry Bennett) had interrogated Ouspensky: I want you to tell me the truth
about Gurdjieff. I know he is not an ordinary man, but I cannot tell if he is very good or very
bad and the immediate reply was: I can assure you that Gurdjieff is a good man. Yet by the
time of the auto crash, Ouspensky was warning that Gurdjieff had two Is, one very good and
one very bad. I believe that in the end the good I will conquer. But meanwhile it is very
dangerous to be near him. He could go mad. Or else he could attract to himself some disaster
in which all those round him would be involved. This hardly tallies with Bennetts assertion that
Gurdjieff achieved liberation from the pairs of opposites in his thirty-second year, but it
certainly tallies with the account given by Peters, who says he frequently warned that his work
could only become more difficult as one learned more; in other words, as one grew one did not
achieve any greater peace or any visible, or tangible rewardone did not become obviously
goodbut the struggle between any individuals capacity for good or evil for himself
became that much more intensified. Mr. Gurdjieff himself was an interesting example of this
particular theory and I often thought that his personal power was such that he could very easily
do as much harm as he could do good.

Fritz Peterss word particularly merits attention, because he not only reports with artless
candor and shattering honesty, but in addition he is about as impartial and neutral a witness as
might be found among the biographers who knew Gurdjieff personally, being neither strictly a
disciple and therefore a proponent committed to the message, nor someone disaffected by the
movement and out to blacken its leader. He was practically speaking a child of circumstance,
raised like an orphan at the Prieur, with no special regard for the teachings, and simply the
attachment or very great, genuine affection for Gurdjieff that a child feels towards a parent.
But he is the first to admit that his involuntary involvement precludes total objectivity, especially
as Gurdjieff claimed to have put something into him as a boy that went considerably deeper than
what a mere pupil might acquire: You learn in skin, and you cannot escape. I already in your
bloodmake your life miserable for everbut such misery can be good thing for your soul, so
even when miserable you must thank your God for suffering I give you. Apparently Gurdjieff
became sufficiently convinced that Peters was poisoned for life to qualify for successor, since
19
he was publicly thus designated, in 1945. This must not be taken too seriously, as Bennett was
likewise a recipient of the same honor during a private talk with Gurdjieff at his caf on the
Avenue des Ternes (Only you can repay for all my labors); and goodness knows on to how
many other shoulders the mantle passed, although Bennett was doubtless the last to receive it, as
Gurdjieff died a week later. Peters assessed the imponderables of his election very astutely: 1.
It was actually true (although I did not honestly know in what his work consisted); 2. It
was intended to expose my ego to myself; 3. It was intended to produce various reactions in
the other persons present; 4. It was a huge joke on the devout followers. While the reader is
not told his definitive conclusion if there was one, Peters does indirectly drop a clue in his dual
evaluation of Gurdjieff as being some sort of self-created, inevitable Messiah, and in a very
literal, paradoxical sense, the embodiment of that excellent phrase: a real, genuine phony
two ideas which are less totally contradictory than might at first appear.

* * *

Profiting from the insomnia suffered during his convalescence, Gurdjieff who slept little
anyhow began devising a scheme whereby to disseminate his ideas throughout the world in
writing. And thus, over a midnight coffee with Olga de Hartmann taking the dictation, began All
and Everything: Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson: It was in the year 223 after the creation of
the World, came the words in Russian. Through the Universe flew the ship Karnak of the
trans-space communication. Never one to conceive anything on a scale less than
Gargantuan, he planned this work exceeding well a thousand pages to be but the first series of a
trilogy, whose second part would be the quasi-or-pseudo-autobiographical Meetings with
Remarkable Men, and the third, Life is Real Only Then, When I Am, where his most intimate
speculations would be unveiled. When he was later able to write himself, he put down his
thoughts in Armenian, which was then translated back by the Armenians into poor Russian and
revised by Mme. de Hartmann before being translated into dictionary English by her husband
and then polished by Orage (who helped set the final idiom) and the English-speaking students.
For Headquarters the author chose the Caf de la Paix in Paris, although he also wrote in
restaurants, dance-halls, and other what he calls kindred temples of contemporary morality.
Then came the shock in 1927: after monitoring frequent public readings of Beelzebub, Gurdjieff
was forced to register the fact that his listeners could scarce understand a word. Whether the
book was too esoteric, or whether his thoughts became hopelessly garbled from the multiple
translations, he saw that it would all have to be re-done. (Some readers may find the final version
equally incoherent, but this is beside the point.)

20
 A decision had to be made. By his calculations the whole work of revision and publication
would take some seven years to complete. Yet neither he as experienced diagnostician nor the
doctors foresaw the possibility of his being able to outlive even half that span of time. He
determined therefore to mobilize all capacities, and if no solution were forthcoming by the
following New Year (Gurdjieff considered his birthday to be the 1st of January old style), then
on the evening of the last day of the Old Year to begin to destroy all my writings, calculating the
time so that at midnight with the last page to destroy myself also.

He now began to notice that his literary output or laborability was in direct proportion to
the amount of suffering he had to endure, lately intensified by the deaths, first of his mother and
then his wife; thus circumstantially the answer to his problem dawned on him at Christmas, that
a principle could be establishedand eventually applied to othersconcerning the relationship
between intentional suffering (for which he coined the word partkdolgduty, from an amalgam of
Armerian, Russian, and English) and creative worka formula to be immortalized on his
mothers tombstone:

Ici repose
La mre de celui
Qui se vit par
Cette mort forc
Dcrire ce livre
Intitul
Les Opiumistes12

It only needed now putting theory into practice, and on the 6th of May 1928 Gurdjieff made
an irrevocable oath before his own essence, under the pretext of different worthy reasons, to
remove from my eyesight all those who by this or that make my life too comfortable. Since
having his friends around was not all that comfortable, for he writes that during his Great Illness
they came-sucked-me-out-like-vampires-and-went-away, one has to suppose that not having
them around would prove still more uncomfortable. We have already seen how he got rid of
Ouspensky. Among his closest and oldest associates next shown the door were Dr. Stjernwal,
Gurdjieffs right-hand man ever since the founding of the Institute in Russia, with his wife and
children; the young Russians Ivanoff and Ferapontoff, respectively leader of the movements

12
Here lies / The mother of he / Who finds himself by / This death compelled / To write this book /
Entitled / The Opiumists. One can wonder that the normal culmination of an aged ladys life could so
traumatize her son; the book moreover is not known. Gurdjieff, however, was extremely sentimental
about family tiesepitaph to the contrary. If this commemoration proves anything, it is that its author
lived the contradiction that most biographers feel was opportunistically posed.

21
demonstrations and personal secretary and translator of the lectures into Englishboth men
wandered off bedazed to Australia; Dr. Maurice Nicoll, a leading exponent of Jungian
psychology; Orage, who left to become editor of the New English Weekly; Alexander de
Salzmann, who went to Switzerland where he soon died; Thomas de Hartmann, because
conditions were made so unbearable that he was forced out on the verge of a nervous breakdown;
and then his wife, because she could not acquiesce to Gurdjieffs demand that her husband now
be forced back. Bennett just before this period had found himself maneuvered into a position
where there was no alternative but to leave the Prieur; he managed, however, to rejoin the
thaumaturge twenty-five years later. As for Peters, he was told at the time of his investiture never
to return; he tried, nevertheless, only to have Gurdjieff close the door in his face with the words:
Cannot say goodbye againthis already done. Orage back in the early thirties, having found
separation intolerable, made the decision to terminate his activities and return to France; that
night he died of heart failurewhich hit Gurdjieff with something of a shock. Even Ouspensky
around the time of his final illness in 1947 was crying in his cups: Doesnt he understand how
much I love him? Why does he not let me go back to him? He knows that I need him and I know
that he needs me.

The prognosis established by Gurdjieff and his physicians proved to be way off target, for he
was to live well over seven times the number of years allotted. While writing at this period, he
also composed more than a hundred musical scores as emotive accompaniment to the readings
from chapters of Beelzebub, which book he managed to rewrite completely within eighteen
months. Life at the Prieur meantime slowly regained its former momentum: for all the people
gone, there were always enough new calves around to keep the Institute developing,
harmoniously or otherwise. And then there were more trips to America, in 1929, 1930, and right
on until the War, mostly spent with his groups in Chicago and particularly New York, where he
held office at Childs Restaurant on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, or one of its branches. Bennett
says there are reasons to believe that Gurdjieff also made one or more brief trips to Asia during
these years; at least the postmarks on letters received show that he was continuously in touch
with Turkestan. And when he spoke of writing letters of enquiry tofriends whom he
respected, it was obviously not his pupils that he had in mind.13

13
For the sake of the record, one of the Seekers of Truth with Gurdjieff during his early travels in Asia
has been identified according to Louis Pauwels on the testimony of the French scientist Jacques Bergier
as being Karl Haushofer, a German army officer and geographer of notorious fame, who was not only
political adviser to Hitler but also founder of the secret society, Order of Thule, to which Hitler and other
top Nazi officials belonged. The philosophical tenets of this order were drawn from the Tibetan grimoire
Dzyan. It is claimed that Gurdjieff was in continuous contact with Haushofer, to whom moreover he
proposed the emblem of the inverted swastika.

22
 * * *

All the tensions and remue-mnage in the years following the automobile accident,
compounded by financial difficulties, finally forced the closing and selling of the Prieur in
1933; and Gurdjieff eventually moved into the Paris apartment of his deceased brother Dimitri, a
rather dank and dingy flat at 6 rue des Colonels Renard near the Etoile, which was to remain his
residence to the end. Peters observed in 1945 that except for the fact that there were no grounds
and gardens in which Mr. Gurdjieffs students could labor, the teaching of his method did not
seem to me to have changed very much. There were still readings, lectures, dance groups, and
interviews with particular students. The only thing missing in the general ambience was The
Prieur itself.

He was perpetually busy trying to get his trilogy polished and published, for although
written exclusively for the Inner Circle, it was clearly too momentous a work to be forever
withheld from humanity. His life style during those years was to buy food at the market, which
he would then prepare, cook, and servehis tasseled magenta fez replacing the chefs hatto
maybe forty or more people in a dining room made to hold six, which inevitably left the majority
of guests standing wedged in halls and doorways while dishes were relayed from the kitchen at
the password: Chain! Some commentators have thought to discern an analogy between these
banquets and the Lords Suppera proof if nothing else of Gurdjieffs dictum about the ease
with which people by the power of suggestion can be made to believe any old tale.

During the war he managed besides his rug trade to harvest proceeds from a company he
owned which fabricated false eyelashes; moreover he apparently maintained himself rather
handsomely amidst scarcity, for in his words: I make deal with Germans, with policemen, with
all kinds idealistic people who make black market. Result: I eat well and continue have
tobacco, liquor, and what is necessary for me and for many others. While I do thisvery
difficult thing for most peopleI also can help many people. Peters noticed, in fact, that his
mentor seemed to support with unwonted deference quite a retinue of old and destitute persons
who visited his apartment each day. When not there, he could almost always be found at the Caf
de la Paix, holding forth like a boulevardier Pythagoras or latter-day Falstaff.

* * *

23
 Bennett renewed the contact in the summer of 1948. Just at this time Gurdjieff set off in a
borrowed car on one of his motor jaunts, heading for Cannes, when in passing through a small
village his car was rammed by a delivery wagon with a drunken driver, who with his passenger
was instantly killed; Gurdjieffs three passengers escaped serious injury, but he himself was
pinned in the buckled car between the wheel and the seat, from which it took an hour to extricate
him. He was perfectly conscious the whole time and directed each movement to prevent fatal
loss of blood.

Bennett reached the rue des Colonels Renard the following evening just as two cars drove
slowly up. From one of them Gurdjieff painfully emerged, spattered with blood and black with
bruises. Bennett realized that he was looking at a dying man. Even this is not enough to express
it. It was a dead man, a corpse, that came out of the car; and yet it walked. I was shivering like
someone who sees a ghost.

With iron-like tenacity Gurdjieff managed to gain his room, where he sat down and said:
Now all organs are destroyed. Must make new. Then he turned to Bennett, smiling: Tonight
you come dinner. I must make body work. As he spoke a great spasm of pain shook his body
and blood gushed from an ear. Bennett thought: He has a cerebral haemorrhage. He will kill
himself if he continues to force his body to move. But then he reflected: He has to do all this.
If he allows his body to stop moving, he will die. He has power over his body.

Although the doctor once there ordered Gurdjieff immediately to bed on risk of dying of
pneumonia if nothing else, his patient disobeyed and came to dinner as usualfractured skull,
smashed ribs, blood-filled lungs, and allto the indescribable agony of those present. When he
did finally go to bed he declined the morphia that had been sent for, saying he had found how to
live with pain. He also refused penicillin (It is poison for the psyche of man) and X-rays, and
yet through some incredible deployment of inner energy he knitted together so well again that by
two weeks he was back to his habitual routines.

But Gurdjieff must have seen that the moment had come to play his trump card, for he now
began gathering in pupils new and old from all over the world. He already told Bennett just three
or four days after the accident to bring across his group from England: Let all come
Necessary not to lose time. Thus this notable English scientist, linguist, mathematician, traveler,
and seeker urged his followers to place themselves directly under Gurdjieffs guidance: I now
have what I would call Objective Hope that I can achieve the transformation of Being that has
been my aim for nearly thirty years. I believe that the same objective hope exists for all of you. I
must warn you that Gurdjieff is far more of an enigma than you can imagine. I am certain that he
is deeply good, and that he is working for the good of mankind. But his methods are often
incomprehensible. For example, he uses disgusting language, especially to ladies who are likely
to be squeamish about such things. He has the reputation of behaving shamelessly over money
matters, and with women also. At his table, we have to drink spirits, often to the point of
24
drunkenness. People have said that he is a magician, and that he uses his powers for his own
ends. What I do know is that he can show us the way to work effectively so as to get results
by the very simple means of invoking the powers latent in our own bodies.

From my point of view, whatever may be the risk and however great may be the payment,
the game is worth the candle.

* * *

Every morning, afternoon, evening, and night: rhythmic exercises, readings, private
consultations, and Pantagruelian feasts without interruption, plus droves of people all the time
arriving; the tension was accumulating until becoming intolerable. What with the battering of
egos and general pandemonium, hard-headed business magnates were reduced to weeping, and
some men and women after a single weekend with Gurdjieff had to leave for the nearest mental
hospital. No matter what went wrong, it was always right, since all served to further the
work.

But Gurdjieff could be extraordinarily courteous when he wished, as Denis Saurat already
had the occasion to observe in an interview with him years earlier. Or tender, as, when playing
some melancholy Eastern air on his little hand organ at two in the morning until all eyes were
moist, he would suddenly stop, intuiting his listeners thoughts, and after a pause say quietly, It
is a prayer. Or disarming, as a timid lady disciple might discover upon ringing his doorbell
when he himself answered and she found herself transfixed speechless before a face whose
masks for once were gone and which now appeared to radiate nothing but charity for the world;
he would calm her with the simple explanation, God helps me.

That autumn the maestro left once more for America, to see his groups and arrange for the
publishing of Beelzebub. The pattern was always the same: gatherings in Childs restaurant, feasts
in his hotel-apartment with music pumped out of the unfailing accordion until about two in the
morning, when Gurdjieff would catch some three hours sleep before a dawn visit to the markets
to buy provisions for feeding up to eighty pupils.

Upon Gurdjieffs return to France the following spring at the age of seventy-two his health
began deteriorating rapidly; and although he passed the summer in his usual manner, devising all
sorts of projects and planning another trip to America, he was mainly preoccupied with how his
work would be carried on in the future. The next five years will decide, he said. It is the
beginning of a new world. I must make the old world Tchik [i.e., squash it like a louse], or else
it will make me Tchik. From now on, I need soldiers who will fight for me for the new world.

25
 On the 21st of October he saw the proofs of the American edition of Beelzebub, and
apparently took this as a sign that his work was done, for the next day he went to his caf for the
last time. Gurdjieffs legs were so swollen with dropsy that when he tried to leave, Bennett had
to hoist him into the car, which he nevertheless insisted on driving. For Bennett it was a
terrifying experience, as Gurdjieff had no strength to apply the brake. After a near collision with
a truck the car crazily coasted to a stop at his flat.

Four days later Gurdjieff was carried out on a stretcher and moved to the American
Hospital, where he cracked jokes over a cigarette while the doctor tapped his dropsy. Bravo
America, he said, and slumped into a coma. At eleven a.m. on the 29th of October, 1949, he
was dead.

Or was he? One of his disciples, Solita Solano, wrote: Four hours after his death his
forehead and neck were still very warm; the doctor said he couldnt understand it. And Bennett,
who arrived on the first plane from England, said after the embalming: I was convinced that he
was breathing. When I shut my eyes and held my breath I could distinctly hear a regular
breathingalthough no one else was in the chapel.

The doctors were even more mystified after the autopsy showed to what a state of
deterioration most of Gurdjieffs organs were in, that he had been able to live for so long.

The body lay for four days in the mortuary chapel of the hospital, where the disciples kept a
permanent day-night vigil amidst a profusion of flowers and throngs of constantly passing
visitors. Then the bier was transported to the Russian Cathedral in the rue Daru, where the priest
offered a short prayer service. Mme. de Hartmann writes: When the priest finished the
ceremony and entered the altar, he closed the curtains. At this moment the electric lights went
outfor some inexplicable reason [according to the priest]. The church was plunged into
darkness, illuminated only by little candles burning before images.

It was Thomas de Hartmann who wrote the eulogy for the burial service, composing it so
that the last words pronounced by the priest in front of Mr. Gurdjieffs coffin in the Russian
church were words from The Struggle of the Magicians. Solita Solano reported: The priest at
the Russian church stated that there has never been such a funeral before, except Chaliapins;
that he has never seen such mass grief, or such a concentration of attitude on the part of the
mourners. Even the undertaker, who had never seen Gurdjieff before he saw him dead, broke
down at the grave and wept. Just from the vibrations, I daresay.

Gurdjieff was buried at Avon, which has since become a Mecca of sorts, as Bennett on his
Coombe Springs estate near Kingston, Surrey, erected in 1957 a curious nine-sided building
designed to concentrate spiritual vibrations, called the Djamichunatrafrom a place described in

26
Chapter 46 of All and Everything where the soul receives second being-foodand laid out so
that the central axis pointed to Fontainebleau.14

(To be continued)

14
This temple of vibrations was inaugurated upon the arrival of the Indonesian thaumaturge, Pak Subuh,
at Coombe Springs, who seemed to be the key to Gurdjieffs enigmatic premonition in May, 1949: I
need Dutch group, for contact with Dutch India. Subuhs visit is a story in itself, already much
publicized following the sensational cure of the actress Eva Bartok. In one month at Bennetts estate over
four hundred people were opened by the mages latihan; and one man in his zeal for progress let his
latihan get so out of control that he ended up dying on the carpet. It was too much even for Subuh, who
exclaimed: Bapak has never seen anything like this in twenty-five years.

27