Center for the Study of World religionS 
harvard divinity SChool

THE TEACHINGS & LEGACY OF
G.I.GURDJIEFF

ConferenCe anthology 



CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF 
WORLD RELIGIONS
42 Francis Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138

cswr.hds.harvard.edu cswr@hds.harvard.edu

Faculty Director
Charles M. Stang

Administration
Gosia Sklodowska, Executive Director
Bhaswar Khan, Assistant Director
Laurie Sedgwick, Events Coordinator
Sarah Iannotti, Administrative Coordinator

Advisory Board, 2024-2025
Mohsen Goudarzi
Tracey Hucks
Teren Sevea

This Publication
Editors: Carole M. Cusack and Gosia E. Sklodowska 
Conference Photos: Ashley Zigman
Editing Specialist: Aaron Ullrey
Proofing: Heather Dubnick, Deborah Blackwell 
Printing: Red Mill

The Teachings and Legacy of G.I.Gurdjieff:  
Conference Anthology is an open access publication 
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World Religions
ISBN 979-8-218-64396-6

mailto:cswr@hds.harvard.edu


ConferenCe anthology

edited by Carole M. CuSaCk &
goSia e. SklodoWSka

Center for the Study of World religionS 
harvard divinity SChool

THE TEACHINGS & LEGACY OF
G.I.GURDJIEFF







Contents
1 Foreword, Charles M. Stang   
4 Introduction, Gosia E. Sklodowska
10 G. I. Gurdjieff, the Work, and the Academic Study of  Religion, Carole M. Cusack
15 Gurdjieff, the New Age Movement, and the Guru Field: Making Sense of  Multiple Entanglements,

Steven Sutcliffe

PART 1
Spiritual and Scientific Influences that Shaped Gurdjieff  and His Teachings

20 Modern Science and Gurdjieff ’s Teaching, Charles Langmuir
25 Transformation in Translation: G. I. Gurdjieff as Cosmopolitan of the early Twentieth Century, 

Michael Pittman
30 Understanding of  the East, Ravi Ravindra

PART 2
Embodied Wisdom

35 The Question Remains of  the Body, David Appelbaum
38 Gurdjieff: Alchemy, The Emerald Tablet, Contemplation, and Movements, Joseph Azize
43 “She Sees the Is beyond the Seems”: Gurdjieff, Phenomenology, and Embodied Wisdom, David 

Seamon
49 The Gurdjieff  Movements: A Personal Journey, Laurence Morrocco

PART 3
The Values and Value of  the Gurdjieff  Teaching

53 Mr. Gurdjieff’s Original Approach to Life, Alexandre de Salzmann
57 Transmission, Tradition, and Integrity: Gurdjieffian Scholarship as Third Force, Cynthia Bourgeault
61 The Eighteenth Commandment: What Are the Values of  the Gurdjieff  Teaching?, Roger Lipsey

PART 4
Cultural Productions

66 The (Hidden) Fourth Way of  Jerzy Grotowski, Catharine Dada
70 Icons Are Cosmic Diagrams, Richard Temple
74 Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as a Summation of  the Gurdjieff  Work, Jon Woodson

79 Piano Recital

80 Authors’ Biographies



1 
 
 

Foreword 
Charles M. Stang 
 
 
 
I approached Gurdjieff as a curious and sympathetic outsider, as a scholar of philosophy and religion 
in the ancient Mediterranean world and Near East, but neither well-read in his writings or those of his 
students nor involved in “the Work.” Gurdjieff appeared to me, at first glance, as somewhat exotic—
an impression I suspect he cultivated. Perhaps that’s why I was grateful for Roger Lipsey’s invitation, 
in his recent study, Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy to look upon the teacher 
through the lens of two ancient Greek philosophers, Pythagoras and Diogenes. This bifocal 
interpretation helped me to bring Gurdjieff into focus, to familiarize him, and to see him in the 
company of other, no less remarkable men.  

As I read further in and about Gurdjieff, I came to recognize in him another familiar figure 
from antiquity: the holy fool.  The holy fool is an important figure in both Eastern Christianity and 
Islam and a well-known religious type in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus, the Silk Road, and 
the whole Eurasian steppe, including Russia. These are precisely the lands and traditions that gave 
birth to Gurdjieff and through which he traveled widely, as recorded in his Meetings with Remarkable 
Men. I wish to invite you to look upon Gurdjieff through this third lens, perhaps for a third eye. 

In Christianity, the figure of the holy fool is often traced back to the apostle Paul and his first 
letter to the Corinthians, where we read remarkable verses such as these: 
 

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the 
world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the foolishness of what we 
preach to save those who believe. (1 Cor. 1:20-21) 
 
For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their 
craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.” (1 Cor 3:19-
20) 
 
For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death; 
because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. We are fools for 
Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in 
honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and 
buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; 
when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are 
now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things. (1 Cor 4:9-13) 

 
Many of these phrases from Paul seem to resonate with Gurdjieff’s writings and especially his 

manner of teaching. Did he not regard the wisdom of the world as foolish? And did he not recognize 
that, as a result, one who is wise would have to appear in such a world as a fool? That one might even 
have to play the fool to reveal the world’s folly and to awaken (in humans and even in angels) a deeper 
wisdom than the world’s? That one might have to become a spectacle, to endure humiliations, and to 
meet every insult with the other cheek? 

Paul is the least and the last of the apostles, and he understands himself to be walking in the 
footsteps of his Lord, a man sentenced to death, a man made a spectacle for the salvation of others. 



2 
 
 

For Paul, Christ’s cross stands as the most potent symbol of this paradox at the crossroads of life and 
death: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it 
is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).  Although Gurdjieff was a baptized Orthodox Christian, and, as 
far as I know, always understood himself as such, the cross seems to play almost no role in his 
teachings. His Christianity is not found at the foot of the cross. He is not alone, of course: many 
Christians throughout history have sought to highlight other moments in Christ’s life and teaching as 
the true crux, as it were, of the matter. Gurdjieff seems to me to walk in the footsteps of the Christ 
who heals and confronts his audience with confounding parables, and not the Christ who walks the 
Via Dolorosa to his death on Golgotha. 

I will leave it to others who know Gurdjieff’s teachings infinitely better than I do to judge my 
impressions. But let me return, briefly, to the figure of the holy fool. The Christian tradition of the 
holy fool is generally said to have begun with Symeon of Emesa in the sixth century, whose life was 
recorded by Leontius of Neapolis in the seventh century.1 After spending nearly 30 years in the deserts 
around the Dead Sea, Symeon was deemed by God worthy to return from the desert to the sown, to 
his native Syrian city of Emesa, to save souls through his outlandish behavior. With Symeon, there 
officially began a long tradition of the holy fool in Eastern Christianity, especially strong in Russia. 
The best study of this tradition is Sergey A. Ivanov’s Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, where he 
defines a holy fool as someone who “feigns insanity, pretends to be foolish, or who provokes shock 
or outrage by his deliberate unruliness.”2  

Centuries before Symeon, other holy men and women were already taking up Paul’s invitation 
to play the fool to show up the world’s foolishness and to reveal Christ’s wisdom. These holy men 
and women were among the earliest to shun society and its norms and to experiment with new modes 
of piety in the deserts of Egypt. They would eventually be known in Greek as “monks”: monachoi (sg. 
monachos) or “solitary ones.” Although they were fashioned as solitaries, these “desert fathers” (and 
mothers) had to live in some form of loose community to survive at the edge of the unforgiving 
deserts of Egypt. The elders among them were called “abbas”—an Aramaic word meaning “father”—
and aspiring young monks would often ask the elders for a teaching: “Give me a word, Abba.” Often, 
that teaching came in the form of a word, a line from scripture perfectly suited to that specific young 
seeker’s soul. But sometimes, the teaching came in the form of a strange and seemingly fruitless 
practice. A particularly haughty aspirant might be given a meaningless, menial task to do, to test his 
commitment, to break his pride, and to awaken the humility necessary for holiness. 

As I read further into and about him, I came to see Gurdjieff in this lineage, as a holy man at 
times feigning foolishness, provoking shock and outrage by his unruliness, inviting scorn and censure 
so as to teach deeper lessons; and behind the tradition of the holy fool, the even longer lineage of 
ascetic teachers who assign their disciples confounding tasks suited to their individual psychologies. 
How many memoirs from the days of the Prieuré in Fontainebleau include such stories of his 
confounding behavior and inexplicable tasks? 

It should come as no surprise that Gurdjieff is part of this lineage because it was (and to some 
degree is) alive and well in his day, and in his meetings with remarkable men, he spent time among the 
living descendants of these communities, Christian and otherwise, real and imagined. Since the time 

 
1 Derek Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’ Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 
1996). 
2 Sergey A. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. See also Varlaam 
Novakshonoff (trans), God's Fools: The Lives of the Holy “Fools for Christ” (Dewdney, BC: Synaxis Press, 2017); E.Poulakou-
Rebelakuo et al. “Holy Fools: A Religious Phenomenon of Extreme Behaviour.” Journal of Religion and Health 53: 1 (2014): 
95–104; Youval Rotman, Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium: The Ambiguity of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 2016);  
 



3 
 
 

of the desert fathers and mothers and Symeon in Emesa, the tradition of the holy fool also took root 
in Islam, with its distinctive logic and rhetoric among the Sufis.3 Presumably, during his travels, 
Gurdjieff played the part of the young aspirant, the seeker after wisdom, where it was he who had to 
receive the confounding teaching, the difficult lesson, from the abba, shaykh, or pir. In Meetings with 
Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff is the bee collecting pollen from these desert flowers; he had yet to become 
his own remarkable man. 

I readily admit that the holy fool is simply one facet of the Gurdjieff gem. But as a student of 
these ancient traditions, I report that this facet shone very brightly for me. Perhaps it will not shine so 
for you, whether you are new to Gurdjieff and the Work or an old hand. Gurdjieff is, like Odysseus, 
a polytropos or “many-minded man,” and perhaps the way of the holy fool is just one of his many 
minds. I offer it and the longer lineage of desert asceticism as another lens, besides Lipsey’s helpful 
bifocals, to see something new in this old soul.  

I want to thank Roger Lipsey, Cynthia Reeves, and Charles Langmuir, for collaborating with 
the Center for the Study of World Religions for their collaboration with the Center for the Study of 
World Religions in bringing this conference to fruition after years of patient planning. And I wish to 
thank my colleague at the Center, Gosia Sklodowska, for all her tireless work, good humor, and 
inspiring curiosity. Finally, I wish to thank Carole Cusack, without whom we could never have 
organized this conference or edited this anthology. It is a pleasure and a privilege to make these 
remarkable essays on Gurdjieff available to a wider readership. 

 
  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
3 See, for example: Michael W. Dols and Diana E. Immisch, Majnūn: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford: 
Clarendon Press, 1992); Ashk Dahlén, “The Holy Fool in Medieval Islam: The Qalandarīyāt of Fakhr al-Dīn ’Arāqī,” 
Orientalia Suecana 53 (2004): 63. On the endurance of the type, see Vladimir Bobrovnikov and Ilona Chmilevskaya, 
“Entangled Narratives of the Changing Muslim Hagiography: A Soviet Holy-Fool in Post-Soviet Southern 
Dagestan,” Gosudarstvo, Religiia, Tserkov’ v Russi i Za Rubezhom 41: 3–4 (2024): 87–119. 
 



4 
 

Introduction 
Gosia E. Sklodowska 
 
 
In December 2024, the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) hosted a conference on “The 
Teachings and Legacy of G.I. Gurdjieff.” The event commemorated the centennial of Gurdjieff and 
twenty-three pupils’ visit to the United States, including stops in Chicago, New York City, and, 
notably, Harvard in Boston. 

The 1924 visit captured an early and important moment in the trajectory of the Institute for 
the Harmonious Development of Man. It was only a few years old and was making its public début—
first in Western Europe, then in the United States. The Institute’s purpose, underlying values, 
activities, and community life were forged over many years, shaped through Gurdjieff’s journeys: 
personal, spiritual, cultural, and geographical. Exposing the Work to a wider audience, Gurdjieff had 
to determine how to define the Institute and present the Work to a mainstream audience. Giving in 
to his provocateur, Diogenean, or holy fool persona, and hoping that the discerning audience would 
connect with the ancient wisdom, he decided to present the Movements, the sacred dances, as 
exercises, but also as tricks, half-tricks, and supernatural phenomena. This decision heavily influenced 
how the Institute and the Work were received and perceived, and eventually sensationalized, by the 
press and in the intellectual milieu.  

The Movements’ superficial reception arguably became a source of regret and disappointment 
for Gurdjieff, contributing to his later decision to withdraw the Work from public view. These early 
ambivalent experiences with mainstream reception may also have made Gurdjieff’s followers and 
successors reluctant to popularize the Work and open it to public scrutiny. They feared that the depth, 
intention, and values of Gurdjieff’s teachings would be lost in wider dissemination that could not 
capture the intimacy required for the Work. Alexandre de Salzmann captures these concerns and 
hesitations in his keynote remarks: “This Work suffers from a reputation of secrecy or exclusivity. Far 
from being elitist, this is perhaps due to the concern of those who came before us to preserve the 
intimate nature required by this search, to prevent a reductive and misguided understanding of it.” 

The CSWR-sponsored conference in 2024 captured the Gurdjieff tradition at an equally 
consequential moment in its trajectory. Over the course of a century, Gurdjieff’s Work evolved 
beyond the Gurdjieff Foundation and expanded into affiliated or independent communities led by 
Gurdjieff’s disciples or their pupils. Gurdjieff’s teachings and methods for practicing the Work have 
invited new interpretations, and they continue to spark dialogues, if not controversies, among various 
groups and lineages. The Gurdjieff tradition faces challenges common to religious movements: 
balancing the preservation of core teachings with openness to growth and adaptation, retaining core 
members while attracting new followers, and maintaining a delicate balance between tradition and 
innovation. With similar goals in mind—to explore Gurdjieff’s legacy while capturing the essence of 
his teachings and firmly grounding the program within an academic setting—the CSWR faced equally 
complex challenges when making decisions about the conference’s structure and content. 

Unlike the 1924 talks and demonstrations, the 2024 conference did not focus on performative 
elements of the Work. The conference was not intended to entice its audience to practice the Work 
nor to uncover esoteric knowledge behind its sensational and superficial depictions. Many of the 
conference’s speakers and participants have, in fact, dedicated their professional and personal lives to 
the Work. For them, the Fourth Way is not just a system of inner development towards higher levels 
of consciousness, as it is often represented; it is no mere passing curiosity, but a philosophy 
understood as a way of life. 



5 
 

The CSWR’s hosting a conference on “The Teachings and Legacy of G.I. Gurdjieff” reflects 
the broader scholarly recognition of the importance of Gurdjieff and his teaching tradition among the 
many esoteric spiritual movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and one worthy 
of ongoing and serious research. Bringing together scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners 
aligns with the Center’s long-standing commitment to bridging the divide between scholarly 
“outsiders” and practicing “insiders.” Many voices and perspectives are critical to interpreting the 
teachings and values of any religious or spiritual tradition, and Gurdjieff’s legacy is no exception. At 
the conference, in many cases for the first time, representatives of the Gurdjieff tradition engaged in 
dialogue with scholars of religion, sharing panels and the podium.  

Increased scholarly interest can both energize and challenge the transmission of Gurdjieff’s 
teachings, leading to an evolving relationship between academic scholarship and the Work. This 
conference and this volume an inclusive vision for scholarship on Gurdjieff. Openness to dialogue 
and the free exchange of ideas should not, according to Alexandre de Salzmann’s keynote, decrease 
the potency or legitimacy of Gurdjieff. “Today it seems to me that the greatest danger on this path is 
not a diluted transmission of ideas, but the risk of settling into a certain comfort, of fixing a dogma, 
and being satisfied with knowing better states. Gurdjieff, on the other hand, would allow none of this; 
he calls for something else.”  

A scholarly approach can balance respect for initiatory traditions with rigorous analysis. 
Cynthia Bourgeault explains in this volume, “The scholarly interest increasingly being directed toward 
G.I. Gurdjieff by the academic community, while unaccustomed and even somewhat jarring to 
traditional Work notions of transmission, has the potential to bring important new energy to the 
teaching as well as a significantly enhanced influence.” Academic study, indeed, can contribute 
meaningfully to the understanding of Gurdjieff’s teachings and their cultural impact. 

The CSWR is delighted to make these papers accessible to a wider audience by presenting the 
Teachings & Legacy of G.I. Gurdjieff Conference Anthology based on the 2024 conference. Rather than a 
formal academic publication, the text that you hold now is a compilation of reflections by scholars, 
practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who participated in the conference. Some contributors’ 
reflections are grounded in evaluative academic studies, others in personal experiences and 
commitments, and still others span these two perspectives. 

Contributors have expanded their conference talks: elaborating key concepts, offering 
complementary perspectives, and building upon prior discussions. Formats, styles, and voices vary 
across chapters due to the diverse topics, approaches, and speakers. Papers have been edited for clarity, 
style, grammar, and consistency in citation, but they are intended to faithfully preserve the perspectives 
and arguments of different authors. The conference and this publication are animated by a 
commitment to spirited dialogue between academics and members of the Gurdjieff traditions. We 
hope this collection fosters discussion, continued engagement, and exploration beyond this landmark 
2024 event; indeed, we hope this is but a stage on a much longer journey. 

The conference was organized around four main themes that also structure the sections of 
this volume: “Spiritual and Scientific Influences that Shaped Gurdjieff and His Teachings”; 
“Embodied Wisdom”; “The Values and Value of the Gurdjieff Teaching”; and “Cultural 
Productions.” Opening keynote presentations by Charles M. Stang, Carole Cusack, Alexandre de 
Salzmann, and Steven Sutcliffe set the stage for the conference. After Stang’s foreword and the 
introduction you currently read, the volume opens with pieces by Carole Cusack and Steven Sutcliffe, 
exploring contexts for Gurdjieff and the ongoing development of the Gurdjieff tradition. 

In “G. I. Gurdjieff, the Work, and the Academic Study of Religion and Esotericism,” Carole 
Cusack explores tensions in the academic study of Gurdjieff and his teachings. Specifically, Cusack 
examines insider approaches—which are confessional—and outsider approaches—which are social-
scientific—to the study of religious, spiritual, and esoteric traditions, including the Gurdjieff tradition. 



6 
 

Cusack highlights James Webb’s pioneering research on Gurdjieff. He produced the first scholarly, 
outsider-oriented, social-scientific studies of Gurdjieff, and he faced resistance on all sides, from 
adherents and academics alike. These days, Cusack explains, the internet makes instantly available 
previously safe-guarded insider materials such as memoires, Movements demonstrations, lectures, 
insider-discussions, all of which offers practitioners new and more direct engagement with Gurdjieff’s 
teaching. Such availability, however, also changes the game for scholars of movements like the 
Gurdjieff tradition. Cusack emphasizes that academic study can provide meaningful contributions to 
the understanding of Gurdjieff’s legacy by situating it in comparative contexts and also analyzing the 
Work’s conceptual frameworks and worldviews. 

Steven Sutcliffe’s keynote contribution, “Gurdjieff, the New Age Movement, and the Guru 
Field: Making Sense of Multiple Entanglements,” explores the historical and academic category of the 
New Age Movement, noting its limited utility as a framework for understanding figures like 
Gurdjieff.  Sutcfliffe reveals and examines the inconsistent ways scholars define the terms New Age 
and New Age Movement(s). Such inconsistencies limit the interpretive capacity for these terminology 
as they are applied to a figure such as Gurdjieff and his tradition. Sutcliffe argues that instead of being 
confined to some nebulous New Age Movement, Gurdjieff and similar figures should be viewed 
within a broader “guru field,” which is an “extension of the authority of South Asian religious 
authorities (Sanskrit guru) into the transatlantic and especially North American sphere.”  The rest of 
the chapters are grouped into four groups that each mirror the conference sections’ themes and titles. 

The first section, entitled “Spiritual and Scientific Influences that Shaped Gurdjieff and His 
Teachings,” begins with Charles Langmuir’s chapter “Modern Science and Gurdjieff’s Teaching,” 
which examines the intersection of Gurdjieff’s teachings with science, spirituality, and planetary 
evolution. Langmuir explores Gurdjieff’s approach as an “inner science” that emphasizes objective 
observation, experimentation, and personal verification: principles akin to the scientific method but 
that are applied to personal spiritual development. He writes, “Spiritual development is not a 
phenomenon separate from the physical world, but a scientific process of physical transformation that 
can be experienced within the human body.”  According to Langmuir, Gurdjieff integrates universal 
laws and inner human structures across different cosmic scales; consequently, he proposes a bridge 
between scientific and spiritual truths, thereby mirroring an ancient idea that human beings are 
“microcosms of the Universe.” Langmuir notes and critiques modern sciences’ limitations by 
contrasting their material focus with Gurdjieff’s holistic vision of human evolution. 

In “Transformation in Translation: G. I. Gurdjieff as Cosmopolitan of the Early Twentieth 
Century,” Michael Pittman applies a framework of rooted cosmopolitanism to Gurdjieff’s early life 
and influences. Rooted cosmopolitanism emphasizes “the bounded nature of one’s roots, even as one 
seeks to embrace and connect with a larger sense of the world.” Gurdjieff’s upbringing in the diverse 
but conflict-ridden Caucasus region of Western Asian and Eastern European exposed him to multiple 
languages, cultures, and traditions, all of which shaped his worldview. His travels throughout the 
Caucasus, Middle East, and Central Asia—perhaps as far as India and Tibet—deepened his quest for 
the meaning of life. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, considered his seminal work, expanded 
the view of our “connection to multiple, successive levels of belonging, from the local to the 
universal.” Pittman argues that the Tales articulated a cosmology wherein human beings, as “three-
brained beings,” reflect the structure and sacred laws of the megalocosmos, the cosmos at large. Gurdjieff 
could not be considered a resident of any single place; indeed, he was a true cosmopolitan, even a 
megalocosmopolitan. 

In “Understanding of the East,” Ravi Ravindra explores the influences of Indian spiritual 
traditions and scriptures on Gurdjieff's teachings. Ravindra writes that, “Gurdjieff brings a revitalizing 
challenge to the traditions, not in order to destroy them, but in order to recover and release their 
essential core from the encrustation of dogma, exclusivism, and mechanical repetition.”  While he 



7 
 

critiqued modern distortions of ancient esoteric traditions, Gurdjieff, at the same time, bore respect 
for ancient esoteric knowledge, such as is contained in some Indian traditions, and he aimed to 
revitalize spiritual wisdom by freeing it from dogma and mechanical ritual. Gurdjieff’s cosmology, in 
fact, paralleled Indian traditions. Gurdjieff’s notions of planetary evolution echo ancient South Asian 
teachings found in scriptures such as The Upanisads, especially the role of the Moon in the cycle of life 
and death.  

The second section, entitled titled “Embodied Wisdom,” opens with David Appelbaum’s 
chapter, “The Question Remains of the Body,” which emphasizes the body’s role in spiritual 
awakening. The process of awakening requires precise attention, surrendering personal will, and 
facilitates experiencing the life-force in a moment of balance when “thought, feeling, and sensation 
are in a dynamic equilibrium.” True embodiment is not just found in sensory experience; it is the 
impression of an animating force within the body, what Gurdjieff calls the Kesdjan body—the second 
body, different from the physical body, from mere biological existence. For Gurdjieff, spiritual 
awakening involves active participation in creation so that practitioners become “co-creators in a 
cosmos of unspeakable immensity.”  

Joseph Azize’s essay, “Gurdjieff: Alchemy, The Emerald Tablet, Contemplation, and 
Movements,” emphasizes the esoteric concept of “making a soul” by transmuting human energies. 
Azize argues that “Gurdjieff might have considered his system to be not only ‘esoteric Christianity’ 
but also ‘esoteric alchemy.’” The Emerald Tablet, an ancient Hermetic text considered foundational for 
European and Islamic alchemists, was central to Gurdjieff’s teachings on transformation, cosmic laws, 
and the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Azize explains that Gurdjieff 
considered alchemy to be a metaphor for the formation of a soul and the transmutation of inner 
energies. Alchemy was not merely the transformation of metal, but a process of our conscious 
development into “higher being-bodies.” 

In “‘She Sees the Is beyond the Seems’: Gurdjieff, Phenomenology, and Embodied Wisdom,” 
David Seamon explores Gurdjieff’s Work and phenomenology’s shared emphasis on the importance 
of “seeing” reality beyond habitual perception. Phenomenology, as defined by Edmund Husserl, seeks 
to break free from the “natural attitude” that takes the world for granted. Gurdjieff’s system of self-
transformation promotes heightened awareness through self-observation. Gurdjieff’s system is not 
just a descriptive phenomenology. It is a transformative practice aiming to achieve self-awareness and 
balance. “Unlike the aims of phenomenology […], Gurdjieff’s rendition is not an end in itself but one 
pathway essential for self-transformation.” 

In “The Gurdjieff Movements: A Personal Journey,” Laurence Morrocco recounts his 
encounter with Gurdjieff’s Movements in 1971, describing deep and transformative experiences 
moving in unison with others. Morrocco reflects on the ineffable nature of what one experiences 
during these exercises: “Only a partial understanding of these experiences can be expressed in 
words.” According to Morrocco, the true purpose of Gurdjieff’s Movements extends beyond physical 
realms. He argues that, when practiced with deep attention and inner struggle, the Movements create 
resonance with higher influences that induce awakening into a deeper reality.  

The third section, entitled “The Value and Values of Gurdjieff Teaching,” opens with a 
transcript of Alexandre de Salzmann’s keynote talk, “Mr. Gurdjieff’s Original Approach to 
Life.” Reflecting on the life and teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, de Salzmann emphasizes Gurdjieff’s 
relentless self-discipline, unconventional methods, and the depth of his commitment to inner work. 
Gurdjieff’s legacy is less a structured system than it is an experiential journey requiring direct 
participation, deep questioning, and an active engagement with reality: “This is not a teaching like any 
other . . . it is a question of ‘ideas to be lived – a drama to be lived.’” His methods were provocative, 
designed to shake students from their beliefs and to awaken them to reality. Gurdjieff pushed himself 
and his students to surpass their limits, rejecting dogma and complacency in favor of continual self-



8 
 

observation and struggle. He lived what he taught, integrating his philosophy into daily life and 
rejecting the pedestal of a master. “By refusing to be considered a master, he wanted to avoid a form 
of devotion that would only be a projection of the ego.”  

In “Transmission, Tradition, and Integrity: Gurdjieffian Scholarship as Third Force,” Cynthia 
Bourgeault reflects on how the Work can be revitalized through scholarly interest and through actively 
engaging the academy. “As the Work struggles to shapeshift yet again, accepting the necessity of 
creating a wider onramp to the teaching in full recognition of the risks that this poses, academic 
scholarship is well poised to contribute what it has always contributed so well: open access, rigorous 
critical discernment, and objective validation within a community of qualified peers.” At its core, the 
Work requires the integration of intellectual, emotional, and physical intelligences. Bourgeault 
highlights the Work’s historical experimentation and adaptability, and she notes Gurdjieff’s 
adaptations, from his early experimental methods to his later, more insular approaches: “Its enduring 
strength has never resided in its outer forms (which have been constantly morphing from the start) 
but in an intrinsic inner intelligence that has allowed it to shapeshift quickly to meet the changing 
circumstances in which it finds itself.” To balance tradition with the contemporary shift toward public 
accessibility, online platforms, and academic validation, Bourgeault advocates a renewed openness to 
disseminating Gurdjieff’s ideas, but that openness must be mindful to ensure the integrity of the 
teaching.  

Roger Lipsey’s “The Eighteenth Commandment: What Are the Values of the Gurdjieff 
Teaching?” considers implicit and explicit values in Gurdjieff’s teachings. Lipsey emphasizes that these 
values are not directly taught by Gurdjieff but are revealed through rigorous practice and self-
discovery. Gradually, core Gurdjieff concepts and their practice—like self-observation, self-
remembering, and mindfulness—allow practitioners to uncover deeper values like self-knowledge, 
perseverance, and self-respect. 

The fourth and final section of the volume, entitled “Cultural Productions,” opens with 
Catharine Dada’s paper, “The (Hidden) Fourth Way of Jerzy Grotowski,” which investigates 
several often overlooked but deep parallels between Gurdjieff and the Polish theater director Jerzy 
Grotowski (1933-1999). Grotowski pioneered experimental theater by articulating “experiences of the 
spiritual within the performer’s/the doer’s body.” While Grotowski denied direct influence from 
Gurdjieff, Dada argues that his theatrical explorations, especially in its later phases, were markedly 
shaped by Gurdjieff’s ideas. Dada notes specific parallels between Gurdjieff’s concept of Objective 
Art and Grotowski’s Objective Drama.  Furthermore, both Gurdjieff’s Movements and Grotowski’s 
“Motion” focus on exacting and precise inner development among participants. Grotowski’s “work 
on oneself” resembles Gurdjieff’s process of self-observation and self-remembering. Such theater 
luminaries as Peter Brook and Zbigniew Osiński themselves recognize links between Gurdjieff and 
Grotowski, reinforcing Dada’s argument that Grotowski can be seen as a Fourth Way teacher, albeit 
in the realm of theater. 

In “Icons are Cosmic Diagrams,” Richard Temple focuses on Gurdjieff and mystical, esoteric 
dimensions in Christianity. He writes that “Icons are cosmic diagrams. They give visual form to the 
struggle of the human soul that seeks to free itself from the lower, from ‘matter’ and ‘evil’ in order to 
rise to the higher, to immortality.” Temple traces connections between Gurdjieff’s teachings and 
Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hesychasm. Temple’s own spiritual journey began with the music of 
J.S. Bach, continued with the study of ancient Christian contemplative traditions, and culminated with 
Gurdjieff. Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Gurdjieff emphasize that reality consists of hierarchical 
levels of being. Christian iconography, particularly Byzantine and Russian traditions, offer a visual 
representation of spiritual truths. The art of icon painting, he argues, is a cosmological and spiritual 
practice that reflects the eternal struggle between higher and lower forces, between the mind and the 
body. With the right applications of the laws of nature and the Universe, icon painting allows painters 



9 
 

to achieve inner peace and harmony; their spiritual mastery is reflected in a work of visual beauty and 
order. 

In “Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as a Summation of the Gurdjieff Work,” Jon Woodson 
demonstrates how Wilder’s famous 1938 play portraying life in a fictional, early twentieth-century, 
New Hampshire town aligns with Gurdjieff’s esoteric teachings, particularly ideas from Gurdjieff’s 
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. The play follows in the literary tradition of Alfred Richard Orage, who 
taught Gurdjieff’s Work in New York using alchemical phonetic cabala codeto convey esoteric ideas. 
Woodson argues that Wilder’s Our Town presents a meditation on human existence that emphasizes 
the importance of self-observation and awareness, which only saints and poets seem to achieve. The 
characters, events, and themes in Our Town—including the central role of death, the mechanical nature 
of human life, and the potential for spiritual awakening—parallel key elements of Gurdjieff’s 
teachings.  

The “journey” is a theme one finds throughout practitioners’ testimonies in this volume. 
Because scholarship is not static and it continuously evolves, journey also characterizes researchers’ 
ongoing interpretive efforts. Academic scholarship has the potential to reinvigorate and revitalize a 
religious tradition; so too, exchanges between the academic outsiders and practicing insiders have the 
potential to deepen academic analysis. We are grateful to the scholars and practitioners who came 
together at Harvard for this conference and whose work is collected here in this volume. We hope the 
conference and these papers will inspire further exchanges and defining moments, personal or 
academic. There are shared journeys to come. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



10 

G. I. Gurdjieff, the Work, and the Academic
Study of Religion and Esotericism
Carole M. Cusack 

This paper addresses tensions existing between confessional approaches (insider discourses assuming 
the truth of a tradition) and social scientific approaches (discourses engaged in classification, 
comparison, and historical and social contextualization of teachers and traditions). The academic study 
of G. I. Gurdjieff and the Work is a recent subfield at the crossroads of religious studies, Western 
esotericism, and more secular philosophical and psychological tendencies. Studies of 
religious/spiritual and occult/esoteric phenomena were traditionally undertaken by members of the 
particular religion or esoteric school in question, and the value of outsider-oriented “scientific” 
research on such topics and groups has often been questioned. 

Arguably the first author to produce a scholarly, outsider-oriented study of Gurdjieff and the 
teaching that he established was James Webb (1946-1980), whose The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and 
Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky and Their Followers1 was published the year he died a suicide at 
the age of 34. The revolutionary nature of Webb’s research is undeniable; after graduating from Trinity 
College, Cambridge, he devoted his life to researching occult and esoteric subjects. He published Flight 
from Reason—which was reissued as The Occult Underground—and The Occult Establishment while in his 
twenties.2 During his life, Webb’s work was largely ignored, but it has undergone a reappraisal since 
the emergence of the academic study of Western esotericism, which is usually dated to 1994, when 
Antoine Faivre (1934-2021) published Access to Western Esotericism. This book proposed the classic six-
point model of Western esotericism, involving symbolic and real correspondences, living nature, 
imagination and mediation, the experience of transmutation, the praxis of concordance, and direct 
transmission from teacher to initiate.3 Faivre’s model has since been critiqued but remains a landmark 
in bringing esotericism into the academy. 

Knowledge and Secrecy: Defining Insiders and Outsiders 
Esotericism studies constantly confront the conflict between the Enlightenment principle that 
knowledge is free and readily available to all, with the traditional principle that knowledge is proprietary 
and may belong to a particular group, disqualifying others from access. This latter position is also held 
by many religious groups who see outsiders as incapable of appreciating wisdom from sacred sources. 
Scholars’ views about how to bridge this gulf—between those who are inside, practitioners with a 
personal commitment to a way of transcendence, and those who are outside, observers engaged in 
evaluative study—differ. Since the 1990s, it has become increasingly evident that distinguishing an 
“insider” from an “outsider” is not only difficult but also often impossible, given that individuals and 
communities typically inhabit multiple roles and realities.4 The methodological debate commonly 

1 James Webb, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers (London: 
Thames and Hudson, 1980). 
2 James Webb, Flight from Reason (London: MacDonald, 1971); James Webb, The Occult Underground (Chicago and La Salle, 
IL: Open Court, 1974); and James Webb, The Occult Establishment (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1976). 
3 Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 5-15. 
4 Ann Gleig, “Researching New Religious Movements From the Inside Out and the Outside In: Methodological 
Reflections from Collaborative and Participatory Perspectives.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 
16:1 (2012), 88–103. 



11 

termed “the insider/outsider problem in the study of religion” is also important in anthropology and 
often focuses on researchers and the groups they are studying, often over many years and with mutual 
respect and mutual exchange at its core.  

The position of the ex-member, the formerly committed practitioner who undergoes a change 
of heart, is one complex identity, as is the “seeker” who reads and explores communities online but 
may not join a “real world” group. The amount of information available online has increased 
dramatically in the past decade or two, with films, lectures, archives, and interactive groups and 
programs delivered online.5 This trend, already noticeable, intensified during the COVID-19 crisis, 
when meeting in person was hampered or prohibited by lockdowns and other restrictions. 

In some groups, the view that only an insider could authentically speak prevailed, and members 
of some religious communities expressed hostility toward Western scholarly assessments of their 
traditions. This is not only because of the insider/outsider distinction, but because like all putatively 
secular academic disciplines, religious studies proposed naturalistic (psychological, cultural, political, 
historical, and so on) explanations for religious and spiritual phenomena, not granting authority to 
theological explanations, divine interventions, miracles, and other sacred phenomena. For some, that 
gulf is unbridgeable; yet I would contend that the contours of the gulf might be redrawn, and a 
different relation toward the religious, spiritual, or esoteric group or teaching might emerge, in which 
scholarly outsiders can make real contributions to knowledge and understanding. The insider-outsider 
distinction has occupied more space than warranted in the study of religion (and arguably esotericism); 
as Jeppe Sinding Jensen notes, the most it demonstrates is “the plain fact that knowledge is unevenly 
distributed among subjects.”6  

The conditions under which a scholar can make a real contribution to the study of a group to 
which s/he does not belong are governed by ethics and require commitment to principles such as 
verifying sources, testing hypotheses, and revising and updating conclusions when new material 
becomes available. There are many different types of comparison or categorization and many 
methodological lenses that can be employed. Scholarship is situated in a genealogy of knowledge. For 
example, Jensen observed that: 

As it happens, genealogical comparison is the application of typological comparison to a 
specific corpus, one that shares a common ancestry. One may talk about magic among Uto-
Aztecan Indians, the ancient Greeks, or Nilotic tribes, but that restriction does not make the 
concept of “magic” one bit less theoretical, nor one bit less a theoretician’s construction—
albeit one that obeys certain constraints in relation to the evidence (subject matter) at hand. 
In addition, it should be taken into account that we do not just apply a concept or a model to 
something “out there”; instead, we do so in relation to a history of research or a scholarly 
tradition—even if it is in its most current state-of-the-art. Thus, I am not alone with my object, 
and the relation between my theoretical construct and my subject matter is not solely dialectic; 
rather, it is triadic. It involves a “tradition” consisting of previous and subsequent scholarship 
as a “form of life.” The difference between “good” and “bad” scholarship is—in terms of 
methodological normativity—the difference between scholarship that is falsifiable, 
theoretically open, and seeks empirical tractability and that which is idiosyncratic, subjective, 

5 David J. Pecotic and Carole M. Cusack, “The (World Wide) Work 2.0,” Fieldwork in Religion, 11:1 (2016), 91-103. 
6 Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Revisiting the Insider-Outsider Debate: Dismantling a Pseudo-Problem in the Study of 
Religion.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23:1 (2011), 29. 



12 
 

and guided by prejudice. Theory is not, as so many positivists have suspected, just a matter of 
personal whim and subjective opinion.7  

 
In other words, scholarship is an ethically exacting and personally challenging activity that must result 
in the transformation of the scholar as a practitioner of scholarship.  
 
James Webb: Researching and Writing The Harmonious Circle (1980) 
James Webb worked to produce The Harmonious Circle in very different conditions to the 2024 scholarly 
norm. The book involved eight years of study, and the research process was arduous because he could 
not begin with the enormous body of literature that exists now on Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and their 
pupils, who established formal lines of transmission for the Work after the deaths of both men. His 
research process was chiefly engaging with people—people who were unlikely to be entirely positive 
about his idea for the book and who were understandably reticent, given that Gurdjieff had attracted 
negative publicity during and after his life.8  

The life of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c. 1866-1949) until he began teaching in Moscow and 
St. Petersburg in 1912 is obscure, and his semi-fictionalized Meetings with Remarkable Men, while 
suggestive of possible real-life journeys and potential sources for his teachings, is inconclusive.  
From approximately 1914, his activities and associates were chronicled by a range of journalists and 
other observers, not necessarily unbiasedly, providing a rich public source of corroborative evidence 
up until his death in 1949.9 Gurdjieff’s writings, published posthumously, and Ouspensky’s 
posthumous In Search of the Miraculous—which Gurdjieff approved for publication—are supplemented 
by a number of memoirs by first-generation pupils. These were the materials available to Webb when 
he began his research, and as Joyce Collin-Smith wrote in her moving obituary for him, “The rag, tag 
and bobtail of the Work is still to be found in splinter groups and sects all over Europe and America. 
James Webb searched them all out painstakingly, charmed his way into getting access to a great deal 
of unpublished material, made many friends, and then set to analyze what he had acquired in the way 
of knowledge.”10 

Circle was eight years in the making; the year it appeared, Webb committed suicide after 
struggling for some time with mental illness. Reading The Harmonious Circle today, it is clear that Webb 
was not always correct, but he did extraordinary research and is rightfully hailed as a pioneer in the 
field. It will suffice to give one example; in seeking other identities that Gurdjieff may have adopted 
at various times before his emergence as a spiritual teaching in Russia just before World War I, Webb 
retold the “legend that Gurdjieff was the Lama Dordjieff” which “was widely believed by his Western 
disciples” dismissively, but speculated that Gurdjieff may have been one Ushe Narzunoff, a spy in the 
“Great Game” between Russia and Britain over control of Central Asia. This identification collapses 
instantly when the reader inspects the photographs of Narzunoff that Webb discusses.11 Yet one 

 
7 Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “On How Making Differences Makes a Difference.” In Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon 
(eds), Introducing Religion: Essays in Honour of J. Z. Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 145. 
8 For example, in Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (New York: Avon Books, 1968 [1960]) 
Gurdjieff is presented as belonging to a milieu of conspiracy theories, paranormal phenomena, and Nazi occultism.  
9 G. I. Gurdjieff, Meetings With Remarkable Men (London and New York: Penguin Arkana, 1985 [1963]); G. I. Gurdjieff, 
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (New York: Penguin Arkana, 1999 [1950]); G. I. Gurdjieff, Life is Real Only Then, When ‘I 
Am’ (New York: Penguin Arkana, 1991 [1975]); and P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: The Teachings of G. I. 
Gurdjieff (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Inc, 2001 [1949]). 
10 Joyce Collin-Smith, “An Appreciation of James Webb.” Joyce Collin-Smith … the essence of my life’s work (2003-2025). At: 
https://www.joycecollinsmith.co.uk/other-works/an-appreciation-of-james-webb.  
11 Webb, The Harmonious Circle, Lama Dordjieff 48-50, Ushe Narzunoff, 60-73, photographs between 288-289. 

https://www.joycecollinsmith.co.uk/other-works/an-appreciation-of-james-webb


13 
 

obvious error does not invalidate Webb’s project, and he is on surer ground once the sources for 
Gurdjieff’s life solidify.  

I will provide two areas where Webb’s research genuinely turned up new information that 
illuminates Gurdjieff’s life and teachings. The first is his identification of a group of writers on occult, 
spiritual, and Russian Orthodox Christian topics who were younger contemporaries of Gurdjieff and 
whose association had originated in Tiflis, where Gurdjieff and his pupils lived in 1919. The leader 
was Pavel Alexandrovitch Florensky (1882-1937), who, like Gurdjieff, had an Armenian mother. With 
his friends A. V. Elchaninov (1881-1934), Valentin Sventitsky (1882-1931), and V. F. Ern (1881-?), he 
entered the priesthood in Moscow. The group published books integrating occult ideas with Orthodox 
theology, including Florensky’s The Pillar and Foundation of Truth and Sventitsky’s The Heavenly Citizens: 
My Travels Among the Anchorites of the Caucasus Mountains. Webb is right to draw a parallel with Gurdjieff’s 
early companions, the Seekers of Truth, in particular Abram Yelov and Sarkis Pogossian.12  The 
second example is the extensive discussion of possible sources for the Enneagram, a symbol often 
uniquely associated with Gurdjieff, but which Webb demonstrates had likely antecedents in the 
writings of, among others, Ramon Llull (1232-1316) and Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680).13 

Unfortunately, Webb’s source materials were destroyed by his widow, Mary, who was not in 
sympathy to his research, and was also in great distress after James’ long period of mental illness 
culminating in suicide. The Harmonious Circle has detailed notes, and if sifted carefully, they can be 
matched to informants (even when the informants have requested anonymity), which aids scholars in 
testing his research for reliability and enables confirmation of certain of Webb’s interpretations, which 
may not accord precisely with those of particular Gurdjieff lineages. 
 
The Future of the Academic Study of Gurdjieff and the Work 
There are uncontroversial areas that Work and non-Work people can reach agreement on; for 
example, the work I have done on cultural production in Work circles and on the formation of 
intentional communities does not encroach upon issues that are regarded as sensitive.14 Other areas 
are more difficult, and there are questions about what belongs “properly” to the initiatory tradition 
and what should remain oral (this is extremely tricky as we are inevitably the products of literacy not 
orality, and Gurdjieff pupils from the beginning constantly made notes of and wrote up accounts of 
his teachings). Additionally, many of Gurdjieff’s lectures and talks have been published in recent years. 
The Internet has proved to be a game-changer in the study of a range of previously obscure or private 
religious, spiritual, and esoteric groups. Much material that Work members may believe to be properly 
regarded as restricted is now available online, meaning that those interested can now not only read the 
books but also engage in interactive online forums, watch Movements demonstrations, and listen to 
lectures and conversations between Work members. 

Scholars bring models of spiritual and esoteric leadership, comparative contexts that situate 
the person and teachings of Gurdjieff in a specific milieu, and analysis of conceptual frameworks in 
Work worldviews and lifeways that may illuminate. Nowadays, texts (in the broadest sense) can be 
readily accessed, and paradigms from religious studies, esotericism studies, literary criticism, heritage 
studies, and other academic disciplines can usefully be applied to studying Gurdjieff, his teachings, 
and his legacy. There are many outstanding tasks still to be undertaken: for example, the analysis of 
original and translated texts (especially those of Ouspensky, to which Joseph Azize has made a 

 
12 Webb, The Harmonious Circle, 36-37. 
13 Webb, “The Sources of the System,” The Harmonious Circle, 499-542. 
14 Carole M. Cusack, “An Enlightened Life in Text and Image: G. I. Gurdjieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men (1963) and 
Peter Brook’s ‘Meetings With Remarkable Men’ (1979).” Literature & Aesthetics, 21:1 (2011), 72-97; and Carole M. 
Cusack, “Intentional Communities in the Gurdjieff Teaching.” International Journal for the Study of New Religions, 6:2 (2015), 
159-178. 



14 

contribution);15 a detailed comparison of the three published versions of Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales 
to His Grandson; assessment of the various contributions of Gurdjieff’s pupils;16 and greater attention 
to the artistic, cultural, religious and political contexts in which the Work developed. For example, the 
study of art forms, including the theatre, cinema, and television that bear the imprint of Gurdjieff and 
his teachings, is another area that merits investigation.17 

Work members (and ex-members and fellow travelers) produce texts, events, and lifeways that 
are of great interest to scholars. The purpose of fieldwork and of scholarly gatherings like this 
conference is the respectful exchange of perspectives and knowledge and the acknowledgement of 
mutual interests and concerns. 

15 Joseph Azize, “P. D. Ouspensky’s First Revision of Tertium Organum,” Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review, Vol. 14, 
Vol. 1, 2023, pp. 47-67. 
16 For example, Joseph Azize, George Mountford Adie: A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia, third edition, revised and enlarged 
(Sydney: Gurdjieff Society of Newport Publishing, 2023) and Joseph Azize, John G. Bennett: Witness to Death and 
Resurrection (Rhinebeck, NY: Red Elixir, 2024). 
17 For example, Catharine Christof, Rethinking Religion in the Theatre of Grotowski (London and New York: Routledge, 
2017). 



15 

Gurdjieff, the New Age Movement, and the 
Guru Field: Making Sense of Multiple 
Entanglements 
Steven Sutcliffe 

I first came across a mention of Gurdjieff when I was personally involved in the “cultic milieu,”1 that 
field of new, alternative, and emergent religion often called “spirituality” in and after the “long 1960s,”2 
as this took local shape in and around Edinburgh in the mid-1980s. Within that field, I was variously 
involved in Zen meditation and T’ai Chi; Tarot interpretation alongside organic whole foods; co-
operative living and men’s anti-sexist politics. Access to groups for meditation and T’ai Chi was open 
and easy: the Zen class was taught in a university extra mural program and T’ai Chi in the Salisbury 
Centre, an Edinburgh “spiritual center” set up in 1973 with Jungian and Western Sufi input (still going 
strong). Within this local “cultic milieu” I did not come across a Gurdjieff group per se, although I 
heard of a ‘Gurdjieff-Ouspensky’ group south of Edinburgh. But I had a good friend, a woodworker, 
who, in addition to practicing Transcendental Meditation and listening to tapes by Robert Bly about 
the mythopoetic men’s movement, was interested in Gurdjieff, and I vividly recall the spines of Views 
from the Real World and Meetings with Remarkable Men on his bookshelf. I read Meetings around this time 
and found it stilted and theatrical—more like an artful, self-conscious “fable”—compared with the 
local lingua franca of “spirituality.” But it was not until I returned to university at the age of 30, after a 
brief career as a shoemaker, to study for a master’s degree in religious studies that I found the networks 
I had previously been involved in now described in academic sources as “The New Age Movement.” 

I remember being surprised since I didn’t recall a high profile for the millennialistic term new 
age in my circles of involvement, which were more “this-worldly” than “other-worldly” (in Max 
Weber’s useful terms) and in which the practical focus was typically on developing the capacities and 
hidden subtleties of the “Self” (and the capital S is important). This focus shaded over into what was 
sometimes called the “Human Potential Movement”3 and what Paul Heelas would label “Self 
religions,”4 which differed from the expectation of the irruption into this world of an external, 
transcendental “Other” typical of millenialistic movements modelled by definition on the biblical 
return of Christ. I was further surprised from a different angle when I read that Paul Heelas in The 
New Age Movement considered Gurdjieff, with Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky and psychologist Carl Jung, 
one of its three “key figures.” Heelas describes Gurdjieff as a “context-setter” whose significance lay 
in his emphasis on the learning and application of “transformational techniques” in comparison with 
the verbose discursivity of Blavatsky and Jung.5 In hindsight this strikes me as an astute observation 
about Gurdjieff, although only two pages of text justify it—and I still couldn’t fit that with the 
millennialism implied by a “New Age.” More critically—and despite the immense value of Heelas’s 

1 Colin Campbell, “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization,” A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5 (1972), 
119–36. 
2 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 1998). 
3 Donald Stone, “The Human Potential Movement,” in The New Religious Consciousness, ed. Charles Y. Block and Robert 
N. Bellah (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 93–115.
4 Paul Heelas, “Self-religions in Britain today,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 1, no., 1 (1984): 4–5.
5 Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996),
47.



16 
 

work—it was an early indication that, with just a few exceptions to prove the rule, most academic 
studies were not much interested in a social and ethnographic history of the “New Age Movement.” 
My PhD, begun in 1994 and completed in 1998, tried to clarify these and related historical questions 
about the impact of category formation in what was slowly being revealed to be a very large field of 
“post-Christian” practices in the European and transatlantic world, whether it was called the “cultic 
milieu” or the “New Age Movement.” I will finish by proposing a more accurate category. 

Through interviews and ethnography, I began to map some of the local content of this field, 
especially in Scotland and in the United Kingdom more widely. I continued to find little evidence for 
either millennialism or Gurdjieff. When asked, most practitioners actively repudiated the term “New 
Age.” When I contacted the Findhorn Community on the Moray Firth—to which I was led via 
numerous references as an epicenter of “the New Age”—I received a letter which welcomed my visit 
but asserted that “the New Age is over.” So perhaps there was or had been a “New Age” movement 
that no longer existed?  

As with so many things, a chance encounter helped me resolve this question. While 
approaching visitors with a questionnaire at a Mind, Body and Spirit fair in Edinburgh in 1995 I met 
a PhD student from a different institution who told me that Findhorn held an extensive archive going 
back to its founding in 1962 and before. This was interesting. Within this large and unwieldy body of 
material I found crucial insights into influences on the Findhorn founders and their correspondence 
with similarly minded groups which predated the construction of “New Age” as a countercultural 
‘self-religion’ of the ‘long 1960s’. For example, an ur-other-worldly interest in UFOs and Spiritualist 
mediumship had been central preoccupations of the small group at the early Findhorn colony which 
could be traced back into the mid-1950s when they had first met. Contemporary UFO literature 
referenced the imminent coming of a “New Age,” described in warnings given by space beings that 
Earth should clean up its act, cease its destructive wars and environmental pollution, or face the 
consequences. Furthermore, the Findhorn founders’ teacher in London - before they set up Findhorn 
in Scotland - was the dissenting daughter of a Scottish evangelical Christian group, called the Faith 
Mission, established in 1886 for the purpose of evangelising in rural areas. Here, at last, I had evidence 
of an eschatological “New Age’” in both evangelical Christian and post-Christian garb. But it appeared 
well before the this-worldly 'self-religion' of the 'New Age Movement' constructed in the academic 
literature. 

Partly through references in the Findhorn archive I also found my way to the enormous oeuvre 
of the Evangelical-turned-Theosophist Alice A. Bailey in which, between the late 1920s and early 
1940s, I found the first semi-systematic presentation of a meditation and prayer practice which aimed 
to ‘bring in’ the “New Age” via a melding of Christian, Buddhist, and Theosophical sources.6 The 
interwar period turned out to host a fascinating earlier iteration of the ‘cultic milieu’ in which new 
religions and new teachers were surprisingly abundant. In another piece of serendipity, this time in a 
second-hand bookshop (in which heterodox sources often circulate when official archives are missing 
in action), I stumbled upon a rich guide to this wider interwar scene: Rom Landau’s God is My 
Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters and Teachers.7 Finally, Gurdjieff was there, in a chapter 
describing Landau’s interview with him in New York. Gurdjieff fittingly comes across as larger than 
life although Landau makes plain his dislike; he prefers Krishnamurti, and especially Steiner. 

Landau’s book helped me to think further about the structure of the field. Putting his lively, 
opinionated accounts of the many new teachers he met into dialogue with Campbell’s analysis of the 
structure of the “cultic milieu,” I identified the key agents of this field across the long twentieth century 

 
6 Steven J. Sutcliffe, Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 
7 Rom Landau, God is My Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters and Teachers (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 
1935). 



17 

as “seekers.” Their interaction with the multiple authorities represented variously by Gurdjieff, 
Krishnamurti and by Steiner helped me to understand the wide spread of “seekership” as a social role 
beyond (but also sometimes within) membership of traditional religious groups. John Godolphin 
Bennett’s memoir Witness was also helpful with its resonant subtitle, The Story of a Search.8 In a chapter 
called “Wandering Stars: Seekers and Gurus in the Modern World,”9 I included a brief account of 
Bennett’s memoir as a case study in seekership. The behaviour of ‘seeking’ as a reasonable response 
to the existence of multiple religious authorities provides in my view a more structured and historically 
accurate model for this entangled field than the oddly decontextualized and reified model of a “New 
Age Movement,” especially in relation to Gurdjieff.10 

I recount this entangled history for three reasons. First, it indicates the challenges to serious 
scholarly research in what is now clearly a very large, complex and variegated field of “post-Christian” 
and “new” religion—or “spirituality”—covering the last 120 years and more. In contrast to established 
and legitimated fields of scholarly study in relation to “religion”—a category permeated by Protestant 
Christian assumptions about the priority of correct belief and doctrine over practices and rituals—
there is still comparatively little work available on the manifold archives (many in private hands), the 
group structures and organizations, and the literature of this “post-Christian” field. This conference, 
following a previous symposium in 2019 at the University of Sydney led by Carole Cusack and 
colleagues, which in turn grew out of a new wave of academic work in religious studies, will help to 
redress lacunae in the particular area of “Gurdjieff studies.” Yet only relatively few traditions within 
what we might call the “long twentieth century” (to riff on Arthur Marwick) have attracted the kind 
of systematic academic enquiry we find in the study of those culturally dominant and politically 
established religions known as “world religions” that continue to serve as powerful gatekeepers to the 
public acknowledgment of what counts as “proper” religion.11 As a scholar of religion I have lost track 
of the occasions when my research interests in New Spiritualities,12 in the Life Reform movement,13 
and—yes—in the study of Gurdjieff14—have been received with lukewarm interest or even 
condescension from theologians and other guardians of normative representation. 

Second, this sketch suggests that specific figures and currents emerge in context and are most 
richly understood in relation to other exemplars. The premise of religious studies is, inevitably, 
comparative. For example, Gurdjieff’s presence (and later representations of that presence) is, I argue, 
a crucial medium for the transmission of his teachings. However, the charismatic presence he exuded 
(by all accounts) is shared (in different ways, to be sure) by the many other “mystics, masters and 
teachers” (to recall Landau’s subtitle) operating in the field. Indeed, the objective existence of just 
such a public field, defined by the co-presence of multiple rival authorities, is a condition of entry for 
a particular teacher: Gurdjieff, for example. 

8 John Godolphin Bennett, Witness: The Story of a Search (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962). 
9 Steven J. Sutcliffe, “Wandering Stars: Seekers and Gurus in the Modern World,” in Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative 
Spirituality, ed. Steven J. Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 17–36. 
10 Joseph Azize and Steven Sutcliffe, “Only This Will Bring Results’: Practising Gurdjieff’s Exercises in a Search 
Culture,” in Intentional Transformative Experiences: Theorizing Self-Cultivation in Religion and Esotericism, ed. Jens Schleiter, 
Bastiaan Benjamin van Rijn and Sarah Perez (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024), 97–120. 
11 Christopher R. Cotter and David G. Robertson, eds., After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (London and 
New York: Routledge, 2016). 
12 Steven Sutcliffe and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus, eds., New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion (London and New York: 
Routledge, 2014). 
13 Steven Sutcliffe, “Religion and the ‘Simple Life’: Dugald Semple and Translocal ‘Life Reform’ Networks,” in Translocal 
Lives and Religion: Connections Between Asia and Europe in the Late Modern World, ed. Philippe Bornet (Sheffield: Equinox, 
2014), 123–48. 
14 Steven Sutcliffe, “Gurdjieff as a Bricoleur: Understanding the ‘Work’ as a Bricolage,” International Journal for the Study of 
New Religions 6, no. 2 (2015): 117–37. 



18 

Third, I have tried to provide evidence to reject the positioning of Gurdjieff within a 
problematic category of a “New Age Movement.” Of course, the success of categories in the “real 
world” (a relevant yet ambiguous category!) is not like running an algorithm. That said, I recommend 
we reconceptualize the “post-Christian” field of seekers and teachers—with Gurdjieff as a case 
study—not as an ancestor of “the New Age Movement” but as an extension of the “guru field” that 
Amanda Lucia has described as an extension of the authority of South Asian religious authorities 
(Sanskrit guru) into the transatlantic and especially North American sphere.15 I would like to further 
extend and apply Lucia’s model to the European field described here, as it was before the imposition 
of the distortions of a “New Age Movement.” If this is so, then Landau’s “mystics, masters and 
teachers” are a case in point and Gurdjieff is indeed a key figure. 

15 Amanda J. Lucia, “The contemporary guru field,” Religion Compass 16, no. 2 (2022): 12–15. 



19 

Spiritual and Scientific 
Influences that Shaped 
Gurdjieff and His 
Teachings 



20 

Modern Science and Gurdjieff’s Teaching
Charles Langmuir

A Search for Truth 
Gurdjieff invites us to explore the “sense and aim of human existence.” Why might we be here? Why 
am I here? The personal pronouns in these questions seem to pertain to the individual, but “here” is 
this room, this world, this universe that we are a part of. So these questions call us to ponder both 
ourselves and the larger world. This can lead to contradictions, because the inner world of mind, 
emotions, spirit, is not easy to relate to the outer world that is the domain today of science and physical 
law. Some traditions have rectified the conflict with creation stories, as in Genesis. Buddha, on the 
other hand, called on people not to speculate on questions that cannot be verified by direct experience. 
In recent times Stephen Jay Gould16 proposed that science and religion are two “magisteria” with non-
overlapping domains. All of these are simply ways to avoid the problem. Across all of time, truth must 
be universal. While paths up the mountain of truth may be far removed from one another, the summit 
of the mountain is the same—the reality of the Universe.  

People with great understanding, whom Gurdjieff referred to as “messengers from above,” 
have appeared at moments to try to convey the truth to people of their time. In ancient times referring 
to galaxies or the atom would have been impossible. And it is not just the scientific understanding of 
the world that evolved, it is also the appearance of the scientific method—fearless observation of 
facts, testing hypotheses, taking nothing on faith, being quantitative.  

  So when we arrive at the twentieth century, truth has not changed, but the human context 
includes modern science that has as its aim the quantitative understanding of the natural world. There 
is then the confrontation of the scientific and spiritual approaches to truth, which leads many scientists 
to become atheists. This is a challenge that Gurdjieff encountered beginning at an early age, when he 
was being trained both for the priesthood and in medicine, and where he was by nature very interested 
in engineering and practical things. His search was modern and inclusive: how to bring an 
understanding that could encompass both “the wisdom of the east and the knowledge of the west.” 

Spiritual Development as Inner Science 
We can see the influence of the modern scientific method in aspects of Gurdjieff’s teaching that in 
their entirety distinguish it from traditional approaches. Objective observation, the ground truth of 
modern science, lies at the heart of Gurdjieff’s approach to spiritual development. While this may 
sound straightforward, those who try with sincerity soon realize the difficulty, because our ordinary 
mind is intrinsically unable to encompass the three brains of body, mind, and emotions simultaneously. 
However difficult it may be in practice, the concept of unbiased and complete collection of data, of 
resourceful experimentation, is akin to the scientific method. Believe nothing that you have not 
personally verified. Discover the truth anew through personal experience, through seeing. 

  Gurdjieff also emphasizes that “everything is material.”17 Emotions, thoughts, higher states 
of consciousness, all involve substances and energy. These substances evolve by interactions between 
the external world—food, air, impressions—and substances within the organism. Food evolves by 
itself through the instinctive functioning of the organism. Conscious efforts enable air and impressions 

16 Stephen Jay. Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16–22 and 60–62. 
17 P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 205. 



21 
 

to create finer substances that gradually infuse and transform the body. These ideas are presented with 
diagrams and numbers, bringing a quantitative perspective to spiritual development.  

  Does this not sound intrinsically scientific? Spiritual development is not a phenomenon 
separate from the physical world, but a scientific process of physical transformation that can be 
experienced within the human body. It sounds so simple. . . . Of course, while the structure of ideas 
in In Search of the Miraculous is one that makes sense from a scientific point of view, and clearly was 
influenced by science, they can make us forget the important role of the feeling. They attract the mind, 
but in practice the difficulties and subtleties cannot be underestimated. 
 
Cosmoses and Laws 
Gurdjieff’s teaching includes the outer world, and his ideas are evenly proportioned between inner 
growth of the individual and the laws and structure of the Universe. Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson 
takes place in the context of a technologically advanced spaceship, aliens, planets, solar systems, and 
indeed the universe as a whole. Three brained beings in the book and throughout the Universe are 
engaged in one of the five strivings of a responsible life—to “know ever more and more concerning 
the laws of world creation and world maintenance.”18 

  Gurdjieff’s teaching presents cosmoses as domains of the universe that operate on different 
scales, but are what today we would call “self-similar.” This echoes ancient ideas of human beings as 
microcosms of the Universe. Gurdjieff notes that the specific manifestations of the laws will differ 
depending on the cosmos. For example, we cannot through understanding of ourselves know the laws 
of nucleosynthesis that operate in stars, nor those of cellular metabolism. He claims, however, that 
there are scale invariant laws that underlie both these domains and the human experience—the laws 
of three and seven. This is an inspiring vision: that from stellar interiors to planets, humans, cells, and 
the nucleus of the atom there are fundamental laws that underlie and include all phenomena. Indeed, 
“threes” are everywhere in science—down to the three subatomic particles that make up the three 
atomic particles of the atom. The aim is akin to modern science—to discover the mysteries of the 
Universe on all scales and the laws that apply to them. Key drivers of scientific research are questions, 
even if they remain unanswered for long periods of time. So, are there fundamental laws that underlie 
phenomena at all scales, manifested as well within the human experience? Can this be transformed 
from theoretical idea or superficial observation to real understanding? Such questions have the 
potential to unite science and spirit, if we could find the inner states and outer experiments with which 
to address them. 
 
Science in Beelzebub’s Tales  
One might think from the preceding paragraphs that appreciation of modern science would pervade 
Beelzebub’s Tales. After all, “knowledge of the west” is half of Gurdjieff’s aphorism applying to the 
human search for meaning. Gurdjieff is indeed laudatory of “objective science” and ancient scientists 
who carried out elaborate experiments with complex apparatuses that illustrate universal laws and 
properties.  

  Beelzebub also includes statements that presage later scientific discoveries. He calls upon a 
creation event on the largest scale out of which flowed galaxies, stars, planets, and life— long before 
the discovery of the Big Bang. He described the Milky Way as one small example of a galactic scale, 
before any of the 200 billion galaxies had yet been discovered. The moon formed from Earth by 
cataclysmic impact, consistent with modern views. The hydrogen atom was made up of smaller 
particles, long before the discovery of subatomic particles.  

 
18 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950), 355. 



22 

  As for modern science itself and its practitioners, he is not impressed, referring to “so-called 
scientists, “scientists of new formation” and so on. He states that present-day scientists have a “fully 
developed inherency to wiseacre.”19 Gurdjieff calls upon the importance of three centered living and 
contact with “objective conscience,” deeply submerged within us, as a guide to behavior. These are 
indeed mostly lacking in the practice of modern science, always tainted by ego, with applications that 
genetically modify animals leading to their great suffering, create chemicals that damage all of life, and 
develop ever more lethal weapons of destruction. 

Amidst these shortcomings are tmohe amazing discoveries of modern science, such as the 
periodic table, the structure of the atom, DNA, plate tectonics, evolution, and the Big Bang. These 
discoveries, which emerged despite the failings of the scientists that participated in them, provide a 
vastly increased understanding of the natural world.  

 Some of these discoveries were emerging in the late nineteenth century—such as the periodic 
table and Darwinian evolution. Towards these Gurdjieff is dismissive, and at the same time sprinkles 
Beelzebub’s Tales with scientific nonsense. He claims the Sun is as cold as the North Pole. The idea that 
the Moon will become like Earth and Earth like the Sun belies the fundamental importance of the size 
of these objects, which cannot be changed. We now know that chimpanzees and humans diverged 
from a common ancestor some six million years ago, but Gurdjieff proposes a reprehensible 
alternative, while calling out Darwin, among the greatest of scientists, as “wiseacring . . . with 
maximum intensity.”20 

  How does a scientist deal with such apparent malarkey? One aspect is to realize that much 
of Beelzebub’s Tales is allegorical rather than literal. One may also gradually discover that Beelzebub’s Tales 
is “state-dependent,”—designed to create experiences rather than give information. Understanding in 
modern science is a function of the ordinary mind, or “one-brained.” Understanding in the 
Gurdjieffian sense is three-brained, and a property of both knowledge and the mysterious word, Being. 
When one ceases to be completely identified with one’s thoughts, the limitations of the ordinary mind 
become apparent: its wandering nature, fixed ideas, fantasies, tendency to wise-acre, and lack of 
connection to present reality. Gurdjieff assaults the tendencies of this mind in many ways in Beelzebub’s 
Tales, for example by using new words for which we have no associations. He offends us and in places 
says things that do not appear to be true, sometimes shortly afterwards dropping a jewel that we can 
only receive if we have not become identified with the reaction and strive for a more open state. Then, 
passages that once seemed wrong or impenetrable may become pregnant with meaning and feeling. 
One is then led to ask, is there a deeper meaning which in our ordinary state is invisible, and cannot 
be accessed by the ordinary mind alone? 

Gurdjieff’s teaching viewed from the perspective of planetary evolution 
Throughout Beelzebub’s Tales Gurdjieff links three-brained beings to their planet. “On each planet . . . 
the planetary bodies of the three-brained beings are coated and take on an exterior form corresponding 
to the nature of that planet, adapting to it in every detail.”21 Life is planetary. We are in every detail of 
our functioning, planetary beings, not just of any planet—but this planet, at this moment in Earth 
history.  

The emergent understanding of Earth history places human beings in a planetary context. 
Earth has gone through a long process of transformation from lifeless rock to verdant present. There 
are discrete stages that can be recognized by the physical state of the planet and the life that is present. 
If planetary evolution follows laws like physics and chemistry, then on Earth we can study this process 

19 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, 783. 
20 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, 253. 
21 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, 59. 



23 
 

as it may play out across the Universe. Human beings and civilization are only the most recent 
planetary transformation, a stage of planetary evolution. 

The young planet was violent, but quite rapidly cooled to a stable state with rocks, an ocean, 
and climate stability. Life soon began, but it consisted of tiny microbes that were energy inefficient, 
called prokaryotes. After a billion years or so, these organisms developed photosynthesis, which 
expanded their ability to receive energy from the Sun and allowed life to become much more prevalent. 
Photosynthesis, however, produced a potent and energetic molecule, oxygen gas, which was toxic for 
early life. Over the next billion years life gradually developed protection against oxygen (anti-oxidants), 
and also learned to use oxygen to obtain eighteen times more energy from food, leading to a revolution 
in life’s size and function. The prokaryotic cells related to one another and formed partnerships that 
became stable—eukaryotic cells that were thousands of times larger and required oxygen. The oxygen 
from the new biosphere began to permeate and transform the planetary surface. After several hundred 
million years the surface became saturated, and oxygen could build up in the atmosphere. The 
availability of this special chemical then allowed the eukaryotic cells to make partnerships—the first 
visible multi-cellular organisms, that could intentionally transport oxygen through breathing. These 
plants and animals soon emerged from the ocean to the land, and covered the entire surface with life, 
receiving and processing ever more energy from the Sun. 

  In each stage of its evolution, a planet develops new access to energy and enlarged scales of 
relationship, leading to a profound modification of planetary function. Most planets may be halted at 
early stages. Mars and Venus may be examples.  

 Human civilization is the latest revolution in planetary function. Language permits 
communication across space and time. Starting in the nineteenth century with the first telegraph wire, 
a global network of communications began, leading to a kind of planetary nervous system. Planetary 
scale sensing emerged. Symbioses among us are essential for our survival and give possibilities that no 
individual can provide. We can explore the laws of the Universe, understand where we come from, 
transform the planetary surface and carry out intentional actions such as space travel and the 
intentional modification of biological evolution. We are the greatest revolution in all of Earth’s 4.5 
billion years of history, and it is happening now in the blink of a planetary eye.  

 Is the next stage of planetary evolution the development of a conscious planet? Human beings 
are potentially an organ of planetary consciousness, 

 a kind of planetary brain, permitting planetary awareness and a presence in what may be a 
conscious galaxy. Of course, our behavior is divorced from that, as we spread instead like a planetary 
cancer, making use of our unparalleled power for personal egotism, destroying the life of the planet 
without regard for its welfare, and killing each other with ever greater efficiency.  

Earth may then be at a crisis point in the latest stage of planetary evolution—will it be able to 
develop a benign consciousness attuned to planetary welfare? Madame de Salzmann in her later years 
often emphasized the Earth, saying that if a higher influence did not begin to operate then “Earth will 
go down” and that we have a responsibility for that. 

  What might be our responsibility? The next stage of planetary evolution may depend on the 
spiritual evolution of three brained beings that appear on the surface. Am I a cell of a planetary brain, 
or planetary cancer? In past revolutions there has been novel access to energy and increased scale of 
relationship. Clearly, the mechanical forms of energy and relationship—fossil fuels (or renewable 
energy) and the internet—are not the answer. What would be the new forms of energy and relationship 
that human beings have the potential to bring to the planet that we depend on, and whose future may 
depend on us? From this perspective, the teaching of Mr. Gurdjieff may be directly attuned to the 
planetary crisis that appears so acutely around us. What if we were able to live according to the words 
Beelzebub says apply to three-centered beings throughout the Universe: 



24 

   “We in gratitude will maintain all that thou hast created.”22 

Might the planet be transformed? How would it be possible? 

22 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, 1076. 



25 

Transformation in Translation: G. I. Gurdjieff 
as Cosmopolitan of the Early Twentieth 
Century
Michael Pittman 

The aim of this essay is to consider some of the conditions and influences in G. I. Gurdjieff’s early 
life, his own response to them, as well as the later expression of his ideas and forms of his work 
through the lens of Cosmopolitanism.23 Gurdjieff navigated the space between the so-called East and 
West, both geographically and spiritually. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff’s semi-
autobiographical book, he writes about his early life and shares stories about his father, his early 
teachers, and fellow travellers. Conveyed within these stories and teachings, the details of his early life 
in the Caucasus shine through. Embodying the diversity of languages of the region, Gurdjieff spoke 
Armenian, Greek, and Turkish, as well as other languages. The Caucasus—or, using the earlier 
descriptor Transcaucasia—was frequently embattled, the site of skirmishes, wars, and border disputes. 
These tensions were also a significant influence on Gurdjieff’s formation, thinking, and worldview. 
Gurdjieff is also known to have later travelled in Central Asia, Egypt, India, and Tibet; his driving 
desire was to find the sense and aim of life on earth. His magnum opus, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, 
or All and Everything, sought to create, as I have argued elsewhere,24 a new “discourse on the soul” 
based on the notion of “conscious labor and intentional suffering.” Arising from this discourse on the 
soul is a presentation of human beings as “three-brained beings” living in an expanding universe—
the megalocosmos—with the potential to live as one created in the image of God. The diversity and 
richness of Gurdjieff’s early life in the Caucasus resonate throughout his ideas, writings, and the 
formulation of his view of human beings and their place in the world and universe.  

On Cosmopolitanism and the Caucasus 
Early references to the notion of cosmopolitanism have been cited in reference to the Greek philosopher 
Diogenes of Sinope, who, when asked where he came from, declared: “I am a citizen of the World” 
(kosmopolite, or citizen of the cosmos). This concept was also explored by Immanuel Kant in the 
eighteenth century and the sociologist Emile Durkheim in the late nineteenth century.25 It has received 
renewed attention since the 1990s as a theoretical term used to explore and identify the significance 
of place and meaning in the world. The term cosmopolitanism is still contested by some for, on the 
one hand, a proclamation of patriotism and, on the other, of a kind of elitism, out of touch with the 
travails of the world. Here I draw on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s usage of the sense of “rooted 
Cosmopolitanism” as a particularly useful way to consider Gurdjieff’s early life and later teachings and 
writings.26 Appiah resists the facile applications of the term to emphasize the notion of the bounded 

23 This essay is an extension of an earlier essay: Michael Pittman, “21st Century Reflections on G. I. Gurdjieff and Late 
19th/Early 20th Century Cosmopolitanism in the Caucasus,” Creoles, Diasporas, and Cosmopolitanisms, ed. David Gallagher 
(London and Washington, DC: Academica Press, 2011). 
24 Michael Pittman, Classical Spirituality in Contemporary America: The Confluence and Contribution of G.I. Gurdjieff and Sufism 
(London: Continuum, 2012). 
25 Barney Warf, “Cosmopolitanism,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd ed., ed. Rob Kitchin and Nigel 
Thrift (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2020), 419–22. 
26 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 217. 



26 
 

nature of one’s roots, even as one seeks to embrace and connect with a larger sense of the world. 
Through the lens of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” Gurdjieff’s valuation of local forms of knowledge 
and even ethical orientations that he learned as a young man are positioned within a larger, 
cosmopolitan worldview. Here I use the term to highlight elements of Gurdjieff’s early orientation to 
the world—or cosmos—and to his later presentation and understanding of the cosmos at large—the 
megalocosmos—and the human being’s place in it. In Gurdjieff’s life and work, we find the indelible 
imprint of cosmopolitanism. The echoes of Gurdjieff’s cosmopolitanism can be discovered in the 
languages and culture he was exposed to as a young person, but also, later, in the ideas and expressions 
in his teaching, writing, and movements.  

While the Caucasus is little studied in Europe and the United States, it has had a long and 
varied, even mythical, history. About the Caucasus, Thomas de Waal writes, “For centuries, the name 
Caucasus was synonymous in Europe with wild cold mountains and with the myth of Prometheus, 
who stole fire from the gods and was punished by being chained to the icy peaks.”27 He adds that the 
highland geography of the Caucasus contributes to the diversity of the region, including its ethnic 
diversity. Linguistically, we can find early Arab references to the Caucasus as “the djabal al-alsun, or the 
‘mountain of languages,’ for its abundances of languages and the North and South Caucasus together 
have the greatest density of distinct languages anywhere on earth.”28 De Waal also adds that the 
southern Caucasus alone has approximately ten nationalities. Especially during the period that 
Gurdjieff lived, the region was fraught with war and conflict as well as frequent border disputes.29 
Gurdjieff grew up in and around the region of the Caucasus and his world view expanded as he 
encountered the variety of people, languages, and cultures around him. And while his worldview 
expanded, he always placed a high value on the traditions, cultures, music, and modes of storytelling 
that he grew up with.  

 
Cosmopolitanism and Beelzebub’s Tales  
The expressions of Gurdjieff’s cosmopolitanism reflect a sense of at-homeness and connection to 
multiple, successive levels of belonging, from the local to the universal. And, in Beelzebub’s Tales, 
Gurdjieff undoubtedly reflects a cosmopolitan world view. Beelzebub’s Tales is told in the mode of a 
frame tale, as a dialogue between Beelzebub and his grandson Hassein, and reflects an influence, both 
direct and indirect, from oral storytelling, popular culture, and early literary forms that were prevalent 
in the texts of Asia, the Middle East, and even Europe. Gurdjieff also drew on the local lore, folktales, 
and stories of the Caucasus and the region, but did not hesitate to criticize them or the way they had 
arrived to us in the modern period. In the introduction to the book, Gurdjieff remarks that the task 
of his book is “to destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and 
feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in 
the world.”30 While respecting fundamental elements of the local, Gurdjieff rejects the privileging of 
ethnic, national, or regional identities. Within this far-reaching narrative, we are introduced to “three-
brained beings,” the epithet used to describe not just human beings but a range of other beings living 
in the expanding universe. Generically, the three-brained being reflects the tripartite structure of a 
being with mind, feeling, and body. Throughout the Tales, the reader is provided with a sense and 
perspective that the three-brained beings of earth are out of sync with other three-brained beings of 
the universe.   

 
27 Thomas de Waal, The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 
28 Ibid. 
29 Christopher Baumer, History of the Caucasus: At the Crossroads of Empires (London: I. B. Tauris, 2021). 
30 Ibid. 
 



27 

Arising out of Beelzebub’s Tales is Gurdjieff’s distillation of the spiritual teachings and traditions 
that he encountered in his life and is perhaps most potently articulated in the phrase “conscious labor 
and intentional suffering.” The neologism Gurdjieff employs for conscious labor and intentional 
suffering is “being-partkdolg-duty,” which emphasizes the sense of duty as intrinsically connected to 
the development and possession of being. Partk is from Armenian, meaning duty, and dolg is from 
Russian, also meaning duty. Thus, the phrase emphasizes and reemphasizes twice more the 
significance of duty, or obligation, in relation to being: Being-duty-duty-duty. J. G. Bennett, in a talk 
on Beelzebub’s Tales, adds that being-partk-dolg-duty means, “what is intrinsically right of itself.” He 
continues, “Being-partk-dolg-duty is that which brings a complete welfare, spiritual and material, 
together. It means that which can assure us of the complete welfare of the individual, of the society, 
and of mankind.”31 The distillation of a spiritual discourse based on “conscious labor and intentional 
suffering” allows Gurdjieff to present a fluid and flexible model for understanding spiritual 
transformation and transmission in a wide variety of contexts, times, and places.  

From Cosmos to Megalocosmos 
Within the frame of Tales, we are also introduced to a cosmology that includes, especially later in the 
book, the notion of the human being as created in the image of God. The term tetartocosmos is first 
used by Beelzebub in Chapter 9 as a brief reference to three-brained beings, including those on Earth. 
He next uses the term and expands upon it nearly seven hundred pages later in the book in the chapter 
“The Holy Planet Purgatory.” Here, Beelzebub, speaking to Hassein, explains that in the creation of 
the universe there were gradually formed certain three-brained systems, made up of microcosmoses, 
called Tetartocosmoses. Additionally, he confirms to Hassein, these beings are also just like those 
beings of Earth that he has become so interested in. The chapter “The Holy Planet Purgatory,” in a 
much-condensed form, presents key details of Gurdjieff’s cosmology and cosmography, including the 
creation of the universe, and the role of three-brained beings in it. In introducing the creation of the 
world, the notion of different levels of organizational strata are introduced, ranging from 
microcosmoses all the way up to the megalocosmos. While the term megalocosmos—or the entirety 
of the universe—was mentioned once before in the book, the chapter on Purgatory attempts to 
explain the significance of this term in relation to the transformation of substances and the role of 
individual beings.  

In this chapter, Beelzebub shares some of the knowledge he learned about the creation of the 
universe: “It was just during this same period of the flow of time that there came to our CREATOR 
ALL-MAINTAINER the forced need to create our present existing ‘Megalocosmos,’ i.e., our 
World.”32 Beelzebub then goes on to describe how the megalocosmos contains and operates according 
to two sacred laws, the Law of Three (triamazikamno), and the Law of Seven (heptaparaparshinokh) in far 
greater detail. After a lengthy and detailed discussion on the operation of these sacred laws of world 
creation and world maintenance, and the necessity to change their functioning, Beelzebub shares an 
important detail about the workings of the cosmos. He also describes here how Hassein’s “favorites,” 
the humans on earth, are like all other three-centered beings in the universe—or megalocosmos—and 
how through them the necessary exchange of substances takes place.  

In the continuing passages, Gurdjieff explains the correspondence between three-brained 
beings and the megalocosmos:  

. . . each three-brained being arisen on this planet of yours represents in himself also, in all 
respects, just like every three-brained being in all our Universe, an exact similarity of the whole 
Megalocosmos.  

31 J. G. Bennett, Talks on Beelzebub’s Tales (Santa Fe: Bennett Books, 2007), 136–37. 
32 G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (New York: E. F. Dutton & Co., 1950), 749. 



28 

“The difference between each of them and our common great Megalocosmos is only 
in scale.33 

The Megalocosmos is represented as the whole cosmos, and the three-brained beings of earth, just 
like all other three-brained beings, reflect the structure of the entire megalocosmos. What is perhaps 
more potent may be the re-rendering of the notion that the human being is created in the “image of 
God” in the next passage:  

Here you should know that your contemporary favorites very often use a notion taken by 
them from somewhere, I do not know whether instinctively, emotionally, or automatically, 
and expressed by them in the following words: ‘We are the images of God.’ 

. . . 
And indeed, each of them is the image of God, not of that ‘God’ which they have in their 
bobtailed picturings, but of the real God, by which word we sometimes still call our common 
Megalocosmos.34 

Now stated in quasi-scientific language but resonant with the language of religion, Gurdjieff’s view of 
the human being is given a new grounding. This new grounding contrasts with the image of God 
founded upon the inherited images received from the past, which tend to either oversimplify God’s 
nature or exaggerate and emphasize God’s remoteness.  

Gurdjieff goes on to declare to Hassein that, despite all the deleterious imaginings of God as 
similar to themselves, “each of your favorites, separately, is, in his whole presence, exactly similar in 
every respect to our Megalocosmos.”35 Gurdjieff recasts and expands the significance of the human 
being, both scientifically and symbolically, with weighty significance: contained within each three-
brained being is the very structure and significance of the megalocosmos. In this sense, we might shift 
the emphasis from cosmos to megalocosmos—from the human as cosmopolitan to human as 
“megalocosmopolitan