A critical investigation of a subject who inspired a partisan movement and also much controversy. Gurdjieff has been diversely described as an occultist, a hypnotist, a mystic, a holistic philosopher, and a charlatan.

G. I. Gurdjieff, New York 1924

CONTENTS KEY

1. Introduction

2. Biographical Factors

3. From Moscow to Constantinople

4. The Carpet Dealer

5. Chateau du Prieure (the Priory)

6. Dr. Young Rejects an Experiment

7. The Issue of Hypnotism

8. New York, Alfred Orage, and Rom Landau

9. Surviving the Second World War

10. P. D. Ouspensky and the System

11. The Philosophical Issue

12. Gurdjieff Versus Aleister Crowley

13. Criticism

14. Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'

15. Astrology

16. Beelzebub's Tales

17. An "unknown teaching"

18. Development not possible for all

19. The Fourth Way

Annotations

Bibliography

1. Introduction

Georgii Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949) has met with very diverse assessments. In what follows, I will attempt a summary of some biographical features. (1) I have never been a follower of Gurdjieff, and am not committed to defending him where flaws can be detected. In my opinion, an effort to penetrate basic events needs to be conducted outside the antipodal gamut of enthusiast and repudiatory approaches. (2) The bibliographic complement is substantial, (3) and a web article cannot be exhaustive in that respect.

Some critical arguments can amount to: Gurdjieff was charismatic, with an eccentric personality, and his writings are bizarre; therefore, he never said or did anything of relevance. This angle is not convincing. More difficult to overlook is the factor of unpredictability. Gurdjieff often exhibited disconcerting behaviour, and was known to speak or write exaggeratedly to produce an effect. In 1919 he promoted at Tbilisi (in Georgia) his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. In a prospectus, he claimed that his agenda was already operative in cities such as Bombay, Kabul, Alexandria, New York, Chicago, Stockholm, Moscow, and Essentuki (Ouspensky, Search, p. 381). This was very misleading. His teaching had gained a foothold in Moscow and Essentuki, but had not yet reached the other places, insofar as is known.

Many of the critical reactions occurring during Gurdjieff's lifetime were distorting. In the 1920s, the negative image of a "black magician" was created by the press. After his decease, Gurdjieff was wrongly portrayed by a French critic as influencing Nazi ideology (Pauwels, Monsieur Gurdjieff). Other writers created a myth that the subject was identical with a "secret agent" working in Tibet and Russia, namely Aghwan Dordjieff (Landau, God is My Adventure). More ingeniously, Gurdjieff became identified with another "secret agent," Ushe Narzunoff (Webb, The Harmonious Circle), a theory since discredited. Clearly, more care must be exercised in charting the nature of events.

A recent commentator has emphasised the shortcomings in partisan literature. "Writings about Gurdjieff... are often replete with erroneous dates and movements, speculations based on hearsay evidence, and, unfortunately, pure invention." Professor Taylor here refers to the well known memoirs (e.g., Bennett, Nott, and Peters), and also the two biographies by James Webb and James Moore. Taylor comments:

"Unfortunately, the number of lacunae, contradictions and speculations that mark the greater part of these accounts confuse more than inform. Though James Moore cautiously called Gurdjieff's own account of his early life, 1866(?)-1912, 'auto-mythology,' he and other writers on Gurdjieff's life seem to have mythologised the whole of his life.... In fact, much written on Gurdjieff's life after 1912 is pure invention, in some instances speculation paraded as fact. The unwary reader who would trust [partisan] accounts is led into perpetuating error." (Paul Beekman Taylor, Inventors of Gurdjieff)

This challenging diagnosis marks a radical departure. The partisan accounts here become a subjective minefield of opinions and uncertainties, attending facts that require resolution. According to Taylor, "the factual accuracy of recollections by Gurdjieff's pupils are always suspect, since each pupil sees his relationship to the man subjectively. With rare exceptions, those who write from a pupil's point of view either invent a privileged relationship with Gurdjieff or exaggerate the actual one" (article linked above). (4)

There is a huge problem, scarcely possible to overstate, with regard to Gurdjieff's own version of his life. According to Taylor, "whatever Gurdjieff has said of himself is parable; he invented himself.... he was wont to say that truth is served best by lies, and by lies he meant stories that objectify meanings unperceived by those who think they can grasp fact" (article linked above). In the face of such implications, Gurdjieff's "storytelling" has nevertheless been interpreted in terms of biographical data. The pitfalls are very obvious. We know very little about his early life. My own recourse here is to follow through some partisan associations, but in terms of factors, not facts. The pre-1912 phase is largely a blank in terms of clearly confirmed detail.

2. Biographical Factors

Georgii Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born in the Greek quarter of Alexandropol, a Russian garrison town in Armenia, and near the borderline of Anatolia (Turkey). He has been described as an Armenian Greek, a half-Armenian, and also as a Greco-Armenian. His mother was an Armenian, and his father a Greek. The date of birth has been urged by two major biographers (Moore and Taylor) as 1866. The date of 1872 has also been favoured. The contrasting date of 1877 has frequently found currency, being based on a passport; however, the subject resorted to several passports with conflicting birthdates (Moore, 1991, pp. 339-40). We can be quite certain that Alexandropol was renamed Leninakan in subsequent decades, and is today known as Gumri.

Armenia was a southern zone in the mountain country of Caucasia (the Caucasus). To the north were Georgia and Daghestan, and to the east was Azerbaijan. The almost bewildering ethnic diversity of Caucasia meant that the Armenians were only one segment of the population. Numerous languages and local dialects were represented. Some reports say that over eighty languages existed in this region during the nineteenth century; many of these have since vanished. A strong Turkic presence should be emphasised in terms of a population density. The Armenian presence dates back to the sixth century BCE, evolving a high degree of urban culture, and being associated with the ancient kingdom of Urartu. (5) However, it is relevant to understand that in such antiquity, Armenia was a province of the Achaemenian and Parthian empire phases extending from Iran. (6)

Alexandropol was also the name of the surrounding province (Aleksandrapol), which was largely Armenian in terms of ethnic substrate, though a minority of Kurds and Azeris (Azeri Turks, often identified as Azerbaijanis, and not to be confused with Ottoman Turks) existed in the south-eastern pocket at the time of the 1896 Imperial (Russian) Census. This situation contrasted markedly with that of Erivan province, named after the old city, a major urban centre in Armenia. At the end of the nineteenth century, only 37% of the population in Erivan province was Armenian. (7) Over half (53%) was Azeri, meaning the Turkic people who were descendants of the Oghuz Turkmen (alias the Black Sheep Turkmen), a phenomenon originally allied with the Mongol wave during the fourteenth century, and so strongly associated with the city of Tabriz, located to the south in Iran. In addition, 8% were Kurds, both settled and nomadic, a distinctive tribal people who could also be found in Iran and Anatolia.

l to r: Giorgios Giorgiades; Gurdjieff and pets at Olghniki, 1917

Gurdjieff's Greek father was Giorgios Giorgiades, a cattle herdsman who exercised the additional vocation of a bardic poet or ashokh. "He rehearsed through chapped lips his phenomenal repertoire of folklore, myth and legend" (Moore, 1991, p. 9). The antiquity underlying his form of existence can be associated with the oral process that preserved and elaborated the Homeric epics over centuries. Giorgiades spoke a Cappadocian dialect and also the Turkic language employed by the ashokhs. The Turkic oral tradition was a strong factor here (associated with the Azerbaijani dialect spoken by Azeris, deriving from the old milieux of the eclipsed Khanates). It is scarcely possible to understand Gurdjieff without reference to the antique Caucasian scene and cultural convergences. One of the texts with which he became familiar was the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient literary artefact associated with Uruk in Mesopotamia, and dating back to the early second millenium BCE. (8) This text was apparently a strong early influence upon him.

Reared to beliefs of Armenian Christianity, Gurdjieff was also exposed to elements of Islamic culture via the Turkic repertory. On some evenings, his father "would tell him stories of Mullah Nassr Eddin, or of the One Thousand and One Nights, and especially of Mustapha the Lame Carpenter, an embodiment of resourcefulness who could make anything" (Moore, 1991, p. 9). Mulla Nassr Eddin (Nasruddin) has been described as the wise fool of Turkic folklore, a humorous figure associated to some extent with Sufism. The adult Gurdjieff was to employ sayings of Nasr Eddin in his writings, though he is thought to have "largely invented or adapted" these (ibid., p. 348).

"In his autobiography Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff confides an impressionistic version of his early manhood, unrolling the lands of Transcaucasia and Central Asia before us, even while he hints at a parallel geography of man's psyche and the route he followed to penetrate it. Well and good on the level of essential meaning. Yet judged by more straight-laced historical criteria the book is unhelpful. The disciplined biographic mind stands aghast at its contradictions and omissions... frequently enough the entire narrative disappears over the rim of some telling allegory." (Moore, Gurdjieff: A Biography, p. 24)

The British biographer James Moore chose as his sub-title The Anatomy of a Myth. In the process, he made clear that his subject's "four impressionistic accounts... are innocent of consistency, Aristotelian logic and chronological discipline; notoriously problematical are 'the missing twenty years' from 1887 to 1907" (ibid., p. 319).

It is easy to credit that Giorgiades suffered the loss of his large cattle herd due to a plague. The conditions of life in Caucasia were frequently harsh. The pater resorted to a lumber yard, which failed; he then changed to a carpentry shop for a meagre livelihood. Giorgiades decided to move about forty miles away to Kars, the border town in Anatolia (perhaps shortly after the Russians had captured that citadel from the Ottoman Sultan in 1877). While Giorgiades continued his carpentry shop in the Greek quarter, his son gained a further education. The local Christian schools were unsatisfactory, though his parents wished Gurdjieff to become a priest. Private tuition was arranged in secular subjects like mathematics and chemistry. In extension, the keen student resorted to the library of Kars military hospital, and subsequently claimed to have read all the books on neuropathology and psychology.

From his parents Gurdjieff had learned Armenian and a Cappadocian dialect of Greek; he was also acquainted, via his father, with the "Turko-Tartar" dialect employed by the ashokh oral tradition. He later acquired familiarity with modern Greek from a refugee priest. Gurdjieff gleaned the Russian language from soldiers, and the Kars milieu enabled his assimilation of Osmanli Turkish. One biographer says that he "grew up communicating easily in all the local languages, including Greek and Turkish" (Taylor, Gurdjieff and Orage, p. x). Yet he appears to have spoken Russian and Turkish imperfectly even in later years.

His family was poor, and he tried to compensate for this. The young Gurdjieff occasionally journeyed back from Kars by mail-coach to Alexandropol, where at the home of his uncle, "he set feverishly to work mending locks, repairing watches, shaping stone, and even embroidering cushions" (Moore, 1991, p. 16). This would explain his tendency in later years to industry and improvisation of a practical kind. Ouspensky wrote that Gurdjieff "was an extraordinarily versatile man; he knew everything and could do everything" (In Search of the Miraculous, p. 34).

Circa 1883 he moved to Tiflis, the capital of Georgia; his father wanted him to join the famous theological seminary in that city, but Gurdjieff was disconcerted by what he considered an arid formalism. Instead, at the age of seventeen, he took casual work as a stoker with the Transcaucasian Railway Company. By now, he was despairing of finding due explanations in science for matters elusive to materialist thought. In a religious mood, he studied for three months at the Christian monastery of Sanaine, and made a laborious pilgrimage on foot to the Armenian sacred city of Echmiadzin. Yet these resorts proved unsatisfying, and the mental turmoil continued.

Both religion and science had failed him. The only answer seemed to lie in the past, via bookshops. He and his close friends investigated traditions like Pythagoreanism, Kabbalism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. He visited Constantinople in order to study the Mevlevi and Bektashi dervishes of Sufism. Retiring to the deserted ruins of Ani, an old Armenian capital, he purportedly found ancient Armenian parchments, one of which referred to the "Sarmoung Brotherhood," supposedly existing in the sixth/seventh centuries CE. He came to believe that this community still existed. The basic intention behind the story was evidently to indicate his link with an esoteric tradition believed to derive from ancient Mesopotamia.

His book Meetings with Remarkable Men has been described as "semi-fictional" (Taylor, Gurdjieff and Orage, p. x). According to this uncertain account, Gurdjieff joined the "Seekers After Truth," a grouping who travelled extensively between Egypt and Tibet. His quest for the Sarmoung gained legendary proportions. "His itinerary is impossible to confirm or even to discern with perfect clarity, but he certainly tramped through deserts and rocky wastes and made 'journeys to inaccessible places' " (Moore, 1991, p. 26). This pursuit lasted for many years and required funding; his account has been suspected of embellishments in the effort to underline such an independent career.

"He deals shrewdly in antiques, Oriental carpets and Chinese cloisonn; he services sewing machines and typewriters; trades in oil-wells and pickled herrings; cures drug addicts and psychosomatic patients by hypnotism; opens restaurants, works them up, and sells them; remodels corsets; poses as a sword-swallower; and even paints sparrows, offloading them as 'American canaries' " (Moore, Gurdjieff: A Biography, pp. 26-7).

Gurdjieff relates that, along with a companion, he gained access to the major Sarmoung monastery, to which he attributed his deepest inspiration and also the sacred dances he later instigated. A provisional dateline for this event is 1898-9. Access was purportedly achieved (while blindfolded) via a twelve day mounted trek from Bukhara, the Islamic city in Central Asia which had fallen to Russian rule. A link with Sufism is implied, following on from the investigations at Constantinople. The Sarmoung story has been interpreted by some in a literal manner, and by others as an allegory. "The allegorists, perhaps more adroitly, construe Gurdjieff's entire monastery story symbolically, beginning with a wayside episode involving a dangerous rope bridge over a deep gorge" (Moore, 1991, p. 31).

He also claimed to have visited Tibet, an episode which has been allocated to 1901-2. "For a year or more he lingered in Upper Tibet, preoccupied with the 'Red Hat' lamas. He studied the Tibetan language, ritual, dance, medicine, and above all psychic techniques. Long years afterwards he would fan the rumour that he took a wife in Tibet and fathered two children there" (ibid., p. 33). He returned to Tibet not long after, and seems to have reacted strongly to the British incursion led by Colonel (Sir) Francis Younghusband; in 1904, the British guns afflicted 700 poorly equipped Tibetan soldiers in a ninety-second volley. Gurdjieff does not mention the massacre at Guru, and understates by complaining about the shooting of only one man, a lama associated with the lineage of Padma Sambhava. The Nyingmapa tradition of Lamaism is here implied.

Despite Gurdjieff's strong association with both Sufi dervish and Tibetan Buddhist environments, the biographer Paul Beekman Taylor has duly stressed the lack of evidence that Gurdjieff ever appeared as a Muslim or a Buddhist. Gurdjieff has been confused with "secret agents" of a political background, including Lama Aghwan Dordjieff. One story credits him as being a collector of monastic revenue for the Dalai Lama, but this scenario arose from the imagination of Alfred Orage in the 1920s.

Moving on from Tibet to other places, Gurdjieff is strongly associated with Tashkent, the Uzbek stronghold in Central Asia acquired by the conquering Russians. He advertised himself as a hypnotist with the ability to cure alcoholism, drug addiction, and sexual disorders. Plus other specialities in the supernatural. "His venue certainly was appropriate. In Old Tashkent the effects of opium and hashish were harrowingly evident and in New Tashkent vodka was a curse" (Moore, 1991, p. 37). The Russians of New Tashkent were not only addicted to vodka, but to Spiritualist seances and Theosophy. Gurdjieff was averse to both Spiritualism and Theosophy, and apparently regarded himself as a rival. According to his own report, he had earlier vowed to renounce the practice of hypnotism, which he perceived as a danger, except in the pursuit of scientific and altruistic ends. It was Asian hypnotism that he studied, and this subject is associated with his interest in Tibetan and Mongolian medicine.

3. From Moscow to Constantinople

In moving to the big cities of Western Russia, the subject's career gains more tangibility. In 1912, Gurdjieff arrived in Moscow; his own report claims that he was a wealthy man by this time, and possessing two valuable collections of rare carpets and porcelain/Chinese cloisonn. He was soon active in St. Petersburg (Petrograd; later Leningrad), where that same year he married or partnered Julia Ostrowska (d. 1926), a Polish woman of humble background and half his age. She proved loyal to him until her death. Gurdjieff made her the chief participant in the "sacred dance" activity that he inaugurated.

l to r: P. D. Ouspensky; Gurdjieff

The major intellectual disciple was Piotr D. Ouspensky, a Russian who first heard of Gurdjieff in 1914, finding a newspaper advert referring to a ballet scenario entitled The Struggle of the Magicians, belonging to a "Hindu." He subsequently discovered that the Hindu was a "Caucasian Greek," namely Gurdjieff. Ouspensky was at first dismissive of the Caucasian, whom he learned was the leader of a group in Moscow which conducted paranormal investigations. He assumed that Gurdjieff was just another occultist, of whom there were many at that time, influenced by Theosophy and other interests. He only agreed to meet the Caucasian after persistent persuasion (Ouspensky, Search, pp. 6-7).

This situation amounted to the fact that Gurdjieff was "an unfashionable provincial" (Moore, Gurdjieff, p. 81), whereas Ouspensky was a published author and metropolitan lecturer with an increasing status amongst the Russian literati. The venue of their meeting was a small caf in a noisy backstreet of Moscow. The date was 1915. Gurdjieff wore a black overcoat and bowler hat. Ouspensky subsequently wrote:

"My first meeting with him entirely changed my opinion of him.... I saw a man of an oriental type, no longer young, with a black moustache and piercing eyes, who astonished me first of all because he seemed to be disguised and entirely out of keeping with the place and its atmosphere.... He spoke Russian incorrectly with a strong Caucasian accent; and this accent, with which we are accustomed to associate anything apart from philosophical ideas, strengthened still further the strangeness and the unexpectedness." (In Search of the Miraculous, p. 7)

Ouspensky became Gurdjieff's pupil. The latter requested a thousand roubles from each pupil; this was regarded as exorbitant by outsiders. Yet "in practice he never refused anybody on the grounds that they had no money. And it was found out later that he even supported many of his pupils" (Search, p. 166). At a later period, Gurdjieff said that only "one and a half persons paid" the specified amount (ibid., p. 371).

In 1916, a group was formed in St. Petersburg, over three hundred miles from Moscow, including Ouspensky and his wife Sophie, the engineer Anthony Charkovsky, the musician Anna Butkovsky, the psychiatrist Leonid Stjoernval, the mathematician Andrei Zaharoff, and the composer Thomas de Hartmann. A basic teaching of Gurdjieff was that man is mechanical and effectively asleep in relation to real life. Most men cannot develop or progress, he maintained.

Gurdjieff became based at Petrograd, and his group increased to thirty strong. In 1917, he retreated from Russia and settled at Essentuki, a town slightly north of the Caucasus. A small group of pupils were invited to his villa from Moscow and Petrogad. These included Ouspensky, who was disconcerted several weeks later when Gurdjieff dispersed the group in August and moved with a few other companions to the Black Sea coast (staying at places like Tuapse and Olghniki). The civil war between the White Russians and Bolshevik revolutionaries eventually percolated this zone. Gurdjieff returned to Essentuki early in 1918, furthering a new phase of discipline, and summoning about forty pupils from the former Moscow and Petrograd groups. There was a new emphasis on "sacred gymnastics" or dance. This and other factors did not suit Ouspensky, who withdrew in a dissident mood.

At this time Gurdjieff had many people becoming dependent upon him. His group at Essentuki swelled to some eighty-five diverse pupils, refugees, and relatives. There was an overflow in neighbouring Piatigorsk. Some of these people faced destitution. Gurdjieff provided food and clothing via strategies such as selling a bale of silk. Money and food were becoming scarce in the chaos of revolutionary Russia (see further de Hartmann, Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff; Taylor, G. I. Gurdjieff: A New Life).

In May 1918, the invading Ottoman Turks shot Gurdjieff's father Giorgiades at Alexandropol; the harmless old man, over eighty years old, had declined to leave for Essentuki, though the rest of the family got clear. By July of 1918, Gurdjieff perceived that the situation at Essentuki was extremely grave, being in fresh peril from the civil war. Not all of his group foresaw the dangers of a subsequent "reign of terror" created by Bolsheviks. Thomas de Hartmann (an officer in the Imperial Rifles) was a case in point, complaining that his wife Olga was too tired to move on. Gurdjieff was unrelenting in his new decision to leave. Had the tired couple remained, "with other Guards officers he [de Hartmann] would have been forced to dig his own grave, then shot and covered with earth alive or dead" (Moore, 1991, p. 113).

Gurdjieff carefully planned the daring departure, which occurred in August. His resourcefulness was considerable, even if the travelling party was relatively small. Many of his associates wished to stay behind. He spread the story that his party would be undertaking an archaeological field study and prospecting for alluvial gold. He actually requested the Bolsheviks (or Soviets) for equipment, and they complied, despite severe shortages. This episode became dramatic when the party of fifteen arrived by rail at Maikop, a town surrounded by warring "White army" Cossacks and "Red army" Bolshevik forces. The Cossacks were victorious, and their military general conducted court martials and hangings in an anti-Bolshevik purge. Gurdjieff then adroitly moved over to the Cossack side, though a few days later the Bolshevik army retaliated with a vengeance, and secured Maikop. Gurdjieff and his party escaped the havoc just in time, with only a day to spare.

Five times thereafter, this tense expedition across the Caucasus had to cross army lines southwards. The problem was to identify which army the sentries and scouts represented. This distinction was crucial. Gurdjieff would twirl his right moustachio as a sign for his companions to produce White papers and conformable manners. If he moved his left moustachio, this meant that Bolshevik papers had to be revealed and peasant manners demonstrated.

Eventually, in October the party reached the port of Sochi, which had been taken by the Georgian republicans. However, the majority of Gurdjieff's companions defected, including Andrei Zaharoff. In this confusion, some journeyed to Kiev, and others moved back to Maikop and Essentuki in a reverse feat. With only five companions, in January 1919 Gurdjieff embarked on a voyage south to Poti in Georgia, and from there he took a train to Tiflis. The five accompanying persons were his wife Julia, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, and Dr. Leonid Stjoernval (a psychiatrist) and his wife Elizabeta.

There was purpose in this difficult flight south. Georgia was subject to very different political conditions in the wake of a Georgian nationalism consolidating in 1917. The new social democracy, or Menshevik republic, was not afflicted with civil war. Tiflis had been renamed Tbilisi, and Gurdjieff was very familiar with this city via his activities there in former years. Adjoining the Russian quarter was Old Tiflis, where the "Tartar" (Azeri) bazaar was still much the same, being an Asiatic scene where women were veiled and traders did things in the old way. Gurdjieff made a beeline for this locale, being in desperate need of money. His knowledge of rugs and carpets enabled him to resurrect his fortunes, in a productive economic avenue contrasting with the depression found elsewhere in Caucasia. Not only that, but Dr. Stjoernval was able to create a new practice in the Russian quarter, while Thomas de Hartmann became a professor of music at a local academy.

At Tbilisi, Gurdjieff created his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. The founding members were the de Hartmanns, Dr. Stjoernval, and two new pupils, namely Alexandre and Jeanne de Salzmann. Alexandre was a Russian artist, and his wife was a French musician. Jeanne was reared in Geneva, and established her own school of music based on the Dalcroze system. She was a talented dancer, and assisted Gurdjieff with the first public demonstration of his distinctive "sacred dances" at Tbilisi Opera House that same year of 1919. She left a retrospective description of Gurdjieff:

"He had an expression I had never seen, and an intelligence, a force, that was different, not the usual intelligence of the thinking mind.... He was, at the same time, both kind and very, very demanding.... The impression he gave of himself was never the same.... You might think you knew Gurdjieff very well, but then he would act quite differently, and you would see that you did not really know him." (de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, p. 1)

Gurdjieff interviewed all applicants to his Institute. One of these was a young aristocratic lady (born in Montenegro, a kingdom in the Balkans) who had married a Russian architect. Olgivanna Hinzenberg (1898-1985) said that she wanted immortality, and that her servants looked after her. Gurdjieff told her to dispense with servants, and to do everything herself. "You must work, make effort, for immortality" (Moore, 1991, p. 134). She complied, and became a leading performer in the "sacred dance" activity at Tbilisi.

Another new contact at this time was the British traveller and writer Carl E. Bechofer-Roberts (1894-1949), who did not become a follower. A book he authored, namely In Denikin's Russia (1921), included an account of his association with Gurdjieff at Tbilisi.

"He [Gurdjieff] claims to have spent much of his life in Thibet [sic], Chitral, and India, and generally in Eastern monasteries.... No one could be in his company for many minutes without being impressed by the force of his personality.... There was no denying his extraordinary all-round intelligence.... The dances, he declared, were based on movements and gestures which had been handed down by tradition and paintings in Thibetan monasteries where he had been." (text in Journey Through Georgia)

Meanwhile, Ouspensky survived the oppressive Bolshevik occupation of Essentuki by resorting to identity as a "Soviet librarian." In January 1919, he and others were set free by the triumphant Cossacks, but in June he moved to other places like Rostov. There he met Zaharoff, who had arrived from Kiev, and who was in a negative frame of mind concerning Gurdjieff. Talking with Ouspensky convinced Zaharoff that he had been wrong to move at a tangent. Zaharoff resolved to contact Gurdjieff at Tbilisi, but by now had contracted smallpox; in January 1920, he met a miserable death in the bloodstained ruins of Novorossiysk. Soon afterwards, Ouspensky departed for Constantinople (Search, pp. 381-2).

In 1920, the conditions in Georgia were threatened. Refugees arrived in Tbilisi with grim accounts of the Bolshevik victory to the north. The national independence of Georgia grew precarious. Southwards, the Turks again invaded Armenia in January, destroying Baytar, where Gurdjieff's sister Anna and most of her family were killed in a massacre. Only one of her children (Valentin, or Valia) escaped, and he reported that the Turks had raped his mother. Savage nationalism has since repeated in too many instances, abundantly proving that the worst beasts on the planet are men, and that the standard of their education is frequently nil. Valia was rescued by the Bolsheviks, and eventually managed to reach Tbilisi, about a hundred and fifty miles away, though the baby he took with him died (Luba Gurdjieff: A Memoir, p. 18). The boy afterwards became one of Gurdjieff's entourage.

Gurdjieff had already moved on, leading a party of thirty people on foot (in the heat of May) to the Black Sea port of Batoum, from where they voyaged to Constantinople (Istanbul). In desperation, Ouspensky had independently arrived at the same Turkish city a few months earlier. Gurdjieff stayed in this location for just over a year, in the European quarter of Pera.

One of those who encountered him at this juncture was Captain John G. Bennett, then the leader of a British Intelligence unit. Bennett discovered that local gossip was depicting Gurdjieff as a great linguist, a convert to Islam, and the representative of a Nestorian sect. Bennett ascertained the truth, which annulled the gossip.

"His linguistic attainments stopped short near the Caspian Sea, so that we could converse only with difficulty in a mixture of Azerbaidjan Tartar and Osmanli Turkish. Nevertheless, he unmistakeably possessed knowledge very different from that of the itinerant Sheikhs of Persia and Trans-Caspia, whose arrival in Constantinople had been preceded by similar rumours. It was, above all, astonishing to meet a man, almost unacquainted with any Western European language, possessing a working knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology and modern astronomy, and able to make searching comments on the new and fashionable theory of relativity [associated with Einstein], and also on the psychology of Sigmund Freud" (cited in Munson, Black Sheep Philosophers).

Bennett also left a description of the subject at this time. "He was powerfully built - his neck rippled with muscles - and although of only medium height, he was physically dominating. He had a shaven dome, an unlined swarthy face, piercing black eyes, and a tigerish moustache that curled out to big points" (Munson, article cited).

Constantinople was flooded with Russian refugees at that time. A reconcilement occurred between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. The latter had gained his own group of Russian students, which expanded to some thirty people, whom he now generously allocated to Gurdjieff. The latter often visited Ouspensky at the island of Prinkipo. Together they visited the bazaars and also the Mevlevi dervishes. "He (Gurdjieff) explained something to me that I had not been able to understand before. And this was that the whirling of the Mehlevi [sic] dervishes was an exercise for the brain based upon counting, like those exercises that he had shown to us in Essentuki" (Ouspensky, Search, pp. 382-3).

Ouspensky and Gurdjieff made several visits together to the Mevlevi dervishes, attending the mukabele or turning ceremony at the Galatahane tekke. They both appreciated the proceedings, but viewed the ceremony differently. Gurdjieff was far more in affinity with sacred music and dance, while Ouspensky resisted what he considered to be an emotional allurement. The mathematical mind of Ouspensky tended to view the ritual in terms of a planetary model, whereas Gurdjieff "strove to awaken his pupil's feelings to the totality of the experience" (Moore, 1991, p. 144). Nevertheless, both of them were later represented by the British press (in 1923) as believing that the dervishes had lost almost all knowledge of the true significance of their dances (in the sense of exercises associated with resolution of problems and acquisition of faculties).

Gurdjieff revived his Institute in October, and gave lectures twice a week, "in Russian, Greek, Turkish or Armenian according to the audience" (ibid., p. 146). Three doors away, he gave much attention to his sacred dance exercises, and more specifically the Struggle of the Magicians. His aggressive deportment and admonition here included bad language, though reserved for the "black magic" dancers who performed an evocative counter to the "white magic" complement.

Ouspensky withdrew when the Institute opened, but "the inner relationship between us remained very good" (Search, p. 383). In the spring of 1921, by special invitation he began to give weekly lectures at the Institute, with Gurdjieff supplementing his explanations. In May, Gurdjieff closed the Institute as a result of diminishing public interest, and retired to Prinkipo, maintaining contact with Ouspensky. The Russian ex-pupil disclosed his plan to write a book recording the talks of the Caucasian in Petrograd. Gurdjieff "agreed to this plan and authorised me to write and publish" the projected account (ibid.). Nevertheless, when these two left Constantinople in August, they parted company. Gurdjieff suggested that Ouspensky accompany him to Germany, but the offer was declined. "In the first place I did not believe it was possible to organise work in Germany and secondly I did not believe that I could work with Gurdjieff" (ibid., p. 384).

The misgivings about Germany were proven correct. Ouspensky maintained an underlying resistance to Gurdjieff's projection; he moved to London, where he commenced to lecture successfully. In contrast, Gurdjieff's plans for Germany met with obstruction. Yet Ouspensky's wife Sophie Grigorievna refused to accompany him to London, instead remaining with Gurdjieff's party. Madame Ouspensky is noted for the loyalist assertion: "No one knows who is the real Georgy Ivanovitch, for he hides himself from all of us" (Moore, 1991, p. 153).

Gurdjieff was certainly a robust and charismatic entity. His background was to become legendary. In Constantinople, a visitor (Boris Mouravieff) asked Gurdjieff about the source of his teachings. According to Professor Taylor, the flippant reply was "I stole them." This would indicate the derived nature of his concepts, from a pre-existing tradition or traditions. The matter is obscure, because Gurdjieff did not elaborate. Mouravieff subsequently claimed that Gurdjieff borrowed from Eastern Orthodox Christianity (section 17 below). In contrast, other writers have insisted that certain Sufi teachings were utilised. Ouspensky is on record for saying that he and others in the early Russian phase would ask Gurdjieff several times a day about the origin of his teaching, and the replies were evidently circuitous.

4. The Carpet Dealer

In eighteenth century Caucasia, local Turkic Khans ruled in their territories such as Shirvan, Karabagh, Baku, Kuba, and Erivan. Yet these kingdoms were eliminated by 1830, when the militant Russian incursion from the north extended the Empire of the Czars. The process of Westernisation was encouraged by the Russian presence. Yet artistically, the old traditions were diehard. "The region was a repository for the arts of Sassanian Iran and of Byzantium, the influences of Arabia and Islam, the customs of Central Asian Turks, the cultures of the Seljuk, Ottoman, and Safavid empires, and the Europeanising influence of Imperial Russia. All are interwoven in Caucasian textiles." (9) Textiles are applicable to Gurdjieff's mercantile tendencies during the early decades of the twentieth century, during the phase when rugs and carpets were woven for export demand, including the destination cities in Russia, America, and Britain.

Ouspensky supplied details about a practical and mundane role exercised by Gurdjieff. The Armenian Greek possessed a mercantile skill, and had evidently acquired a close knowledge of Eastern rugs and carpets (and not just the Caucasian variety, it is possible to deduce). "He told me a great deal about carpets which, as he often said, represented one of the most ancient forms of art" (Search, p. 35). (10)

Recent textile scholarship has intensively classified Eastern rugs and carpets on an ethnographic basis. The general findings have concluded that specific attributions of design significances are frequently arbitrary, motifs being customarily preserved amongst weavers in terms of a folk art and urban commercial activity. However, some ancient connections are discernible, and tangibly going back to the earliest known pile weavings, such as the Pazyryk rug. In terms of design influences, even the relevant gauge of which came first (nomadic or urban design) has been strongly debated, and involving the scenario of early Turkish carpets versus Persian court luxury weavings. Nevertheless, one argument is that "a number of motifs in tribal and village rugs of the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries may be traced to sources that are even older than the Pazyryk [rug]." (11)

Pazyryk rug, featuring borders with horsemen and deer

In 1949, a Russian archaeologist discovered the now famous Pazyryk rug, which had been preserved for nearly two and a half thousand years by the enveloping ice layer. The site was a tribal tomb in the Pazyryk valley, located in the Altai mountains of Siberia. This is a technically accomplished weaving, comparing well with more recent finely knotted examples. Arguments arose about the source of this weaving, one theory urging an Achaemenian origin in Iran, and another maintaining a nomadic origin. The theory has since been streamlined. Certainly, the proficiency of weaving indicates a far earlier phase of development. The complex ethnographic data and arguments relating to the Pazyryk rug are generally lost in popular coverage. (12)

Gurdjieff's theme of an ancient carpet art is justified. His form of assessment was quite rare in his day, and perhaps even unique. Eastern rugs and carpets were generally purchased merely for their decorative value, and vast numbers of them have worn out under the impact of unsympathetic feet. In the West today, a more informed knowledge of these weavings has developed, with much attention given to tribal and village environments, in addition to well known urban centres of production like Tabriz and Isfahan. The weavings in tribal communities, rural areas, and many urban locales were made by women, though men customarily sold the loom products. This rather basic fact has afforded extra interest.

Ouspensky seems to have been puzzled when Gurdjieff purchased carpets (and/or rugs) in Moscow and sold them in Petersburg (Petrograd), where they commanded higher prices. The Russian intellectual attributed this activity to the factor of "acting." Ouspensky himself obviously knew little about rugs/carpets, and was not a businessman. Many woven artefacts were small rugs rather than large carpets, and the former were far easier to transport. Most Caucasian pile weavings were rugs, not carpets, though one could easily credit Gurdjieff with a knowledge of expensive Persian carpets.

The intellectual was evidently fascinated by the procedure involved. Gurdjieff would place an advertisement in a Petersburg newspaper, and "all kinds of people came to buy carpets" (Search, p. 34). In these situations, the customers assumed that Gurdjieff was merely a Caucasian rug/carpet dealer. "I often sat for hours watching him as he talked to the people who came" (ibid.). The clientele must have been wealthy middle class/upper class persons, like the lady who selected "a dozen fine carpets" and bargained relentlessly for more.

"With these carpets, in the role of travelling merchant, he again gave the impression of being a man in disguise" (ibid.). Ouspensky relates how one day Gurdjieff paid close attention to the technique of a Persian carpet restorer whose services he utilised. Carpet repair is skilled work, and even Gurdjieff had not yet learned the art. The Persian would not sell the tool that he used, and Gurdjieff improvised a replica from the the blade of a penknife, which he filed to size. The next day, Ouspensky found that Gurdjieff "was sitting on the floor mending a carpet exactly as the Persian had done" (Search, p. 35).

Link:
G. I. Gurdjieff - Life and Controversy