Feet of Clay

The punishments instituted by Koresh were as savage as those employed by Jones. He taught that children as young as eight months old should receive corporal punishment for misbehaviour, and told their mothers that they would bum in hell if they refused to beat their children. Children were punished for the slightest misdemeanour by being beaten with a piece of wood known as a ‘helper’. Each child had his own ‘helper’ with his name written on it. A special room was set aside for these beatings. Koresh beat his own three-year-old son Cyrus so severely that it sickened Marc Breault, and no doubt contributed to Breault’s eventual disillusion. Several of the twenty-one children who were eventually released bore the marks of recent beatings. Another punishment was to immerse the offender in sewage and not allow him or her to bathe. Derek Lovelock, an English survivor of the terminal siege, nevertheless insisted that Koresh was ‘a very caring compassionate man,’ and denied the accusations of cruelty and sexual abuse, although he did admit that parents sometimes beat their children.9 He told William Shaw that the months he spent at the ranch were the happiest days of his life. ‘“We were one big family,” he says. “We all believed in the one belief, and agreed on the same points. We were all one community.”’10

Koresh was as sexually rapacious as Jim Jones, but his tastes were different. In 1983, Koresh married Rachel, the daughter of an official of the Branch Davidian Church. She was only fourteen years old, but no one objected. She bore him three children. In 1986, Koresh began sleeping with her younger sister, then twelve years old. When Koresh took command of Ranch Apocalypse, he split up families by ensuring that the men slept on one floor, the women on another. Severing family ties was one way of reinforcing allegiance to himself, and also made it easier for him to seduce the women he wanted. Koresh considered himself entitled to have sexual relations with any of the females in the compound, including girls of twelve and thirteen. One child who was too small for penetration was urged to use large tampons in order that her vagina might become able to accommodate him.11

Koresh, like Jones, deteriorated mentally. He took a variety of vitamins and herbal remedies to cure what he called impotence, but drugs cannot be blamed for the development of his delusions as they can in the case of Jones. He was less obviously a confidence trickster than Jones; but when Breault was asked whether Koresh really believed what he was teaching or was just a con man, Breault replied: ‘I think a little of both. Vernon gets a craving. Then he finds the theology to justify that craving. When others buy into his doctrine, he starts believing it himself.’12

By 1986 he was teaching that he was entitled to a hundred and forty wives. When Ranch Apocalypse finally went up in flames, 17 of the 22 children who perished had been fathered by Koresh, who claimed that only he was allowed to procreate, and that part of his mission was to fill the world with righteous children.

At the beginning of the FBI siege, Koresh allowed those children who were not fathered by him to be released. The psychiatrists who interviewed them repeatedly heard stories about dead babies. Some children alleged that the bodies of babies were stored in a freezer until they could be got rid of. It is possible, though unproven, that Koresh sacrificed the children of cult members because he himself was not their father. He certainly tried to persuade his followers that ritual sacrifices of children might be necessary. It is fair to add that reports about the condition of the children who were released varies. In his book The Ashes of Waco, Dick J. Reavis is chiefly concerned with attacking the clumsy way in which the ATF* and the FBI handled the siege, which he considered entirely unjustified. He claims that there is evidence that the children within the compound were well cared for and quotes one psychiatrist who examined the released children as saying that there was no evidence of sexual abuse. When the FBI blasted holes in the compound buildings, they assumed that the mothers of small children would take the opportunity to escape with their offspring. None did so. The final holocaust was initiated by members of the cult, who used kerosene lamps to start the blaze. Not everyone who died was burned alive. Twenty-seven cult members, including Koresh himself, were shot.

Constructing or adopting a belief system in which one is either God’s prophet or God himself inflates the ego to monstrous proportions. Koresh was more deeply concerned with religion, Jim Jones with racial equality and an egalitarian society. But both compensated for isolation and lack of love in childhood by becoming infatuated with power, and both ended up with delusions of their own divinity.

It seems almost incredible that either of these gurus could have retained the allegiance of their followers for so long. Koresh made some ineffective attempts to conceal the identity of the children whom he took to bed, but most of the outrageous sexual behaviour and the appalling cruelty of each guru were paraded rather than concealed. There were very few defectors from either camp. It appears that once a guru has convinced a follower of his Messianic status, his actual behaviour, as judged by ordinary human standards, becomes largely irrelevant. Belief in a guru, while it persists, entirely overrules rational judgement. Dedicated disciples are as impervious to reason as are infatuated lovers.

There is a well-known psychiatric phenomenon called folie à deux. If two people live together and one is mad, the other may become convinced by at least some of the delusions expressed by the psychotic partner. If the psychotic partner is removed to hospital, the other partner usually recovers his or her sanity. Shared delusions are mutually reinforcing, and membership of a sect led by a psychotic leader reassures both the leader and the disciple who has fallen under his spell of the truth of their beliefs. Both Jim Jones and David Koresh kept their followers under close surveillance and made it difficult for anyone to leave. Fortunately, this is exceptional. Contrary to popular belief, most of those who join ‘New Religious Movements’ are not subject to coercion, and many leave such movements without difficulty. But communities like Jonestown which are isolated from normal sources of information become more dependent on whatever information is given them by their leaders, and are less able to question what they are told. Research into so-called ‘sensory deprivation’ has shown that individuals who are cut off from most varieties of sensory input by being placed in sound-proof, light-proof rooms become more suggestible, and tend to be less critical of any information which is fed to them. The same is true of isolated communities. In addition, anyone within the community who dares to doubt the pronouncements of the guru is likely to be treated as a traitor by his fellows. Jones and Koresh, to all except their disciples, appear to have been evil madmen. They exhibited, in exaggerated form, with very few redeeming features, all the worst possible characteristics of gurus. Fortunately, the majority of gurus are not as bad as they were. We need to examine some other varieties.

II GEORGEI IVANOVITCH GURDJIEFF

GURDJIEFF CLAIMS OUR INTEREST because he, or his doctrines as propounded by his disciple Ouspensky, bewitched so many interesting and intelligent people, including the writer Katherine Mansfield, A. R. Orage, the distinguished socialist editor of The New Age, Margaret Anderson, the editor of the Little Review, and her friend and co-editor Jane Heap; the surgeon and sexologist Kenneth Walker; Olgivanna, the third wife of Frank Lloyd Wright; John Godolphin Bennett, later to become something of a guru himself. The psychiatrists James Young and Maurice Nicoll, and the psychoanalyst David Eder were also followers. T. S. Eliot, David Garnett and Herbert Read intermittently attended Ouspensky’s meetings. Ouspensky, who first encountered Gurdjieffin 1915, became chiefly based in London and was therefore more accessible to interested English people than the guru himself.

The date of Gurdjieff’s birth is uncertain. Some say 1866; others quote one of his several passports, which showed December 28, 1877. James Moore,1 Gurdjieff’s latest biographer and the author of Gurdjieff and Katherine Mansfield, argues that the earlier date is the more probable. Gurdjieff was secretive about this as he was about so many features of his background. He died on October 29, 1949. His birthplace was Alexandropol (formerly Gumru) in Russian Armenia, in the land lying between the Black Sea on the West and the Caspian Sea on the East, south of the Caucasus mountains. His father was Greek, his mother Armenian. Armenian was spoken at home, but he also learned some Greek, some Turkish, and the local dialects. In his autobiographical memoir, Meetings with Remarkable Men, he claimed to know eighteen languages, but there is no evidence to support this. Throughout his life, he continued to speak both Russian and English incorrectly.

Gurdjieff was the eldest of six children; he had a brother and four sisters. One of the sisters died young. In Gurdjieff’s early childhood, the family moved to the near-by city of Kars, shortly after the defeat of the Turkish forces there in 1878 by the Grand Duke Michael Niklayevich, brother of the Russian Tsar. The boy Gurdjieff was accepted as a chorister at Kars military cathedral, and being obviously intelligent, attracted the notice of Father Dean Borsh, who helped to educate him. He developed a passion for learning, read widely in Greek, Armenian, and Russian, and began to harbour a wish to find some answer to the problem of ‘the meaning of life’. He resembles other gurus in going through a period of doubt which was succeeded by the revelation which manifested itself in his new cosmogony and his teaching. Why his perplexity was so extreme as to propel him into a search for truth which lasted twenty years is not apparent.

Gurdjieff’s esoteric knowledge and status as a guru were attributed to his discoveries during his travels in Central Asia, but we are entirely dependent upon his own inaccurate account. The period 1887–1911 remains unsubstantiated and mysterious. Gurdjieff claimed to have learned much from a three months’ stay in ‘the chief Sarmoung monastery’, belonging to a brotherhood which he said taught him secret wisdom derived from traditions dating back to 2500 B.C., including physical techniques for self-transformation, and sacred dances. Gurdjieff was careful never to be specific about the exact location of these teachers of secret knowledge, although he later stated that he had a teacher from whom he was never separated, and with whom he constantly communicated, presumably telepathically. The Sarmoung monastery cannot be identified, and even disciples of Gurdjieff regard his account of it as an allegory rather than literal truth. His own autobiographical account, in Meetings with Remarkable Men, is contradictory and chronologically unreliable. What does emerge from that book is his resourcefulness and his capacity to survive, both physically and financially. He sold carpets and antiques; repaired sewing-machines; bought quantities of old-fashioned corsets and remodelled them to suit current taste; traded in oil and fish, and claimed that he cured drug addicts by hypnosis. His prowess as a healer was, he wrote, unprecedented (Gurdjieff never exhibited false modesty). When asked by Ouspensky about his studies and discoveries, he said that he travelled with a group of specialists in various subjects who eventually pooled their knowledge; but he did not vouchsafe their names or say where they were, nor did he answer direct questions about where he had been. ‘About schools and where he had found the knowledge he undoubtedly possessed he spoke very little and always superficially.’2 It is hardly surprising that there were rumours that he was a secret agent employed by the Russians.

Gurdjieff established himself as a guru in Moscow in 1912. His principal contention was that man does not know himself, and is therefore not what he should be. He considered that modern civilization had made it difficult to co-ordinate the physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects of personality, which he believed were controlled by three separate centres. He thought that the majority of people were ‘asleep’, and behaved like machines reacting blindly to external forces. His training was designed to awaken selected followers to a higher level of consciousness and a new perception of reality.

A modem man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies. About sleep, its significance and its role in life, we will speak later. But at present just think of one thing, what knowledge can a sleeping man have? And if you think about it and at the same time remember that sleep is the chief feature of our being, it will at once become clear to you that if a man really wants knowledge, he must first of all think about how to wake, that is, about how to change his being.3

By participating in what became known as ‘The Work’, the fortunate few might become more able to co-ordinate the three centres through self-observation. Instead of living in a dream in which a series of fleeting ‘I’s’ succeeded one another, the awakened individual would cease living ‘in quotation marks’, achieve a new unity, and, by means of this, direct his own destiny, or become able to do, as Gurdjieff phrased it. ‘To do means to act consciously and according to one’s will.’4 This change in consciousness, like everything else, has a material basis, which in this case manifests itself as a trace chemical compound in the brain.

The keystone of his teaching, of course, was that no progress – no human progress, that is – can be accomplished except on an individual basis. Group work is valuable only in the sense that it helps the individual to achieve individual self-perfection.5

J. G. Bennett, who died in 1974, first met Gurdjieff in 1920. In his book Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Bennett devoted three chapters to Gurdjieff’s travels and search for esoteric wisdom. Both J. G. Bennett and James Moore have to admit that it is impossible to trace Gurdjieff’s travels with any degree of accuracy. Although careful never to commit himself whole-heartedly, Bennett clearly believed in the literal truth of the tradition that, somewhere in Central Asia, there is a group of wise men or ‘Masters of Wisdom’ who watch over the destiny of mankind and intervene from time to time to alter the course of events by introducing new ideas and new modes of thinking. Bennett suggests that Gurdjieff made contact with such a group; an ‘Inner Circle of Humanity’, perhaps the Sarmoun brotherhood, whose members were highly developed spiritually and able to generate higher energies. Bennett wrote:

The true significance of such a group must lie in its mission. The more that one becomes aware of the spiritual realities, the more convinced does one become that a very great action is now proceeding in the world. The task before us is to help mankind to make the difficult and dangerous transition to a new epoch. If we find evidence that Gurdjieff was concerned in this task and moreover that he opened the way for us to participate in it, we shall have gone a long way to connecting him with the ‘Inner Circle’.6

We shall again encounter the idea that mankind is on the threshold of a new epoch when discussing the ideas of Jung.

Bennett was a long-term disciple of Ouspensky, and was therefore at one remove from the master himself. But he remained intermittently in touch with Gurdjieff, and saw him frequently during the last two years of his life. Bennett believed that Gurdjieff’s ideas and teaching had transformed his own life, and himself ran groups along Gurdjieffian lines in London, sometimes with dire effects upon participants, as I remember from seeing one or two of them as psychiatric patients. Nevertheless, Bennett followed a path characteristic of those who constantly search for esoteric wisdom without ever quite finding what they want.

Bennett … broke from the Gurdjieffian mainstream in 1955 to pursue eclectic affiliations (being inter alia ‘opened’ into Subud by Hosein Rofé, initiated by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, received into the Roman Catholic Church, and introduced to the ‘Invisible Hierarchy’ by Idries Shah).7

The Russian revolution of 1917 caused Gurdjieff to move to Tiflis in Georgia and then to Constantinople and on to Berlin. His exhausting and sometimes dangerous journeys are chronicled by his biographer, James Moore. His close associates Thomas and Olga de Hartmann joined him in one of his stopping places; Essentuki in the Caucasus. This was in August 1917, not long after Kerensky had been announced as Prime Minister of the coalition government which followed the abdication of the Tsar. Gurdjieff then suddenly announced that he was going to Tuapse, on the Black Sea. The dutiful de Hartmanns followed. Their account of an exhausting nocturnal walk forced on them by Gurdjieff in spite of the fact that they were unsuitably clad and also dead tired is a striking example of the autocratic and unreasonable demands which Gurdjieff made on his followers which they nevertheless slavishly obeyed. Olga de Hartmann’s feet were so swollen and bleeding that she could not put on her shoes and had to walk barefoot. Thomas de Hartmann had missed a night’s sleep because he had been ordered to stay on guard. Their limbs ached and they were both exhausted; but they went on nevertheless.

Mr. Gurdjieff demanded from us a very great effort, especially difficult because we did not know when it would end. We suffered and would have been only too happy to rest; but there was no protest in us, because the one thing we really wished to do was to follow Mr. Gurdjieff. Beside that, everything else seemed unimportant.8

It was a recurrent pattern of behaviour. The de Hartmanns claim that these demands were made upon them as a way of teaching them to overcome emotional and physical difficulties. Gurdjieff certainly pushed people to the limit of their physical capacities; and some discovered that they had more powers of endurance than they had ever suspected.

When short of money, he survived by dealing in caviar and carpets. He had hoped to settle in England, but the Home Office were suspicious of him and would not permit him to stay unless he did so as a private individual, which would have meant abandoning his nucleus of followers. Eventually, the generosity of Lady Rothermere, the estranged wife of the newspaper magnate, together with funds from other wealthy supporters, made it possible for him to set up his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Château du Prieuré, a large estate near Fontainebleau, in France.

‘The Work’ was carried out in groups and included special exercises and dances, exhausting physical work, training in memory and self-observation, together with lectures given by Gurdjieff at irregular intervals. Some of those who participated in the so-called ‘Sacred Dances’ found them more valuable than Yoga or any other training affecting physical awareness. Complete concentration on whatever was being carried out at the time was an essential part of Gurdjieff’s message and of his own behaviour. Insistence on living intensely in the present moment and discarding the concern with past or future which interferes with fully experiencing the here-and-now, is not confined to Gurdjieff’s teaching. Zen also treats the past and future as fleeting illusions. It is only the present which is eternally real.9

Gurdjieff was a dictator. He had the capacity so completely to humiliate his disciples that grown men would burst into tears. He might then show the victim special favour. He demanded unquestioning obedience to his arbitrary commands. For example, he once suddenly announced that none of his followers might speak to each other within the Institute. All communication must be by means of the special physical movements he had taught them. Gurdjieff sometimes imposed fasting for periods up to a week without any lessening of the work load. His authority was such that his followers convinced themselves that these orders were for their own good. Those less infatuated are likely to think that, like other gurus, Gurdjieff enjoyed the exercise of power for its own sake. There were also dinners at which large quantities of alcohol were drunk, and large sums of money extracted from the diners.

Gurdjieff also developed an elaborate cosmology. His picture of the universe and man’s place in it is complex, and unsupported by any objective evidence. It is deliberately obscure and often incoherent. Yet, because Gurdjieff was a powerful guru whose followers included some sophisticated, intelligent people, attempts have been made by his followers to make sense out of what appears to the sceptical reader to be a psychotic delusional system. The task is rendered more difficult by the numerous ludicrous neologisms which Gurdjieff introduced. It is appropriate to remind the reader that chronic schizophrenics often invent words which carry a special meaning for them but which others find hard to understand. Eugen Bleuler, the famous director of the Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich and the originator of the term ‘schizophrenia’, quotes a patient who wrote:

At Apell plain church-state, the people have customs and habits partly taken from glos-faith because the father wanted to enter new f. situation, since they believed the father had a Babeli comediation only with music. Therefore they went to the high Osetion and on the cabbage earth and all sorts of malice, and against everything good. On their inverted Osetion valley will come and within thus is the father righteousness.10

Another patient referred to being tormented by ‘elbow-people’. As Bleuler notes, wording is preferably bombastic. ‘The patients utter trivialities using highly affected expressions as if they were of the greatest interest to humanity.’11 I am not suggesting that Gurdjieff was schizophrenic, but his use of language resembled that employed by some psychotics.

For example, Gurdjieff is said to have believed in God, to whom he referred as ‘Our Almighty Omni-Loving Common Father Uni-Being Creator Endlessness’.12 This description may fairly be described as bombastic. In the beginning was the ‘Most Most Holy Sun Absolute’ in space which was also endless, but which was charged with a primordial cosmic substance Etherokilno. ‘Because this nebulous Etherokilno was in static equilibrium, the super-sun existed and was maintained by our Common Father, quite independently of outside stimulus, through the internal action of his laws and under the dispensation termed Autoegocrat (I keep everything under my control).’13

However, Time, that villain who attacks us all, appeared in the shape of the merciless Heropass, which so threatened to diminish the volume of Sun Absolute that steps had to be taken to forestall this action. Thereupon Common Father issued from himself a creative Word-God named Theomertmalogos which interacted with Etherokilno to produce our universe Megalocosmos. This creation is maintained by a principle or law named Trogoautoegocrat – by eating myself, I am maintained: ‘In the cosmic sense, God feeds on the Creation and the creation feeds on God.’14 So God and his creation become separate entities, which are only distantly related to each other, and creation is maintained by new laws; Triamazikamno, the law of Three, and Heptaparparashinokh or Eftalogodiksis, the law of Seven.

The law of Three is relatively straightforward. ‘The higher blends with the lower in order to actualise the middle.’ For example, sperm and ovum merge to create the embryo. This formula can be applied to many situations in which opposites require a third – Moore gives as an example a judge resolving a case between plaintiff and defendant.

The law of Seven is more complex, and, in my view, incoherent. Gurdjieff tried to relate cosmology with the musical scale, believing that every completing process has seven discrete phases corresponding to an ascending or descending series of notes, including the two semitonal intervals, which constitute necessary irregularities. Gurdjieff represented the universe in a diagram called the Ray of Creation which begins with the Absolute and ends with the moon.