Feet of Clay

Gurdjieff taught that a collision between a comet named Kondoor and the earth gave rise to two orbiting bodies, Loondeiperzo (later known as the moon) and Anulios, After the shock ‘a whole commission consisting of Angels and Archangels, specialists in the work of World-creation and World-maintenance, under the direction of the Most Great Archangel Sakaki, was immediately sent from the Most Holy Sun Absolute to that solar system “Ors”.’15 Gurdjieff’s beliefs about the moon were even more eccentric. He claimed that the moon was still an unborn planet which was gradually becoming warmer and more like earth, just as the earth was becoming warmer and more like the sun. Anulios became forgotten, but the moon required energy to assist its evolution. Sakaki therefore arranged that the planet earth should send to the moon the ‘sacred vibration askokin’. Askokin was liberated when organic life on earth dies. According to Ouspensky’s report in In Search of the Miraculous, Gurdjieff said:

The process of the growth and the warming of the moon is connected with life and death on the earth. Everything living sets free at its death a certain amount of the energy that has ‘animated’ it; this energy, or the ‘souls’ of everything living – plants, animals, people – is attracted to the moon as though by a huge electromagnet, and brings to it the warmth and the life upon which its growth depends, that is, the growth of the ray of creation. In the economy of the universe nothing is lost, and a certain energy having finished its work on one plane goes to another.16

He then went on to say that the moon influences everything that happens on earth.

Man, like every other living being, cannot, in the ordinary conditions of life, tear himself free from the moon. All his movements and consequently all his actions are controlled by the moon. If he kills another man, the moon does it; if he sacrifices himself for others, the moon does that also. All evil deeds, all crimes, all self-sacrificing actions, all heroic exploits, as well as all the actions of ordinary life, are controlled by the moon.17

And J. G. Bennett wrote:

At a certain point in the history of the earth it was perceived by the Higher Powers that a very undesirable and dangerous situation was developing on the planet earth which could endanger the equilibrium of the entire solar system and, in particular, the evolution of the Moon.18

If men realized that, because they were controlled by the moon, their personal efforts were unavailing, might they not be tempted to mass suicide, and so deprive the moon of the askokin needed for its development? To guard against this possibility, the Higher Powers implanted an organ at the base of man’s spine delightfully named by Gurdjieff ‘the organ Kundabuffer’.* This had the effect of ensuring that man would base his values solely on satisfying his own desires and the pursuit of happiness by making him perceive reality as topsyturvy. So man would serve the moon blindly, unaware that, by embarking on the path of self-development, he could free himself from the moon altogether. Once the moon crisis had passed, the organ Kundabuffer was removed; but the majority of mankind still behave blindly, selfishly, and without insight as if the organ was still there. This is actually necessary if the purposes of nature are to be fulfilled. According to Ouspensky, Gurdjieff said that the evolution of humanity as a whole might be injurious.

For instance, the evolution of humanity beyond a certain point, or, to speak more correctly, above a certain percentage, would be fatal for the moon. The moon at present feeds on organic life, on humanity.

Humanity is part of organic life; this means that humanity is food for the moon. If all men were to become too intelligent they would not want to be eaten by the moon.19

The majority of human beings provide askokin for the moon after death, and are then condemned to obliteration. However, some few who follow the path of self-development and self-realization prescribed by Gurdjieff create askokin during life. Such people may finally develop a soul which can survive and may even reach Objective Reason and attain a form of immortality by being reunited with the Most Most Holy Sun Absolute.

How can anyone ever have taken this kind of thing seriously? Some have referred to Gurdjieff’s teachings as myths, and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh claimed that Gurdjieff was joking about the moon, but J. G. Bennett wrote that Gurdjieff certainly intended his account of the historical appearance and disappearance of the organ Kundabuffer to be taken literally.20 He also quotes the author Denis Saurat, then Director of the French Institute in London, as believing that Gurdjieff’s teaching ‘could not be of terrestrial origin. Either Gurdjieff had revelations vouchsafed only to prophets or he had access to a school on a supernatural level.’21 Although writers about Gurdjieff tend to distance themselves from his most extravagant propositions, Philip Mairet, an intelligent literary figure who was editor of the New English Weekly, and who was also well acquainted with the works of Freud, Jung, and Adler, is reported as saying: ‘No system of gnostic soteriological philosophy that has been published to the modern world is comparable to it in power and intellectual articulation.’22 Having read Ouspensky’s exposition of Gurdjieff’s teaching in his book In Search of the Miraculous, and having attempted to read Gurdjieff’s own book All and Everything, I can only wonder at Mairet’s opinion. Perhaps I have extracted enough to give the reader some idea of Gurdjieff’s picture of the cosmos, and to demonstrate that Gurdjieff’s own writings are both voluminous and obscure. Even his devotees say that All and Everything has to be read several times if its meaning is to be grasped; and some claim that Gurdjieff’s obscurity was deliberate; a device adopted to ensure that the disciple would have to make a considerable effort at understanding on his own account rather than be spoon-fed with clear statements and doctrines.

At first sight, it is difficult to believe that Gurdjieff’s elaborate cosmology was anything other than a planned, comical confidence trick designed to demonstrate how far the gullibility of his followers could be tested. His own account of how he survived his early wanderings reveals how expert he was at deception. Gurdjieff wrote that he coloured sparrows with aniline dyes and sold them as ‘American canaries’ in Samarkand. He tells us that he had to leave quickly in case rain washed the sparrows clean. When people brought him sewing machines and other mechanical objects for repair, he was often able to see that the mere shift of a lever would cure the problem. However, he was careful to pretend that such repairs were time-consuming and difficult, and charged accordingly. He also wrote that he found out in advance which villages and towns the new railway would pass through, and then informed the local authorities that he had the power to arrange the course of the railway. He boasted that he obtained large sums for his pretended services, and said that he had no pangs of conscience about doing so.23

We know from J. G. Bennett that, when he and his followers were in danger from the conflict between the Cossacks and the Bolsheviks, Gurdjieff managed to get transport from the Provincial Government by spreading a rumour that he knew of enormously rich deposits of gold and platinum in the Caucasus mountains which would fill the Government’s coffers. Bennett wrote:

In all this, he was also demonstrating to his pupils the power of suggestion and the ease with which people could be made to ‘believe any old tale’.24

Fritz Peters recounts an elaborate hoax in which Gurdjieff diluted a bottle of vin ordinaire with water, and then covered it with sand and cobwebs. Two distinguished women visitors were tricked into believing that Gurdjieff was serving them with wine of a rare vintage, and dutifully pronounced it the most delicious which they had ever tasted.25

Fritz Peters recalled an occasion on which a rich English lady approached Gurdjieff as he was sitting at a café table and offered him a cheque for £1,000 if he would tell her ‘the secret of life’. Gurdjieff promptly summoned a well-known prostitute from her beat in front of the café, gave her a drink, and proceeded to tell her that he was a being from another planet called Karatas. He complained that it was very expensive to have the food he needed flown in from this planet, but urged the prostitute to taste some which he gave her. When asked what she made of it, she replied that he had given her cherries, and went on her way with the money Gurdjieff pressed upon her, obviously believing that he was mad. Gurdjieff turned to the English lady and said: ‘That is the secret of life.’ She appeared to be disgusted, called him a charlatan, and went off. However, she reappeared later on the same day, gave Gurdjieff the cheque for £1,000, and became a devoted follower.26

He became skilled at extracting money from Americans to support his enterprises at the Château du Prieuré, and referred to this activity as ‘shearing sheep’. For example, an American woman travelled from the United States to the Prieuré to seek Gurdjieff’s advice about her chain smoking, which she said was a phallic activity connected with her marital sexual difficulties. After a pause for thought Gurdjieff suggested that she should change her brand of cigarette to Gauloises Bleus, and charged her a large fee for this advice, which she gladly and gratefully paid. There is no doubt that Gurdjieff could be a convincing confidence trickster when he so wished and that he did not hesitate to mislead the gullible when it suited him. He was always a wonderful story teller who held his audiences entranced.

He told Peters, ‘I not make money like others make money, and when I have too much money I spend. But I never need money for self, and I not make or earn money, I ask for money and people always give and for this I give opportunity study my teaching.’27 However, he contradicted himself a moment later by saying that he owned a business making false eyelashes and another business selling rugs. When he went to New York in 1933, he demanded coaching in the use of four-letter words in English from Fritz Peters before giving a dinner for some fifteen New Yorkers. When the diners had drunk a certain amount, Gurdjieff began to tell them that it was a pity that most people – especially Americans – were motivated only by genital urges. He picked out a particularly elegant woman and told her in crude terms that she took so much trouble with her appearance because she wanted to fuck. The guests were soon behaving in an uninhibited fashion and becoming physically entangled with each other. Gurdjieff then announced that he had proved his point that Americans were decadent and demanded that he be paid for his lesson. According to Peters, he collected several thousand dollars.

Yet confidence trickery cannot be the whole explanation of Gurdjieff’s teaching. If Gurdjieff could support himself so easily by deception, why should he bother to invent a cosmogony? Gurdjieff found writing a burden. He was much more impressive as a lecturer than he was as a writer. All and Everything is enormously long, and, although it was dictated to Olga de Hartmann rather than written, it must have demanded considerable dedication to complete. Gurdjieff began his dictation on 16 December 1924. He completed the dictation of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson (the first part of All and Everything) in November 1927. Could anyone devote so much time and energy to creating something in which he did not believe himself, with the deliberate intention to deceive? We hover on the borderline between confidence trickery and psychosis. Gurdjieff’s propositions about the universe were totally at variance with the discoveries of astronomers and other scientists, and can only be compared with science fiction, but I think he believed in them, just as paranoid psychotics believe in their delusional systems.

Gurdjieff’s arrogance and disregard of established experts were extraordinary. When he visited the caves of Lascaux, he told J. G. Bennett that he did not agree with the Abbé Breuil’s dating of the rock paintings at thirty thousand years ago because he had concluded that the paintings were the work of a brotherhood that existed after the loss of Atlantis some seven or eight thousand years ago. He also told Bennett that he intended that his Institute would become ‘a centre of training and research not only into the powers of man himself, but into the secrets of the solar system. He said he had invented a special means for increasing the visibility of the planets and the sun and also for releasing energies that would influence the whole world situation.’28

Gurdjieff’s complete disregard for science and for the views of generally accepted experts is narcissistic in the extreme. But he did, at times, show considerable interest in other people, and compassion for those who were suffering. He sometimes exhibited a capacity for intense concentration upon individuals, which was certainly one component of his undoubted charisma. Fritz Peters, whose parents were divorced, was legally adopted by his mother’s sister, Margaret Anderson and her friend Jane Heap, who were mentioned earlier as adherents of Gurdjieff. Peters, who was brought to Le Prieuré when he was a boy of eleven and stayed there until he was fifteen, described Gurdjieff’s behaviour to himself.

Whenever I saw him, whenever he gave me an order, he was fully aware of me, completely concentrated on whatever words he said to me; his attention never wandered when I spoke to him. He always knew exactly what I was doing, what I had done. I think we must all have felt, certainly I did, when he was with any one of us, that we received his total attention. I can think of nothing more complimentary in human relations.29

This intense concentration, as we have seen, was an important part of Gurdjieff’s teaching. It entered in to everything he did. His ability to mobilize and direct attention may have accounted for his extraordinary effect on other people.

When you do a thing, do it with the whole self. One thing at a time. Now I sit here and eat. For me nothing exists in the world except this food, this table. I eat with the whole attention. So you must do – in everything … To be able to do one thing at a time … this is the property of Man, not man in quotation marks.30

In movement, he gave the impression of complete co-ordination and integrated power. ‘His gait and his gestures were never hurried, but flowed in unison with the rhythm of his breathing like those of a peasant or a mountaineer.’31 Peters writes that Gurdjieff’s presence and physical magnetism were ‘undeniable and generally overwhelming’. When, in the late summer of 1945, long after he had left the Prieuré, Peters suffered from severe depression with insomnia, anorexia, and loss of weight, he sought Gurdjieff in Paris. Gurdjieff realized that he was ill, forbade him to talk and at once offered him a bedroom for as long as he needed it. He made Peters drink strong, hot coffee, and concentrated upon him intensely. It seemed to Peters that a violent electric blue light emanated from Gurdjieff and entered himself. Whatever the reason, Peters promptly recovered from his depression.

However, not everything about Gurdjieff was so impressive. His personal habits could be disgusting. One of the jobs that Peters was given when he was still resident at the Prieuré, was to clean Gurdjieff’s rooms.

What he could do to his dressing room and bathroom is something that cannot be described without invading his privacy; I will only say that, physically, Mr. Gurdjieff, at least so I gathered, lived like an animal … There were times when I would have to use a ladder to clean the walls.32

Gurdjieff generalized from his own experience in that he set himself up as a teacher who could train others to attain the wisdom and autonomy which he believed himself to possess. But such teaching could only be assimilated by the chosen few. As we saw earlier, Gurdjieff did not believe that mankind as a whole was capable of development, or that it was desirable that any attempt should be made in this direction, lest the development of the moon might suffer. Gurdjieff, like many other gurus, was unashamedly élitist and authoritarian.

Gurdjieff’s sexual behaviour was unscrupulous, in that he coupled with any female disciple whom he found attractive, and not infrequently made her pregnant. When Fritz Peters went to the Château du Prieuré at the age of eleven, there were about ten other children there, some of whom were undoubtedly fathered by Gurdjieff.

Like other gurus whom we have encountered, Gurdjieff enjoyed the exercise of power. We saw earlier what physical demands he made on the de Hartmanns. He was not directly cruel, but the regime he imposed upon his disciples was rigorous to the point of physical exhaustion.

The daily routine was exacting in the extreme. We woke up at five or six in the morning and worked for two hours before breakfast. Afterwards there was more work: building, felling trees, sawing timber, caring for the animals of almost every domestic species, cooking, cleaning, and every kind of domestic duty. After a quick light lunch and a period of rest, one or two hours were devoted to ‘exercises’ and ‘rhythms’ accompanied by music usually played by Thomas de Hartmann on the piano. Sometimes there would be fasts lasting one, two, three or even up to seven days during which all the work continued as usual. In the evening, there would be classes in rhythms and ritual dances which might go on for three, four or five hours until everyone was totally exhausted.33

It is not surprising that one disciple who was fixing trusses twenty-five feet above the ground fell asleep whilst precariously balanced on a narrow beam and had to be rescued by Gurdjieff.

Bennett does not point out that, whether or not this regime assisted spiritual development, it was certainly a convenient way of obtaining free labour to run the Prieuré. Moreover, Gurdjieff, as an experienced hypnotist, would have realized that physical exhaustion makes people more suggestible, although one of his avowed aims was to discover some means of ‘destroying in people the predilection for suggestibility’.34 He once ordered Orage to dig a ditch to drain water from the kitchen garden. Orage worked extremely hard for several days. He was then told to make the edges of the ditch quite equal, and did so after more labour. Immediately after he had finished, Gurdjieff ordered him to fill in the ditch because it was no longer needed.

One of Gurdjieff’s disciples was Olgivanna Ivanovna Lazovich, who became the third wife of the American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. She first encountered Gurdjieff in Russia in 1917 at a time of crisis in her life. She was nineteen years old and was just about to have a child. Her first marriage was failing, her father was ill, her mother far distant. When Gurdjieff moved to the Prieuré, she joined him, became one of his best dancers, and an assistant instructor in The Work. In 1924, Gurdjieff suggested that she join her brother in America for no obvious reason. Shortly after her arrival, she encountered Frank Lloyd Wright at a ballet performance in Chicago and fell in love with him. Gurdjieff visited the Wrights on more than one occasion. Finding that Wright was seriously worried about his digestion, Gurdjieff invited them both out to dinner and served a series of extremely hot and indigestible dishes followed by the inevitable draughts of Armagnac. Wright felt terrible, but woke the next morning to find that his fears about his digestion had disappeared.35 On another occasion,

Wright grandly remarked that perhaps he should send some of his pupils to Gurdjieff in Paris. ‘Then they can come back to me and I’ll finish them off.’

‘You finish! You are idiot,’ said Gurdjieff angrily. ‘You finish! No. You begin. I finish.’ It was clear that Wright had met his match.36

Wright had many guru-like characteristics himself, so that it is not surprising to learn that these two autocrats found themselves in competition. Even so, Gurdjieff won Wright over. Shortly after Gurdjieff’s death, when Wright was receiving a medal in New York, he interrupted proceedings to announce: ‘The greatest man in the world has recently died. His name was Gurdjieff.’37

Olgivanna appears to have acquired or developed a number of Gurdjieff’s less engaging traits. Draftsmen, apprentices and their wives were supposed to sit at Olgivanna’s feet whilst she gave them instructions and mercilessly criticized their failings. They even had to undergo the ordeal of listening to Wright reading from Gurdjieff’s writings.38 As she became older, she became more and more dictatorial, and, after Wright’s death, became a ‘despotic and jealous’ widow with whom scholars and institutions preferred not to negotiate.39

Adherents of Gurdjieff’s teaching recount with satisfaction that he did not bring pressure upon followers to stay with him, and in fact often dismissed them. This is interpreted as indicating his desire that they should become independent of him. In some cases, it may rather have been his perception of impending apostasy: gurus generally prefer to rid themselves of potential dissidents rather than be deserted. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s most devoted disciple and interpreter, began to lose confidence in him as a person as early as 1917. This seems to have been precipitated by Gurdjieff’s arbitrary dispersal of the group he had assembled around him in Essentuki. Ouspensky continued to believe in the authenticity of Gurdjieff’s vision and teaching which he accepted as having been handed down from some ancient, esoteric source, but found the man himself more and more intolerable. Ouspensky formally broke off relations in January 1924, and forbade his own pupils to communicate with Gurdjieff or refer to him.40

A. R. Orage, the talented editor of the New Age, had abandoned literary life in London for life at the Prieuré, and later moved to New York, where he set up his own Gurdjieffian groups, and whence he sent large sums of money to Gurdjieff. During the seven years of his close involvement with Gurdjieff, he produced practically no work of his own. As John Carswell puts it: ‘The most notable English editor of his time had become a mysterious exile owing obedience to an Armenian magus.’41 Orage’s devotion was tested to the limit by Gurdjieff’s incessant demands for money, and by the abuse heaped upon him when he did not instantly obey. His allegiance was further undermined by his wife, Jessie Dwight, whom he married in 1927, and who had hated her visit to the Prieuré. Eventually, Gurdjieff, realizing Orage’s disillusion, turned up in New York when Orage was temporarily absent, assembled Orage’s group, denounced Orage and required each member to sign a written declaration that they would have nothing further to do with their instructor. Some did so; others refused. Orage, summoned back from England, demanded to see Gurdjieff, and, after remarking that he too repudiated the Orage created by Gurdjieff, signed the document denouncing his own teaching.

J. G. Bennett gives a list of close adherents whom Gurdjieff deliberately dismissed. Bennett himself left the Prieuré in 1923 and did not see Gurdjieff again until 1948, the year before he died. Even Fritz Peters, who had been greatly influenced by Gurdjieff in childhood, and who, as we have seen, turned to Gurdjieff when he was seriously depressed as an adult, wrote: ‘He began to seem to me in a very excellent phrase “a real, genuine phony.”’43

By the beginning of 1932, it became clear that the Château du Prieuré was no longer financially viable. Gurdjieff habitually overreached himself financially and American support fell away after the crash of 1929. The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man finally closed in May. But Gurdjieff himself continued to flourish. He lived in Paris throughout the German occupation of the city during the Second World War. Characteristically, he obtained credit from various food shops by persuading them that an American pupil had given him an oil well in Texas which would ensure that their bills would be settled as soon as the war was over.