Gurdjieff, G. I.

by Michel de Salzmann
GURDJIEFF, G. I. (1877?1949), Georgii Ivanovich Gurdzhiev; GreekArmenian spiritual teacher who remains an enigmatic figure and an increasingly
influential force in the contemporary landscape of new religious and psychological
teachings. Resembling more the figure of a Zen patriarch or a Socrates than the
familiar image of a Christian mystic, Gurdjieff was considered by those who knew
him simply as an incomparable awakener of men. He brought to the West a
comprehensive model of esoteric knowledge and left behind him a school
embodying a specific methodology for the development of consciousness.
By the term consciousness Gurdjieff understood something far more than
mental awareness and functioning. According to him, the capacity for
consciousness requires a harmonious blending of the distinctive energies of mind,
feeling, and body, and it is this alone that can allow the action within man of those
higher influences associated with such traditional notions as nous, buddhi, or
atman. From this perspective, man as we find him is actually an unfinished being
unconsciously led by his automatic conditioning under the sway of external
stimuli. The wide variety of Gurdjieffs methods may all be understood as
instrumental toward realizing self-consciousness and the spiritual attributes of
real manthat is, will, individuality, and objective knowledge. These methods
and his teaching about the evolution of man are implicated in a vast network of
cosmological ideas that are spelled out in his own writings and in P. D.
Ouspenskys In Search of the Miraculous (New York, 1949).
During his lifetime, notwithstanding the sensationalistic press accounts
written about him during the 1920s, Gurdjieff was almost unknown outside his
circle of followers. From the 1950s onward, however, his ideas began to spread
both through the publication of his own writings and through the testimonies of
his pupils. His exceptional personal character, especially his genius for using every
circumstance of life as a means for helping his pupils feel the whole truth about
themselves, gave rise to numerous misleading accounts that for many years
overshadowed the integrity of his ideas. Today, however, the Gurdjieff teaching
has emerged out of this background of rumor and innuendo to be recognized as
one of the most penetrating spiritual teachings of modern times.

Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol in the southern Transcaucasian part of

Russia. His father was Greek and his mother Armenian. Exceptionally gifted, as a
boy he was favored with tutors from the Orthodox church and was precociously
schooled for both the priesthood and medicine. Convinced that the thread of
perennial esoteric knowledge was somewhere still preserved, he left the academic
path to engage himself in a quest for ultimate answers. For some twenty years
(18941912) he pursued his searchmostly in Inner Asia and the Middle Eastfor
the core of the ancient traditions. This chapter of his life remains a mystery,
although the significant events are recounted in his autobiographical narrative
Meetings with Remarkable Men.
In 1913 Gurdjieff appeared in Moscow with a fully developed teaching and
began to organize around him groups of pupils drawn mainly from the
intelligentsia. From then on the outline of his life can be more clearly traced. Both
the Russian writer P. D. Ouspensky and the composer Thomas de Hartmann
describe the continuity of his work throughout the hardships of the Bolshevik
Revolution and the journey that brought him and his followers to the Caucasus
(1917), then to Constantinople (1920), and finally to Fontainebleau, France, south of
Paris, where in 1922 he was able to establish on a firmer basis his Institute for the
Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieur dAvon.
The institutes doctrine and experimental methods soon attracted many
leading artists and intellectuals from England and the United States, who came to
meet Gurdjieff and eventually work with him. Most of them, like Maurice Nicoll,
Jane Heap, and Katherine Mansfield, had been introduced to the teaching by A. R.
Orage, the noted critic and editor of The New Age, and by P. D. Ouspensky.
In early 1924, Gurdjieff made his first visit to the United States,
accompanied by a large group of pupils, where, mainly in New York, he gave a
series of public performances of his work on sacred dances. His aim was to show
the forgotten principles of an objective science of movements and to demonstrate
its specific role in the work of spiritual development.

In the summer of 1924, after a nearly fatal automobile accident, Gurdjieff decided
to reduce the activities of his institute and the circle of his followers, and to secure
the legacy of his ideas in written form. By 1934, he had completed the first two
series of his writings and part of the third. In the meantime he maintained contact

with his older pupils, returned twice to the United States (in 1929 and 1933), and
settled definitely in Paris.
In 1935, Gurdjieff resumed his work with groups, assisted by Jeanne de
Salzmann, his closest disciple, who was later responsible for the continuation of his
work. Although extreme discretion was demanded of his followers, the groups in
France expanded continuously, even throughout the war, and included
outstanding figures in literature, art, and medicine, such as Ren Daumal, Kathryn
Hulme, and P. L. Travers. After the war, Gurdjieffs international family of pupils
again gathered around him. He made his last visit to America in December 1948
and in spite of illness continued his work intensively until his death, in Paris, on 29
October of the following year.
Beelzebubs Tales to His Grandson, first published in English in 1950, is his
masterpiece, an unprecedentedly vast and panoramic view of mans entire life on
Earth as seen by beings from a distant world. Through a cosmic allegory and
under the cloak of discursive anecdotes and provocative linguistic elaborations, it
conveys the essentials of Gurdjieffs teaching. Meetings with Remarkable Men,
published in 1963, tells the tale of Gurdjieffs youth and his unremitting search for
knowledge. Gurdjieff originally intended to complete his trilogy with a final series
entitled Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am; the manuscript, however, was never
completed, and part of it was lost. The remaining part, raw and fragmentary, was
published in 1981. Views from the Real World, published in 1973, is a collection of
talks given by Gurdjieff and recorded by his pupils in the 1920s. Gurdjieff also left
a considerable amount of music, composed in collaboration with Thomas de
Hartmann. Some of this music was used to accompany the movements and sacred
dances that constituted an essential part of Gurdjieffs teaching and that have been
documented and preserved by his pupils.
The specific work and correlative research proposed by Gurdjieff have been
carried on and expanded, under the guidance of his pupils, through foundations
and societies in most major cities in the Western world. A number of other groups
have also appeared, which, though not connected with his pupils, claim to follow
Gurdjieff or to have some relation to his teaching.

This essay was previously published in The Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 Volumes, Mircea
Eliade, editor in chief, New York: Macmillan, 1987.