George Ivanovich Gurdjieff is one of the most enigmatic figures of twentieth-century spirituality. He founded neither a religion nor an initiatory order in the traditional sense, but a "work" on oneself that attracted writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals. Much of the information about his life comes from him and is deliberately wrapped in mystery: that is precisely why it is important to distinguish what is documented from what belongs to the story.
A childhood on the borders of empires
Gurdjieff was born at Alexandropol, today Gyumri in Armenia, then in the Russian Empire, to a Greek father and an Armenian mother. His date of birth is uncertain: the hypotheses range from 1866 to 1877. His father was a herdsman and an ashokh, a singer of traditional poems, and Gurdjieff recalled hearing the epic of Gilgamesh from him.
He grew up in Kars, in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious setting. His youth is the subject of the book Meetings with Remarkable Men, published after his death: in it he tells of long journeys in Central Asia, Egypt, Tibet and the Middle East in search of ancient knowledge, together with a group called the "Seekers of Truth". Historians regard this book as partly autobiographical and partly allegorical: the journeys cannot be documented in detail.
Moscow, St Petersburg and Ouspensky
Gurdjieff appears with certainty in the sources around 1912 in Moscow, where he gathered a first group of pupils. In 1915 he was met by the journalist and mathematician Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky, already the author of books on the fourth dimension. Ouspensky became his most important pupil and carefully recorded his teachings of those years, later published as In Search of the Miraculous, which appeared in 1949.
The Russian Revolution forced the group to keep moving: Essentuki in the Caucasus, Tbilisi, Constantinople, Berlin. Ouspensky parted from Gurdjieff around 1924 and continued teaching on his own in London.
The Institute at Fontainebleau
In 1922 Gurdjieff settled in France and bought the Château du Prieuré at Avon, near Fontainebleau, where he founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. The pupils led an intense communal life there, made up of strenuous manual labour, exercises of attention, music and dances.
In January 1923 the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield died there; already gravely ill with tuberculosis, she had chosen to spend her last months at the Prieuré. In 1924 Gurdjieff was the victim of a serious car accident; after his convalescence he scaled down the Institute's activities and devoted himself mainly to writing.
The main ideas
Gurdjieff's teaching, which Ouspensky called the Fourth Way, differs from the ways of the fakir, the monk and the yogi because it does not require withdrawal from the world: it is practised in ordinary life. Some fundamental concepts are:
- man as a machine: the ordinary human being acts automatically, reacting to stimuli without real will;
- self-remembering: the effort to be present to oneself while observing what happens, the precondition of any transformation;
- the three centres: intellectual, emotional and moving, which in ordinary man work in an unbalanced way;
- the law of three and the law of seven: cosmological principles said to govern every process, the second linked to the musical scale;
- the enneagram: a nine-pointed figure inscribed in a circle, used to represent processes according to these laws.
It should be remembered that the personality enneagram, so widespread today, is a later development that arose in the 1960s and 1970s and does not coincide with Gurdjieff's use of the figure.
The Movements and the music
An essential part of the work was the Movements, sacred dances and group exercises of great precision, which Gurdjieff said he had learned in monasteries and communities in Asia. They were presented in public in Paris and New York between 1923 and 1924. With the composer Thomas de Hartmann, Gurdjieff produced hundreds of piano pieces inspired by Eastern melodies.
Writings and last years
Gurdjieff's main work is Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, a long and complex cosmic narrative published in 1950, in which a being from another world ironically describes the oddities of humanity. Gurdjieff died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in October 1949.
A balanced judgement
Gurdjieff still divides those who study him. His pupils testify to the force of his presence and the effectiveness of his demands for attention. Critics point to his often harsh and authoritarian methods, his demands for money, and the impossibility of verifying the sources from which he claimed to have drawn his knowledge. For the history of ideas he remains a key figure in the transition from nineteenth-century occultism to the twentieth-century spiritualities centred on awareness.
In short
- G. I. Gurdjieff was born at Alexandropol on an uncertain date between 1866 and 1877 and died in 1949.
- His teachings of the Russian years are known to us mainly through Ouspensky.
- At Fontainebleau he founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, with work, Movements and music.
- Concepts such as man as a machine, self-remembering and the enneagram define the Fourth Way.
