G. I. Gurdjieff, the Work, and the Academic Study of Religion and Esotericism

This paper addresses tensions existing between confessional approaches (insider discourses assuming the truth of a tradition) and social scientific approaches (discourses engaged in classification, comparison, and historical and social contextualization of teachers and traditions). The academic study of G. I. Gurdjieff and the Work is a recent subfield at the crossroads of religious studies, Western esotericism, and more secular philosophical and psychological tendencies. Studies of religious/spiritual and occult/esoteric phenomena were traditionally undertaken by members of the particular religion or esoteric school in question, and the value of outsider-oriented “scientific” research on such topics and groups has often been questioned.  

Arguably the first author to produce a scholarly, outsider-oriented study of Gurdjieff and the teaching that he established was James Webb (1946-1980), whose The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky and Their Followers (1980)¹ was published the year he died a suicide at the age of 34. The revolutionary nature of Webb’s research is undeniable; after graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge, he devoted his life to researching occult and esoteric subjects. He published Flight from Reason (1971)—which was reissued as The Occult Underground (1974)—and The Occult Establishment (1976) while in his twenties.² During his life, Webb’s work was largely ignored, but it has undergone a reappraisal since the emergence of the academic study of Western esotericism, which is usually dated to 1994, when Antoine Faivre (1934-2021) published Access to Western Esotericism. This book proposed the classic six-point model of Western esotericism, involving symbolic and real correspondences, living nature, imagination and mediation, the experience of transmutation, the praxis of concordance, and direct transmission from teacher to initiate.³  

Esotericism studies constantly confront the conflict between the Enlightenment principle that knowledge is free and readily available to all, with the traditional principle that knowledge is proprietary and may belong to a particular group, disqualifying others from access. This latter position is also held by many religious groups who see outsiders as incapable of appreciating wisdom from sacred sources. Scholars’ views about how to bridge this gulf—between those who are inside, practitioners with a personal commitment to a way of transcendence, and those who are outside, observers engaged in evaluative study—differ. Since the 1990s, it has become increasingly evident that distinguishing an “insider” from an “outsider” is not only difficult but also often impossible, given that individuals and communities typically inhabit multiple roles and realities.⁴ The methodological debate commonly termed “the insider/outsider problem in the study of religion” is also important in anthropology and often focuses on researchers and the groups they are studying, often over many years and with mutual respect and mutual exchange at its core.  

The position of the ex-member, the formerly committed practitioner who undergoes a change of heart, is one complex identity, as is the “seeker” who reads and explores communities online but may not join a “real world” group. The amount of information available online has increased dramatically in the past decade or two, with films, lectures, archives, and interactive groups and programs delivered online.⁵ This trend, already noticeable, intensified during the COVID-19 crisis, when meeting in person was hampered or prohibited by lockdowns and other restrictions. 

In some groups, the view that only an insider could authentically speak prevailed, and members of some religious communities expressed hostility toward Western scholarly assessments of their traditions. This is not only because of the insider/outsider distinction, but because like all putatively secular academic disciplines, religious studies proposed naturalistic (psychological, cultural, political, historical, and so on) explanations for religious and spiritual phenomena, not granting authority to theological explanations, divine interventions, miracles, and other sacred phenomena. For some, that gulf is unbridgeable; yet I would contend that the contours of the gulf might be redrawn, and a different relation toward the religious, spiritual, or esoteric group or teaching might emerge, in which scholarly outsiders can make real contributions to knowledge and understanding. The insider-outsider distinction has occupied more space than warranted in the study of religion (and arguably esotericism); as Jeppe Sinding Jensen notes, the most it demonstrates is “the plain fact that knowledge is unevenly distributed among subjects.”⁶  

The conditions under which a scholar can make a real contribution to the study of a group to which s/he does not belong are governed by ethics and require commitment to principles such as verifying sources, testing hypotheses, and revising and updating conclusions when new material becomes available. There are many different types of comparison or categorization and many methodological lenses that can be employed. Scholarship is situated in a genealogy of knowledge. For example, Jensen observed that: 

As it happens, genealogical comparison is the application of typological comparison to a specific corpus, one that shares a common ancestry. One may talk about magic among Uto-Aztecan Indians, the ancient Greeks, or Nilotic tribes, but that restriction does not make the concept of “magic” one bit less theoretical, nor one bit less a theoretician’s construction—albeit one that obeys certain constraints in relation to the evidence (subject matter) at hand. In addition, it should be taken into account that we do not just apply a concept or a model to something “out there”; instead, we do so in relation to a history of research or a scholarly tradition—even if it is in its most current state-of-the-art. Thus, I am not alone with my object, and the relation between my theoretical construct and my subject matter is not solely dialectic; rather, it is triadic. It involves a “tradition” consisting of previous and subsequent scholarship as a “form of life.” The difference between “good” and “bad” scholarship is—in terms of methodological normativity—the difference between scholarship that is falsifiable, theoretically open, and seeks empirical tractability and that which is idiosyncratic, subjective, and guided by prejudice. Theory is not, as so many positivists have suspected, just a matter of personal whim and subjective opinion.⁷  

In other words, scholarship is an ethically exacting and personally challenging activity that must result in the transformation of the scholar as a practitioner of scholarship.  

James Webb worked to produce The Harmonious Circle in very different conditions to the 2024 scholarly norm. The book involved eight years of study, and the research process was arduous because he could not begin with the enormous body of literature that exists now on Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and their pupils who established formal lines of transmission for the Work after the deaths of both men. His research process was chiefly engaging with people—people who were unlikely to be entirely positive about his idea for the book and who were understandably reticent, given that Gurdjieff had attracted negative publicity during and after his life.⁸  

The life of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c. 1866-1949) until he began teaching in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1912 is obscure, and his semi-fictionalized Meetings with Remarkable Men, while suggestive of possible real-life journeys and potential sources for his teachings, is inconclusive.  

From approximately 1914, his activities and associates were chronicled by a range of journalists and other observers, not necessarily unbiasedly, providing a rich public source of corroborative evidence up until his death in 1949.⁹ Gurdjieff’s writings, published posthumously, and Ouspensky’s posthumous In Search of the Miraculous (1949)—which Gurdjieff approved for publication—are supplemented by a number of memoirs by first-generation pupils. These were the materials available to Webb when he began his research, and as Joyce Collin-Smith wrote in her moving obituary for him, “The rag, tag and bobtail of the Work is still to be found in splinter groups and sects all over Europe and America. James Webb searched them all out painstakingly, charmed his way into getting access to a great deal of unpublished material, made many friends, and then set to analyze what he had acquired in the way of knowledge.”¹⁰ 

Circle was eight years in the making; the year it appeared, Webb committed suicide after struggling for some time with mental illness. Reading The Harmonious Circle today, it is clear that Webb was not always correct, but he did extraordinary research and is rightfully hailed as a pioneer in the field. It will suffice to give one example; in seeking other identities that Gurdjieff may have adopted at various times before his emergence as a spiritual teaching in Russia just before World War I, Webb retold the “legend that Gurdjieff was the Lama Dordjieff” which “was widely believed by his Western disciples” dismissively, but speculated that Gurdjieff may have been one Ushe Narzunoff, a spy in the “Great Game” between Russia and Britain over control of Central Asia. This identification collapses instantly when the reader inspects the photographs of Narzunoff that Webb discusses.¹¹ Yet one obvious error does not invalidate Webb’s project, and he is on surer ground once the sources for Gurdjieff’s life solidify.  

I will provide two areas where Webb’s research genuinely turned up new information that illuminates Gurdjieff’s life and teachings. The first is his identification of a group of writers on occult, spiritual, and Russian Orthodox Christian topics who were younger contemporaries of Gurdjieff and whose association had originated in Tiflis, where Gurdjieff and his pupils lived in 1919. The leader was Pavel Alexandrovitch Florensky (1882-1937), who, like Gurdjieff, had an Armenian mother. With his friends A. V. Elchaninov (1881-1934), Valentin Sventitsky (1882-1931), and V. F. Ern (1881-?), he entered the priesthood in Moscow. The group published books integrating occult ideas with Orthodox theology, including Florensky’s The Pillar and Foundation of Truth (1914) and Sventitsky’s The Heavenly Citizens: My Travels Among the Anchorites of the Caucasus Mountains (1915). Webb is right to draw a parallel with Gurdjieff’s early companions, the Seekers of Truth, in particular Abram Yelov and Sarkis Pogossian.¹²  The second example is the extensive discussion of possible sources for the Enneagram, a symbol often uniquely associated with Gurdjieff, but which Webb demonstrates had likely antecedents in the writings of, among others, Ramon Llull (1232-1316) and Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680).¹³ 

Unfortunately, Webb’s source materials were destroyed by his widow, Mary, who was not sympathetic to his research and was also in great distress after James’ long period of mental illness culminating in suicide. The Harmonious Circle has detailed notes, and if sifted carefully, they can be matched to informants (even when the informants have requested anonymity), which aids scholars in testing his research for reliability and enables confirmation of certain interpretations. 

There are uncontroversial areas that Work and non-Work people can reach agreement on; for example, the work I have done on cultural production in Work circles and on the formation of intentional communities does not encroach upon issues that are regarded as sensitive.¹⁴ Other areas are more difficult, and there are questions about what belongs “properly” to the initiatory tradition and what should remain oral (this is extremely tricky as we are inevitably the products of literacy not orality, and Gurdjieff pupils from the beginning constantly made notes of and wrote up accounts of his teachings). 

Additionally, many of Gurdjieff’s lectures and talks have been published in recent years. The internet has proved to be a game-changer in the study of a range of previously obscure or private religious, spiritual, and esoteric groups. Much material that Work members may believe to be properly regarded as restricted is now available online, meaning that those interested can now not only read the books but also engage in interactive online forums, watch Movements demonstrations, and listen to lectures and conversations between Work members. 

Scholars bring models of spiritual and esoteric leadership, comparative contexts that situate the person and teachings of Gurdjieff in a specific milieu, and analysis of conceptual frameworks in Work worldviews and lifeways that may illuminate. Nowadays, texts (in the broadest sense) can be readily accessed, and paradigms from religious studies, esotericism studies, literary criticism, heritage studies, and other academic disciplines can usefully be applied to studying Gurdjieff, his teachings, and his legacy. There are many outstanding tasks still to be undertaken: for example, the analysis of original and translated texts (especially those of Ouspensky, to which Joseph Azize has made a contribution);¹⁵ a detailed comparison of the three published versions of Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1931, 1950 and 1992); assessment of the various contributions of Gurdjieff’s pupils;¹⁶ and greater attention to the artistic, cultural, religious and political contexts in which the Work developed. For example, the study of art forms, including the theatre, cinema, and television that bear the imprint of Gurdjieff and his teachings, is another area that merits investigation.¹⁷

Work members (and ex-members and fellow travelers) produce texts, events, and lifeways that are of great interest to scholars. The purpose of fieldwork and of scholarly gatherings like this conference is the respectful exchange of perspectives and knowledge and the acknowledgement of mutual interests and concerns.