# Gurdjieff, the New Age Movement, and the Guru Field: Making Sense of Multiple Entanglements ## Gurdjieff, the New Age Movement, and the Guru Field: Making Sense of Multiple Entanglements Steven J. Sutcliffe ![Blue Rectangle](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-01/Screen%20Shot%202025-01-22%20at%204.46.20%20PM.png?itok=0fG7fqHu) ## Gurdjieff, the New Age Movement, and the Guru Field: Making Sense of Multiple Entanglements I first came across a mention of Gurdjieff when I was personally involved in the “cultic milieu,”[1](#references) that field of new, alternative, and emergent religion often called “spirituality” in and after the “long 1960s,”[2](#references) as this took local shape in and around Edinburgh in the mid-1980s. Within that field, I was variously involved in Zen meditation and T’ai Chi; Tarot interpretation alongside organic whole foods; co-operative living and men’s anti-sexist politics. Access to groups for meditation and T’ai Chi was open and easy: the Zen class was taught in a university extra mural program and T’ai Chi in the Salisbury Centre, an Edinburgh “spiritual center” set up in 1973 with Jungian and Western Sufi input (still going strong). Within this local “cultic milieu” I did not come across a Gurdjieff group *per se*, although I heard of a ‘Gurdjieff-Ouspensky’ group south of Edinburgh. But I had a good friend, a woodworker, who, in addition to practicing Transcendental Meditation and listening to tapes by Robert Bly about the mythopoetic men’s movement, was interested in Gurdjieff, and I vividly recall the spines of *Views from the Real World* and *Meetings with Remarkable Men* on his bookshelf. I read *Meetings* around this time and found it stilted and theatrical—more like an artful, self-conscious “fable”—compared with the local *lingua franca* of “spirituality.” But it was not until I returned to university at the age of 30, after a brief career as a shoemaker, to study for a master’s degree in religious studies that I found the networks I had previously been involved in now described in academic sources as “The New Age Movement.” I remember being surprised since I didn’t recall a high profile for the millennialistic term *new age* in my circles of involvement, which were more “this-worldly” than “other-worldly” (in Max Weber’s useful terms) and in which the practical focus was typically on developing the capacities and hidden subtleties of the “Self” (and the capital S is important). This focus shaded over into what was sometimes called the “Human Potential Movement”[3](#references) and what Paul Heelas would label “Self religions,”[4](#references) which differed from the expectation of the irruption into this world of an external, transcendental “Other” typical of millenialistic movements modelled by definition on the biblical return of Christ. I was further surprised from a different angle when I read that Paul Heelas in *The New Age Movement* (1996) considered Gurdjieff, with Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky and psychologist Carl Jung, one of its three “key figures.” Heelas describes Gurdjieff as a “context-setter” whose significance lay in his emphasis on the learning and application of “transformational techniques” in comparison with the verbose discursivity of Blavatsky and Jung.[5](#references) In hindsight this strikes me as an astute observation about Gurdjieff, although only two pages of text justify it—and I still couldn’t fit that with the millennialism implied by a “New Age.” More critically—and despite the immense value of Heelas’s work—it was an early indication that, with just a few exceptions to prove the rule, most academic studies were not much interested in a social and ethnographic history of the “New Age Movement.” My PhD, begun in 1994 and completed in 1998, tried to clarify these and related historical questions about the impact of category formation in what was slowly being revealed to be a very large field of “post-Christian” practices in the European and transatlantic world, whether it was called the “cultic milieu” or the “New Age Movement.” I will finish by proposing a more accurate category. Through interviews and ethnography, I began to map some of the local content of this field, especially in Scotland and in the United Kingdom more widely. I continued to find little evidence for either millennialism or Gurdjieff. When asked, most practitioners actively repudiated the term “new age.” When I contacted the Findhorn Community on the Moray Firth—to which I was led via numerous references as an epicenter of “the New Age”—I received a letter which welcomed my visit but asserted that “the new age is over.” So perhaps there *was* or *had been* a “new age” movement that no longer existed? As with so many things, a chance encounter helped me resolve this question. While approaching visitors with a questionnaire at a Mind, Body and Spirit fair in Edinburgh in 1995 I met a PhD student from a different institution who told me that Findhorn held an extensive archive going back to its founding in 1962 and before. This was interesting. Within this large and unwieldy body of material I found crucial insights into influences on the Findhorn founders and their correspondence with similarly minded groups which predated the construction of ‘New Age’ as a countercultural ‘self-religion’ of the ‘long 1960s’. For example, an other-worldly interest in UFOs and Spiritualist mediumship had been central preoccupations of the small group at the early Findhorn colony which could be traced back into the mid-1950s when they had first met. Contemporary UFO literature referenced the imminent coming of a New Age, described in warnings given by space beings that Earth should clean up its act, cease its destructive wars and environmental pollution, or face the consequences. Furthermore, the Findhorn founders’ teacher in London - before they set up Findhorn in Scotland - was the dissenting daughter of a Scottish evangelical Christian group, called the Faith Mission, established in 1886 for the purpose of evangelising in rural areas. Here, at last, I had evidence of an eschatological “New Age’” in both evangelical Christian and post-Christian garb. But it appeared well before the this-worldly 'self-religion' of the 'New Age Movement' constructed in the academic literature. Partly through references in the Findhorn archive I also found my way to the enormous oeuvre of the Evangelical-turned-Theosophist Alice A. Bailey in which, between the late 1920s and early 1940s, I found the first semi-systematic presentation of a meditation and prayer practice which aimed to ‘bring in’ the New Age via a melding of Christian, Buddhist, and Theosophical sources.[6](#references) The interwar period turned out to host a fascinating earlier iteration of the ‘cultic milieu’ in which new religions and new teachers were surprisingly abundant. In another piece of serendipity, this time in a second-hand bookshop (in which heterodox sources often circulate when official archives are missing in action), I stumbled upon a rich guide to this wider interwar scene: Rom Landau’s *God is My Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters and Teachers*.[7](#references) Finally, Gurdjieff was there, in a chapter describing Landau’s interview with him in New York. Gurdjieff fittingly comes across as larger than life although Landau makes plain his dislike; he prefers Krishnamurti, and especially Steiner. Landau’s book helped me to think further about the structure of the field. Putting his lively, opinionated accounts of the many new teachers he met into dialogue with Campbell’s analysis of the structure of the “cultic milieu,” I identified the key agents of this field across the long twentieth century as “seekers.” Their interaction with the multiple authorities represented variously by Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti and Steiner helped me to understand the wide spread of “seekership” as a social role beyond (but also sometimes within) membership of traditional religious groups. John Godolphin Bennett’s memoir *Witness* was also helpful with its resonant subtitle, *The Story of a Search*.[8](#references) In a chapter called “Wandering Stars: Seekers and Gurus in the Modern World,”[9](#references) I included a brief account of Bennett’s memoir as a case study in seekership. The behaviour of ‘seeking’ as a reasonable response to the existence of multiple religious authorities provides in my view a more structured and historically accurate model for this entangled field than the oddly decontextualized and reified model of a “New Age Movement,” especially in relation to Gurdjieff.[10](#references) I recount this entangled history for three reasons. First, it indicates the challenges to serious scholarly research in what is now clearly a very large, complex and variegated field of “post-Christian” and “new” religion—or “spirituality”—covering the last 120 years and more. In contrast to established and legitimated fields of scholarly study in relation to “religion”—a category permeated by Protestant Christian assumptions about the priority of correct belief and doctrine over practices and rituals—there is still comparatively little work available on the manifold archives (many in private hands), the group structures and organizations, and the literature of this “post-Christian” field. This conference, following a previous symposium in 2019 at the University of Sydney led by Carole Cusack and colleagues, which in turn grew out of a new wave of academic work in religious studies, will help to redress lacunae in the particular area of “Gurdjieff studies." Yet only relatively few traditions within what we might call the “long twentieth century” (to riff on Arthur Marwick) have attracted the kind of systematic academic enquiry we find in the study of those culturally dominant and politically established religions known as “world religions” that continue to serve as powerful gatekeepers to the public acknowledgment of what counts as “proper” religion.[11](#references) As a scholar of religion I have lost track of the occasions when my research interests in New Spiritualities,[12](#references) in the Life Reform movement,[13](#references) and—yes—in the study of Gurdjieff[14](#references)—have been received with lukewarm interest or even condescension from theologians and other guardians of normative representation. Second, this sketch suggests that specific figures and currents emerge in context and are most richly understood in relation to other examplars. The premise of religious studies is, inevitably, comparative. For example, Gurdjieff’s presence (and later representations of that presence) is, I argue, a crucial medium for the transmission of his teachings. However, the charismatic presence he exuded (by all accounts) is shared (in different ways, to be sure) by the many other “mystics, masters and teachers” (to recall Landau’s subtitle) operating in the field. Indeed, the objective existence of just such a public field, defined by the co-presence of multiple rival authorities, is a condition of entry for a particular teacher: Gurdjieff, *for example*. Third, I have tried to provide evidence to reject the positioning of Gurdjieff within a problematic category of a “New Age Movement.” Of course, the success of categories in the “real world” (a relevant yet ambiguous category!) is not like running an algorithm. That said, I recommend we reconceptualize the “post-Christian” field of seekers and teachers—with Gurdjieff as a case study—not as an ancestor of “the New Age Movement” but as an extension of the “guru field” that Amanda Lucia has described as an extension of the authority of South Asian religious authorities (Sanskrit *guru*) into the transatlantic and especially North American sphere.[15](#references) I would like to further extend and apply Lucia’s model to the European field described here, as it was before the imposition of the distortions of a “New Age Movement.” If this is so, then Landau’s “mystics, masters and teachers” are a case in point and Gurdjieff is indeed a key figure. ### Author Biography Dr. Steven J. Sutcliffe is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Edinburgh and a past President of the British Association for the Study of Religions. He works on new and alternative spiritualities in late modernity and is author of *Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices* (2003) and co-editor (with Ingvild Sælid Gilhus) of *New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion* (2014) and (with Carole Cusack) of *The Problem of Invented Religions* (2016). He has published several articles on the Gurdjieff movement in cultural and historical context and is also working on a monograph on Life Reform networks in Scotland and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century with special reference to vegetarianism, conscientious objection and nature cure. ![Steven J. Sutcliffe](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2024-12/Sutcliffe_square.png?itok=z1eYuHFb) ## References 1. Colin Campbell, “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization,” *A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain* 5 (1972), 119–36. 2. Arthur Marwick, *The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States c. 1958–c. 1974* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 3. Donald Stone, “The Human Potential Movement,” in *The New Religious Consciousness*, ed. Charles Y. Block and Robert N. Bellah (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 93–115. 4. Paul Heelas, “Self-religions in Britain today,” *Journal of Contemporary Religion* 1, no., 1 (1984): 4–5. 5. Paul Heelas, *The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity* (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 47. 6. Steven J. Sutcliffe, *Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices* (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 7. Rom Landau, *God is My Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics, Masters and Teachers* (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1935). 8. John Godolphin Bennett, *Witness: The Story of a Search* (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962). 9. Steven J. Sutcliffe, “Wandering Stars: Seekers and Gurus in the Modern World,” in *Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality*, ed. Steven J. Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 17–36. 10. Joseph Azize and Steven Sutcliffe, “‘Only This Will Bring Results’: Practising Gurdjieff’s Exercises in a Search Culture,” in *Intentional Transformative Experiences: Theorizing Self-Cultivation in Religion and Esotericism*, ed. Jens Schleiter, Bastiaan Benjamin van Rijn and Sarah Perez (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024), 97–120. 11. Christopher R. Cotter and David G. Robertson, eds., *After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies* (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 12. Steven Sutcliffe and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus, eds., *New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion* (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 13. Steven Sutcliffe, “Religion and the ‘Simple Life’: Dugald Semple and Translocal ‘Life Reform’ Networks,’” in *Translocal Lives and Religion: Connections Between Asia and Europe in the Late Modern World*, ed. Philippe Bornet (Sheffield: Equinox, 2014), 123–48. 14. Steven Sutcliffe, “Gurdjieff as a *Bricoleur*: Understanding the ‘Work’ as a *Bricolage*,” *International Journal for the Study of New Religions* 6, no. 2 (2015): 117–37. 15. Amanda J. Lucia, “The contemporary guru field,” *Religion Compass* 16, no. 2 (2022): 12–15. #### Suggested Citation Sutcliffe, Steven J. "Gurdjieff, the New Age Movement, and the Guru Field: Making Sense of Multiple Entanglements" in The Teachings & Legacy of G.I.Gurdjieff: Conference Anthology, edited by Carole Cusack and Gosia Sklodowska. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2025. © License: CC BY-NC.