An Enlightened Life in Text and Image: G. I. Gurdjieff''s Meetings With Remarkable Men (1963) and Peter Brook's Meetings With Remarkable Men (1979)
by Carole M. Cusack
Literature & Aesthetics 21 (1) June 2011, page 72
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Introduction
This article considers the 'autobiographical" memoir by George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866[?] – 29 October 1949), Meetings With Remarkable Men (hereafter Meetings), which was published posthumously in 1963 under the aegis of Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieff''s designated successor. Almost all known about the Greek-Armenian Gurdjieff is open to question, from his birth date (variously given as 1866, 1872 and 1877), to the "Work", as his teaching is called. The Work has been jealously guarded as a modern initiatory tradition by first – and second – generation disciples, and is controversial in terms of its sources, meaning and interpretation.1 The 1979 film, Meetings With Remarkable Men, with a script co-authored by Madame de Salzmann, directed by Gurdjieffian theatre and film auteur, Peter Brook (b. 1925), depicts the young Gurdjieff''s spiritual quest reverentially. This article investigates a number of issues including: what models underlie the self-understanding expressed in Gurdjieff's memoir; what role Jeanne de Salzmann and other prominent disciples in the Work played in the dissemination of Gurdjieff''s model of the "enlightened life"; the ways that Peter Brook has modelled his own life on that of Gurdjieff; what the constituent elements of an "enlightened life" in the contemporary, deregulated spiritual marketplace might be; and the aesthetics of the film's presentation of the quest for enlightenment. It is speculated that the film adaptation of Meetings With Remarkable Men potentially won for Gurdjieff a new audience of spiritual seekers who did not wish to join the secretive and authoritarian Work, but admired the portrayal of Gurdjieff as a spiritual seeker who achieved enlightened status.
Gurdjieff as Enlightened Esoteric Teacher
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was probably born 1866 “in Alexandropol (now Gyumri, Armenia), on the Russian side of the Russo-Turkish frontier, his father a Cappadocian Greek carpenter and bardic poet [ashokh], and his mother an illiterate Armenian.”2 His family was Orthodox Christian. When Gurdjieff was a boy the family moved to Kars, a nearby city, where he became a chorister at the Kars Military Cathedral school, under the tutelage of Dean Borsh.3 From approximately 1887 to 1911 nothing verifiable is known of his life. He emerged as a spiritual teacher in 1912 in Moscow, married Julia Ostrowska in St Petersburg in the same year, and attracted group of early pupils, the most significant of whom was the philosopher and writer Pyotr Demianovitch Ouspensky (1878-1947). The group also included Sophia Ouspensky, the composer (and close friend of Wassily Kandinsky), Thomas de Hartmann, and his wife Olga, a talented singer.4 In 1917 the Russian Revolution caused Gurdjieff to leave St Petersburg and return to Alexandropol. During 1917-1922 he was based progressively at Essentuki, Tblisi (formerly Tiflis), Constantinople and Berlin.
In Tblisi he met the artist Alexandre von Salzmann (later de Salzmann) and his wife Jeanne (who were friends of the de Hartmanns and Kandinsky) and they became his staunch followers. In 1919 the first public demonstration of the sacred dances (first called "exercises", but later known as "Movements") took place in Tblisi, and the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was founded.5 Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann worked intensively on the never-performed ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians. The group resided in Constantinople for about a year (where Gurdjieff and Ouspensky met John G. Bennett, later a significant, though heterodox, teacher in the Work), then to Berlin, finally settling in Paris in 1922. Gurdjieff then established the second Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at a chateau called the Prieure, in Fontainebleau, to the south of Paris.6 This was his headquarters for two years only, as in 1924 he had a near-fatal car crash and disbanded the Institute shortly after, moving to a flat in Paris. Although the Prieure continued to have “a small, though fluctuating, population for several more years… he ceased to have any formal pupils;”7 instead, Gurdjieff concentrated on his writing, assisted by Olga de Hartmann and Alfred R. Orage. For the last twenty-seven years of his life (1922-1949), apart from nine visits to America, some quite lengthy, and an unaccounted-for period in 1935, Gurdjieff remained in France.8
It is important to understand that until P. D. Ouspensky met Gurdjieff and began to document his system there was no virtually external testimony concerning Gurdjieff''s life at all. Ouspensky separated from Gurdjieff in 1924, although the two men met several times in between 1924 and Ouspensky's death in 1947. Ouspensky is significant in that he continued to teach the Gurdjieff system after breaking with him, and published the earliest and most systematic version of the teaching, In Search of the Miraculous, which appeared posthumously. Ouspensky was a prolific and well-regarded author of scientific and esoteric works, including The Fourth Dimension (1909), Tertium Organum (1912), A New Model of the Universe (1931) and a novel, The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1915), which explored the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence. Ouspensky recollected meeting Gurdjieff, whom he described as:
a man of oriental type, no longer young, with a black mustache [sic] and piercing eyes, who astonished me first of all, because he seemed to be disguised… I was still full of impressions of the East. And this man [had] the face of an Indian raja or an Arab sheikh whom I at once seemed to see in a white burnoose or gilded turban.9
In their early conversations Gurdjieff told Ouspensky of the plans for his ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians, which would feature some of the sacred dances that he had witnessed during his travels in the East. In explaining these dances to Ouspensky he drew attention to their cosmological significance: “In the strictly defined movements and combinations of the dancers, certain laws are visually reproduced which are intelligible to those who know them… I have many times witnessed such dances being performed during sacred services in various ancient temples.”10 The purpose of these dances was to bring into alignment the human "centres", and to align human beings with the cosmos.
In Gurdjieff''s system, humans are "three-brained beings", who need to align their intellectual, emotional and sensory selves into a single self through the development of a soul (which people, who effectively do not exist, do not have unless they work to grow one). This is known as the development of a finer, (or kesdjan), body. Gurdjieff''s teachings are often called "The Fourth Way" because of his illustration of the three ways that are connected to the three centres of being. The way of the fakir (Sufi ascetic) Gurdjieff connects to the body and the sensory centre; the way of the monk (Christian renunciant) he connects to the emotional centre; and the way of the yogi (Hindu ascetic) he connects with the intellectual centre. But all these paths are inadequate, as they “are all imbalanced because each centre is only aware of part of what we are… So in effect, there are two kinds of imbalance… individual neurosis (derived from the fact that centres try to do the work that is proper to one of the others) and 'spiritual lopsidedness" (derived from the fact that no centre can reveal the whole nature of man).”11
Gurdjieff''s system is forbiddingly difficult to penetrate, not least because he used a formidable vocabulary of neologisms. There are two fundamental laws, the Law of Three (Triamazikamno) and the Law of Seven (Heptaparaparshinokh). The first of these rejects dualistic understandings, through positing three forces, positive, negative and reconciling, or neutralising (rather than just positive and negative), “[t]he higher blends with the lower to actualize the middle, which becomes higher or the preceding lower and lower for the succeeding higher.12 These three forces, in Gurdjieffian language, are called the affirming, denying, and reconciling. The Law of Seven applies to multiple aspects of the teaching: there are seven levels of energy, seven different cosmoses, and the Ray of Creation diagramme has seven emanations. James Moore concisely explains the Law of Seven as follows:
[e]very completing process must without exception have seven discrete phases: construing these as an ascending or descending series of seven notes or pitches, the frequency of vibrations must develop irregularly, with two predictable deviations (just where semi-tones are missing between Mi-Fa and Si-Do in the untempered modern major scale EDCBAGFE).13
These two laws are synthesised and expressed symbolically in the Enneagram, a nine-sided figure.14
In the Gurdjieffian universe everything is alive and seeks to feed itself to achieve higher levels of being. Thus the moon is trying to develop into a new Earth and the Earth to develop into a new sun. Garrett Thomson summarises the role of organic life in this system as follows:
Organic life is a huge accumulator of energy gathered from the sun and the rest of the solar system by the earth to feed itself and the development of the moon. At death, everything that lives releases energy, askokin, to the moon… In other words, the choice between Heaven and Hell is the choice between feeding the sun or the moon… Our spiritual development consists a struggle to become free from the mechanical influences of the moon.15
You see by this how the spiritual Movement was wedged as it were between two set purposes, one intent upon distorting the truth concerning the Moon, the other upon distorting the truth concerning the planets. — That was the situation at the end of the nineteenth century. H. P Blavatsky and Sinnett were to distort the truth about the Moon; the others set out to distort the truth about the connection of the planets with the evolution of the Earth. Do not imagine that it is an easy position to be wedged between two such currents; for here we have to do with occultism, and where occultism is involved a stronger force is necessary for grasping its truths than for grasping the ordinary truths of the physical plane. But consequently there is also at work a far stronger force of deception which it is essential to see through. This is not easy, because of the strong force required to counter it. On the one side, the truth about the Moon is veiled by the distortion, and on the other, the truth about the planets. One was therefore wedged between two fallacies committed in the interests of materialism. First, it was a matter of reckoning with the materialism emanating from the oriental side, which was responsible for promoting the fallacy about the Moon in order to introduce the oriental teaching of reincarnation. The teaching of the fact of reincarnation was of course correct, but we shall soon see what a strong concession had been made to materialism in Esoteric Buddhism — as the book was called. On the other side there was the desire that a certain form of Catholic Esotericism should be protected from the assault of the Indian influence, and there, more than ever, the tendency was at work to allow all spiritual reality connected with the evolution of the planetary system as a whole to be submerged in materialism. The mission of Spiritual Science was wedged between these two currents. This was the situation with which one was confronted. Everywhere there were strong forces at work, intent upon making the one or the other influence effective.
-- The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and Its Relation to Modern Culture, by Rudolf Steiner
Gurdjieff therefore defines the purpose of life as the development of a soul or kesdjan body through work and "conscious suffering", which he calls the Fulasnitamnian principle. Its opposite, the Itoklanoz principle, awaits most people whose wills are fragmented and dominated by trivial likes and dislikes. This process is related to Gurdjieff''s emanative cosmology, with “different manifestations, and concentrations of energy, which flow from the Absolute and which are all interconnected.”16
Humans, in Gurdjieff''s system, are essentially machines who pass through life asleep. There are four states of consciousness; sleep, waking consciousness (which is nearly the same as sleep), self-remembering, and objective consciousness, the attainment of which is connected with the development of the kesdjan body. The Movements are central to Gurdjieff''s teaching, in that they are the most important physical activity undertaken within the Gurdjieff Work. This is, despite the complex cosmological mythology developed in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (hereafter Tales), primarily an applied spiritual training, through actual physical labour, in addition to body-based exercises (the Movements). The Gurdjieff-de Hartmann music has an important sub-division of music for the Movements, which has become known through recordings by significant pianists including Wim van Dullemen and Helen Adie.17
In 1923, shortly after arriving in Paris, Gurdjieff staged a public performance of these 'sacred gymnastics". In 1924 he and a group of pupils went to the United States where Gurdjieff “presented public demonstrations of his movements in New York and laid the groundwork for the opening of the first branch of his institute.”18 A. R. Orage, a former student of Ouspensky, was put in charge of the New York branch. Several of the Movements teachers in the Work had been trained in other body-based disciplines. For example, Jessmin Howarth and Rose Mary Nott (nee Lillard), whom Gurdjieff met in Paris in 1922, were instructors of the eurhythmics system used to teach music developed by Gurdjieff''s Swiss contemporary, Emile-Jacques Dalcroze (1865-1950), and Jeanne de Salzmann had also studied with Dalcroze. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the founder of Anthroposophy, similarly developed a system called Eurythmy, which he began teaching in 1912, which contained the essence of his spiritual teachings, and which was fully developed by 1919 (when he took Eurythmy practitioners on tour in post-war Europe).19
Gurdjieff''s avowed intention was to wake people up, and consciousness is crucial to his teachings. He was adamant that spiritually undeveloped human beings are machines, passive and lacking consciousness. He taught that they had to develop essence and bypass personality. The majority of his teachings are contained in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950) the "First Series" of his collected writings, known as All and Everything, which is a sprawling science fiction epic of more than twelve hundred pages, in which the reformed Beelzebub tells tales of his adventures, chiefly among three-brained beings on Earth, to his grandson Hassein as the two travel in a spaceship, the Karnak, from Beelzebub's home planet, Karatas. Gurdjieff wrote in Armenian, his native language, and pupils translated the works into different languages. The English translation first published was mainly the work of Orage, who worked closely with Gurdjieff to produce it.20 When immersed in Gurdjieff''s writings the reader is often disconcerted by the lightness of style and the apparent frivolity of certain passages. Gurdjieff often used humour and shocks to teach, as well as pushing followers to the limit physically and emotionally. He was often vulgar, sexually explicit, and appreciated good food and wine, and boisterous company.
Apart from Gurdjieff''s own writings, the most important sources of information about him are the memoirs of his pupils; significant accounts were published by the de Hartmanns, Fritz Peters, J. G. Bennett, and others. It is undeniable that Gurdjieff''s followers viewed him as an authentic spiritual teacher; an enlightened being. A sketch published in Practical Psychology Monthly in 1937 by a pseudonymous pupil stated that “[m]any people attributed impartial objective knowledge to Gurdjieff… He could read character at a glance. He had powers of clairvoyance, thought-reading and the like. In short, it was claimed for him by some people that he was a veritable God-man.”21 John Bennett concurred, saying that although Gurdjieff tended to make ambiguous statements about himself, “[s]ometimes he came very near to claiming he was an avatar, a Cosmic individual incarnated to help mankind.”22
Gurdjieff as Spiritual Seeker: Meetings With Remarkable Men (1963)
During his life, Gurdjieff published only The Herald of Coming Good (hereafter Herald), which was released privately in Paris in 1933. The popular writer on esoteric traditions, Romuald (Rom) Landau, discussed Herald in God is My Adventure (1935). Landau, who also interviewed Gurdjieff twice in 1934, concluded that Herald was “the work of a man who was no longer sane,” and dismissed the grandiose assertion that Gurdjieff would publish three series of works, ten volumes in all, that revealed significant esoteric knowledge. The autobiographical Herald was franker than Gurdjieff would ever be subsequently; Landau covers Gurdjieff''s claim to have been in a certain "dervish" monastery of the "Mohammedan religion" in Central Asia and the claim that Gurdjieff had “arrived at unprecedented practical results without equal in our day.”23 Landau's low opinion of Herald was shared by P. D. Ouspensky who burned the copies that were sent to him. After a few months, Gurdjieff recalled the book and destroyed the remaining copies.24
Gurdjieff''s three major works, Tales (1950), Meetings (1963), and Life is Only Real When ‘I Am’ (1974) were published posthumously. In the "autobiographical" Meetings Gurdjieff presents himself as a seeker after truth, one who is fundamentally concerned with the reconciliation of religious, esoteric and scientific knowledge. Additionally, his birth and upbringing in Transcaucasia positions him as a reconciler of East and West; in 1923, he told Professor Denis Saurat, the Director of the French Institute in London,
I want to add the mystical spirit of the East to the scientific spirit of the West. The Oriental spirit is right, but only in its trends and general ideas. The Western spirit is right in its methods and techniques. Western methods alone are effective in history. I want to create a type of sage who will unite the spirit of the East with Western techniques.25
To date, Gurdjieff has received comparatively little academic attention, despite his clear significance within the esoteric milieu. Arguably, the three most influential teachers of alternative spirituality and esoteric systems in the modern West are: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 with the American Civil War veteran Colonel Henry Steel Olcott; Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), a philosopher and scientist who broke with Theosophy in 1912 to form the Anthroposophical Society; and Gurdjieff.26
Compared to Tales, which is a demanding text in terms of its vast length, vocabulary of neologisms, and exposition of complex cosmology, Meetings appears to be a relatively brief and 'simple" book in which Gurdjieff recounts his early life. However, the “Introduction” resolutely refuses to permit the reader to enter the text without effort, with its seemingly random anecdotes about grammar, Persian folktales, and musings on the differences between "European" and "Asiatic" literatures, presented as the findings of an “elderly, intelligent Persian.”27 The convoluted prose style of all Gurdjieff''s writings is itself an important teaching technique, and not merely the product of his own polyglot status and the complex processes of translation. Joshua Gunn has argued persuasively that esotericists usually employ one of three standard strategies with regard to language, which as a human attribute cannot reliably express ineffable truths: first, the recommendation to keep silent; second, the use of “language itself in order to ascend to higher states of awareness;”28 and third, a quest for a pure language (possibly from a divine source) that is able to express the ineffable. Gurdjieff''s writings are excellent examples of the second strategy; his followers assert that his neologisms and difficult prose are designed to reveal higher levels of reality. Further, he developed (with Alexandre de Salzmann) a new script, which read vertically from top to bottom, in which to write the forty aphorisms that featured on the walls of the Prieure.29 Mohammad H. Tamdgidi argues that Gurdjieff learned from his ashokh father to hide “serious ideas under the cloak of apparently trivial, absurd and nonsensical ones.”30
In Meetings, Gurdjieff recounts pivotal moments in his young life, and the "remarkable men" in whose company these occurred. The first such man is his father, the bard (whom he claimed could recite the Epic of Gilgamesh, a text which was not translated until much later), and he is followed by Gurdjeff's teacher at Kars, Dean Borsh, and the priest Bogachevsky, also known as Father Evlissi. In the chapter dedicated to Bogachevsky, Gurdjieff introduces the motif of the Yezidi boy trapped within a chalk circle. The adolescent Gurdjieff saw a small boy weeping and struggling to escape, and being mocked by the other children:
I was puzzled and asked what it was all about. I learned that the boy in the middle was a Yezidi and the circle had been drawn round him and that he could not get out of it until it was rubbed away. The child was indeed trying with all his might to leave this magic circle, but he struggled in vain. I ran up to him and quickly rubbed out part of the circle, and immediately he dashed out and ran away as fast as he could.31
This anecdote presents Gurdjieff as a benevolent liberator from superstitious irrational constraints, a role that he assumed as an esoteric teacher many years later in pre-revolutionary Russia. Other early experiences, such as the mysterious resurrection of a Tartar corpse (or accidental burial of a live man, depending on how the incident is interpreted), and the duel involving cannons fought with his friend Piotr Karpenko over “the Riaouzov girl,” with whom he was passionately, though briefly, in love, are vividly portrayed.
The core of the book details the search by the adult Gurdjieff and his friends, known as the 'seekers of Truth". These included Abram Yelov, the Aisor (Assyrian Christian), trainee priest Sarkis Pogossian, who became an engineer and later the owner of a steamship company, the pasha's son Ekim Bey, Professor Skridlov, an archaeologist, and the Prince Yuri Lubovedsky, who is presented as the principal spiritual guide in Gurdjieff''s memoir. Embedded in the chapter about Prince Lubovedsky are the stories of the alcoholic Soloviev and Vitvitskaia, the one "remarkable woman" acknowledged by Gurdjieff. Intriguingly, she is Polish and has a dubious reputation, having been a "kept woman". This invites the speculation that she is modelled on Gurdjieff''s wife, Julia Ostrowska, who was Polish and retained her own name, possibly because Gurdjieff already had a wife and children.32 It is undeniable that Gurdjieff loved Madame Ostrowska, and that she was a person of rare spiritual qualities is testified to by many of his pupils.33 However, she was only twenty-two when they married in 1912, too young to have belonged to the Seekers of Truth, if they really existed.
The Seekers of Truth sought ancient wisdom and allegedly journeyed far and wide in the 1880s and 1890s to attain it. Gurdjieff stated that:
[t]hirty years ago twelve of us spent many years in central Asia, and we reconstructed the Doctrine by oral traditions, the study of ancient costumes, popular songs, and certain books. The Doctrine has always existed, but the tradition has been interrupted. In antiquity some groups and castes knew it, but it was incomplete. The ancients put too much stress on metaphysics, their doctrine was too abstract.34
Their quest involves archaeological expeditions in the Gobi Desert, examination of the antiquities of Egypt after discovering a “map of pre-sand Egypt” (which Gurdjieff connects to Atlantis),35 experiments with music and vibrations, discussions with the wandering holy men of Central Asia, and finally, for Gurdjieff, arrival at the fabled monastery of the esoteric Sarmoung Brotherhood, where he is reunited with Prince Lubovedsky and learns the sacred dances, or Movements (referred to above).
There has been much speculation about the sources of Gurdjieff''s teachings, which raises the issue of how reliable the account of his early years given in Meetings is? The teachings have variously been described as an amalgam of esoteric Christianity, Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, Western occult traditions, and Hindu ideas. Some of his disciples, like J. G. Bennett, believed that sources for the Work could be identified and that Gurdjieff''s travels were to some extent verifiable. Bennett accepted that Gurdjieff had spent time with Essenes and at the famed Christian monastery of Mount Athos, and had visited Ethiopia where he became familiar with Coptic Christianity. He further accepted that Gurdjieff spent time in Egypt, Babylon, Afghanistan and Tibet, and was initiated into a Sufi order. Also, Bennett claims that Gurdjieff was a Russian spy:
[h]is almost uniformly hostile references to England, and especially his attack on the Younghusband Expedition into Tibet in 1903, suggests that he was in conflict with the authorities of British India. I can personally confirm that he had an unfavourable dossier in New Delhi because, as an intelligence officer in Constantinople in 1920, I first heard of Gurdjieff in a dispatch from New Delhi warning us of a “very dangerous Russian agent, George Gurdjieff, who was in Georgia and had applied for a permit to come to Constantinople”… I was invited to dinner by my friend Prince Sabaheddin to meet an old friend of his whom he regarded as a most exceptional man in the field of occultism and spirituality. This was Gurdjieff… Anyone who knew the Caucasus at that time would suspect that a man who could get permits and move freely through the Bolshevik and Social Democrat areas must have a secret pull with the authorities.36
The truth of these fascinating assertions has not been definitely established. They are mentioned for two reasons: first, there is a resemblance between the roles of spy and esoterist, in that both deal with multiple realities, fragmented identities and secrets; and second, because one very obvious model of the enlightened life that Gurdjieff drew upon was that of Madame Blavatsky.
Prior to the establishment of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had led a daring and unconventional life for a well-born Russian woman of the nineteenth century. The daughter of Colonel Peter von Hahn and the novelist Helena de Fadeyev, she ran away from a marriage of convenience to the middle-aged Nikifor Vassilievich Blavatsky after a matter of weeks in 1848, aged seventeen. She travelled in Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Western Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean, India, and Tibet, where she allegedly spent at least seven years studying with a spiritual master. Richard Hutch argued that she became an American citizen in 1878 to “stop British charges that she was on a mission to India as a Russian spy.”37 Further, Blavatsky had made her living in an unconventional fashion, which included working as a medium in Cairo in the 1870s, and Gurdjieff in Meetings details sundry ways that he earned money through deception and fringe pursuits, most notably hypnotism. Further connections are apparent when Hutch discussed the sources of Madame Blavatsky's occult teachings and concluded that:
Blavatsky drew from the more esoteric, though ubiquitous traditions of Russian pre-Christian and Orthodox Christian spirituality. The former involved an unconscious identification with so-called “paganism”, or shamanistic religion which… is characteristic of Russian tribal societies… [the] latter associate[d] the essence of Christian liturgical history and continuity with the tradition of “holy men” or “pilgrims” of the church.38
Gurdjieff''s Meetings abounds in Christian references (for example, Jesus Christ is referred to as “Our Divine Teacher,” the ecclesiastical seasons of Lent and Easter are observed, and when Gurdjieff speaks of his deceased friends he asks God to look with favour on them), and he did describe his system as "esoteric Christianity" to pupils on occasion. Gurdjieff followed Blavatsky in recounting tales of the lost civilization Atlantis and crediting the Atlanteans with an advanced technology and great wisdom. Gurdjieff was clearly familiar with Theosophy and referred to it in conversation.39 Blavatsky's death in 1891 is at the beginning of the decade when Gurdjieff''s quest with the Seekers of Truth began.
Andrew Rawlinson assesses Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's claim to have been initiated into Eastern traditions as truthful, stating that “we would have to say that we know of no other Westerner of the time who was doing the same… Blavatsky has a unique place in the great process by which Eastern teachings – and by extension, spiritual psychology as a worldview – have come to the West.”40 The debt of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy to Theosophy is well-documented; there is much more to do in detailing the debt that Gurdjieff owes his greatest nineteenth century role-model of the enlightened life, Madame Blavatsky, and the debt the Work owes to Theosophy.
Gurdjieff, Jeanne de Salzmann and Peter Brook
Having considered Gurdjieff's textual rendering of his enlightened life, attention is now turned to Peter Brook, and the film he directed of Gurdjieff's memoir. Renowned theatre and film director Peter Brook was born in England to Russian parents in 1925. Tuberculosis in his mid-teens resulted in him spending two years in Switzerland, and at seventeen he became a student of Magdalen College, Oxford. In his first year of study he directed an amateur production of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus at the Torch Theatre in London, and in 1946 he directed Love’s Labours Lost for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon. In 1948 he became Director of Productions at Covent Garden Opera House. Brook read Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous in 1950, and in 1951 he married the Russian-English actress Natasha Parry. They joined the London Gurdjieff group under the direction of American writer Jane Heap (1883-1964), and after her death gravitated to the Paris Work group led by Jeanne de Salzmann.41 The couple moved to Paris in 1972 and Brook now heads the Paris Gurdjieff group. Brook's theatrical practice has been deeply influenced by his spiritual explorations, and the model of Gurdjieff as both spiritual seeker and esoteric master arguably underpins his understanding of his artistic vision.
During his time studying Gurdjieff's system with Jane Heap, Brook experimented with radical theatrical practice. The Theatre of Cruelty workshops, inspired by the work of Antonin Artaud (1886-1948), in which Brook collaborated with Charles Marowitz, led to the publication of The Empty Space (1968), his theatrical manifesto. Brook distinguished four types of theatre: Deadly (which was commercial and bad); Holy (which was akin to ritual, and showed the influence of Artaud); Rough (which was popular and incited laughter); and Immediate (which used improvisation and experimentation).42 Brook's own directorial practice sought to combine Holy and Rough theatre, in what Maria Shevtsova calls a “universal theatre which, in cutting across ethnic, linguistic and value differences, will traverse cultural boundaries, closing the gaps that divide race from race, class from class, and whatever else sets divisions in motion.”43 This has led him to combine stories and performance modes from widely divergent cultures, with often spectacular, though controversial, results.
Tracing Brook's conscious modelling of his own life on that of his spiritual master, and of his theatrical output on Gurdjieff''s teaching, is a complex and difficult task, but one that repays effort. Sally Mackey and Simon Cooper note the parallels between the two in passing: “Gurdjieff originated from a Near Eastern background from which Brook would draw inspiration… Gurdjieff''s concept of a journey as a means of learning and discovery was taken up by Brook, particularly in his African travels… Gurdjieff was a teacher and mystic. Although Brook denies his own guru status there is no doubt that he is regarded as such by some contemporary practitioners.”44 Gurdjieff himself was sternly critical of much that passed for art, literary and otherwise. In Tales, he has Beelzebub tell his grandson Hassein that before art became degraded, artists were known as Orpheists, a term that meant “that he rightly sensed the essence.” The term "artist", by contrast, simply means “he-who-is-occupied-with-art.” Literary and artistic fashions, Beelzebub maintains, are simply alternations to “the external form of what is called "the-covering-of-their-nullity".”45 However, it is undeniable that he attracted many artists, particularly writers and musicians, as pupils, and the Work continues to be attractive to creative people.46
Brook is recognised as somewhat self-dramatising and highly conscious of his stature as an auteur, moved in the 1960s to increasingly grandiose productions that claimed significance beyond mere entertainment and performance. Orghast at Persepolis, in 1971, involved the development of a script that combined disparate theatrical texts. The basis was Aeschylus" Prometheus Bound, to which were added extracts of “text from the Spanish playwright Calderon, a chorus from an Armenian play… Seneca, and an exploration of Avestan, the ceremonial language of Iran,” which were blended with writings from the poet Ted Hughes.47 Brook used members of his company and local Iranians, and language and technical preparation was done very swiftly, with much reliance on improvisation. The Persian archaeological site of Persepolis (which is redolent of antiquity in general and Alexander the Great in particular) provided a huge and impressive stage set. Performances began at dusk, with the sunset and the sunrise the following morning being important contributions to lighting effects. The flaming torches illuminating the site reinforced the reception of Orghast at Persepolis as a type of esoteric ritual, or temple spectacle, very far removed from theatre, as the West understands it. Brook has made extravagant claims regarding what his theatrical productions can achieve; “holy theatre not only presents the invisible but offers conditions that make its perception possible.”48
The other great international marathon theatrical event that Peter Brook is associated with is the nine-hour production of The Mahabharata that he conceived and delivered in the 1980s, after he had made the film of “Meetings With Remarkable Men.” Where Orghast was an original script, Brook has been praised and vilified for his adaptation of the vast Indian epic, which was composed between approximately 400 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., although it is traditionally attributed to the sage Vyasa.49 Core to criticism of Brook's Mahabharata was the claim that it was an orientalising appropriation of Indian theatre and culture. This elucidates another parallel between Gurdjieff and Brook; both were "Orientalists" who presented an exoticised version of the Orient to the Occident.50 The East, as Edward Said argued, “was not allowed to represent itself, but had to be represented by the Occident. In other words, it had to be re-presented in a manner so as to align itself within the prevailing hierarchy, with the imperial powers on top, the Orient at the bottom, of the political, social, and cultural scale”51 It has been objected that Brook reduced the action of the Mahabharata to a tragic tale of two flawed heroes, Karna and Duryodhana, rendering it Shakespearean, rather than a traditionally Indian religious cultural event.52 More serious charges against Brook included that he made promises to certain Indians, particularly a young male dancer named Dohonda, regarding participation in the production and later reneged on them, and that he had failed to bring the Mahabharata back to the villagers whose traditions he appropriated, which some critics viewed as an act of “cultural piracy.”53
This failure to appreciate the authentic Indian qualities of the Mahabharata on the part of Brook reveals another way in which he models his life and activities on Gurdjieff. Esoteric teachings posit that there is a universally applicable strand of ancient wisdom (the philosophia perennis, the prisca theologica) that is available to enlightened souls in all historical eras and across all geographies and cultures. This perspective is thus anti-modern and anti-progress, as the ancient Atlanteans (or which ever group is valorised) possessed perfect wisdom, to which nothing further could be added.54 It also tends to erase differences between cultures and to propose universally applicable solutions for human dilemmas. Nevertheless, Brook's Mahabharata is considered a masterpiece by many, particularly by those who operate within a "Traditionalist" framework. Basarab Nicolescu argues that there is a close relationship between theatre and “spiritual work,” because of the fact that both involve oral transmission, and asserts that Brook's troupe of actors “can communicate just as well with African villagers, Australian aborigines or the inhabitants of Brooklyn.”55 He suggests that the art of theatre as practiced by Brook is a universal language, and cites Gurdjieff:
[t]he fundamental property of this new language is that all ideas are concentrated around one single idea: in other words, they are all considered, in terms of their mutual relationships, from the point of view of a single idea. And this idea is that of evolution. Not at all in the sense of a mechanical evolution, naturally, because that does not exist, but in the sense of a conscious and voluntary evolution. It is the only possible kind… The language which permits understanding is based on the knowledge of its place in the evolutionary ladder.56
Nicolescu concludes that any activity that facilitates the evolution of consciousness (which is a spiritual process), in this case the theatre of Brook, should be considered as sacred.
In his autobiography Brook presents himself as a spiritual seeker not unlike Gurdjieff. As an imaginative young child, he “learned that what we call living is an attempt to read the shadows, betrayed at every time by what we so easily assume to be real.”57 When recuperating from tuberculosis in Europe he has a similar emotional awakening to women as that Gurdjieff experienced with “the Riaouzov girl,” which he calls “the wild sickness of love born of one glimpse of a dark-haired Italian schoolgirl, looking down at me from the top of a flight of steps.”58 He admits to an interest in the occult and describes meeting Aleister Crowley (who also met Gurdjieff) as a teenager. He praises Jane Heap as a teacher of rare insight:
[t]hrough her, I began to discover that “tradition” had another meaning from the sterile old-fashionedness I so detested in the theater. I learned to understand the oriental way of hiding knowledge like a precious stone, of concealing its sources, of making it hard to discover, so that its value can be truly appreciated by the searcher who has been willing to pay the price. She showed how every religion rapidly destroyed the purity of its origins by offering too readily to others what one has not made one's own by hard practical work.59
After Heap's death he and his wife Natasha developed a deep bond with Jeanne de Salzmann, who was described to him as “like a fan, which gradually opens until more and more is revealed.”60 While in New York in the mid-1970s de Salzmann suggested to Brook “very lightly, "Why don"t we make a film of Meetings With Remarkable Men?"”61 Brook responded to this proposal with enthusiasm, but his initial desire to make a “dynamic, colorful film” was thwarted by Madame de Salzmann, who desired to “give to the spectator a direct taste of that 'something else" she had experienced with Gurdjieff over the years.”62 This anecdote demonstrates that viewing the film of Gurdjieff''s autobiography was intended as a kind of substitute for an encounter with Gurdjieff himself, and thus can be understood as a type of evangelism, of spreading the word about the Work.