Did the devil made him do it?

Whitall Perry's "Gurdjieff in the light of tradition" is a surprisingly uninteresting work, criticizing the rogue guru G. I. Gurdjieff from the standpoint of René Guénon's Traditionalism. The book was originally published in 1978. This is a second edition from 2001.

I don't consider myself a scholarly expert on Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and the Fourth Way, and I admit that Perry's work confirmed all of my prejudiced opinions about the mysterious Greek Armenian. Still, the book feels too short. I would like to have seen more of pretty much everything: an analysis of Gurdjieff's ideas and sources, the history of his movement and (above all) an initiated description of his early life and travels. But sure, perhaps I was looking in all the wrong places. After all, Perry's aim is to show that Gurdjieff doesn't represent an authentic "tradition" in the Guénonian sense of that term.

Perry seems to accept many of Gurdjieff's claims about his early travels in Central Asia, and believe that the man might have been trained by Sufi orders, Tibetan lamas and Orthodox monks. He is also supposed to have investigated the faith of the mysterious Yezidis. However, since Gurdjieff's system (at least in Ouspensky's interpretation) sounds Buddhist, I'm not sure if Islam, Christianity or Yezidism are relevant as sources for inspiration? Perry also believes that Gurdjieff might have been an agent of the Russian secret service! The problem, of course, is that "G" (as his followers called him) was lying about pretty much everything. He claimed to have met Stalin, when the future dictator of the Soviets was still a student at an Orthodox seminary in Georgia! Gurdjieff was supposedly a student at the same seminary...

As always, it's almost impossible to comprehend what G really wanted to accomplish. His followers lived as a collective at a French mansion, and were expected to meditate, carry out menial work-tasks and learn a strange form of dance as part of their spiritual awakening. Gurdjieff was frequently abusive to his followers (as a "spiritual" technique, of course), eventually leading to an open break between him and Ouspensky, his foremost disciple. A number of students at the mansion seem to have died or committed suicide due to mental breakdowns. Gurdjieff also slept around with his female supporters, and travelled in first class while the followers were supposed to make do with cheaper accommodations. As for Gurdjieff's writings, his magnum opus "Beelzebub's tales to his grandson" is an almost incomprehensible book, apparently deliberately so. It's most famous (or infamous) for its weird neologisms and bizarre names: Iraniranumange, Trogoautoegocrat, Sacred Triarnazikarno, Omnipresent-Okidanokh, His Self-Keepness the Archseraph Ksheltarria, Transpalmian perturbation, and (of course) Kundabuffer. God is known as Our Common All-Embracing Uni-Being Autocrat Endlessness. Got that?

But what was the *point* of the exercise? Perry at first suggests that Gurdjieff was a charlatan, which (I suppose!) is the usual reaction to this outrageous character. His power over the followers was the result of sheer charisma and a form of hypnosis, while his "spiritual" philosophy was really a form of materialism. However, since Perry believes in traditional religion himself, he eventually comes up with a more disturbing possibility: the rogue maverick was actually under the influence of infernal forces from the netherworld. Gurdjieff was an authentic wonder-worker who did open a window to spiritual realities, but these realities were lower than the material world. Essentially, G was in league with the Devil himself. That he titled his main work "Beelzebub's tales to his grandson" was a way of hiding in plain sight! In the author's opinion, Gurdjieff wanted to destroy all authentic religion, replacing it with a new consciousness from "the animic substratum" and thereby create chaos in the whole world.

Secularism and materialism has made the modern world unable to distinguish between spirituality from above and a very different one from below. Gurdjieff have opened the first cracks in the edifice dividing our world from the infernal regions, and is a harbinger of much worse things to come. Perry closes with the ominous words: "In order to situate Gurdjieff and his movement, the one and only question the seeker has to resolve is whether or not God is Omnipotent. If the answer is in the affirmative, then Gurdjieff and his hosts are doomed".

I'm not sure how to rate "Gurdjieff in the light of tradition". At first, I only wanted to give it two stars, but since Perry does accomplish what he set out to do (i.e. critique "G" as yet another example of what Guénon called Counter-Initiation), I suppose I have to give it three...

Besides, it *is* easier to read than "Beelzebub's tales to his grandson"...