There is a lot of information about the Enneagram in the primary Gurdjieff materials. However it is rather esoteric and almost nothing that points to what we know about the system through the work of Ichazo, Naranjo, Ochs, or any of their students. The closest in my estimation are some of the writings of John G. Bennett, however Bennett’s authorization by Gurdjieff is murky.
Most of the close students of Gurdjieff do not support the iteration of the Enneagram teaching as proposed by Ichazo et al. Some like Mr. William Patrick Patterson mince no words.
Mr. James Moore was an authorized Gurdjieff teacher, and his paper, The Enneagram: A Developmental Study contains the most sympathetic view I could find. It is presented with no edits. There is a website dedicated to his work, JAMES MOORE HOME PAGE.
First published in 1987 and updated by the author in March 2004. Moore winnows the grain from the chaff in this discriminating examination of Gurdjeff’s problematic and best-known symbol.
The sea of faith, whose ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ (1) was evoked metaphorically by the elegiac Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, is sweeping back, but in a hundred strange modalities. And though its waves are ostentatious, its eddies and undertows are obscure; and the charting of its cross-currents – these admixtures among religions old and new – is aided by certain discrete ‘marker-buoys’. This paper examples one, which – moored decades ago in the esoteric deep – has been swept leeward into the frothy shallows of pseudo-Sufism, ARICA, Transpersonal Psychology and liberal Catholicism. Our chosen marker is Gurdjieff’s problematic ‘enneagram’.
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949) was a writer, explorer, choreographer, psychologist, composer, physician, polyglot, entrepreneur, and spiritual teacher, who utterly eludes simplistic categorisation. But his ascendancy over many distinguished pupils, and his seminal importance in a variety of fields, are now challenged only by the most ill-informed or opinionated critics.
The Enneagram
Gurdjieff’s integrated cosmological and psychological teaching has been described as ‘bewilderingly simple and sublimely, or absurdly complete’: (2) one small but disproportionately significant component was his enneagram, or nine-sided figure (3)– first presented to a private group of pupils in Moscow and Petrograd in 1916. Stressing the symbol’s importance, he demonstrated it as a dynamic model for synthesising, at macrocosmic and microcosmic level, his ‘Law of Three’ (4) and ‘Law of Seven’. (5) Later at Fontainebleau in 1922 he choreographed and taught the first of those many sacred dances (6) or ‘Movements’, whose beautiful but rigorously choreographed evolutions enact the enneagram.
The subject is abstruse, certainly contentious, and not our real concern. All we need initially establish is that the enneagram was intrinsic and peculiar to Gurdjieff’s system of ideas, and unpromulgated before him.
In effect, Gurdjieff did claim priority here, and persuasive in his favour is the enneagram’s perfect calibration with other uniquely Gurdjieffian models – those relating to cosmogony and cosmology, and to man’s assimilation of food, air, and sensory impressions. Nor has investigative scholarship yet produced a serious challenge. Consider Whitall Perry: this stern critic (7) of Gurdjieff is formidably armed with brickbats from oriental mystical literature, neo-Platonism, pseudo-Dionysius, Martinist, Rosicrucian and Masonic sources. Yet even he backed by all the academic resources of the Guénon-Schuon philosophical school (8) fails to adduce a precedent for the enneagram. Consider James Webb: no independent scholar worked more doggedly to unearth the provenance of Gurdjieff’s ideas. Yet all his efforts to tease the enneagram out of cognate materia in the Kabbalah, in the Ars Magna of Ramon Lull (c. 1232-1315), and the Arithmologia of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), seem finally as implausible as they are laboured. Consider J. G. Bennett: no Gurdjieffian became more personally and passionately involved in the search. Yet his convoluted argument that the enneagram ‘ . . . originated with the Sarmãn society about 2500 years ago and was revised when the power of the Arabic numeral system was developed in Samarkand in the fifteenth century’, (9) is projected with no hint of intellectual vigilance, and supported by no scrap of textual or archaeological evidence.
Conclusion: although some future revelation cannot be ruled out, we may meanwhile decently hypothesise that the enneagram is sui generis and G. I. Gurdjieff, if not its author, is at least its first modern proponent. We have a valid anthropological marker.
The Authorised Version
For more than thirty years (a longish spell with new religions), the enneagram remained hermetically sealed within its Gurdjieffian ambit. In Paris at the Salle Pleyel Gurdjieff gave it hauntingly beautiful expression in dance. In England profound commentaries were meditated (but not published) by his distinguished pupils, the Russian writer Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878-1947) and the psychoanalyst Dr Maurice Nicoll (1884-1953).
On 29 October 1949 Gurdjieff died, and the ensuing three years saw a natural dissemination (10) of hitherto recondite material. His original enneagram exposition, supplemented by Ouspensky’s commentary, was embodied in the latter’s brilliant recapitulation of Gurdjieff’s larger teaching; in May 1950 enneagram dances were included in the programme shown publicly by Gurdjieff’s pupils at the Fortune Theatre, Drury Lane, London; and finally in 1952 came the publication of Dr Nicoll’s 14 enneagram dissertations. These four manifestations represent, if anything can, the hieroglyph’s ‘authorised version’, and whatever one’s view of symbolism, sacred dance, or the enneagram in particular – it is hard to deny their integrity and essential dignity. On this sturdy and decent foundation however, a whole cluster of baroque enneagram ‘developments’ would soon be reared by ideological entrepreneurs.
Heterodox Gurdjieffian Extrapolation
The first innovators were (in the broadest possible sense) Gurdjieffians. Rodney Collin-Smith (1909-1956), a precocious disciple of Ouspensky, emigrated to Mexico City and here in 1952 published The Theory of Celestial Influence (El Desarollo de la Luz). This astonishing work is essentially a Gurdjieffian Systema Universi, bearing comparison both in its audacity and ultimate implausibility with Bergson’s ‘Panpsychism’, Comte’s ‘Panhylism’ Fechner’s ‘Panentheism’, and Hegel’s ‘Cosmosophy’. Significantly for later developments, it gave the first account of the enneagram in Spanish, and contributed (11) to the formation of groups in Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay.
The Gurdjieffian spirit, although unaligned with any specific religion, is essentially theistic and traditionalist: and in 1954 in Italy, Collin-Smith was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He now published his brief perfervid Christian Mystery, which tendentiously gives an enneagrammatic and astrological form to the incarnation, passion and resurrection of Christ. Needless to say, Rome took no formal cognisance of Collin-Smith, who died age 47 at Cuzco on 3 May 1956, probably by suicide. (12) Within the Gurdjieffian pantheon he remains at best an equivocal figure: in his speculations – brilliant perhaps – the enneagram begins to lose its aura of objectivity.
Already, through our modest enneagram exhibit, we approach the more general dilemma of doctrine which challenges contemporary Gurdjieffians (as classically it challenges the custodians of any new teaching, once its protagonist is dead). Where lies the middle way between an indulgently ‘progressive’ exegesis and a moribund conservatism? ‘Every stick,’ as Gurdjieff was fond of saying, ‘has two ends.’
It was law-conformable that among Gurdjieff’s broad posterity two divergent schools arose, orthodox and heterodox. In England they might respectively be personified by two eminent (13) men, Kenneth Walker (1882-1966) and John Godolphin Bennett (1897-1974). Contrast them in 1957. This was the year in which Bennett at his Institute (14) in Coombe Springs opened his Djamichunatra, (15) a lofty study hall, oriented towards Gurdjieff’s grave, and having, like the enneagram, nine sides; it was a year which found him well embarked on The Dramatic Universe, his own Brobdingagnian Systema Universi, permeated by enneagrammatic speculation. It was also however the year which saw publication of Walker’s eagerly awaited Study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching,(16_ which added to the enneagram canon – precisely nothing.
Nearly fifty years have come and gone, yet from the orthodox Gurdjieff school (17) scarcely a fresh word on the enneagram has emerged into the public domain. They have cherished the authorised version; they have laboured – some more than others – to deepen their understanding of it; above all they have brought it to vibrant life in dance, and recorded that silence.
The heterodox faction – mostly inspired by Bennett – have grown more incontinent as they dwindled in numbers and influence. Largely abjuring Gurdjieff’s cosmological and metaboldance on film (18) which it would be an impertinence to praise. But being justifiably concerned that spiritual glasnost would only replenish the ‘Schachermacher-workshop-booths’ (19) of popular charlatans, they have maintained – in the face of each new provocation – their deep ic synthesis, they have unexpectedly preferred themes of management, industry and science: in 1963 Clarence E. King perceived the enneagram at play in the engineering division of Vauxhall Motors; (20) in 1966 Kenneth Pledge, more persuasively, calibrated it with Newton’s prism deviation experiment and the corresponding spectrometer experiment; (21) in 1974 Bennett himself published his controversial anthology The Enneagram, exampling the symbol in the kitchen; in 1978 Irmis Popoff found it relevant to consumer product testing; and in 1987 Saul Kuchinsky confidently applied it across the whole managerial spectrum. (22) Speculations of this species have proliferated and indeed toppled over into a new century.
And their validity? Intuition is not slow to suggest an answer. Yet if the poor heterodox Gurdjieffians are to be accused of reckless and feeble subjectivism (as they sometimes are), council for the defence might plead in mitigation that they strove, however clumsily, to relate to Gurdjieff’s writings, and to respect – in its many implications and constraints – the specific geometric and arithmetic morphology of his symbol. Such a deference and such a discipline hardly commended itself to the self-anointed ‘enneagram experts’ who quickly arose outside Gurdjieffian circles.
Non-Gurdjieffian Appropriations
All that was meretricious in the nouvelle orientalism of the 1960s, facilitated an impudent collusion by a small cabal of Home County pseudo-Sufis to denigrate Gurdjieff – the better to suggest that the half Scottis, half Afghan ‘Grand Sheikh’ Idries Abutahir Shah (1924- ) had somehow assumed his mantle. (23) They worked through rumour and pseudonymous writing; through half-truth, historical revisionism, and the usurpation of Gurdjieffian ideological talismans. (24)
The want of a credible ‘proto-enneagram’ even within the incomparable treasure-house of traditional Islamic geometry was happily supplied (as so often in Shah’s ambit) by imagination:
On a wall faced with white Afghan marble, delineated in polished rubies glowed the symbol of the community. This is the mystical ‘No-Koonja’, the ninefold Naqschor ‘Impress’ . . . (25)
The casual generalist may be forgiven for viewing such passages (and they abound) (26) merely as nondescript oriental Kitsch: but the Gurdjieffian and the anthropologist – construing them within a broader complex of coded allusions, almost tantamount to a metalanguage – identifies a specific and tendentious claim. In effect Gurdjieff’s enneagram – ignobly shorn of functional significance – is being appropriated as some sort of pseudo-Sufic trademark.
The enneagram’s final descent to a level of spiritual vaudeville affords only the bitter-sweet consolation of humour. That the symbol, for example, has been so aggressively marketed throughout South and North America, is due respectively to the Instituto de Gnoselogia (founded Arica, Chile 1968) and the ARICA Institute, Inc. (founded New York 1971). Neither enterprise is remotely Gurdjieffian. Each was instigated by the clever Bolivian ideological opportunist Oscar Ichazo, who is instructed by Metraton the prince of archangels, guided by the Green Qu’tub, and his removed his karmic nodules by massaging his left foot with the handle of a mixing spoon.(27)
These dubious advertisements aside, it is arguable that Ichazo’s methodology and typology should be independently situated and evaluated within the extravagant complex of American eupsychian therapies (Synanon games, T-groups, Erhard Seminar Training, encounter groups, Transactional Analysis, Myers-Briggs personality inventory etc.) which, as Theodore Roszak points out, (28) owe so much to Gurdjieff yet acknowledge so little. But Ichazo himself forfeits independence by placing the enneagram at the centre of his system – and moreover in a manner which tests, virtually to destruction, one’s neutrality of viewpoint.
The symbol’s exterior form has been copied without the smallest grasp of its interior dynamic: a conceptual instrument developed to transport objective ideas, is flatly reproduced as a means for coaxing down some personal advantage. Analogically Ichazo’s enneagram is to Gurdjieff’s what the New Guinea cargo-cults are to aviation. Ichazo’s 63 ‘domains, energies, divine principles, fixations, virtues, passions, and psychocatalyzers’ seem stuck around the symbol au choix like so many bird-of-paradise feathers.
The Bolivian implausibly claims to have discovered the ‘enneogon’ and its arcane meanings independently; (29) his pupil John C. Lilly, an authority on dolphins, (30) chimes in misleadingly, ‘ . . . the enneagram is a device used by the Sufi school and developed by Ichazo.’ (31) By a sort of spiritual Gresham’s Law, it is this pastiche and commercialised version which has gained ascendancy in our contemporary world; which is enriching its proponents; which begins to infiltrate British Universities; (32) which is taught indeed in Roman Catholic retreats. (33) Perhaps it is unsurprising that a facile psychometric typology commends itself to Californian freshmen: but its uncritical acceptance at professorial level, and still worse by the spiritual heirs of St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus – this is sobering indeed. Gurdjieff himself jocularly foresaw a moment when his work would ‘be read in Pope’s palace’, (34) but hardly in the form of travesty.
CONCLUSION
The symbolic corollaries to religious, political, artistic and literary movements are not historically negligible. Whether the enneagram in particular will sustain its present momentum, and even emerge from the ruck of contemporary symbols, very much remains to be seen: one might already concede it some resilience and adaptive qualities. Then does it matter that most modern exegesis is trivial and preposterous, and as much resembles the original ‘as a nail is like a requiem’? (35) The answer depends on one’s point of view. Clearly it does not matter a jot to those exploiting the symbol; and little if anything to the value-free anthropologist. But predictable indifference in these quarters does not oblige the more engaged commentator to emulate Mathew Arnold and ‘bring the eternal note of sadness in’. (36) For if Gurdjieff’s model lacks fundamental integrity, its corruption cannot concern us: and if, on the contrary, it is one of those rare symbols which encapsulate and transmit a new idea of awakening power, it will survive even its wildest extrapolators and apologists: some spirits at least, first meeting the enneagram in debased pastiche, will instinctively turn for a truer perspective to Gurdjieff’s original teaching. Perhaps on that formidable ground, an infinitely more intelligent, infinitely more responsible, exegesis could now be raised. Certainly it is overdue.
First published in Religion Today: A Journal of Contemporary Religions (London)
V (3), October 1986-January 1987, pp.1-5.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Original Formulation
1949. G. I. Gurdjieff. Quoted by P. D. Ouspensky In Search of the Miraculous. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 399p., pp. 286-95.
Orthodox Gurdjieffian Commentaries
1949. P. D. Ouspensky. Ibid.pp. 376-8.
1952. Maurice Nicoll. Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. Three Volumes. Vincent Stewart, 1766p., Vol. 2, pp. 373-438.
Heterodox Gurdjieffian Speculation
1954. Rodney Collin-Smith. The Theory of Celestial Influence. Vincent Stewart, 392p., passim.
1954. Rodney Collin-Smith. The Christian Mystery. Mexico City: Ediciones Sol, 24p.
1956-1966. John Godolphin Bennett. The Dramatic Universe.Four Volumes, Hodder & Stoughton, 1667 p., passim.
1974. John Godolphin Bennett. The Enneagram. Coombe Springs Press, 1974, 64p.; amplified edition retitled Enneagram Studies. Weiser, 1983, 133p.
1978. Irmis B. Popoff. The Enneagramma of the Man of Unity. Weiser, 96p.
Non-Gurdjieffian Appropriations
1972. Oscar Ichazo. The Human Process for Enlightenment and Freedom: A Series of Five Lectures. New York: Arica Institute Inc, 120p.
1975. Charles T. Tart (ed.). Transpersonal Psychologies. New York: Harper & Row, 485p. Contains ‘The Arica Training’ by John C. Lilly and Joseph E. Hart, pp. 330-351.
1982. Oscar Ichazo. Between Metaphysics and Protoanalysis: A Theory for Analysing the Human Psyche. New York: Arica Institute Inc.
1984. Marian Beesing O. P., Robert J. Nogosek C. S. C., and Patrick O’Leary S. J. The Enneagram: A Journey of Self-Discovery. New Jersey: Dimension Books Inc.
1987. Barbara Metz S. N. D. de N. and John Burchill O. P. The Enneagram and Prayer: Discovering Our True Selves Before God. New Jersey: Dimension Books Inc.
NOTES
1 From ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) the most celebrated poem of Mathew Arnold (1822-1888), English critic and professor of poetry at Oxford University.
2 Richard Rees. ‘Monsieur Gurdjieff’ The Twentieth Century. Vol. 164, No. 981. Nov. 1958, p. 440.
3To construct Gurdjieff’s enneagram: describe a circle: divide its circumference into nine equal parts: successively number the dividing points clockwise from 1 to 9, so that 9 is uppermost: join points 9, 3, and 6 to form an equilateral triangle with 9 at the apex: join the residual points in the successive order 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, and 7 to form an inverted hexagon (symmetrical about an imaginary diameter struck perpendicular from 9).
In relation to the digits 3 and 7 – which in Gurdjieff’s model, as in mystical systems generally, are crucially significant – the sequence 142857 has noteworthy properties (lost incidentally when transposed to notations other than denary). It deploys all digits except 3 and its multiples. As a recurring decimal, it results from dividing 1 (The Monad) by 7. Its cyclical progression yields every decimalised proper seventh (thus 2 sevenths = .285714: 3 sevenths = . 428571 and so on).
4 Named by Gurdjieff ‘Triamazikamno’, the Law of Three is a ubiquitous sacred dialect, built around his formulation ‘The higher blends with the lower in order to actualise the middle and thus becomes either higher for the preceding lower, or lower for the succeeding higher’. (See Beelzebub’s Tales, 1950, p. 751 passim.)
5 Named by Gurdjieff ‘Heptaparaparshinokh’. The Law of Seven defies précis. Centred on the idea of the ubiquitous discontinuity of vibrations, it has correlates with the Western musical scale (and more problematically with quantum theory and the periodic table of the elements, though Gurdjieff did not adduce these). (See Gurdjieff, ibid., p. 755 ff., passim).
6 Gurdjieff perceived himself not least as a teacher of dancing, and the enneagram as a moving symbol. In many of his dances, individual and ensemble displacements are precisely governed by the enneagram. The word ‘Movements’, which in 1928 replaced the term ‘exercises’ in Gurdjieffian vocabulary, evidently now embraces seven discrete categories: the six preliminary exercises or ‘Obiligatories’; women’s dances; rhythms (harmonic, plastic and occupational); ritual exercises and medical gymnastics; men’s ethnic dances e.g. Dervish and Tibetan; sacred temples dances and tableaux; and the 39 Movements of Gurdjieff’s last series.
7 Whitall N. Perry Gurdjieff in the Light of Tradition, Perennial Books, 1978 (first serialised as three instalments in Studies in Comparative Religion during the Autumn of 1974 and the Winter and Spring of 1975) constitutes the most considered intellectual attack on Gurdjieff to date. His charges of exclusivism, obscurantism, and anti-traditionalism, have been contested by Michel de Salzmann, K. E. Steffens, and James Moore.
8 The hostility of René Guénon to Gurdjieff had a personal basis (see James Webb,The Harmonious Circle, Thames & Hudson, 1980, p. 467). For biographical detail see Robin Waterfield, René Guénon, Crucible, 1987, 160p.). The brilliant philosophical school overtly indebted to Frithjof Schuon (‘Isa Nuruddin’) – and to Guénon through the Alawiyya dervishes of Morocco – reinstituted attacks on Gurdjieff in 1972. Ironically Guénon’s and Schuon’s books (and those by associated figures like Titus Burckhart, Ananda Coomeraswamy, Martin Lings, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Marco Pallis, Whitall Perry and so on) receive more sympathetic attention in certain Gurdjieffian circles than anywhere else.
9 John Godolphin Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Turnstone, 1973, 320p., p. 293.
10 In January 1949 Gurdjieff sanctioned posthumous publication of Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous (an account of Ouspensky’s discipleship, essentially comprising Gurdjieff’s direct and reported speech). He also urged forward publication of his own magnum opus,Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950, 1238p.); this work, although not explicitly referring to the enneagram, contains (in Chapters XXXIX and XL) the deepest exposition of the laws it encapsulates.
11 The strength and prevalence of Gurdjieff groups in South and Central America is largely owed to the direct influence of orthodox Gurdjieffians from France, England, and the USA – commencing shortly after Gurdjieff’s death.
12 An idealised account of Collin-Smith’s death appears in a postscript to his book The Theory of Conscious Harmony, Vincent Stewart, 1958, 212p., pp 187-8. A less inhibited version is offered in The Harmonious Circle, Thames & Hudson, 1980, 608p., pp. 494-6 by the rationalist historian James Webb (who tragically took his own life on 8 May 1980.)
13 Walker was a man of wide culture and three times Hunterian Professor of Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons. Bennett was a polyglot and mathematician; his speculative paper ‘Unified Field Theory in a Curvature-Free Five-Dimensional Manifold’ (written with R. L. Brown and M. W. Thring) was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in July 1949. As J. B. Priestly wrote, ‘The level of Gurdjieff’s . . . most devoted students was very high. In order to study this movement, nobody will have to do any intellectual slumming.’
14 Bennett’s Institutefor the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences Ltdwas incorporated on 22 May 1946. By 1954 Bennett had broken from the Gurdjieffian mainstream to purse an eclectic line: he used his Institute to promote several cults (notably Subud and pseudo-Sufism), which were neither mutually consistent nor compatible with Gurdjieff’s ideas. See Bennett’s autobiography Witness, Turnstone, revd. ed 1975, 385p.
15 For fuller detail see James Moore, ‘Neo-Sufism: The Case of Idries Shah’ Religion TodayVol 3, No. 3, note 30. For photographs of the Djamichunatra,, see various editions of J. G. Bennett’s autobiography, Witnessibid.
16 Kenneth Walker, A Study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching, Jonathan Cape, 1957, 221p.
17 Albeit 'orthodox Gurdjieffian school' remains a taxonomic signifier which is useful and salutary in many contexts, the growing need for interpretative vigilance is manifest from recent untoward episodes within the Gurdjieffian communion. The delineation of orthodox and heterodox groupings in James Moore's ‘Gurdjieffian Groups in Britain’ [Religion TodayVol. 3 (No. 2)] published in May 1986, has become largely outdated. More perennially relevant may prove his 'Moveable Feasts: The Gurdjieff Work'[Religion Today Vol.9 (No.2) spring 1994] with its principled differentiation of (i) an orthodoxy fixedly arrogated to itself in institutional and nomenclatural terms, as against (ii) an orthodoxy validated, however fragilely, in terms of Gurdjieffian historicity and traditional praxis. Here Moore examples inter alia the problematical 1992 revision of the English-language text of Gurdjieff's magnum opus Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (since withdrawn from circulation), which drew widespread criticism as stylistically vapid, ideologically revisionist, and socially divisive. Paradoxically it sprang from the fountainhead of orthodoxy, namely Mme Jeanne de Salzmann and her Gurdjieff Foundations: yet was far-sightedly opposed by broadly heterodox Gurdjieffian figures like Annie Lou Staveley and even (at the earliest feasibility stage) by J.G. Bennett.
18 A substantial effort of the traditional Gurdjieff groups over the last 35 years has been to create and preserve for the future, a visual record of Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dance and Movements. At a considerable expense of time, effort, and money, some 10 archival films have been made in Paris by the French, English, and American groups, collaborating together under the supervision of Gurdjieff’s senior pupil Jeanne de Salzmann (1889-1990). None of these films, from the heart of Gurdjieff’s teaching, are as yet in the public domain, but semi-public showings have recently begun (eg. in London on 14 June 1987). Here is a major quandary for Gurdjieffians: on the one hand they feel certain these films would ‘nourish the times’; on the other hand they readily identify forces and agencies which would appropriate, copy, and corrupt the material, for artistic and even for commercial purposes. Thus the only fragment so far released to the general public is the last 10 minutes of Peter Brook’s (1979) adaptation of Gurdjieff’s autobiography Meetings with Remarkable Men.
19 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, op cit.,p. 1188.
20 Clarence E. King, ‘The Systematics of a Manufacturing Process’, Systematics, Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 111.
21 Kenneth Pledge, ‘Structured Process in Scientific Experiment’, Systematics, Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 304.
22 Evidently the American business milieu is a unique field for cultivating a debased Gurdjieffianity. Charles Krone, a Carmel organisational consultant personally unconnected with Gurdjieff or his senior pupils, reportedly indoctrinated the 67,000 employees of Pacific Bell Inc. with his ‘Standard Leadership Development’ programme: Krone candidly acknowledges his fundamental reliance on J. G. Bennett’s (debatable) version of Gurdjieff’s ideas. See Kathleen Pender, ‘Pac Bell’s New Way to Think’, San Francisco Chronicle 23 March 1987, p. 1, 6. Ms. Pender implies that similar programmes are in progress or planned at Dupont, Scott Paper, Certain Teed – and in the UK at I.C.I.
23 See (i) L. P. Elwell-Sutton, ‘Sufism & Pseudo-Sufism’, Encounter, Vol. XLIV, No. 5, May 1975, pp. 9-17 and the series of fifteen lively letters under various headings relating to Gurdjieff and Sufism between August 1975 and March 1976 from among others, Michael Currer-Briggs, James Moore, John Pentland and James Webb; and (ii) James Moore, ‘Neo-Sufism: The Case of Idries Shah’, Religion Today, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 4-8.
24 Another Gurdjieffian talisman exploited by the Shah-School was the putative ‘Sarmoung Brotherhood’. Shah also followed Gurdjieff in his enthusiasm for Mullah Nassr Eddin, the medieval wise fool of Turkish folklore.
25 Major Desmond R. Martin (? Pseud.) ‘Below the Hindu Kush’, The Lady Vol. CLXII, No. 4210, 9 Dec. 1965, p. 870.
26 cf. ‘Rafael Lefort’ (pseud.) The Teachers of Gurdjieff, Gollancz, 1966, 151p., p. 23. And, Taslim (? Pseud.) ‘A Reconnaissance – Why I Travelled’ in The Diffusion of Sufi Ideas in the West: An Anthology of New Writings by and about Idries Shah (ed. L. Lewin) Institute for Research on the Dissemination of Human Knowledge, 1972, 212 p., pp. 158-9.
27 These unusual claims are made on Ichazo’s behalf by John C. Lilly and Joseph E. Hart in ‘The Arica Training’ in Transpersonal Psychologies(ed. Charles T. Tart) Harper & Row, 1975, 485 p.; 1977, 504 p., p. 329-351, see p. 341 and p. 346.
28 Theodore Roszak, Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 271p., p. 139.
29 See Interviews with Oscar Ichazo, New York: Arica Institute Press, 1982, 190 p., passim. Significantly however major Gurdjieff enneagram disquisitions were available in Spanish throughout South America, before Ichazo published his first book.
30 Dr Lilly, a former associate in residence at Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, is the author of Man and Dolphin (1961) and The Mind of the Dolphin(1967). He spent two and a half months in a ‘living-in situation’ with Margaret Howe and a dolphin called Peter; and ten years working with isolation tanks and LSD. He converted to Ichazo in 1970.
31 Lilly and Hart, op. cit., p. 333.
32 Especially in the USA. A recent British case was Shree Pickar’s workshop ‘The Enneagram: Symbol for Personal Transformation’ held on 13-14 October 1984, under the auspices of the University of Surrey. Ms. Pickar formerly led workshops for Claudio Naranjo, the Chilean psychiatrist and authority on drug states.
33 In the USA ‘Enneagram workshops’, loosely based on Ichazo’s adaptation, have for approximately for eight years been given by Jesuits, Dominicans, and various women’s orders. In the UK these characteristically take place under the auspices of the Roman Catholic National Retreat Movement at Cenacle houses in London, Dublin, Liverpool, Bristol, and Hindhead.
34 Gurdjieff quoted by John Godolphin Bennett in his autobiography Witness: the Story of a Search, Hodder & Stoughton, 1962, 381p., p. 271.
35 Mullah Nassr Eddin quoted by Gurdjieff Beelzebub’s Tales, op. cit., p. 13.
36 Arnold loc. cit.
~ * ~
Special Note on relevant 1987-2003 developments.
In appending below a provisional recapitulation of some significant developments touching on the typological enneagram, I acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Gurdjieff bibliographer and independent scholar J. Walter Driscoll, for sharing his knowledge of developments in the U.S.A.
1988 Helen Palmer publishes ‘The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life ‘(Harper).
1990 Oscar Ichazo's lawsuit against Helen Palmer for copyright infringement of his "Enneagon" is dismissed.
1992 Religion Today Vol.7 (No.2) (London). Anthony C. Edwards publishes ‘Competitiveness and Apartheid in the New Age: the Enneagram Schools’, rashly lending academic weight to the misinformation promoted by successive proponents of the personality analysis industry, namely that indeterminate Sufic schools, not Gurdjieff, originated the enneagram.
1992 Religion Today Vol.8 (No.1) (London). James Moore publishes ‘New Lamps for Old: The Enneagram Débâcle’ challenging Anthony C. Edwards representations and emphasising Gurdjieff as the enneagram’s protagonist.
1993-1994 Gnosis # 30 Winter issue, News & Notes: ‘Enneagram Enters Halls of Academe’ announces that Helen Palmer's Center for Enneagram Studies and Stanford University's Business School will host the first International Enneagram Conference. (Addressing Conference, Kathleen Speeth unexpectedly warns of the “potential for harm" inherent in using the typological enneagram, adding that she herself will discontinue teaching it publicly.)
1994 Claudio Naranjo publishes Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View, a scholarly if laboured apologia for Ichazo’s contentious enneagram of personality types.
1994 Gnosis: a Journal of the Western Inner Traditions (San Francisco) Summer Issue # 32 carries feature ‘Why the Enneagram: an interview with Helen Palmer’
1995 Helen Palmer publishes The Enneagram in Love & Work: Understanding Your Intimate & Business Relationships. (Harper).
1996 A.G.E. Blake publishes The Intelligent Enneagram [Shambhala], a unique and honourable attempt to calibrate Gurdjieff’s enneagram with numerous scientific, philosophical, and spiritual paradigms. Audacious, cerebral, and heavy going.
1996 Gnosis (San Francisco) Fall 1996 Issue carries feature ‘The Distorted Enneagram: interview with Claudio Naranjo’ in which he indicates “my main interest in learning from Oscar Ichazo was the conviction that he was the link to the Sarmouni - the school behind Gurdjieff." (The interviewer, O. M. C. Parkin suggests that "Ichazo has retreated to Hawaii and, apart from an interview with L. A. Weekly in 1993, has remained almost silent in public.")
1997 Gnosis Magazine (San Francisco) #42, Winter, features a revealing correspondence section "Special Forum: The Enneagram in Contention": Helen Palmer defends herself against Claudio Naranjo's accusations of her "misappropriating the enneagram oral tradition":
Nicolas Tereschenko stresses that "Mr. Gurdjieff himself never gave his pupils any indication of this low-levels application of the enneagram”; Claudio Naranjo closes with a terse refusal to rebut criticism.
1998 William Patrick Patterson Taking with the Left Hand(Arete Communications) Part 1: ‘How the Enneagram Came to Market’ offers a racy and adversarial recapitulation of the links among Ichazo, Naranjo, Palmer et al, distancing that entire lineage from Gurdjieff’s original teaching.
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Copyright © James Moore 1987, 2004
Retrieved from www.Gurdjeiff-Bibliography.com
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