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mysticism and the occult in early-20th-century
Russia and Europe. Gurdjieff was born in
Alexandropol (Leninakan) in Armenia, to an
Armenian mother and a Greek father who was a
carpenter and traditional storyteller. In later
years, Gurdjieff obscured the details of his life,
but it seems that he left home at the age of 16 to
pursue secret knowledge among the holy men of
India, China, and Tibet. By 1905 he was back in
the Caucasus practicing as a hypnotist and
teacher of the occult. He moved to Moscow in
1911, where he developed a strong following
through his lectures and personal presence, but
his plans to establish a teaching institute were
interrupted by war and revolution. Gurdjieff was
one of the first to make use of the Western inter-
est in Eastern esoteric thought and mysticism,
developing an eclectic system that combined ele-
ments of Sufism with yoga exercises and dervish
dancing. He was not well educated, and his
influence grew only after the recruitment of Petr
OUSPENSKY
, a talented philosopher who tried to
give clarity to his rather cryptic thoughts. During
the Russian civil war he returned to the Caucasus
before emigrating to Turkey, from where he fol-
lowed Ouspensky to England. With Ouspensky's
help in 1922 he founded a teaching center, the
Institute for the Harmonious Development of
Man, in Fontainebleau, France, where they both
taught until their break in 1924. The school fea-
tured an intensive daily regime of “intentional
suffering” that combined manual labor with
question-and-answer sessions with the “Master.”
A serious car accident limited his teaching and
compelled him to write down his thoughts and
revelations. He died in the Paris suburb of
Neuilly. His writings, published posthumously,
include works that draw on Indian and Persian
esoteric traditions and an account of his alleged
early meetings with wisemen of the East,
Meet-
ings with Remarkable Men,
which was turned into
a relatively successful film in 1979.
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