"The Harmonious Circle" has a lengthy subtitle in which Gurdjieff,
Ouspensky, Orage, Collin, Bennet and others are insinuated ("The Lives
and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers").
James Webb, the very talented researcher who published "The Occult
Establishment" some years before "The Harmonious Circle", has built a
reputation of very thorough researcher, a man who can discover what
others can't, a man who infiltrated even the tightest occult circles in
order to get first-hand, otherwise unavailable, information. He had
access to typescript and handwritten documents that even today, 35 years
later (the book was published in 1980) some of the documents Webb
mentions have not seen publication. Webb's tone throughout the book is a
professional historian one, full of objectivity, however he does allow
himself slight sarcasm and cynicism when describing some particularly
hairy moments. Mr. Webb died by committing suicide some time after "The
Harmonious Circle" was published.
Webb analyzes the people and teachings into great detail going into
historical circumstances, fashions and fads of the times, Die Zeitgaist,
and political implications of the power plays of the period. For Webb,
Gurdjieff is definitely "Ushe Narzunov" a Russian Tzarist "intelligence
asset" (i.e. spy) who was one of the closest collaborators and a
student of Lama Agwan Dordjieff, an influential Buddhist leader from the
Russian Empire Buddhist Areas who was the personal tutor of the Dalai
Lama. Agwan Dordjieff was linked directly to the Russian Tzar who was
engaged with the British Empire in "The Great Game" i.e. for domination
of East Asia, especially Tibet (as all the rest was pretty much taken by
then). The British, with their Indian allies, were approaching Tibet
from the south, while Russians, with their Buddhist and Muslim allies
from the Russian Empire Buddhist Areas and Russian Turkestan (where
Turkestan is referring not to today's former Soviet republic, but the
huge area including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and
the Chinese Turkestan, currently known as Xinjiang) , were approaching
the conquest of Tibet from the north.
Gurdjieff makes a big deal in "Beelzebub" of the British Tibet
expedition of 1903 led by Lord Younghusband. He even claims that a
stray bullet from that expedition killed the last sage on this planet
who knew the full ancient knowledge (of course, Gurdjieff was known for
exaggerating for dramatic effect, just read his "Herald of the Coming
Good" which can be seen as a non-intentional tragicomedy). Gurdjieff
himself was hit by stray bullets three times in his life, but he
survived each incident (still died at age 81 of cirrhosis of the liver,
brought on by excessive alcohol use). Few other historical events are
described by Gurdjieff with such excruciating detail and
barely-suppressed volcanic (negative) emotion like the Younghusband
expedition. The facts fit perfectly. In 1903 Gurdjieff/Narzunoff would
have been in Tibet, working on Russian Tsarists interests, but after
the Younghusband expedition, and especially after the ingenious Chinese
manoeuvre to attack Tibet from the north, thus cutting off both Russian
reinforcement and escape routes for the Dalai Lama to Russia.
The
Dalai Lama was forced to flee to the British in India, who made the
main condition for their help the breaking of any and all ties with
Russia whatsoever, and full denunciation of Russia, which the Dalai
Lama, afraid for his life, promptly and fully did. The British have
won this round of the Great Game, but in a decade or so, it became
irrelevant, and in a few decades the British lost their entire empire.
The real winners here were the Chinese, which although severely weakened
by the western powers' meddling (this was decades before the Communist
Revolution of 1949), have scored a decisive geopolitical victory by
claiming almost all of Historic Tibet for themselves. If the Dalai Lama
succeeded in escaping to Russia at this time - we'd have much different
political landscape in East Asia today, and Tibetan would have probably
been written with the Cyrillic alphabet.
With the Russians expelled from Tibet, Agwan Dordjieff, Gurdjieff's
tutor, moved back to St.Petersburg and was granted land and money by the
Russian Tsar, where he founded a Tibetan Buddhist temple which he
ruled, and in which he died in 1938. Gurdjieff also went back to Russia
and was presented to the Tsar Nicolas II for his services to the
Russian Crown and after a few years wandering in Tashkent and Tbilisi he
went back to Moscow where his cousin, the famous sculptor Mercurieff,
started introducing him to his circle and from where the known history
of Gurdjieff starts.
It is interesting to note that Mdme. de Hartmann had a key for a
lock-box that Gurdjieff gave her for safekeeping because he said "I knew
you'd never look inside" and eventually emptied the contents into a
fireplace in the late 1930s, when he decided that his incognito travels
are over. In the box there were multiple passports from different
countries and other official documents and letters of introduction,
gathered and assigned to Gurdjieff by the Russian Tsarist intelligence,
during the long decades he was an active spy. Gurdjieff also loved to
call himself "The Tiger of Turkestan" which fits with the life of Ushe
Narzunoff spending almost a decade in that area, the Chinese Turkestan
(Xinjiang), adjoining Tibet, which was going to be the stepping stone
for the Russian conquest of Tibet ("first entire Turkestan, then Tibet"
the Russian Tsar used to say).
There is a photograph from this
time of Ushe Narzunoff/Georgi Gurdjieff with his Chinese wife and their
two sons, aged about 5 and 2. Gurdjieff mentioned in talks several
times that he was a "trader in Chinese Turkestan" (common cover for
spies in all ages) and in Beelzebub the old devil speaks about his two
sons with tenderness and longing, which might have been Gurdjieff's
personal emotions. He probably never got back to Chinese Turkestan
because of all the wars interceding and the new political realities. He
might have heard that his elder son got married and had a son himself,
Gurdjieff's first grandson. That must have made Gurdjieff very proud,
and sad at the same time, making Hassein, Beelzebub's grandson, the main
character of the book besides the Old Devil. One can only imagine how
Gurdjieff's Chinese wife felt. First she was promised a family life and
future with a western merchant-husband, and then she was abandoned
forever to raise their children by herself. Direct blood descendants of
Gurdjieff might still exist in modern China today, although they
probably call themselves "Pure Chinese" and are CCP members.
Webb seems to have a bit of a bias contra Gurdjieff and pro Ouspensky,
although I am not sure why, both men had their positive and their
negative sides/habits. The rest of the book is less interesting since
it depicts (in excruciating, mind-numbing detail) the lives of
Ouspensky, Orage, Collin, Bennett, Nicoll, and few other "breakaway
currents" in the Gurdjieff system and Work. The most interesting parts
of the book and Webb's research are the hidden stories about Mr.
Gurdjieff while the stories of the followers (and I consider Ouspensky a
follower, not a teacher or co-teacher) are full of pettiness, squabbles
and delusions of grandeur.
