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Research concerning Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff Studies - Research

Whilst celebrated as avatar, dancing teacher, composer, healer or derided as occult magician or charlatan guru Gurdjieff remains unrecognised as one of the great story-tellers of the twentieth century, a writer who drew on the Turkic oral tradition of his childhood, folk tales, Bible stories, Greek, Sumerian, alchemical and astrological myth, and the literary modernism of 1920s Paris to create his own seductive world, scholars in these fields would have much to offer Gurdjieff studies.

Religious Studies

Of the many academic disciplines which touch on and intersect with Gurdjieff studies, there is a growing awareness of his place in relation to Theosophy, his influence on New Religious Movements and New Age thinking the field of Religious Studies. Less well explored is his cosmic thinking in relation to the history of ideas, to Pythagorean, Platonic, Neo-Platonic cosmological and esoteric thinking, and to 19th century European Philosophy.

Cultural Studies

Readers of Gurdjieff’s America will have begun to realize Gurdjieff’s influence on the writers, musicians and painters of his day, and this is worth examining in relation to Modernist studies not only in Paris and New York, but earlier in Russia and the Caucasus. Magicians and occultists have played roles in the politics, arts and sciences of cultures from the Sumerian to our own day and although there has been a longstanding academic reluctance to explore occult areas the influence of Astrologers, Alchemists, Cabalists, Hermeticists, is beginning to be recognised.

Academic Resource Questions and Answers

The site may be used as a resource for scholars pursuing Gurdjieff-related research, queries and responses will be posted in this section.

Contact re. submission of material

Non-Academic Questions and Answers

Practitioners of the teaching and/or people whose interests are not primarily academic may also use the site as a resource for the posting of queries and responses and also brief papers on Gurdjieff-related themes. See this section.

Contact re. submission of material