The Great Game, the Vril-ya and Theosophy

[Helen Reyes]

Yes,how about some more on Gurdjieff.If I remember during the Russian civil war he left with his adepts,and traveled to somewhere in Persia.Was that Turkish land or Iran?I believe he was studying the sufi mysteries.:joyman:

Hmm, I didn't find any itineraries for Gurdjieff, but this is interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Bennett

Idries Shah

While the educational work was progressing, Bennett learned of Idries Shah, an exponent of Naqshbandi Sufism. When they met, Shah presented Bennett with a document supporting his claim to represent the 'Guardians of the Tradition'. Bennett and other followers of Gurdjieff's ideas were astonished to meet a man claiming to represent what Gurdjieff had called 'The Inner Circle of Humanity', something they had discussed for so long without hope of its concrete manifestation.

This is undoubtedly the Sarmoung Brotherhood Gurdjieff sought to contact in Central Asia, and claimed he had, I'm fairly sure.

It would be fun to speculate Sarmoung originates in some corruption of Sarnath, which is both a city in India and the city in Arabia Petra in Lovecraft's The Doom that Came to Sarnath, (and there is another connection here: Lovecraft wrote it was located near the Pillars or Irem, which turn up in Shah's work and are apparently an authentic tradition of a lost city or civilization located in the Empty Quarter in Arabia), but it might just as well be a corruption or alternate form of Shakyamuni, see Shakya and compare with Bön, Tagzig Olmo Lung Ring and Mount Kailash. This seems a better fit for what Gurdjieff is talking about.



John G. Bennett was the founder of a Gurdjieffian schookl in England, knew him personally, and had performed various intelligence and diplomatic functions in Turkey, including issuing a visa to Kemal Ataturk. His school at Coombe Springs, an estate in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, eventually gave its name to a publishing venture which published, among other things, Sufi, Mulsim and Traditionalist Rene Guenon's Lord of the World, a book about the secret ruler and/or rulers of the world in Central Asia and the fusion of temporal and spiritual power in a single monarch.

Probably coincidentally, "Gurdjieff established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man south of Paris at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Fontainebleau-Avon near the famous Château de Fontainebleau. Gurdjieff acquired notoriety after Katherine Mansfield died there of tuberculosis under his care on 9 January 1923." This was the favorite haunt of French/Lithuanian symbolist, poet, Catholic Traditionalist Oskar Wladyslaw de Lubicz Milosz, who used to speak to the bird there, by his own account, and died on the eve of World War II there in 1939. Gurdjieff went on to live through the German occupation of France. Milosz was concerned exactly with the those aspects of spiritual and temporal power Guenon was (a symptom of the age?) but believed the Pontiff as the builder of bridges would eventually rule over a renewed world based on Catholic science.

It's interesting the Milosz's cousin Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize Winner in 1980 for his 1953 work The Captive Mind, devotes a lot of that book to retelling a novel (Insatiability by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz) about the Murti-Bing pill, a sort of instant gratification medication from the Orient, and connects it with the importation of Asian religion into Christian Europe at the expense of the ancien regime. Czeslaw Milosz connects this directly with Nazi flirtations with Buddhism, iirc. Nominally his book is about the effect of Marxist-Leninist doctrine on the populations of the Soviet satellites.

Captive Mind... Mind Control,... hmmm. Great White Brotherhods, the Mahatma Panel, Sarmoung Brotherhoods, renegade sufis in Eastern Afghanistan...

In Exegetic Notes to The Poem of the Arcana, Verse 81 The Tool Bag, Oskar Milosz explains:

In the commentary to verse 56 we have mentioned one of the most peculiar events of antiquity, the Persian communist revolution of Mazdek, a disciple of Mani. The Medes and the Persians were Indo-Europeans. Their native country was neither the Susiana of the Achaemenids, nor the mountainous region of the Parthians. Before they invaded these areas and founded their empires there, they had, for thousands of years, led a nomadic existence on the steppes of mysterious southern Russia, a land which in the night of prehistory seems to have influenced decisively the destiny of the Aryan race ... Were the "mushki" of Asia Minor simply Muzhiki? ... To come back to Mazdek and his communism, could it not be simply an attempt to return to the natural system of the Scythians, a system which, under the form of "mir," has survived until the present throughout the entire Muscovite empire, offering prepared ground for the Bolsheviks' social reform? Russian Communism is as old as Russia itself. Western Communism, a new and perhaps temporary form of theocratic Monarchy whose universal rule seems to us inevitable, certainly will be very different from Scythian bolshevism characterized by a double, Mongolian and Orthodox, imprint, as well as by a centuries-old tradition of groveling before German pedantry.

The East no longer has anything to offer us. ...

(The Noble Traveller, O. V. de L. Milosz, 1985, Lindisfarne Press, West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, pp. 371-372)

The concept of mir as the original social unit, akin to a commune, of the Slavs was a favorite idea of early 20th century pan-Slavicists. The word also means world, and peace, in Russian. In Central Asia it can be a temporal and/or spiritual leader, and is usually thought to derive from Arabic, as in emir. The semantic node covers a lot: cosmos, society, order, leader. I like to think Pamir is related, pa- meaning geographically proximate, so that the Pa-mir is the Edge of the World, or perhaps at the edge of the great ice sheet, and, at the same time, the sole village is the entire extent of the known world, or at least of society. But that last bit is pure speculation.