Changes in G. I.

Gurdjieff’s Teaching ‘The Work’

by Dr Sophia Wellbeloved (London)
A paper presented at The 2001 Conference (CESNUR-INFORM) in London. Preliminary
version - Do not reproduce without the consent of the author

Abstract

Gurdjieff (1866?-1949) changed his teaching’s form to accord with contemporary

interests: cosmological occultism in Russia c1912 and writing his texts in literary Paris
of the 1920s-1930s. Thus change itself is part of the Gurdjieff ‘tradition’. After his
death Foundations were set up to conserve his teaching, however, from the 1960s there
has been a change from ‘active’ to ‘passive’ Work practise. Other recent changes
suggest the Foundations may wish to ally themselves with established Traditions.
Gurdjieff’s obscure spiritual lineage has allowed for the appropriation or absorption of
his teaching by those claiming knowledge of its sources in, for example, Hinduism,
Western European Occultism, Sufism, Theosophy, or Orthodox Christianity. Others
seek to give the Work a contemporary expression, most notably via ‘Gurdjieff’s
enneagram’ which has become the ‘enneagram of personality’ utilised in popular
psychology, therapies, and business studies.

Introduction

Gurdjieff was born 1866/70? and died in Paris in 1949. He taught that human beings
have no central ‘I’, are asleep and need to wake up. His teaching addresses this problem
through a variety of methods for the integration of mind, body and emotions.

Change is inherent in Gurdjieff’s teaching because he both embraced and provoked

change; in relation to the needs of his pupils and also in accordance with contemporary
interests. [1] This has made it difficult for the teaching to be passed on in one form only,
and in fact the Work has fragmented into many streams. We will look first at how
Gurdjieff embraced change, adapting his teaching to contemporary interests; secondly at
how he provoked change; and thirdly at how these changes relate to the continuation of
his teaching after his death.

Changes in Form and Mode of Teaching

We will look briefly at two points, in Gurdjieff’s long teaching career, which show how
he changed the form and mode of his teaching. When Gurdjieff began teaching in
Russia c1912, his cosmological teaching was given in occult terms, the group meetings
were held in secret, pupils could not relate what they learned to others outside the
group. This was in accord with contemporary interests because the occult revival was
strong in Russia, Theosophy and other Western Occult teachings were of great interest
to the intelligentsia in general and Gurdjieff’s pupils in particular.

Gurdjieff is quoted as saying that he taught via occultism because it was a subject his
pupil had studied, but that there is ‘no need to use occultism as the base from which to
approach an understanding of the truth’. [2] However, if we accept Webb’s definition of
the occult as anti-rational and anti-establishment we can see that Gurdieff’s teaching
was occult, and whatever other changes occurred to the teaching, it remained occult for
the whole of his life. [3]

Later, when Gurdjieff came to France, the period he is probably best known for, he
opened his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, forty miles outside Paris
in 1922, but this was only fully functioning for two years. During this time Gurdjieff
had a high profile life, within a matter of months he had the reputation of both charlatan
and magician, the Institute became a kind of tourist attraction and on Saturdays there
were demonstrations of sacred dancing and of magic. [4]

Then, in 1924, Gurdjieff made another dramatic change in the form of the Work and
began to put his teaching into a written form. This was also in accord with
contemporary interests because Paris was both an occult and a literary centre. In the
1920s and 1930s there were many English language writers in Paris and the two
interests, occultism and literature were intertwined. [5] Gurdjieff’s texts reflect both
interests, they contain many occult references and are zodiacally structured. [6] They
may also be defined in relation to contemporary modernist literary interests, in the
rejection of conventional literature, experimentation with punctuation, and romantic
interest in myth and the anti-hero.

The high profile period of Gurdjieff’s teaching from c1922 - c1932 was important
because it enabled him to attract large numbers of pupils and because his ideas were
also spread by writers, for example: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, and Aldous
Huxley. This would not have happened had he continued teaching in the closed format
that he used in Russia. These changes show that Gurdjieff was willing to embrace
contemporary interests and to change the form and mode of his teaching accordingly.

Provocation of Change - Fragmentation within the Work

However, Gurdjieff also provoked change. If we looked at what happened after his
death, we can see that although he had united the groups of American and British
pupils, in Paris after World War Two, he chose not to form a secure line of succession.
At the same time he suggested to various pupils that they were the only one who could
carry out his teaching after his death and this was a provocation to schism. [7]

Although most of his pupils stayed with Jeanne de Salzmann (b.1889) who remained
until her death in 1990 the head of the Foundations set up to transmit and preserve the
authentic teaching, at least eight of his pupils, some sooner than others, formed their
own institutes or groups which carried on the Work outside the umbrella of the
Foundations. [8] Many of these groups, or those which have sprung from them, are still
functioning.

The life-myth, which Gurdjieff created for himself in his writings, has also been a cause
for fragmentation within the Work. He acknowledged that he drew his teaching from a
number of diverse sources, and although traces of Western European Occult traditions,
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism can all be detected in his teaching and his
texts, he left no information about his sources that we can verify. The obscurity and
multiplicity of the sources from which Gurdjieff drew his teaching has allowed for the
re-fragmentation of his teaching back towards its possible constituent parts.

As a result there were, and are, strands of the Work in which it has been mixed with, for
example: Roman Catholicism (Rodney Collin); Greek Orthodox Christianity
(Mouraviev, Robin Amis, UK, The Church of Conscious Harmony, USA); Hinduism
(the School of Economic Science, UK); Hinduism and Theosophy (Sri Krishna Prem,
Sri Ashish Madhava, India, Sy Ginsburg, USA). Gurdjieff did not provide a clear
lineage and so his teaching was open to appropriation by those who claimed to be in
touch with his teachers. Idries Shah, for example, said that he was in contact with
Gurdjieff’s Sufi origins. [9]

But, while some of those outside the Foundations have sought to take the teaching back
to its ‘origins’ others have sought to take it forward, making it in tune with the times,
arguing that this is what Gurdjieff himself would do were he alive now. Thus there are
the ‘Gurdjieff Ouspensky Schools’ and ‘The Fellowship of Friends’, they operate
outside the Foundations, do not have a line from Gurdieff’s pupils, and they do
advertise.

Changes to Work Practice introduced in 1960s/1970s in the Foundations

Although the Foundations were set up to conserve the Work, there is a sense in which
the teaching was irrevocably changed by Gurdjieff’s death because pupils were now
without his charismatic presence. I was informed in personal communications that
Jeanne de Salzmann visited spiritual teachers in North Africa and India, researching
how to take the Work forward. Whatever she decided, she does seem to have made one
important change. In the late 1960s or early 1970s she introduced a new form of passive
and receptive Work, where the pupil received love, through the crown of the head, he
experienced himself as being worked upon, rather than actively working on himself,
(these changes were not introduced in London until 1980). [10] While we cannot be sure
that Gurdieff did not introduce this form of Work at the end of his life, there is nothing
in his texts nor in the pupil memoirs which suggest this. [11] All of these stress the need
for incessant struggle against passivity and sleep.

Gurdjieff reputation in relation to his pupils is mixed. He had much bad publicity during
his high profile time, often unfounded, which he did nothing to correct, he was a great
destabiliser of his own reputation. The Foundations, in wishing to preserve the teaching,
have focused on his role as a spiritual teacher. But to tidy Gurdjieff up is to deny the
essential paradoxes that he himself created; in his self-presentation, his mode of
teaching pupils, in his theory which is inconsistent, and in his texts. [12]

Destabilising paradoxes, contradictions and anomalies are of value because they arouse
questioning and force the pupil to be active in relation to the teaching. These are
qualities which Gurdieff valued and it is clear from his writings that he was aware of
and valued the irreconcilable elements within his teaching. [13] As mentioned earlier,
Gurdjieff’s teaching remained a revolutionary, occult, anti-establishment, anti-rational
teaching and this renders any aim to establish it as a tradition, or to conserve one
specific form of it problematic.
There are signs at the moment that there is a change in feeling about the nature of the
Work. Terms relating to the traditions, ‘meditation’, ‘spiritual teaching’ are now in use
by Work pupils, these were certainly not used in London in the 1960s when the Work
was presented largely as a psychology. This shift can also be seen in two quotations
relating to John Pentland, who was the head of the Foundation in New York from 1953
until his death in 1984. He is described, by a past Foundation member, as a man:

who understood the work and its need for a vehicle uncontaminated with the
thought forms of the time. He had resolutely sought to guard the teachings
against any and all deviation, so that it might be passed down intact. [14]

We can see that the aims of the Foundation, expressed in relation to preserving the
teaching, is very different from Gurdjieff’s own approach where indeed he did use the
‘thought forms of the time’ and taught through them. The second quotation is from Roy
Finch’s introduction to a book of Pentland’s group meetings. [15] He refers to Pentland
as a spiritual director who is compared to Thomas Merton, among others. [16] This may
show the Foundations moving to establish themselves with the Traditions, or at least
looking for a more public face than they have had up till now. The Foundations have
always followed the quiet mode of teaching of Gurdjieff’s later years, they have never
advertised and so the number of new pupils have declined.

Changes to the Enneagram

However, the element of Gurdjieff’s teaching which seems to have separated itself from
the main body of the teaching is ‘Gurdjieff’s enneagram’ which has become the
‘enneagram of typology or personality’ widely used in therapies and business studies.
Gurdjieff taught that his enneagram was a unique symbol not to be found elsewhere. [17]
However, Gurdjieff did adapt ‘his enneagram’ which has a form and a numerology that
is connected with the Tree of Life and the zodiac. This makes its connection with the
enneagram of personality understandable; the points of the enneagram represent the
signs of the zodiac, or the planets. [18] Once again, Gurdjieff’s decision not to reveal the
sources of ‘his’ enneagram, opened the way for its appropriation by Oscar Ichazu at his
Arica foundation c1960. The ‘enneagram of personality’ arrived, via Claudio Naranjo,
at the Eslan Institute and from there information was taken up at seminars in Jesuit
theological centres, especially the Universities of California, Berkley and Loyola
University Chicago, and thence on into numerous popular publications. [19] A web
search (via www. google.com) reveals that another religious teaching is forming around
the enneagram which involves a prayer practise termed kything. [20]

Conclusions

In conclusion we can see that the changes which Gurdjieff made in his teaching, the
inconsistencies and the paradoxes that he presented through the way he taught, through
his theory and his teaching texts, have opened the teaching to appropriation and
fragmentation. Formal and informal Work groups, some with lineage and some without,
groups which focus on past origins and those which focus on present adaptations, both
advertised and unadvertised now exist in Australia, China, India, Japan, Malaya, North
and South America and Europe in a multiplicity of expressions which continue to
fragment and reform.
NOTES

[1] ‘While the truth sought for was always the same, the forms through which he [Gurdjieff] helped his
pupils approach it served only for a limited time’ de Salzmann in Gurdjieff, G. I., Views From The Real
World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff. (Views). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976, p. vii.

2. [2] Views, p. 14.

[3] Webb defines the occult as ‘rejected knowledge, that is an Underground whose basic unity’ is that of
being in opposition to the established political and religious powers. Webb, James, The Flight From
Reason (vol. I of The Age of The Irrational). London: MacDonald, 1971 pp. v-vii, 120-21. Alchemy,
astrology, Hermeticism, Gnostisicm and the mystery religions are all forms of occult teaching traces of
which can be found in Gurdjieff’s teaching.

[4] Taylor, Paul Beekman. Shadows of Heaven: Gurdjieff and Toomer. York Beach Maine: Samuel
Weiser, 1998, p. 9.

[5] Taylor, Paul Beekman. Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium. York Beach Maine: Samuel
Weiser, 2001, p. 22-3.

[6] Wellbeloved, Sophia. Gurdjieff Astrology & Beelzebub’s Tales. Aurora, Oregon: Abintra, 2001.

[7] Moore, James. Gurdjieff: the Anatomy of a Myth. London: Element, 1991, p. 288.

[8] Paul and Naomi Anderson (American Institute For Continuing Education, USA) John Bennett,
(Sherbourne, Combe Springs, UK and Claymont USA), Rodney Collin (Mexico USA), C. Daly King,
USA, Louise March (East Hill Farm, USA), Willem Nyland (Institute for Religious Development, USA),
A. L. Stavely (Two Rivers Farm, USA), Olgivana Wright (Taliesen, USA), from a diagram in Speeth,
Kathleen, Riordan. The Gurdjieff Work. London: Turnstone, 1977, p. 96, (first pub. USA: And/or, 1976).

[9] Moore, James. ‘Neo-Sufism: The Case of Idries Shah’ Religion Today: A Journal of Contemporary
Religion 3 (3),n.d. pp. 4-8 and ‘New Lamps for Old: The Enneagram Debacle’ Religion Today: A Journal
of Contemporary Religion/ 5, (3) n. date pp. 8-11.

[10] see Wellbeloved, Sophia. ‘G. I. Gurdjieff: some Reference to Love’, Journal of Contemporary
Religion, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1998 pp. 321-332.

[11] see Anderson, Margaret. The Unknowable Gurdjieff. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962;

de Hartmann. Thomas and Olga, Our Life With Mr Gurdjieff, enlarged edn. rev. by C. T. Daly and T. A.
G. Daly, London : Arkana, 1992 (first pub. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). 1964,

Ouspensky, P. D., In Search of the Miraculous: Fragment of an Unknown Teaching. London Arkana,
1987 (first pub. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Peters, Fritz. Gurdjieff. London: Wildwood House, 1976
(Boyhood With Gurdjieff first pub.1964, Gurdjieff Remembered first pub. 1965)

[12] Wellbeloved, 2001 pp. 65-73.

[13] Taylor, Paul Beekman. ‘Decontruction of History in the Third Series’ All & Everything Proceedings
of the International Humanities Conference, ed. H. J. Sharp and others, Bognor Regis, privately published
1997.

[14] Patterson, William Patrick. Eating the ‘I’: A Direct Account of the Fourth Way - the Way of
Transformation in Ordinary Life. California: Arete, 1992, p. 348).
[15] Pentland, John. Exchanges Within: Questions from Everyday Life selected from Gurdjieff Group
Meetings with John Pentland in California 1955 - 84. New York: Continuum, 1997.

[16] Finch, an academic philosopher and long term Gurdjieff student, includes Simone Weil, Baron von
Huegel [Hugel], Martin Buber, Frithjof Schuon in the list of spiritual directors with whom Pentland is
compared.

[17] (Ouspensky 1950, p. 287).

[18] Wellbeloved 2001, pp. 42-5. Ouspensky (1987, p. 378) shows an ‘astronomical enneagram’ in which
seven of the enneagram’s nine points are represented by the seven planets.

[19] Levine, Janet. The Enneagram Intelligences: Understanding Personality for Effective Teaching and
Learning. Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 1999, pp. 12, 18).

[20] References for and against kything can be found on the web, for: Savary and Bearne on Kything: The
Art of Spiritual Presence, a case against kything is given on the Catholic evangelist Eddie Russell’s Blaze
 Mary Poppins Goes to Hell. Pamela Travers,
Gurdjieff, and the Rhetoric of
Fundamentalism
by Massimo Introvigne

(A paper read at The International Humanities Conference, Bognor Regis 1996.

Pamela Travers died in the same year 1996)

On September 6, 1995 La Stampa, Turin's daily newspaper, titled at full page "Is Mary
Poppins really Satan?". Many readers were, understandably, surprised but no reader was
more astonished than the undersigned. In fact I learned from the article that I had
accused Mary Poppins to have "clear links with the esoteric and satanic thought". I was
credited for having discovered that "under the gentle mask of the extraordinary nanny a
dangerous creature was hidden, with features no less than satanic" [1]. The same
journalist, appropriately, interviewed an exorcist who complained that "Introvigne
normally minimizes the presence of Satan in our life" (a reference to my book on
Satanism, where I argue that the number of real Satanists is minimum compared to the
number of those who promote Satanism scares) [2]. But this, for the exorcist, amounted
to still more convincing evidence that Mary Poppins was really satanic: "If someone
like Massimo Introvigne has written such a thing, this could only mean that the danger
is really there" [3]. The problem was, however, that I had never written such a thing. The
day before, on September 5, 1995, the Catholic daily newspaper Avvenire had
anticipated a small part of a chapter on Pamela Travers and Mary Poppins of my book Il
sacro postmoderno [4]. The chapter and the article were, if anything, complimentary to
Pamela Travers (and Mary Poppins). This did not prevent a majority of the Italian daily
newspapers from picking up the news that Mary Poppins was a Satanist. Having a good
access -- for a number of reasons -- to a number of daily newspapers and to the national
TV, I managed to be interviewed in the evening news of Channel 2, wrote a letter to La
Stampa and slowly persuaded most reporters that there was in fact a big
misunderstanding. By September 8, the situation was improving and the leftist daily
newspaper Il Manifesto wrote, appropriately, that the news was not that I had accused
Mary Poppins of Satanism, but that a reputable newspaper like La Stampa had entirely
misrepresented an honest article. Calling my article in Avvenire "original, entertaining
and scholarly", Il Manifesto commented that "Introvigne simply analyzed the cultural
education of Pamela Travers" and "called for more scholarly studies about the important
cultural influence of Gurdjieff in Europe". The newspaper correctly noted that the word
"esotericism" that I used for the work of Pamela Travers is not a synonymous of
"occultism" and much less of "Satanism". By confusing three different things --
esotericism, occultism and Satanism -- La Stampa had "invented" news that never was
[5]. Reconsidered after six months, the curious incident had, at least, the advantage of
calling the attention of the Italian public on Gurdjieff and his influence. After all, we do
not hear every day Gurdjieff mentioned in the evening news. To a scholar, the incident
also offers the opportunity for some comments on the rhetoric of fundamentalism.
 Pamela Travers, Gurdjieff, and Mary Poppins

Pamela Travers met Gurdjieff in 1938, while the first edition of Mary Poppins was
published in 1934 [6]. The equally famous Mary Poppins Comes Back followed in 1935
[7]. Although Travers may have heard about Gurdjieff in the British esoteric milieu
before their personal meeting, this is far from being probable and any influence by
Gurdjieff is more likely to be found in the following Mary Poppins books (particularly
Mary Poppins Opens the Door, 1944 and Mary Poppins in the Park, 1952) [8]. Travers,
of course, is more clearly influenced by Gurdjieff in her non-fiction works About the
Sleeping Beauty (1975) and What the Bee Knows (1989) [9], and in her non-Mary
Poppins fictional work Friend Monkey (1971) [10]. All scholars of Gurdjieff are familiar
with the entry on the Master authored by Pamela Travers for Richard Cavendish'
encyclopedia Man, Myth & Magic (1970) [11], and with the subsequent fascinating
booklet George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1973) [12]. Apart from placing Gurdjieff's birth
date in 1877 (rather than in the more probable 1866) [13], Travers' work still maintains
the taste of a genuine Gurdjieffian experience, and is a good introduction to the Fourth
Way for beginners. The perennial popularity of Mary Poppins, thus, could become an
opportunity to explore Travers' other works and her relations with Gurdjieff.

This is not, however, the only possibility. Although any influence of Gurdjieff is
extremely unlikely for the first two books of the Mary Poppins saga, the situation could
be different for Mary Poppins in the Park, published in 1952. On the other hand, one
could apply to Mary Poppins the theory that Max Weber suggested for capitalism.
Although early modern capitalism, in Italy and elsewhere, could obviously not be
"protestant" or "puritan" many decades before Martin Luther and John Calvin, Weber
argued that capitalism had from its very beginning some significant "elective affinities"
with puritan protestantism. In time, these "elective affinities" (a concept Weber
borrowed from Goethe, who had used it in a very different context) would have
revealed themselves and forged an alliance between capitalism and puritanism [14]. I
argue that Mary Poppins had, from the beginning, an "elective affinity" with Gurdjieff's
thought. This was, of course, not entirely casual. Travers, from 1925 on, had been
introduced to Theosophical thought and to literary figures familiar with the
Theosophical Society, including George Russell and William Butler Yeats. The latter
was, of course, also one of the leaders of the Golden Dawn [15]. Although many authors
have insisted on Gurdjieff's uniqueness, a recent study by Paul Johnson -- controversial
but useful -- insists on what he had in common with Theosophy and a larger western
esoteric tradition [16]. The correspondence between Travers and Staffan Bergsten, when
the latter was preparing his book Mary Poppins and Myth (1978) [17], is particularly
interesting. Travers insists that Mary Poppins is not only a children's book but the
conscious creation of a myth. One could wonder whether Travers purposely led
Bergsten away from the Gurdjieff track, since the Master is never mentioned in Mary
Poppins and Myth. Bergsten, however, at least insists on what he calls the "mythical
method" of Mary Poppins.

I will give only three examples of these "elective affinities". In chapter 10 of Mary
Poppins we meet the animals of a zoo dancing the "Grand Chain" (a military dance, but
also -- as Bergsten knows -- a reference to the esoteric Great Chain of Being) guided by
a snake, Hamadryad (the snake is common in Yeats and Travers was also an admirer of
Blake). To the children surprised that the animals, left free, do not eat each other, the
snake explains that after all

"'it may be that to eat and be eaten are the same thing in the end. My wisdom
tells me that this is probably so. We are all made of the same stuff, remember,
we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us -- the tree
overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star -- we are all one, all
moving to the same end. Remember that when you no longer remember me, my
child.'

'But how can tree be stone? A bird is not me. Jane is not a tiger,' said Michael
stoutly.

'You think not?' said the Hamadryad's hissing voice. 'Look!' and he nodded his
head towards the moving mass of creatures before them. Birds and animals were
now swaying together, closely encircling Mary Poppins, who was rocking
lightly from side to side. Backwards and forwards went the swaying crowd,
keeping time together, swinging like the pendulum of a clock. Even the trees
were bending and lifting gently, and the moon seemed to be rocking in the sky
as a ship rocks on the sea.

'Bird and beast and stone and star -- we are all one, all one --' murmured the
Hamadryad, softly folding his hood about him as he himself swayed between the
children.

'Child and serpent, star and stone -- all one’" [18].

I would take a second example from Mary Poppins Comes Back, where each chapter
corresponds -- symmetrically -- to a chapter in Mary Poppins. Like the twins John and
Barbara in Mary Poppins, the newly born baby of the Banks family of Mary Poppins
Comes Back, Annabel, talks with a starling. Infant children in the saga of Mary Poppins
are in fact able to understand the language of the animals, but they forget after a few
months. In fact, they forget a number of other things, as we understand from the
following dialogue between Annabel, the starling and one of his fledglings:

"Annabel moved her hands inside the blanket.

'I am earth and air and fire and water,' she said softly. 'I come from the Dark
where all things have their beginning.'

'Ah, such dark!' said the Starling softly, bending his head to his breast.

'It was dark in the egg, too!' the Fledgling cheeped.

'I come from the sea and its tides,' Annabel went on. 'I come from the sky and its
stars; I come from the sun and its brightness --'

'Ah, so bright!' said the Starling, nodding.

'And I come from the forests of earth.'

 As if in a dream, Mary Poppins rocked the cradle -- to-and-fro, to-and-fro with a
steady swinging movement.

'Yes?' whispered the Fledgling.

'Slowly I moved at first,' said Annabel, 'always sleeping and dreaming. I

remembered all I had been, and I thought of all I shall be. And when I had
dreamed my dream, I awoke and came swiftly.'

She paused for a moment, her blue eyes full of memories.

'And then?' prompted the Fledgling.

'I heard the stars singing as I came and I feld warm wings about me. I passed the
beasts of the jungle and came through the dark, deep waters. It was a long
journey.'

Annabel was silent.

The Fledgling stared at her with his bright inquisitive eyes.

Mary Poppins' hand lay quietly on the side of the cradle. She had stopped
rocking.

'A long journey, indeed!' said the Starling softly, lifting his head from his breast.
'And, ah, so soon forgotten!'

Annabel stirred under the quilt.

'No!' she said confidently. 'I'll never forget.'

'Stuff and Nonsense! Beaks and Claws! Of course you will. By the time the
week's out your won't remember a word of it -- what you are or where you came
from!'

Inside her flannel petticoat Annabel was kicking furiously.

'I will! I will! How could I forget?'

'Because they all do!' jeered the Starling harshly. 'Every silly human, except' --
he nodded his head at Mary Poppins -- 'her!'" [19].

Here, again, there is a quite obvious reference to Blake, but also to the Theosophical
scheme of the discent of the humans along the Rays. Gurdjieff is not far away if we
reflect that children are born with a pure essence in touch with the mysteries of the
universe, that will soon be overcome by a personality that will forget everything about
the true origin of the humans. In turn, the only way to overcome the personality is to be
"different" like Mary Poppins: "She is the Oddity, she is the Misfit" according to the
Starling [20].

A third example comes from Mary Poppins in the Park (written, as mentioned earlier,
after Travers had met Gurdjieff). Here Jane and Michael discover that the real word is
probably less real than it may seem. While Jane is reading to Michael in the Park the
story of the three princes, Florimond, Veritain and Amor, the princes step out from the
book and start a real-life conversation with the children:

"'Don't you know us, Jane?' asked Florimond, smiling.

'Yes, of course!' she gasped. 'But -- how did you get here?'

'Didn't you see?' asked Veritain. 'You smiled at us and we smiled at you. And
the picture looked so shiny and bright -- you and Michael and the painted roses..'

'So we jumped right into the story!' Amor concluded gaily.

'Out of it, you mean!' cried Michael. 'We’re not a story. We're real people. It's
you who are the pictures!'

The Princes tossed their curls and laughed.

'Touch me!' said Florimond.

'Take my hand!' urged Veritain.

'Here's my dagger!' cried Amor.

Michael took the golden weapon. It was sharp and solid and warm from Amor's
body.

"Who's real now?' Amor demanded. 'Tuck it into your belt,' he said, smiling at
Michael's astonished face" [21].

One should not jump to the conclusion that there is a clearly gurdjieffian element here
about the real word not being too "real" after all, since this is simply an inversion of the
theme of earlier Mary Poppins stories, where the children (and occasionally Mary
Poppins and her friend Bert) may jump into a book or a picture. Bergsten thinks that one
source is a book by William Anderson about the story of the Chinese painter Wu Tao-
Tsz, of the T'ang dinasty (600-900 A.D.), who entered one of his own pictures,
disappeared and "was never seen again" [22]. The idea of an "elective affinity" between
Travers' "mythical method" and Gurdjieff remains however here particularly
fascinating.

We should, of course, resist the temptation of reading too much of Gurdjieff into Mary
Poppins' stories. In an interview which appeared in The Paris Review in 1982 the
interviewers asked Travers whether "Mary Poppins' teaching -- if one can call it that --
resemble that of Christ in his parables". Travers replied:
"My Zen master, because I've studied Zen for a long time, told me that every one (and
all the stories weren't written then) of the Mary Poppins stories is in essence a Zen story.
And someone else, who is a bit of a Don Juan, told me that every one of the stories is a
moment of tremendous sexual passion, because it begins with such tension and then it is
reconciled and resolved in a way that is gloriously sensual".

The answer is clarified by the following question: "So people can read anything and
everything into the stories?". "Indeed" [23].

The Rhetoric of Fundamentalism

It would be nice to conclude on this sober note, but I would like to add a final comment
on the rhetoric of fundamentalism. Although new religious and esoteric movements
only amount to 1% of the general population in all Western countries, they have become
a convenient scapegoat for all kind of social trouble. The secular anti-cult movement is
mirrored, within Christianity, by a fundamentalist counter-cult movement that sees the
direct work of the Devil behind all "cults" [24]. Generally speaking, the activities of both
the secular anti-cult and the religious counter-cult movements have been less successful
than they normally like to believe. For many groups and private individuals, however,
the assault -- largely based on ignorance -- has been a source of unnecessary suffering.
The rhetoric of the "children in danger" has been often used in the anti-cult discourse.
Fundamentalist counter-cultists have been particularly active in "discovering" occult or
satanic meanings hidden in children literature. A case in point is Madeleine L'Engle (in
fact, if anything, a liberal Christian) whose award-winning books for young boys and
girls (particularly her Time Trilogy, which consists of A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the
Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet) [25] have been accused by fundamentalist Christians
to carry sinister New Age and occult messages, not far from Anton LaVey’s Satanic
Bible [26]. True, fundamentalists have been able to prove that L'Engle occasionally flirts
with esotericism and quotes Theosophical authors. But, once again, in the case of
L'Engle -- and countless other authors -- the rhetoric of fundamentalism operate by
confusing esotericism with occultism, and occultism with Satanism. My own adventure
with La Stampa about Pamela Travers and Mary Poppins shows that this rhetoric may
make dangerous inroads into the mainline press. The latter, however, unlike its
fundamentalist fringe counterpart, is at least prepared to hear another side of the story,
and occasionally to correct its own errors. It would be, however, a mistake for scholars
and friends of esotericism alike to dismiss the dangerous rhetoric of fundamentalism as
merely stupid, and to underestimate the power of the popular press.

Notes

1. [back] Paolo Poletti, " ‘Mary Poppins? Satana’", La Stampa, June 6, 1995.
2. [back] See my Indagine sul Satanismo. Satanisti e anti-satanisti dal Seicento ai nostri giorni,
Milan: Mondadori 1994.
3. [back] Paolo Poletti, "I bimbi nel mirino", interview with the exorcist Don Gabriele Amorth, La
Stampa, June 6, 1995.
4. [back] See my "Mary Poppins esoterica", Avvenire, September 5, 1995 and my book Il sacro
postmoderno. Chiesa, relativismo e nuova religiosità, Milan: Gribaudi, 1996, pp. 293-304.
5. [back] Giuseppina Ciuffreda, "Mary Poppins non è Satana", Il Manifesto, September 8, 1995.
6. [back] P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins, London: Gerald Howe, 1934.
7. [back] P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins Comes Back, London: Lovat Dickson & Thompson, 1935.
8. [back] P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, London: Peter Davies, 1944; Ead., Mary
Poppins in the Park, London: Peter Davies, 1952.
9. [back] P.L. Travers, About the Sleeping Beauty, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975; Ead., What the
Bee Knows. Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Stories, Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press,
1989.
10. [back] P.L. Travers, Friend Monkey, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
11. [back] P. Travers, entry "Gurdjieff", in Richard Cavendish (ed.), Man, Myth & Magic: An
Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural, New York: Marshall Cavendish Corporation,
1970, 24 voll., vol 9, pp. 1188-1189.
12. [back] P.L. Travers, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Toronto: Traditional Studies Press, 1973.
13. [back] According to the seminal work by James Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth. A
Biography, Shaftesbury (Dorset)-Rockport (Massachussetts): Element 1991.
14. [back] On the concept of "elective affinity" in Weber see Hubert Treiber, "Nietsche's Monastery
for Freer Spirits and Weber's Sect", in Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (eds.), Weber's
Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993, pp. 133-159.
15. [back] See George Mills Harper, Yeats's Golden Dawn: The Influence of the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn on the Life and Art of W.B. Yeats, London: Macmillan, 1974; in general: Ellic
Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-
1923, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.
16. [back] See K. Paul Johnson, Initiates of Theosophical Masters, Albany (New York): State
University of New York Press, 1995.
17. [back] Staffan Bergsten, Mary Poppins and Myth, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International,
1978.
18. [back] P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins, pp. 172-173.
19. [back] P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins Comes Back, pp. 142-144.
20. [back] Ibid.
21. [back] P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins in the Park, p. 131.
22. [back] S. Bergsten, Mary Poppins and Myth, p. 64. The reference is to William Anderson,
Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of a Collection of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the
British Museum, London: British Museum-Department of Prints and Drawings, 1886. Bergsten
misspells the name of the noted historian of Japanese art as "Andersen".
23. [back] Edwina Burness and Jerry Griswold, "The Art of Fiction LXXIII - P.L. Travers", The
Paris Review, 24:8 (Fall 1982), 211-229 (218).
24. [back] For the difference see my "The Secular Anti-Cult and the Religious Counter-Cult
Movement: Strange Bedfellows of Future Enemies?", in Eric Towler (ed.), New Religions and
the New Europe, Aarhus-Oxford: University of Aarhus Press, 1995, pp. 32-54.
25. [back] Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962; A
Wind in the Door, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968; A Swiftly Tilting Planet, New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
26. [back] For a typical fundamentalis assault see Brenda Scott - Samantha Smith, Troyan Horse:
How the New Age Movement Infiltrates the Church, Lafayette (Louisiana): Huntington House
Publishers, 1993.