Joseph Azize (pictured) has just published an article in which he discusses the relationship between
Gurdjieff and Gudjieffians and
Guénon and Traditionalists, covering much of the ground that was covered in an earlier discussion on this blog, available
here. Short conclusion: “Some in Gurdjieff groups are also avowed devotees of Traditionalist writers,” while “Gurdjieff’s system was traditional in its aim (being a system of practical mysticism),
but innovatory in its methods.” The article is Joseph Azize, “Gurdjieff and the Traditionalist/Perennialist Schools,”
Literature & Aesthetics 35:2 (2025), pp. 30–43, available open access
here.
5 comments:
There have been various postings on Gurdjieff here before. so i hope I'm not repeating something which others have written .
But based on " Guenonian " criteria there's no way that Gurdjieff could be considered " Traditional "
1. There is the syncretistic nature of his teaching .
2. There is the fact that he didn't practice any religion or " exoterism "
3. There is the fact that he had no identifiable lineage .
4. There is the absence of any formal initiation , and an apparent belief that self - initiation is possible.
5 . There is also a certain grotesque aspect to his teaching and character ..
Guenon makes this clear in some of his letters ( e.g. to Louis Cattiaux ) which another subscriber referred to in earlier postings.
I thought that it was a bit interesting that among the places which Gurdjieff mentions when talking about his wanderings in "search of truth " was Turkestan . I thought this was interesting as another dubious " adept " more or less contemporaneous with Gurdjieff was Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken , better known perhaps as Bo Yin Ra who also claimed a Turkestan origin for his teachings. .
Turkestan is interesting because it was one of the places which Guenon identified as the location for one of the seven counter initiatic " Tours du Diable " which Guenon claimed encircle Europe .
The blog post is not entirely clear. Azize says that Gurdjieff was “traditional” (with a small “t”), not “Traditionalist.” He states clearly in his abstract: “I suggest that Gurdjieff’s system was traditional in its aim (being a system of practical mysticism), but innovatory in its methods. In particular, it has nothing in common with the Traditionalist/Perennialist stream which traces its origins to René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon.” Bear in mind that he is an insider of the Gurdjieff school. Basically, it is a clash between occultists: both Guénon and Azize claim “tradition” and reject the “ism.” They should probably read Hobsbawm...
Guenon was not an occultist despite his youthful involvement with such groups. Having found that such groups had only pseudo - initiation to offer , he made a complete break with them. I wish that we had the book which he planned to write against occultism similar to those which he did write against spiritualism ( "The Spiritualist Error" ) and against Blavatsky's so- called Theosophy ( " Theosophism - History of a pseudo religion "). However chapters 32 and 36 of "The Reign of Quantity" , for example , should be enough to show his views on neo - spiritualism , etc .
As for the marxist Hobsbawn wasn't he just another " champagne communist " ? He is on record as saying that the death of millions under Stalin would have been justified if a marxist state had been created.
The following from his wikipedia page : "After reading Age of Extremes, Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the USSR,[39] and John Gray, though praising his work on the nineteenth century, has described Hobsbawm's writings on the post-1914 period as "banal in the extreme. They are also highly evasive. A vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had 'provincialised himself'. It is a damning judgement".[45]
In a 1994 interview on BBC television with Canadian academic Michael Ignatieff, Hobsbawm said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuinely communist society had been the result.[3][46][47 ".
Hobsbawn, as a Jew who was divorced from his tradition , is an illustration of what Guenon described as the reverse or inverse of the spiritual mission of the Jews.
Just as a follow-up to my previous posting regarding Hobsbawm here is a link to an interesting article https://newcriterion.com/article/eric-hobsbawm-lying-to-the-credulous/
The Invention of Tradition is a milestone in human knowledge of how traditions work. Guénon and his adorers are good for spitting antisemitic nonesense like the one above
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