James Moore was a member of the Gurdjieff Society in London from 1956 to 1994, one of four groups established in the early 1950s, in Paris, London, New York and Caracas, by Jeanne de Salzmann. He is the author of three books: Gurdjieff and Mansfield, Gurdjieff: the Anatomy of a Mythand Gurdjieffian Confessions: A Self Remembered.[2] In 1994, the same year his article ‘Movable Feasts’ is published in the academic journal Religion Today, he broke away to work independently.[3]

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G.I. Gurdjieff’s (1866?-1949) premier biographer James Moore’s 1994 article ‘Moveable Feasts’ is of prime importance for this study, because it marks the start of the ‘New Work’ debate, extending the related discussion beyond the Gurdjieffian community to the Academy.[4]

 

Moore, among his other allegations which will not be explored in this study (such as discarding ‘the 'heroic' and historical Gurdjieff,’ and the revision Beelzebub’s Tales), draws from the classical theological dialectical tension between effort and grace and claims that there was a change of emphasis from former to the latter in the post-Gurdjieff era, under the guidance of Jeanne de Salzmann (1889-1990) to whom Gurdjieff confided his affairs.[5]

 

He advances; this constitutes ‘clandestine infusion of orientalism into Gurdjieff’s body of ideas’ and implies mystical illuminism via which pupil’s goal of individuation is replaced with fusion with a supernatural force. Moore adds, accordingly, the Work’s effort-saturated cosmological matrix (the Ray of Creation, the Food Diagram, the Enneagram etc.) that is ‘enunciated by Gurdjieff, promulgated by P.D. Ouspensky, mediated by Maurice Nicoll, extrapolated by J.G. Bennett and Rodney Collin, and cherished inter alia by H.H. Lannes’ is vanished from the discourse.

 

In a footnote Moore mentions Bennett’s name once more, but this time due to his theories in his magnum opus, The Dramatic Universe, concerning ‘the Great Work,’ and ‘the Cosmic Energies,’ as a foreshadower of de Salzmann’s final, oral teaching. He writes:

 

Within the Gurdjieffian literary oeuvre, the basis for such a gratuitously salvific and Pentecostal spiritualization is supplied not in canonical works but by the heterodox and eclectic J.G. Bennett.[6]

 

Without giving any specific details about the former regular communal practice, to draw parallels Moore describes the ‘new,’ ‘passive’ practice in ‘Yogic terminology’ as follows: 

 

Fronting the new doctrine was an oligarchy-led modulation of idiom from active to passive voice: the pupil no longer ‘remembered himself’ but ‘was remembered’; no longer ‘awoke’ but ‘was awoken’. Pupils did not, need not, could not, work: they were ‘worked upon’ (even while they literally slept!).

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In regular communal ‘sittings’ the highly energized ‘love from above’ professedly entered the pupil’s subtle body through an ‘aperture’ at his crown (cf. Kundalini’s ‘Lotus of a Thousand Petals’) as he waited with eyes closed in still, sustained and intensely refined attention. With each vital breath (cf. Prâna) this transforming energy ducted itself ‘arterially’ down the spine (cf. Shushumna) into the sexual zone (cf. Svaadhishthâna chakra) and thence up again to exit between the eyebrows (cf. Ainâ chakra).[7]

 

Moore concludes, this is lawful in relation to law of octaves (without necessary shocks applied at intervals), and thus constitutes a deviation in a diametrically opposite direction from the original teaching, that emphasized the necessity for unremitting struggle and effort, while ‘still preserving its former name.’ He also reports the changes were not introduced in The Gurdjieff Society, London until 1980, till his teacher Mme Lannes’, who was ‘Mme de Salzmann’s chosen representative and plenipotentiary,’ death.[8]

 

As we will see below, resultant the ‘New Work’ label that is associated with ‘passivity / receptivity’ and de Salzmann lineage, though along with perspectival differences, is embraced by some other insider-scholars, most notably by Sophia Wellbeloved and by Joseph Azize.

 

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[1] Personal website: http://www.jamesmoore.org.uk

[2] James Moore, Gurdjieff and Mansfield (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); James Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth. A Biography (Dorset: Element Books, 1991); James Moore, Gurdjieffian Confessions: A Self Remembered (Gurdjieff Studies Ltd., 2005)

[3] https://gurdjieffclub.com/en/dzheims-mur/ [accessed 23.01.2021]

[4] James Moore, ‘Moveable Feasts: The Gurdjieff Work,’ Religion Today, Vol.9 No.2 (1994) pp. 11-16.

[5] Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch, Gurdjieff: A Master in Life (Toronto: Dolmen Meadow Editions, 2006) pp. 246.; Joseph Azize, Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) pp. 221-222.

[6] Moore, ‘Moveable Feasts,’ footnote #30, pp. 11-16.

[7] Moore, ‘Moveable Feasts,’ pp. 11-16.

[8] Moore, ‘Moveable Feasts,’ pp. 11-16.

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