01.08.08
Patterson’s Taking With The Left Hand
Taking With the Left Hand: Enneagram Craze, People of the Bookmark, & The Mouravieff “Phenomenon” (Paperback)
The previous link to the enneagram, upon inspection, is filled with the hopeless muddle that came into being with the ‘character types’ enneagram racket.
The book by Patterson gives a good account of the whole history, but preposterously ends by defending the ‘real’ enneagram subject matter of Gurdjieff. The book is nonetheless useful for background information.
mybrainisafleamarket said,
01.08.08 at 6:16 pm
What later happened to N’s sidekick Speeth:
‘The Group’ by Dashka Slater, originally published in the East Bay Express in 1998
http://www.rickross.com/reference/general/general82.html
The Gurdjieff Con » Comment on Speeth said,
02.08.08 at 9:59 am
[...] Another interested comment made a post mybrainisafleamarket [...]
mybrainisafleamarket said,
02.08.08 at 5:37 pm
Just wanted to make clear what my source was:
James Webb is the one who strongly suggested that Gurdjieff might have been a secret agent in the Imperial Russian secret service. Webb made this suggestion in his book The Harmonious Circle. Webb had access to old files kept by the British Intelligence service (I cant remember if it was M 15 or M 16, and traced G’s probably itenerary in India and in Tibet. It appears that G posed as a Tibetan and Webb has some interesting photographs. Webb was cautious and did not want to jump to any conclusions beyond what the records could bear, but he took the trouble
to lay out the evidence, and allowed his readers to be as jurors and come to our own verdict. I personally thought that Webb’s secret agent hypothesis fit the points on the curve rather nicely.
As for the enneagram, Webb gave a long, long list of theosophical and occult books that would have been available in pre-revolutionary Russia and provides us with an enneagram like diagram that can be found in the works of Raymond Lull.
I still think it very interesting that in the 1840s and 50s Captain Richard F. Burton exhaustively studied sufism and occult practices in Sindh, India, and Egypt, looked for manusripts in libraries in Sindh, the Al Ahazar Mosque in Cairo, and in Medina, did all he could to learn information, spoke Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Sindi and some Pastu fluently, yet never mentions a trace concerning the enneagram. Burton was eager to publish information that would be to the advantage of other travellers and agents wishing to go undercover and “pass” as natives, and I am personally satisfied that if the enneagram had in any way been important to the Sufis, Burton would have heard about it, learned it and mentioned it. A man who took the trouble to describe the favorite epic poems and stories in Sindh, the local methods of alchemy, how crooks counterfeited documents, coins and signet seals, ettiquette, the various methods of preparing and smoking hashish (we are told exactly how to prepare the stuff and how to fill the pipe) the differences between Sindhi chess and Western chess, the method of doing the mandal or ‘magic mirror’ trick, and who gives us the exact method (plus diagram) on how Sindhi soothsayers read the future from a sheeps shoulderbone, would, IMO have told us about the enneagram had it existed and been at all important in the areas where he travelled.
(Note: it is also most interesting that Burton opens his chapter on Sufism (which he correctly names ‘tassawuf) in Sindh by listing 3 representative poets, one for Arabic, one for Sindi Persian and one for Pastu–Ibn Faris, Hafiz, Shah Betai and Abd el Rahman. Rumi is not mentioned!
Earlier in that chapter, he does mention Rumi but in passing–’A system of belief adopted by such minds as Jami, Hafiz, Saadi, Jelal el Din (Rumi), Abd el Kadir, Ibn Fariz and others…” (page 200 from Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus by RF Burton)
It is very interesting to see that in Burton’s careful survey of Sufism in what is now Pakistan, in an area heavily influenced by Persian/Iranian culture, he refers to Rumi as just one among many–an interesting contrast with the fad status that Rumi has today in English translation!
The Gurdjieff Con » James Webb on Gurdjieff the intelligence agent said,
02.08.08 at 6:33 pm
[...] Another interesting comment on Gurdjieff as intelligence agent, upgraded to post level. I will comment in another post. [...]