Mind on Fire Books

Remembering the mystic, George Gurdjieff (1866-1949), on the anniversary of his death.

“Greco-Armenian holistic philosopher, thaumaturge, and teacher of Sacred Dances (whose ancillary personae as musicologist, therapist, hypnotist, raconteur, explorer, polyglot, and entrepreneur exercise the taxonomic mind).

Gurdjieff’s work comprises one ballet, some 250 Sacred Dances, 200 piano pieces composed in collaboration with his pupil Thomas Alexandrovitch de Hartmann (1886-1956), and four books, the magnum opus being Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. For more than 35 years he privately taught, by example and oral precept, a previously unknown doctrine styled “The Work”, attracting – and often quixotically repulsing – groups of gifted disciples: Russian, English, American, and French.

His system integrated a semantic critique, a social critique, an epistemology, a mythopoeic cosmogony and cosmology, a phenomenology of consciousness, and a practical Existenzphilosophie…” – James Moore

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