This post is about a possible connection between Gurdjieff and Zoroastrianism. J G Bennett, in his book ""Gurdjieff: Making a New World" hypothesized that Gurdjieff's teachings, especially what he put down in Beelzebub's Tales, were strongly influenced by Zoroastrianism.
Here are a few relevant excerpts from Bennett.
[quote author=Bennett in Gurdjieff: Making a New World]
When Zoroaster lived in Balkh, the ‘Mother of Cities’, in the sixth century before Christ, he inherited a still more ancient tradition. The earliest hymns of the Aryan people contain convincing evidence of having been composed in the far north ten thousand years ago. I believe that a continuous tradition can be traced back for more than thirty thousand years when Central Asia was a fertile region, the meeting-ground of different cultures, far more ancient than those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and India which arose six or seven thousand years ago. We shall examine these ancient traditions in the next chapter.
We cannot hope to understand Gurdjieff unless we attempt to share his sense of the historical significance of spiritual traditions. He knew that periodic renewals are inevitable, but he was convinced that there is an eternal unchanging core of wisdom to which mankind has always had access. He frequently referred to traditions four or five thousand years old, that were still preserved when he travelled in Asia, as well as to more ancient teachings going back to human origins.
The Zoroastrian tradition gave way to the Christian and Manichean, and these in turn were absorbed by Islam. But Islam owes some of its most vital insights to its contacts with Persia and Central Asia. According to Muslim tradition, Selman the Persian, who was the first convert to Islam from the Magian {Magi are supposed to be followers of Zoroastrianism}religion and one of the close companions of the Prophet, belonged to the school of wisdom that flourished for nearly two thousand years at Balkh. This was the school of the Masters.
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According to Bennett, initiates of this "school of the Masters" were the Khwajagan, who operated in later days within the Sufi tradition. Gurdjieff mentioned the Sarman brotherhood in his writings. About the Sarman, Bennett writes
[quote author=Gurdjieff: Making a New World]
The pronunciation is the same for either spelling and the word can be assigned to old Persian. It does, in fact, appear in some of the Pahlawi texts to designate those who preserved the doctrines of Zoroaster. The word can be interpreted in three ways. It is the word for bee, which has always been a symbol of those who collect the precious ‘honey’ of traditional wisdom and preserve it for future generations. A collection of legends, well known in Armenian and Syrian circles with the title The Bees, was revised by Mar Salamon, a Nestorian Archimandrite in the thirteenth century, that is, about the time of Jenghis Khan. The Bees, refers to a mysterious power transmitted from the time of Zoroaster and made manifest in the time of Christ.
A more obvious rendering is to take the "mān" in its Persian meaning as the quality transmitted by heredity and hence a distinguished family or race. It can be the repository of an heirloom or tradition. The word "sar" means head, both literally and in the sense of principal or chief. The combination sarmān would thus mean the chief repository of the tradition, which has been called ‘the perennial philosophy’ passed down from generation to generation by ‘initiated beings’ to use Gurdjieff’s description.
And still another possible meaning of the word Sarmān is ‘those who have been enlightened’ – literally, those whose heads have been purified.
This gives us a possible clue to Gurdjieff’s intention. In the chapter ‘Beelzebub’s Opinion of War’, he refers to a fraternity existing in Central Asia under the name of the ‘Assembly-of-the-Enlightened’ (see Chapter 11 below). He adds that in those days the brothers of this fraternity were very much venerated by other three-brained beings around them, and hence their brotherhood was sometimes called ‘The Assembly-of-All-the-Living-Saints-of-the-Earth’. This is the nearest Gurdjieff comes to specific mention in his own writings of a group that could correspond to the ‘Inner Circle’ of Humanity.
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Khwajagan (masters) are not necessarily the same as the Sarman brotherhood but it is possible that individual Khwajas were associated with the Sarman.
[quote author=Gurdjieff: Making a New World]
It is likely that the original custodians of the traditions were the Sarmān Brotherhood and we must find out all that we can about their origins and activities.
Gurdjieff provides here another astonishing clue. He says that the society ‘The Earth-is-Equally-Free-for-All’ set itself to establish in Asia a single religion, a single language and a single central authority. The religion they selected was “to be based in that of the Parsis, only changing it a little” (ibid., p. 1093). The language was to be Turkmen, the Turkish dialect spoken in Turkmenistan from Samarkand to Balkh. The central authority was to be established at Margelan, the capital of the Ferghanian Khanate. No reference to the Parsis, the religion founded by Zoroaster, appears elsewhere in Gurdjieff’s writings. It is particularly remarkable that there is no reference to Zoroaster in the chapter on Religion, nor does his name appear among the wise men who assembled in Babylon and formed the society of adherents of legominism (ibid., p. 455). The date of the latter is easily fixed at 510 bc because Cambyses is known at that date to have brought learned men from Egypt to Babylon, and according to Iamblichus, Pythagoras was one of them. This agrees with Beelzebub’s tale.
Gurdjieff must have known the Greek traditions referring to Zoroaster or Zaratas. Apuleius refers to Zoroaster as the spiritual guide of Cyrus the Great and the teacher of Pythagoras, and there are many similar references in Greek literature. Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras (Chapter Four) states that Pythagoras spent twelve years in Babylon consorting with the Magi. These are passages remarkably reminiscent of Gurdjieff’s description of the Club-of-Adherents-of-Legominism (Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter XXX). Gurdjieff certainly had read his Iamblichus and to some extent modelled his Institute upon the Pythagorean schools. Unless Zoroaster is to be identified with Ashiata Shiemash, he does not appear in Beelzebub’s tales of the Babylonian period. Why then should his religion be referred to in a much later chapter describing events two thousand years after the time of Zoroaster, as the best foundation for a creed in which all Asiatic communities could share?
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Considering the assumption that the character of Ashiata Shiemash in Beelzebub's Tales is influenced by Zoroaster, Bennett provides some comments.
[quote author=Gurdjieff: Making a New World]
After his enlightenment, Ashiata is said to have gone to “the capital city Djoolfapal of the country then called Kurlandtech which was situated in the middle of the continent of Asia”. If this refers to Zarathustra’s journey in his thirtieth year, after receiving enlightenment, the city must be Balkh where Kave Gushtaspa was king. Here Zarathustra found two men, counsellors of the king, Jamaspa and Frashaostra who were seeking for wisdom. He enlightened them and initiated the king.
There is a remarkable verse in the Avesta (fifth Gatha, verse 16) which says: “The leadership of the Maga mysteries has been bestowed on Kave Gushtaspa. At the same time he has been initiated into the path of Vohu Manah {one of the six immortal beings in the Zoroastrian religion }by inner-vision. This is the way that Ahura Mazda has decreed according to Asha.”
In later Persian sacred literature, Asha becomes Ashtvahasht, which is strangely suggestive of Ashiata Shiemash. According to the legend, Kave Gushtaspa placed himself entirely under the direction of Zarathustra and this inaugurated the reign of the Good Law. It is obviously possible that Gurdjieff has all this in mind, but he left no clear indication.
The name Ashiata Shiemash can be derived from the Turkish word Ash, meaning food, and the words iat and iem which refer to eating. According to this interpretation, Ashiata Shiemash personifies the principle of reciprocal feeding (Chapter XXXIX). This is very interesting because of the conclusion I reach on other grounds that the principle has a Zoroastrian origin.
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Bennett follows several geographical clues left by Gurdjieff in his "Meetings with Remarkable Men" in his book in addition to the clues in "Beelzebub's Tales" to evaluate the evidence in favor of his hypothesis. He speculates whether the Kurdish philosopher Atarnakh who rediscovered the ancient manuscript "doctrine of reciprocal maintenance" in Beelzebub's Tales can be connected to Manes (or Mani, the founder of Manichaeism).
[quote author=Gurdjieff: Making a New World]
The conundrum he sets before us here is to account for the place of Manes in the esoteric tradition and to see if he was likely to be connected with the Sarmān Brotherhood. Manes declared that in two spiritual experiences at the ages of sixteen and thirty, he had been called to be the prophet of Christ sent into the world to bring about the unity of religions. He accepted the Pauline doctrine of the redemption, but he saw that much that was of vital importance to mankind in the teaching of Zoroaster had been left out of Christianity. In particular, the dualism of worlds of matter and spirit having nothing in common, that had entered Greek thought and has been taken over by Christian theologians, was evidently leading to the eventual collapse of religion. Manes saw that the Israelites, in taking over the doctrine of the Saoshyant or Divine Saviour, had converted it into a quasi-political expectation of the Messiah who was to restore the kingdom of Judah. The more serious error is that of dividing man on the same dualistic basis into an immortal, spiritual soul and a mortal, physical body. This false dualism, in spite of its obvious absurdity, has never been eradicated from Christian doctrine.
All this was clear to Manes, who seized the essence of the Zoroastrian and Mithraic psychology and succeeded in converting a very large following. Gurdjieff castigates the ‘Babylonian dualism’ in terms reminiscent of Manes (ibid., pp. 338-45). An even closer correspondence is to be found between Gurdjieff’s teaching of Conscience and Manes’s ‘Call from Above’, described in a manuscript discovered in Egypt and reputedly from his own hand. The ‘Call of Conscience’ is the message sent by the good spirit, Ahura Mazda, to awaken man from his prevailing state of delusion.
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Connected to the "law of reciprocal maintenance, the "role of man in creation" forms another link in this chain connecting Gurdjieff's teachings to Zoroastrianism. In Beelzebub's Tales, Gurdjieff alludes to higher beings needing man to fulfill his purpose for the overall maintenance of the universe. Virtually no extant religion talks about higher beings (or God) needing man in this way, except Zoroastrianism.
[quote author=Gurdjieff: Making a New World]
....the old religion of Zoroaster, which taught that both life on the earth and man endowed with intelligence were created to be allies for the Good Spirit Ahura Mazda in the struggle with the power of darkness. The Avestan hymns are full of references to the role of man as a helper in the cosmic process. For example, Yasna 30.9 has the invocation: “May we belong to those who renew the world and make it to progress!”.
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