TRACING THE POSTERITY OF THE “FOREST PHILOSOPHERS”

This chapter purports to be the first enquiry into the previously uninvestigated influence of the ideas of the Caucasian esoteric thinker George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866–1949), the creator of what many years ago was defined as the “forest school” (Sharp 1923), on the founder of a specific twentieth-century Gnostic movement, Samael Aun Weor (1917–77). We have taken up this task for three main reasons.

First, both esoteric thinkers under consideration gave rise to an extremely complex genealogy of groups and movements, often in varying degree of conflict with each other, widespread around the globe, with thousands (if not tens of thousands) of followers, to such an extent that we might apply to them the term “hypertrophy of filiation”, used by sociologist Massimo Introvigne (1999) in studying the posterity of another leading figure in the contemporary esoteric-occultist milieu, Giuliano Kremmerz (Ciro Formisano, 1861–1930). In this regard, although there are numerous studies of the filiation and posterity spawned by Gurdjieff's teaching (Rawlinson 1997: 282–313; Wellbeloved 2003: 223–54), no such studies of Samael Aun Weor exist. Indeed, no studies of any kind exist regarding him, except for two essays, which we have produced in recent years (Zoccatelli 2000, 2004). It bears underlining here that this reveals how vast a field remains to be explored in the realm of contemporary esotericism.