Digging Up The Dog: The Greek Roots Of Gurdjieff's Esoteric Ideas

When asked to define his teaching, the world-traveler and mystic seeker George Ivanovich Gurdjieff characterized it as "esoteric Christianity." Where did this esoteric Christianity come from? According to Gurdjieff, "Everything Christian came from old Greek, then they spoil. All, all comes from Greek..." Although Gurdjieff spent time in Tibet, and has often been linked to the Sufis he encountered on his travels, his esoteric ideas had their roots in his own backyard, where his Greek father, a bard steeped in the ancient oral tradition, recited thousands of lines of ancient sagas from memory. Reading Gurdjieff's magnum opus, "All and Everything," the informed reader cannot fail to notice the many correspondences between ancient Greek texts and Gurdjieff's ideas. The ancient Greeks carried the torch of esoteric knowledge for well over a thousand years, and Gurdjieff lays out many of their teachings, encrypted in the Pythagorean method he liked to refer to as "burying the dog."