Recently in Aletheia Category

As a young student journalist in 1994, I was given the opportunity to interview the Australian artist Vali Myers. We talked about her life in New York, and at a wildlife sanctuary in Il Porto, Italy. "The Sicilian dons treated me better than the New York City art dealers who tried to rip my work off as cheap postcards," she explained. A true witch, Myers encountered the authentic Sicilian Mafiosi. In contrast, most of us live with a third-hand cultural stereotype: Mario Puzo's Godfather novel and Francis Ford Coppola's film trilogy, which has shaped our understanding of loyalty, honour, and inter-group conflict.

The word 'loyalty' is traced to the Old English word treoth or Troth, which means 'truth' or 'pledged faithfulness'. I first encountered Troth in the Gurdjieff Work and then in writings of American runologist Dr. Stephen Edred Flowers, who has observed that this is the Northern, Germanic equivalent of Puzo and Coppola's ideal. Loyalty thus has a far deeper and richer context than popular stereotypes may portray, and has deep Indo-European roots.

Flowers makes several points about Troth in the context of a Traditionalist discussion. What follows is a personal interpretation, so go to the original sources. Flowers contends that the quality of Troth that guides personal conduct is often missing in contemporary civilisation, in that many activities can involve subtler forms of lying. In part, the Traditionalist critique observes that 'outer seeming' can become estranged from 'inner being'.

Troth also suggests a type of knowledge, sense-making and perspective: the ability to discern truth from falsehood, out-of-context quoting and disinformation. Finally, Troth is observable --- in people's conduct, how their networks evolve over time, in their work or artifacts of their inner states, and in why people make decisions, not just the surface-level effects or what other people infer.

Several months ago I wrote Don Webb about a documentary I had just seen at the Melbourne Internationa Film Festival: the eco-thriller The Cove. We talked about Arkte, Runa, the scientist John C. Lilly, the media's power to construct and shape social realities, and exchanged anecdotes about dolphins and other cetaceans.

Tonight, The Cove won the Best Documentary Oscar at the 82nd Academy Awards, beating out Food, Inc and Burma VJ, which are also worth seeing. National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos and dolphin activist Ric O'Barry attended the Academy Awards ceremony (Psihoyos' acceptance speech was cut short). To learn more, visit the sites for the Oceanic Preservation Society (Psihoyos), and the Earth Island Institute and Save Dolphins Japan (O'Barry).

Heidegger, Martin (1996/1927) Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit.Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Staumbaugh's 1996 translation is clearer to read than Macquarrie and Robinson's 1962 original, although it is helpful to have both for comparison. Sein und Zeit influenced existentialist, phenomenological, deconstruction and hermeneutic philosophy, and spans a bridge to pivotal later work by Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method), Alain Badiou (Being and Event; Logic of Worlds), and Paul Ricoeur (Time and Narrative).

This opens up some potential 'correspondences' to compare Heidegger and Gurdjieff's philosophies worth further exploration. Sein und Zeit may be Heidegger's 'legominism'; Heidegger's hermeneutic method an attempt to recover the 'I'; Dasein an awareness of Time as Gurdjieff's 'Merciless Heropass'; and Heidegger's 'hermeneutics of suspicion' broadly similar to Gurdjieff's 'Way of Golgotha' (during the First World War and the 1917 Russian Revolution), in that both are death-aware orientations to personal conscience. Heidegger's perspectives in Sein und Zeit about angst, falling into inauthenticity, and tradition's role in cultural transmission are similar to Gurdjieff's arguments. Finally, Sein und Zeit is about Aletheia in the sense of 'unconcealment' of being-in-life.


Faye, Emmanuel (2009) Heidegger:The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Faye's book ignited controversy during its 2005 publication in France. Smith's translation has done so again, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Faye makes three main arguments. (1) Heidegger embraced Nazi metaphysics in the late 1920s before he became Rector of Freiburg University, and this influence is clear in his 1933-35 seminars. (2) Heidegger's Nazism has influenced hermeneutics, postmodernists, and radical ecologists, who may be susceptible to proto-N. ideas. (3) Heidegger's political beliefs mean that he should be banished as a philosopher from university courses, and censored in libraries.

For many reviewers, Faye's contribution has been to highlight the archival sources in (1), although others claim Faye has misrepresented Heidegger's ideas to advance his arguments. (2) and (3) have ignited the debate: Who has Heidegger influenced over time, and to what effect? Under what conditions can knowledge creation be separated from its sociopolitical contexts, particularly when these contexts may change? What should be the fate of philosophers who may be brilliant in one sphere, but taint their reputation in other areas? Is it possible to be influenced subtly by 'evil' ideas, and how would we be ethically self-aware enough to know?

Faye's book is best read as an 'active exercise' with these issues in mind, issues that highlight Lethe as the opposite of Aletheia: how knowledge may be de-manifested, fragmented or (willfully) forgotten over time. A comparison of Heiddeger's period as Rector of Freiburg University with Gurdjieff's Paris groups raises some intriguing questions about Aletheia and ethical self-awareness in the midst of revolution, war and societal conflict. On the Paris groups, see the Gurdjieff group transcripts in William Patrick Patterson's Voices in the Dark: Esoteric, Occult, & Secular Voices in Nazi-Occupied Paris (Fairfax CA: Arete Communications, 2000).


De Salzmann, Jeanne. (2010) The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff. Boston: Shambhala Press.

De Salzmann (1889-1990) was the closest pupil of Gurdjieff's during his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleu, and during the later Paris period in World War II. She was pivotal to the Gurdjieff Foundation, to the transmission of the Movements, and to Peter Brook's film adaptation of Meetings With Remarkable Men (1979). Her publicly available writings have a directness of presence that differs from most other sources, the exceptions being Uspenskii's In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt, 1949) and John Pentland's Exchanges Within (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997). This book compiled from De Salmann's 40 years of private notes promises to be a watershed moment in the Gurdjieff Work.


Tamdgidi, Mohammad H. (2009) Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Robert Fripp's DGM diary for 3rd February 2010 alerted me to Tamdgidi's study, which has an introductory essay by noted Gurdjieff Work scholar J. Walter Driscoll. Tamdgidi contends that Gurdjieff's expertise as a hypnotist is essential to understand his relationship with students, and the deep structure of his books, especially the 'legominism' Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (New York: Harcourt, 1950). In doing so, Tamdgidi demonstrates the methodological value of hermeneutics to interpret Gurdjieff's texts and to reconstruct the hints and 'fragments' into a coherent whole. This book reveals some of the 'mesoteric' ideas on the transcultural sources of Gurdjieff's cosmology, the appropriate use of friction in the teacher-student relationship, and the hypnotic structure of many occult ideas. Tamdgidi's analysis however has some broader implications about the performative nature of Uttering a Word, and why the Task and Curse of a Magus involves a paradigmatic shift or conceptual distance.

Don Webb writes: '1. There is a cheap out-of-print mystery novel by Don Webb with 24 chapters, each one keyed to a Rune. Buy it. Heck have a book club. It is called The Double.'

Anyone have a copy of The Sarandib Revelations?

Or an Austin flyer for Zandor Sinestro's Circus of Terror?

Or know the Secret of the Brotherhood of Travelers?

Dr. Michael A. Aquino once posed a central question of Setian philosophy to me. Rephrased from memory, it was something like: 'Why is it that Earth has only one species which has the self-aware consciousness to create civilization, symbolic systems, and other complex manifestations? Why not two or more? What would it be like if there was more than one species?' In this email exchange Dr. Aquino did acknowledge research into ape and dolphin communication, which perhaps has significance for Lilith Aquino's Utterance of Arkte. I pose this as a philosophical, existential dilemma, and not as a position of species infallibility. Within the Temple of Set, Dr. Aquino and others referred to this self-aware consciousness as the Gift of Set. Category 17 of the TS Reading List explored this in more detail, in the following categories.

Don Webb's Edred.net essay 'Concerning Words' (publicly released 16^th February 2010) synthesizes two decades of reflection on several initiatory, metaphysical and cosmological philosophies, drawing on Plato, Chaldean theurgy, Crowleyan Thelema and Setian metaphysics. His focus is on the core Words that encapsulate these philosophies, the equivalent in these traditions of Thomas Kuhn's 'paradigms' used in philosophy of science to describe conceptual revolutions.

This post briefly discusses some lessons that LHP and Rune-Gild practitioners can learn from the Graeco-Armenian magus George Gurdjieff and the orthodox Gurdjieff Foundation, based in New York.

This personal interpretation remanifests a series of email dialogues with Vesa Itti, and with Petri Laakso in late 1997-early 1998 around the time of his IV* Recognition in the Temple of Set. In a follow-up entry I will discuss some of the limitations and criticisms.

I don't speak for the Foundation, the Temple, or the Gild, just myself.

The Graeco-Russian philosopher George Gurdjieff argued in the early 20th century that humanity lives much of its life in a form of waking sleep.  This all sounds very theoretical --- Gurdjieff was the subject of one of my first four dossiers in 1998 for Disinformation and a 2001 undergraduate essay --- but the right circumstances can drive his point home with clarity.

This past weekend provides two examples apart from the Mumbai siege.  In the first, Jdimytai Damour an agency temp was trampled to death at a Wal-Mart sale in Long Island, New York, on Black Friday, 28th November 2008.  Associated Press coverage quotes Kimberly Cribbs that customers acted like "savages".  The New York Times blamed the media for creating unrealistic expectations about Black Friday sale bargains: the catalyst for a mania.  In the second, Sydney's Glebe Coroner's Court has held an inquest into Emma Hansen's death: Hansen was a pedestrian accidentally killed in 2007 by learner driver Rose Deng, who is still permitted to drive by Australian authorities.  Both incidents illustrate on a micro-scale Gurdjieff's Law of Accident or Law of Hazard ("when an event happens without the lines of the events we observe").

For two overviews of Gurdjieff's philosophy see Richard Smoley's introduction to Gnosis Magazine's special issue here and John Shirley's essay The Shadows of Ideas.  I also recommend Shirley's book Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Ideas (Tarcher, San Francisco, 2004) and his DVD commentary as co-scriptwriter for Alex Proyas' dark gothic masterpiece The Crow (1994), infamous for another Law of Accident case: Brandon Lee's accidental death during a film stunt.