We love a good cult story. A magnetic leader promising a better way of life. Bizarre rituals. A sympathetic convert who realizes too late that secret, sacred truths come at a cost. The result is a modern-day fable: This is what happens when you allow a charming wolf to lead you off the path.
Modern pop culture is rife with these narratives. Documentaries like The Vow and Escaping Twin Flames expose the cults among us, and fictional accounts like The Girls and The Last Housewife dive deep into the cultistโs psyche. But the cult story, and our fascination with it, is nothing new. Cults inspired the same intrigue a hundred years ago, when the writer Katherine Mansfield died at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France, under the care of mystic, spiritual teacher, and choreographer George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Known for her short stories, and as friend and rival to Virginia Woolf, Mansfield ran in Londonโs literary and intellectual circles. News of her death and its strange circumstances spread fast, igniting public intrigue and outrage.
The familiar story reassures us, the readers, that we are right and the cultists are wrong, that we would never fall for those tricksโand that if we did, bad things would follow.
Multi-part accounts of the Institute appeared in the Daily News and The New Statesman. Articles ran with titles like: โDr. Gurdjieff and his Magical Secret of Life: How to be a Super-Man or Super Woman by Feeding Pigs, Dancing Weird Dances All Night and Other Fantastic Antics.โ They fit what was known of the facts to a simple narrative: a woman led astray by the false promises of a charismatic figure. Mansfield, however, described her own experience very differentlyโa tension inherent in the modern cult story, as well.
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The cult narrative begins with a vulnerable person in search of something society canโt or wonโt provide. In 1922 Mansfield was thirty-three years old and dying of tuberculosis. She saw numerous doctors and underwent experimental (and ineffectual) radiation treatment. She also began attending lectures given by Russian mathematician and writer P.D. Ouspensky.
A student of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky had come to London to spread word of his teacherโs philosophyโand perhaps also to raise money. His talks, hosted in drawing rooms and theosophist meeting halls, attracted a slew of high-profile guests, including Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot. Ouspensky explained that Gurdjieff had travelled through the Orient and discovered the correct way to live. Man in modern society was disordered, but, at the school Gurdjieff was building across the Channel, harmony could be restored.
After Mansfield informed her husband that she was going to Gurdjieffโs Institute, he responded, disturbed, that giving up radiation treatment for the Institute โseems to me criminal. I mean wrong, utterly wrong.โ But Mansfield was undeterred. She told him she was just going to take a look: โIโll take a toothbrush and peigne and come back Wednesday morning, only.โ
She set off for Fontainebleau and never returned.
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The victim in a cult story encounters a new world too good to be true. And the grounds of the Institute were, in fact, โfabulous and otherworldlyโ: a former monastery backdropped by the forests of the รle-de-France, with large gardens and two hundred wooded acres. The Institute, still in its infancy, was home to around seventy students, about half Russian and half English. Nine children lived there as well, with โa different mother every week to look after them.โ
And at the center of everything was Gurdjieff. Articles emphasized his โexoticโ appearance. Bald, with a โhandsomely domedโ head, โpowerful body,โ and a long, dark mustache, Gurdjieff was striking, well-cast to play the wolf. He spoke Armenian, Farsi, Greek, broken Russian, and very little English. Described by some as โvirile and magnetic in presence,โ and by others as looking like โsomeone amateurishly disguised,โ Gurdjieff was an enigmatic figure.
He was not what Mansfield expected. โHeโs what one wants to find in him, really,โ she wrote. โBut,โ she continued, โI do feel absolutely confident he can put me on the right track in every way.โ
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In time the new recruit realizes that something darker lurks in this new world. Many accounts of the Institute cast Gurdjieff as a cruel taskmaster who โreigned as a tyrant among devoted slaves,โ and life at the Institute was undeniably hard. Students slept three or four hours and then got to work, wheelbarrowing or building or tending to livestock. Sometimes labor served no purpose apart from the work itself. Mansfieldโs former editor and fellow student, A.R. Orage, explained: โOften [Gurdjieff] makes us spend a whole day digging an enormous ditch in the park, and then he has us spend the next day filling it up again.โ
But they also built beautiful things. They converted a stone house into a Russian bath, fashioning a boiler out of an old cistern and installing the plumbing and lighting, with Gurdjieff laying the bricks himself. They transformed the frame of a wartime airplane hangar into a performance hall, with glazed and colorfully painted walls and a glowing fountain at its center. The roof shimmered with sequined cloths.
After hours of hard labor, the students would break for food. When there were guests, theyโd have a feast, with dishes โbearing anything from a suckling-pig to Turkish delight.โ More often, meals were bare bones: soup and a little Russian porridge, with little of the produce the students had worked so hard to harvest.
These living conditionsโsleep deprivation, hard labor, scarce foodโare widely recognized control techniques, used to enforce group obedience. And yet Mansfield found meaning and freedom in the work: โIf I am sincere I can only say we live hereโevery moment of the day seems full of life.โ She saw purpose behind Gurdjieffโs cryptic instructions: โHe speaks very little English but when one is with him one seems to understand all that which he suggestsโฆ.And he always acts at precisely the moment one needs it.โ
We do not want to be taken in by the wolf. But what if he really does have something marvelous to show us?
More work followed dinner, and then evening exercises into the early morning hours. Gurdjieff choreographed elaborate ballets for his students out of sacred movements. These โweird dancesโ were the focus of many articles, ridiculed like NXIVMโs midnight volleyball games and the UFO ideology of Heavenโs Gate. But the dances were also striking. An article in the New York Times described them as โbewildering in their complexity,โฆamazing in the precision of their execution,โฆand exceedingly beautiful in the gracefulness of the postures.โ Mansfield loved them.
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At the end of the story, a tragedy. Mansfield died of a hemorrhage after three months in Fontainebleau, sparking interest in the Instituteโs regimen. Gurdjieff became known as โthe man who killed Katherine Mansfield.โ D.H. Lawrence stated: โI have heard enough about that place at Fontainebleau where Katherine Mansfield died, to know it is a rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt.โ
Some students of Gurdjieff were horrified by the coverage, claiming it distorted โa work directed toward consciousness until it was completely unrecognizable, either by making it totally absurd or by deliberately turning it into something evil.โ Up until the end, Mansfield believed the Institute had real transformative power: โIt is like a dreamโor a miracle. What do the โsillyโ people matter & there are silly people who come from London, see nothing & go away again. There is something marvelous here if one can only attain it.โ Gurdjieffโs regimen did not cure her tuberculosis, but nor was any effective treatment yet available. Mansfield arrived at the Institute a dying woman.
The cult narrative, however, had already taken hold.
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The cult narrative casts adherents as appropriate objects of ridicule or fear or both, and the unusual, harsh conditions of Gurdjieffโs Institute fit that framework well. The familiar story reassures us, the readers, that we are right and the cultists are wrong, that we would never fall for those tricksโand that if we did, bad things would follow. But to flatten Mansfieldโs story into a cautionary tale is to oversimplify. Mansfield struck out in search of meaning and connection in her final days and believed herself to have found it. These competing visions of the world are at play in todayโs cult stories, too, and this tension continues to fuel our fascination with them. We do not want to be taken in by the wolf. But what if he really does have something marvelous to show us?
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The Ascent by Allison Buccola is available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
