With what is this book concerned? "Primarily with the destiny of Man and with that of individual men, with their genuine human functions and the obstacle that prevents the fulfillment of them, and with those procedures that may hold out promise of being used effectually to alter the situation. This was the sort of thing taught in the ancient Mysteries, now mostly lost and almost entirely unintelligible because the key of those teachings has vanished. . . . But the same verities, to which they pointed, shall be our subject too; for the truth, if genuine, is unique and single. But the terms presently to be defined, will be modern terms and thus more readily comprehensible to the contemporary reader." A. R. Orage, editor and owner of the famous avant-garde magazine The New Age, met the Russian journalist P. D. Ouspensky in 1914 in London. Both men were deeply interested in spiritual matters and corresponded in the following years. During this time, Ouspensky met G. Gurdjieff and became his pupil. Driven by the Russian Revolution, Ouspensky, after many adventures, arrived in London in 1921, and began giving lectures on the Gurdjieff-system. Orage attended his lectures and realized that Ouspensky had found what both had been looking for. But, after Gurdjieff's first visit to Ouspensky's group, he knew that Gurdjieff was the teacher. Eventually, he gave up everything, sold The New Age, and went to Fontainebleau. Orage attended Gurdjieff's Institute in Fontainebleau from October 1922 until December 1923 when he was sent to New York by Gurdjieff to prepare for his first visit and demonstrations of sacred dances. With the intention to open branches of the Institute in America, Gurdjieff left Orage in New York to continue what had been begun. But in 1924 Gurdjieff suffered a serious car accident which forced him to revise all his plans. He decided to transmit his knowledge in written form with Orage as his editor and collaborator. From 1924 to 1931, Orage held regular meetings in New York to explain the nature of the Institute and its work. It was at one of these meetings in the fall of 1924 that C. Daly King first met Orage. What impressed King most, was the complete and utter rationality of what he heard. This was contrary to what he had expected-a proselytizing harangue for a bogus cult. The topics went to the real heart of what had always intrigued him, and from then on he regularly attended Orage's meetings. By the following fall, King was already conducting two groups of his own, and in his absence, Orage even appointed King as his deputy. They had formed a close friendship, which gave King the opportunity to discuss with Orage all the details of the system. All this came to an end, when between 1930-1931, Gurdjieff staged the repudiation of Orage which led to Orage's return to England. His New York groups were abandoned, and three years later, Orage died suddenly and unexpectedly on 6 November 1934. Gurdjieff made his last trip to America at the end of 1948. King attended two of his meetings, and realized that the Oragean version of the teaching no longer remained extant, and that it was upon the verge of being irrecoverably lost. He therefore resolved to set it down in accurate detail, the result of which, is the present volume. Fully indexed with over 40 redrawn illustrations and corrected errata.

Jean Toomer's adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In To Make a New Race Jon Woodson explores the intense influence of Greek-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff on the thinking of Toomer and his coterie--Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman--and, through them, the mystic's influence on many of the notables in African American literature. Gurdjieff, born of poor Greco-Armenian parents on the Russo-Turkish frontier, espoused the theory that man is asleep and in prison unless he strains against the major burdens of life, especially those of identification, like race. Toomer, whose novel Cane became an inspiration to many later Harlem Renaissance writers, traveled to France and labored at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Later, the writer became one of the primary followers approved to teach Gurdjieff's philosophy in the United States. Woodson's is the first study of Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance to look beyond contemporary portrayals of the mystic in order to judge his influence. Scouring correspondence, manuscripts, and published texts, Woodson finds the direct links in which Gurdjieff through Toomer played a major role in the development of "objective literature." He discovers both coded and explicit ways in which Gurdjieff's philosophy shaped the world views of writers well into the 1960s. Moreover Woodson reinforces the extensive contribution Toomer and other African-American writers with all their international influences made to the American cultural scene. Jon Woodson, an associate professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C., is a contributor to the collection, Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940-1960. He has published articles in African American Review and other journals.

"In the year 1924, M. Georges Gurdjieff came to New York City. He was then the founder and head of The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, at Fontainebleau, France and he brought with him a considerable number of his instructors and pupils. M. A.R. Orage had remained in New York City as the representative of M. Gurdjieff to hold a series of informal groups for those interested, in order to explain the nature of the Institute and its work. I was then twenty-nine years of age.The field of these formulations is that of objective truth, both personal and non-personal.And so, I wish you good hunting."C. Daly King