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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ENCYCLOPAEDISM
Between 1978 and 1984
Moore maintained intermittent correspondence with (Henry) John
Sinclair, 2nd Baron Pentland, contributing firstly
towards the privately published Gurdjieff Bibliography [San
Francisco 1980], and secondly to the more substantial Gurdjieff,
an annotated bibliography by J. Walter Driscoll and the
Gurdjieff Foundation of California [New York 1985, Garland
Publishing Inc., 363pp. ISBN 0-8240-8972-3]. From this ensued a
longstanding and productive friendship with Driscoll. Moore’s most
innovative ‘bibliographic’ excursion was his compact article
‘Gurdjieff: the Man and the Literature’. Sensitively braiding
narrative and citation, it draws on Work classics to evoke
Gurdjieff’s life and teaching. Originally published in Resurgence
[No.96, Jan-Feb 1983], it has been widely ‘borrowed’ and reproduced;
its current posting on the Web in numerous European languages
suggests it may become an ‘evergreen’ of secondary Gurdjieffian
literature.
For decades Moore has
worked to promote a more responsible depiction of Gurdjieff in works
of reference. In 1985, in correspondence with Lars Mahinske of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, he corrected erroneous allusions to
Gurdjieff in the Micropaedia [Vol.5, 15th
ed.] The substantial module on Gurdjieff and the Gurdjieff legacy in
Professor Andrew Rawlinson’s compendium The Book of Enlightened
Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions [Chicago and La
Salle 1997, pb., 680pp, ISBN 0 8126 9310 8] was tempered by Moore’s
advice. Apropos The Encyclopaedia of New Religious Movements
ed. Professor Peter B. Clarke [London 2006, Routledge, Taylor &
Francis, 686pp, ISBN 10: 0 415 26707 2] Moore’s contributions on
Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were hobbled by space constraints. However,
his historico-morphological study of Gurdjieff’s symbol the
enneagram constitutes a salutary challenge to the populist and
aggressively marketed ‘typological enneagram’.
The crown of Moore’s
endeavour in encyclopaedism is his module on Gurdjieff in the
Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism edited by
Professor Wouter J. Hanegraaff, in collaboration with Professor
Antoine Faivre, Roelof van den Broek and Jean-Pierre Brach [Leiden,
Boston, Koeln, 2005, Brill Academic Publishers]. Leaning
neither to scepticism nor credulity, Moore impartially
differentiates Gurdjieff’s uncorroborated evocation of his spiritual
apprenticeship from independently validated history of his
subsequent ministry. He next rises to the formidable challenge of precising Gurdjieff’s panoramic and triple-tiered ideology - a
concordia universa integrating a semantic critique, a social
critique, an epistemology, a mythopoeic cosmogony and cosmology, a
phenomenology of consciousness, and a practical
Existenzphilosophie. To encapsulate all this in c.4000 words has
been saluted as a considerable achievement. Now accessible on the
WWW, the piece is mandatory orientational reading for anyone
seriously embarking on Gurdjieff studies, criticism, or apologetics.
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