From Abracadabra to Zombies | View All

Petyr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878-1947)

Ouspensky was a mathematician and mystic who played the St. Paul to Gurdjeff's Jesus, taking the occult and often unintelligible notions of the master and making them palatable, if no more comprehensible in works such as In Search of the Miraculous--Fragments of an Unknown Teaching and The Fourth Way.

Unlike St. Paul, however, Ouspensky eventually lost faith in his master. Perhaps as his answer to Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, Ouspensky founded the Society for the Study of Normal Man and developed his own following. Ouspensky is likely to remain a favorite among New Agers since he wrote books with titles like The symbolism of the tarot: philosophy of occultism in pictures and numbers and Tertium Organum: the third canon of thought: a key to the enigmas of the world, an attempt to reconcile the mysticism of the east with the rationalism of the west.

See also Gurdjieff.

further reading

A Brief Overview of Certain Aspects of the Thought of Petyr Demianovich Ouspensky by Michael Presley