“You cannot imagine what hardships fakirs undergo. I do not know whether you have seen real fakirs or not. I have seen many; for instance, I saw one in the inner court of a TEMPLE in India and I even slept near him. Day and night for twenty years he had been standing on the tips of his fingers and toes. He was no longer able to straighten himself. His pupils carried him from one place to another, took him to the river and washed him like some inanimate object. But this was not attained all at once. Think what he had to overcome, what tortures he must have suffered in order to get to that stage. Fragments: Two

“In addition to these, other people become fakirs simply from being struck by some fakir they have seen. Near every fakir in the TEMPLEs people can be seen who imitate him, who sit or stand in the same posture. Not for long of course, but still occasionally for several hours. And sometimes it happens that a man who went into the TEMPLE accidentally on a feast day, and began to imitate some fakir who particularly struck him, does not return home any more but joins the crowd of that fakir’s disciples and later, in the course of time, becomes a fakir himself. You must understand that I take the word ‘fakir’ in quotation marks. In Persia fakir simply means a beggar; and in India a great many jugglers call themselves fakirs. And Europeans, particularly learned Europeans, very often give the name of fakir to yogis, as well as to monks of various wandering orders. Fragments: Two

“Generally speaking we know very little about Christianity and the form of Christian worship; we know nothing at all of the history and origin of a number of things. For instance, the church, the TEMPLE in which gather the faithful and in which services are carried out according to special rites; where was this taken from? Many people do not think about this at all. Many people think that the outward form of worship, the rites, the singing of canticles, and so on, were invented by the fathers of the church. Others think that this outward form has been taken partly from pagan religions and partly from the Hebrews. But all of it is untrue. The question of the origin of the Christian church, that is, of the Christian TEMPLE, is much more interesting than we think. To begin with, the church and worship in the form which they took in the first centuries of Christianity could not have been borrowed from paganism because there was nothing like it either in the Greek or Roman cults or in Judaism. The Jewish synagogue, the Jewish TEMPLE, Greek and Roman TEMPLEs of various gods, were something quite different from the Christian church which made its appearance in the first and second centuries. The Christian church is — a school concerning which people have forgotten that it is a school. Imagine a school where the teachers give lectures and perform explanatory demonstrations without knowing that these are lectures and demonstrations; and where the pupils or simply the people who come to the school take these lectures and demonstrations for ceremonies, or rites, or ‘sacraments,’ i.e., magic. This would approximate to the Christian church of our times. Fragments: Fifteen

“Esoteric schools, that is, not pseudo-esoteric schools, which perhaps exist in some countries of the East, are difficult to find because they exist there in the guise of ordinary monasteries and TEMPLEs. Tibetan monasteries are usually built in the form of four concentric circles or four concentric courts divided by high walls. Indian TEMPLEs, especially those in Southern India, are built on the same plan but in the form of squares, one contained within the other. Worshipers usually have access to the first outer court, and sometimes, as an exception, persons of another religion and Europeans; access to the second court is for people of a certain caste only or for those having special permission; access to the third court is only for persons belonging to the TEMPLE; and access to the fourth is only for Brahmins and priests. Organizations of this kind which, with minor variations, are everywhere in existence, enable esoteric schools to exist without being recognized. Out of dozens of monasteries one is a school. But how is it to be recognized? If you get inside it you will only be inside the first court; to the second court only pupils have access. But this you do not know, you are told they belong to a special caste. As regards the third and fourth courts you cannot even know anything about them. And you can, in fact, observe the same order in all TEMPLEs and until you are told you cannot distinguish an esoteric TEMPLE or monastery from an ordinary one. Fragments: Fifteen

The reading of what constituted the first chapter stopped at this point. G. listened attentively the whole time. He sat on a sofa, with one leg tucked beneath him, drinking black coffee from a tumbler, smoking and sometimes glancing at me. I liked his movements, which had a great deal of a kind of feline grace and assurance; even in his silence there was something which distinguished him from others. I felt that I would rather have met him, not in Moscow, not in this flat, but in one of those places from which I had so recently returned, in the court of one of the Cairo mosques, in one of the ruined cities of Ceylon, or in one of the South Indian TEMPLEs — Tanjore, Trichinopoly, or Madura. Fragments: One

“My ballet is not a ‘mystery,’” said G. “The object I had in view was to produce an interesting and beautiful spectacle. Of course there is a certain meaning hidden beneath the outward form, but I have not pursued the aim of exposing and emphasizing this meaning. An important place in the ballet is occupied by certain dances. I will explain this to you briefly. Imagine that in the study of the movements of the heavenly bodies, let us say the planets of the solar system, a special mechanism is constructed to give a visual representation of the laws of these movements and to remind us of them. In this mechanism each planet, which is represented by a sphere of appropriate size, is placed at a certain distance from a central sphere representing the sun. The mechanism is set in motion and all the spheres begin to rotate and to move along prescribed paths, reproducing in a visual form the laws which govern the movements of the planets. This mechanism reminds you of all you know about the solar system. There is something like this in the rhythm of certain dances. In the strictly defined movements and combinations of the dancers, certain laws are visually reproduced which arc intelligible to those who know them. Such dances are called ‘sacred dances.’ In the course of my travels in the East I have many times witnessed such dances being performed during sacred services in various ancient TEMPLEs. Some of these dances are reproduced in The Struggle of the Magicians.’ More-over there are three ideas lying at the basis of “The Struggle of the Magi-cians.’ But if I produce the ballet on the ordinary stage the public will never understand these ideas.” Fragments: One

“Legends,” said one of those present, “have been preserved of statues of gods in ancient Greek TEMPLEs, for example the statue of Zeus at Olympia, which produced upon everybody a definite and always identical impression.” Fragments: Fourteen

Indicating what had been preserved up to our time, G. at the same time pointed out what had been lost and forgotten. He spoke of sacred dances which accompanied the “services” in the “TEMPLEs of repetition” and which were not included in the Christian form of worship. He also spoke of various exercises, and of special postures for different prayers, that is, for different kinds of meditation; about acquiring control over the breathing and of the necessity of being able to tense or relax any group of muscles, or the muscles of the whole body at will; and about many other things having relation, so to speak, to the “technique” of religion. Fragments: Fifteen