Carole M. Cusack, The Institute and the Institution: G. I. Gurdjieff’s Community at the Prieuré des Basses Loges and its Literary Portrayal as an Asylum Carole Cusack European Association for the Study of Religion (EASR), ‘Religions 360’, 20-25 September 2026, Bucharest

https://www.academia.edu/176140890/Carole_M_Cusack_The_Institute_and_the_Institution_G_I_Gurdjieff_s_Community_at_the_Prieur%C3%A9_des_Basses_Loges_and_its_Literary_Portrayal_as_an_Asylum?email_work_card=title Greek-Armenian esotericist G. I. Gurdjieff (1877-1949) established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in January 2023. This launch was overshadowed by the death of New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) on 9 January, the day before the official opening. Before Mansfield died Gurdjieff was referred to in the correspondence of many people, and in contemporary journalism, as a “magician” and “charlatan,” and the Institute as an “asylum for the insane.” After his death some pupils wrote accounts of their time with their teacher, including descriptions of group living in the Prieuré, and how it functioned as a template for intentional communities led by Gurdjieff’s pupils and successors. Several novels have taken up the idea that the Prieuré was a kind of mental institution. Surrealist novelist Leonora Carrington was a veteran of incarceration in an asylum and a Fourth Way group, and The Hearing Trumpet (1974) sites Gurdjieff as the medical director of an aged care home; while in Andrew Crumey’s novel Beethoven’s Assassins (2023) the Prieuré becomes a psychiatric hospital in the Scottish Borders with mystical interests run by the enigmatic Dr Hyle. The equivalence between Gurdjieff’s Institute and psychiatric institutions posited by Carrington and Crumey is interrogated and its implications the popular reception of Gurdjieff himself are assessed.