Parchment of the Sarmoung Brotherhood

Parchment of the Sarmoung Brotherhood

Sarmoung or Sarman

"The pronunciation is the same for either spelling and the word can be assigned to old Persian. It does, in fact, appear in some of the Pahlawi texts...The word can be interpreted in three ways. It is the word for bee, which has always been a symbol of those who collect the precious 'honey' of traditional wisdom and preserve it for further generations. A collection of legends, well known in Armenian and Syrian circles with the title of The Bees, was revised by Mar Salamon, a Nestorian Archimandrite in the thirteenth century. The Bees refers to a mysterious power transmitted from the time of Zoroaster and made manifest in the time of Christ."

Man is "Persian meaning as the quality transmitted by heredity and hence a distinguished family or race. It can be the repository of an heirloom or tradition. The word sar means head, both literally and in the sense of principal or chief. The combination sarman would thus mean the chief repository of the tradition..."

"And still another possible meaning of the word sarman is... literally, those whose heads have been purified."

"...Ancient Armenian texts, including the book Merkhavat... referred to the 'Sarmoung Society' as a famous esoteric school that according to tradition had been founded in Babylon as far back as 2500 B.C. and which was known to have existed in Mesopotamia up to the sixth or seventh century of the Christian era. The school was said to have possessed great knowledge containing the key to many secret mysteries. The date of 2500 B.C. would put the founding of this school several centuries before the time Hammurabi, the greatest lawgiver of antiquity, but it is not an impossible one."

- John G. Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making of A New World

Around 1886 George Gurdjieff and a friend traveled "to the silent and abandoned city of Ani, former capital of the Bagratid Kings of Armenia. Here fate intervened. Digging irresponsibly and haphazardly in the ruins, the young men made a series of dramatic finds: an underground passage, a crumbling monastic cell, a wall niche, a pile of ancient Armenian parchments - and in one of these parchments an obscure but exhilarating reference to the 'Sarmoung Brotherhood'. Textual analysis suggested that the Brotherhood has been an Aisorian school, situated 'between Urmia and Kurdistan' in the sixth or seventh century AD. Gurdjieff's response was immediate: he 'decided to go there and try at any cost to find where the school was situated and then enter it'."

"Gurdjieff was obliged to make the journey blindfolded; contemporary maps were defective; and above all he was sworn to eternal secrecy. Basically what Gurdjieff tells us is that sometime in 1898 or 1899 he and Soloviev started out from Bokhara with horses, asses, and four Kara-Kirghiz guides. After crossing rivers and mountains, they reached their goal at sunset on the twelfth day. Bokhara is...an ancient city on the Silk Road, to the north of Afghanistan, which had fallen under Russian Suzerainty in 1873. Given its grim environs, the Sarmoung magic circle can hardly be more than 500 miles in diameter; and of this we can provisionally discount the northern and western segments, which verge respectively on the Kizil Kum and Kara Kum deserts. Indeed Gurdjieff's tantalizing references to the valleys of the rivers Zarovshan and Pyandzh (or Ab-i-Pandj), point us directly eastward along 'the golden road to Sarmakand'."

"The allegorists...construe Gurdjieff's entire monastery story symbolically, beginning with a wayside episode involving a dangerous rope bridge over a deep gorge. The hero on the 'perilous bridge' is noted as the very stuff of myth and folklore: in the West we have Lancelot's sword-bridge, and Bifrost the Scandinavian rainbow bridge; in the East there is Sirat, The Muslims' bridge over hell, and the Awesome Chinvat bridge of the Zoroastrian last judgment. As the remote and secret spiritual center ringed by mountains, it is a glyph which, as 'Shambhala', pervades Tibetan and Mongolian culture..."

"...It was under the Samanid dynasty that Bokhara, in the tenth century, attained its brief and glittering zenith as a center of civilization, art, and learning, producing amongst others Avicenna author of the Canon of Medicine. Alternatively the word Sarman in ancient Persian may be interpreted - by those so predisposed - to suggest the essence of Zoroastrian tradition and enlightenment. The obvious difficulty here is that the bearers of all these traditions, certainly in the Emirate of Bokhara - ended up on the skull piles of Genghiz Kan's Golden Horde in AD 1219."

- James Moore, Gurdjieff- Anatomy of a Myth