Although the details are lost in time, a closer look at the ancient mythology surrounding their worship will help us understand how pagan practices have survived in popular Eastercustoms.

Two of the earliest recorded deities were the Babylonian fertility god Tammuz and the goddess Ishtar. Every year Tammuz was believed to die, passing away from the cheerful earth to the gloomy subterranean world (Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1993, p.326).

The seasonal cycle came to be connected with Tammuzs supposed annual death and resurrection. Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of life which they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the dead. In name and detail the rites varied from place to place: in substance they were the same (p.325).

Many of these rites revolved around inducing the return of Tammuz from the dead. One of these ceremonies is recorded in Ezekiel 8:14 Ezekiel 8:14Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORDs house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.American King James Version, where Ezekiel saw in vision an abominable sight: women weeping for Tammuz at the very temple ofGod.

The Expositors Bible Commentary says regarding this verse: Tammuz, later linked to Adonis and Aphrodite by name, was a god of fertility and rain In the seasonal mythological cycle, he died early in the fall when vegetation withered. His revival, by the wailing of Ishtar, was marked by the buds of spring and the fertility of the land. Such renewal was encouraged and celebrated by licentious fertility festivals The women would have been lamenting Tammuzs death. They perhaps were also following the ritual of Ishtar, wailing for the revival of Tammuz (Ralph Alexander, Vol. 6, 1986, pp.783-784).

As worship of Tammuz and Ishtar spread to the Mediterranean region, including the territory of biblical Israel, the pair came to be worshiped under other names: Baal and Astarte (Ashtoreth), Attis and Cybele, and Adonis and Aphrodite. God heatedly condemned the sensual, perverted worship of Baal and Astarte, the Queen of Heaven (Judges 2:11-15 Judges 2:11-15 11 And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served Baalim: 12 And they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, which brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods, of the gods of the people that were round about them, and bowed themselves to them, and provoked the LORD to anger. 13 And they forsook the LORD, and served Baal and Ashtaroth. 14 And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and he delivered them into the hands of spoilers that spoiled them, and he sold them into the hands of their enemies round about, so that they could not any longer stand before their enemies. 15 Wherever they went out, the hand of the LORD was against them for evil, as the LORD had said, and as the LORD had sworn to them: and they were greatly distressed.American King James Version; Judges 3:7-8 Judges 3:7-8 7 And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and forgot the LORD their God, and served Baalim and the groves. 8 Therefore the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of Chushanrishathaim king of Mesopotamia: and the children of Israel served Chushanrishathaim eight years.American King James Version; Judges 10:6-7 Judges 10:6-7 6 And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the LORD, and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria, and the gods of Zidon, and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the LORD, and served not him. 7 And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and he sold them into the hands of the Philistines, and into the hands of the children of Ammon.American King James Version; 1 Kings 11:4-33 1 Kings 11:4-33 4 For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father. 5 For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. 6 And Solomon did evil in the sight of the LORD, and went not fully after the LORD, as did David his father. 7 Then did Solomon build an high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. 8 And likewise did he for all his strange wives, which burnt incense and sacrificed to their gods. 9 And the LORD was angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned from the LORD God of Israel, which had appeared to him twice, 10 And had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods: but he kept not that which the LORD commanded. 11 Why the LORD said to Solomon, For as much as this is done of you, and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes, which I have commanded you, I will surely rend the kingdom from you, and will give it to your servant. 12 Notwithstanding in your days I will not do it for David your fathers sake: but I will rend it out of the hand of your son. 13 However, I will not rend away all the kingdom; but will give one tribe to your son for David my servants sake, and for Jerusalems sake which I have chosen. 14 And the LORD stirred up an adversary to Solomon, Hadad the Edomite: he was of the kings seed in Edom. 15 For it came to pass, when David was in Edom, and Joab the captain of the host was gone up to bury the slain, after he had smitten every male in Edom; 16 (For six months did Joab remain there with all Israel, until he had cut off every male in Edom:) 17 That Hadad fled, he and certain Edomites of his fathers servants with him, to go into Egypt; Hadad being yet a little child. 18 And they arose out of Midian, and came to Paran: and they took men with them out of Paran, and they came to Egypt, to Pharaoh king of Egypt; which gave him an house, and appointed him victuals, and gave him land. 19 And Hadad found great favor in the sight of Pharaoh, so that he gave him to wife the sister of his own wife, the sister of Tahpenes the queen. 20 And the sister of Tahpenes bore him Genubath his son, whom Tahpenes weaned in Pharaohs house: and Genubath was in Pharaohs household among the sons of Pharaoh. 21 And when Hadad heard in Egypt that David slept with his fathers, and that Joab the captain of the host was dead, Hadad said to Pharaoh, Let me depart, that I may go to my own country. 22 Then Pharaoh said to him, But what have you lacked with me, that, behold, you seek to go to your own country? And he answered, Nothing: however, let me go in any wise. 23 And God stirred him up another adversary, Rezon the son of Eliadah, which fled from his lord Hadadezer king of Zobah: 24 And he gathered men to him, and became captain over a band, when David slew them of Zobah: and they went to Damascus, and dwelled therein, and reigned in Damascus. 25 And he was an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon, beside the mischief that Hadad did: and he abhorred Israel, and reigned over Syria. 26 And Jeroboam the son of Nebat, an Ephrathite of Zereda, Solomons servant, whose mothers name was Zeruah, a widow woman, even he lifted up his hand against the king. 27 And this was the cause that he lifted up his hand against the king: Solomon built Millo, and repaired the breaches of the city of David his father. 28 And the man Jeroboam was a mighty man of valor: and Solomon seeing the young man that he was industrious, he made him ruler over all the charge of the house of Joseph. 29 And it came to pass at that time when Jeroboam went out of Jerusalem, that the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite found him in the way; and he had clad himself with a new garment; and they two were alone in the field: 30 And Ahijah caught the new garment that was on him, and rent it in twelve pieces: 31 And he said to Jeroboam, Take you ten pieces: for thus said the LORD, the God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to you: 32 (But he shall have one tribe for my servant Davids sake, and for Jerusalems sake, the city which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel:) 33 Because that they have forsaken me, and have worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Milcom the god of the children of Ammon, and have not walked in my ways, to do that which is right in my eyes, and to keep my statutes and my judgments, as did David his father.American King James Version; 1 Kings 16:30-33 1 Kings 16:30-33 30 And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD above all that were before him. 31 And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he took to wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshipped him. 32 And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria. 33 And Ahab made a grove; and Ahab did more to provoke the LORD God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.American King James Version; 1 Kings 22:51-53 1 Kings 22:51-53 51 Ahaziah the son of Ahab began to reign over Israel in Samaria the seventeenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, and reigned two years over Israel. 52 And he did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked in the way of his father, and in the way of his mother, and in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin: 53 For he served Baal, and worshipped him, and provoked to anger the LORD God of Israel, according to all that his father had done.American King James Version; 2 Kings 23:13 2 Kings 23:13And the high places that were before Jerusalem, which were on the right hand of the mount of corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Zidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of the Moabites, and for Milcom the abomination of the children of Ammon, did the king defile.American King James Version; Jeremiah 7:18 Jeremiah 7:18The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings to other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.American King James Version).

In ancient worship we find the mythology that would ultimately link these ancient customs to Christs death and resurrection. Says Alan Watts: It would be tedious to describe in detail all that has been handed down to us about the various rites of Tammuz, Adonis, and many others But their universal themethe drama of death and resurrectionmakes them the forerunners of the Christian Easter, and thus the first Easter services. As we go on to describe the Christian observance of Easter we shall see how many of its customs and ceremonies resemble these former rites ( Easter: Its Story and Meaning, 1950, p.58).

Watts describes some of the similarities and parallels: Shortly before the vernal [spring] equinox the members of this cult [of Tammuz-Ishtar, Attis-Cybele and Adonis-Aphrodite] began a fastas Christians also have the fast of Lent, beginning forty days beforeEaster.

He tells how some worshippers would cut down a tree, then carry it with reverence and ceremony to Cybeles temple and set it up in the central sanctuary There, upon its central stem [trunk], was hung the figure of the young god (p.59).

Here, for the remaining days of the fast, the worshipers gathered to sing hymns of mourning for the dead Attis And to this day, on Good Friday at the Veneration of the Cross, Christians sing their hymn of mourning for another and greater one who died on a Tree (p.59).

As the fast drew to an end, a remarkable rite took place: The figure of the dead Attis was taken down from the tree and buried under the twilight sky. Far into the night his devotees stood around the grave and sang hymns of mourning. But as dawn approached, a great light was kindled, as today Christians light the Paschal Candle on Easter Eve as a symbol of the risen Christ (pp.61-62).

Frazer describes the idolatrous worship this way: The sorrow of the worshippers was turned to joy The tomb was opened: the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest touched the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The resurrection of the god was hailed by his disciples as a promise that they too would issue triumphant from the corruption of the grave. On the morrow the divine resurrection was celebrated with a wild outburst of glee. At Rome, and probably elsewhere, the celebration took the form of a carnival (p.350).

In its various forms, worship of Tammuz-Adonis-Attis spread around the Roman Empire including to Rome itself. As Christianity spread through the empire, religious leaders apparently merged customs and practices associated with this earlier resurrected god and applied them to the resurrected Son ofGod.

Says Frazer: When we reflect how often the Church has skillfully contrived to plant the seeds of the new faith on the old stock of paganism, we may surmise that the Easter celebration of the dead and risen Christ was grafted upon a similar celebration of the dead and risen Adonis (p.345).

In this respect Easter followed the pattern of Christmas in being officially sanctioned and welcomed into the church. As Frazer goes on to say: Motives of the same sort may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the Easter festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which fell at the same season. Now the Easter rites still observed in Greece, Sicily and southern Italy bear in some respects a striking resemblance to the rites of Adonis, and I have suggested that the Church may have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ (p.359).

To discover what God thinks of merging customs associated with worship of other gods with worship of Him, be sure to read Does It Matter to God? .

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The Resurrection Connection | United Church of God

All of us chase after success. For majority of us, success means achieving more in life. A better car, a bigger house, a promotion at job or a fancy watch. This particular definition of success pertains to what I call as professional success. Most of the stars, sports people, top shot CEOs and other celebrities that you know are at pinnacle of their professional success. They probably worked very hard to achieve what they have today and are also probably very proud of it. So far, so good.

But, there is another aspect of success. I call it personal success. If you compare two people: one movie star and another middle class office goer, do you really think movie star is more happy than the office goer? Deep inside they both have same happiness scale. In fact, for all the possessions and fame that a movie star has got, he may be actually not as happy as the regular office goer who gets to see his family every day and spend quality time with them. Regular Joe is happy as hell, why should he be ashamed of not being a movie star?

So, personal success is a different ball game altogether. It is completely independent of professional success you have got. In fact, I value personal success much more as compared to professional success. Reason for that is because personal success is much easily achievable. You all have a choice to spend quality time with your friends and family and live a rich and happy life. But, sadly, many of choose to chase professional success like mad people (rats). We work endlessly to achieve the elusive professional success, odds of achieving which is very less (just compare number of celebrities out there v/s total population on Earth).

So, given you can be happy with your personal life right now, why would you work non-stop and sacrifice personal life for some professional success. Why should it even matter that you could not become Sachin Tendulkar, Bill Gates, Lady Gaga or Tom Cruise? Just because they are at pinnacle of their professional careers, do you think they more happy than you? I doubt and I am pretty convinced.

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Professional success and personal success: two independent ...

George Bernard ShawBorn(1856-07-26)26 July 1856Portobello, Dublin, IrelandDied2 November 1950(1950-11-02) (aged94)Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, EnglandResting placeShaw's Corner, Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, EnglandOccupationPlaywright, critic, polemicist, political activistNationalityBritish (18561950)Irish (dual nationality 193450)SpouseCharlotte Payne-Townshend (m.1898; d.1943)Signature

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.

Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform, and opposed vaccination and organised religion. He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable, and although not a republican, castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period. These stances had no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years saw a series of often ambitious plays, which achieved varying degrees of popular success. In 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he received an Academy Award. His appetite for politics and controversy remained undiminished; by the late 1920s he had largely renounced Fabian Society gradualism and often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of the right and lefthe expressed admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin. In the final decade of his life he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946.

Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion has varied about his works, but he has regularly been rated as second only to Shakespeare among British dramatists; analysts recognise his extensive influence on generations of English-language playwrights. The word "Shavian" has entered the language as encapsulating Shaw's ideas and his means of expressing them.

Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street[n 1] in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw (18141885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (ne Gurly; 18301913). His elder siblings were Lucinda (Lucy) Frances (18531920) and Elinor Agnes (18551876). The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to the dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland;[n 2] George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual alcoholic, was among the family's less successful members. His relatives secured him a sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s; thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant. In 1852 he married Bessie Gurly; in the view of Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd she married to escape a tyrannical great-aunt. If, as Holroyd and others surmise, George's motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her family's money. She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty".

By the time of Shaw's birth, his mother had become close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father; there is no consensus among Shavian scholars on the likelihood of this.[8] The young Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but he later recalled that her indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply. He found solace in the music that abounded in the house. Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing; Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Lee's unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws' house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players.

In 1862, Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a house, No. 1 Hatch Street, in an affluent part of Dublin, and a country cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay. Shaw, a sensitive boy, found the less salubrious parts of Dublin shocking and distressing, and was happier at the cottage. Lee's students often gave him books, which the young Shaw read avidly; thus, as well as gaining a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works, he became familiar with a wide spectrum of literature.[14]

Between 1865 and 1871, Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated.[n 3] His experiences as a schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education: "Schools and schoolmasters", he later wrote, were "prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents." In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents, where he worked hard, and quickly rose to become head cashier. During this period, Shaw was known as "George Shaw"; after 1876, he dropped the "George" and styled himself "Bernard Shaw".[n 4]

In June 1873, Lee left Dublin for London and never returned. A fortnight later, Bessie followed him; the two girls joined her.[n 5] Shaw's explanation of why his mother followed Lee was that without the latter's financial contribution the joint household had to be broken up. Left in Dublin with his father, Shaw compensated for the absence of music in the house by teaching himself to play the piano.

Early in 1876 Shaw learned from his mother that Agnes was dying of tuberculosis. He resigned from the land agents, and in March travelled to England to join his mother and Lucy at Agnes's funeral. He never again lived in Ireland, and did not visit it for twenty-nine years.

Initially, Shaw refused to seek clerical employment in London. His mother allowed him to live free of charge in her house in South Kensington, but he nevertheless needed an income. He had abandoned a teenage ambition to become a painter, and had no thought yet of writing for a living, but Lee found a little work for him, ghost-writing a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly, The Hornet. Lee's relations with Bessie deteriorated after their move to London.[n 6] Shaw maintained contact with Lee, who found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer.[n 7]

Eventually Shaw was driven to applying for office jobs. In the interim he secured a reader's pass for the British Museum Reading Room (the forerunner of the British Library) and spent most weekdays there, reading and writing. His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel, Immaturity (1879), was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s. He was employed briefly by the newly formed Edison Telephone Company in 187980, and as in Dublin achieved rapid promotion. Nonetheless, when the Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw chose not to seek a place in the new organisation. Thereafter he pursued a full-time career as an author.

For the next four years Shaw made a negligible income from writing, and was subsidised by his mother. In 1881, for the sake of economy, and increasingly as a matter of principle, he became a vegetarian. He grew a beard to hide a facial scar left by smallpox.[n 8] In rapid succession he wrote two more novels: The Irrational Knot (1880) and Love Among the Artists (1881), but neither found a publisher; each was serialised a few years later in the socialist magazine Our Corner.[n 9]

In 1880 Shaw began attending meetings of the Zetetical Society, whose objective was to "search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race". Here he met Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant who, like Shaw, was busy educating himself. Despite difference of style and temperament, the two quickly recognised qualities in each other and developed a lifelong friendship. Shaw later reflected: "You knew everything that I didn't know and I knew everything you didn't know... We had everything to learn from one another and brains enough to do it".

Shaw's next attempt at drama was a one-act playlet in French, Un Petit Drame, written in 1884 but not published in his lifetime.[37] In the same year the critic William Archer suggested a collaboration, with a plot by Archer and dialogue by Shaw. The project foundered, but Shaw returned to the draft as the basis of Widowers' Houses in 1892, and the connection with Archer proved of immense value to Shaw's career.

On 5 September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, addressed by the political economist Henry George. Shaw then read George's book Progress and Poverty, which awakened his interest in economics. He began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx, and thereafter spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital. He was not impressed by the SDF's founder, H. M. Hyndman, whom he found autocratic, ill-tempered and lacking leadership qualities. Shaw doubted the ability of the SDF to harness the working classes into an effective radical movement and did not join ithe preferred, he said, to work with his intellectual equals.

After reading a tract, Why Are The Many Poor?, issued by the recently formed Fabian Society,[n 10] Shaw went to the society's next advertised meeting, on 16 May 1884. He became a member in September, and before the year's end had provided the society with its first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2. He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885, and later that year recruited Webb and also Annie Besant, a fine orator.

"The most striking result of our present system of farming out the national Land and capital to private individuals has been the division of society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other"

Shaw, Fabian Tract No. 2: A Manifesto (1884).

From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association; it was, Holroyd observes, "the closest Shaw had ever come to university education." This experience changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism. When in 188687 the Fabians debated whether to embrace anarchism, as advocated by Charlotte Wilson, Besant and others, Shaw joined the majority in rejecting this approach. After a rally in Trafalgar Square addressed by Besant was violently broken up by the authorities on 13 November 1887 ("Bloody Sunday"), Shaw became convinced of the folly of attempting to challenge police power. Thereafter he largely accepted the principle of "permeation" as advocated by Webb: the notion whereby socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into existing political parties.

Throughout the 1880s the Fabian Society remained small, its message of moderation frequently unheard among more strident voices. Its profile was raised in 1889 with the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw who also provided two of the essays. The second of these, "Transition", details the case for gradualism and permeation, asserting that "the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone". In 1890 Shaw produced Tract No. 13, What Socialism Is, a revision of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had defined socialism in anarchistic terms. In Shaw's new version, readers were assured that "socialism can be brought about in a perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions".

The mid-1880s marked a turning point in Shaw's life, both personally and professionally: he lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic.[55] He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow some years his senior. Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. Shaw's sex life has caused much speculation and debate among his biographers, but there is a consensus that the relationship with Patterson was one of his few non-platonic romantic liaisons.[n 11]

The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre: Cashel Byron's Profession written in 188283, and An Unsocial Socialist, begun and finished in 1883. The latter was published as a serial in ToDay magazine in 1884, although it did not appear in book form until 1887. Cashel Byron appeared in magazine and book form in 1886.

In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When Archer resigned as art critic of The World in 1886 he secured the succession for Shaw. The two figures in the contemporary art world whose views Shaw most admired were William Morris and John Ruskin, and he sought to follow their precepts in his criticisms. Their emphasis on morality appealed to Shaw, who rejected the idea of art for art's sake, and insisted that all great art must be didactic.[62]

Of Shaw's various reviewing activities in the 1880s and 1890s it was as a music critic that he was best known.[63] After serving as deputy in 1888, he became musical critic of The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto.[64][n 12] In May 1890 he moved back to The World, where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years. In the 2016 version of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Robert Anderson writes, "Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability."[66] Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950.[67]

From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review, edited by his friend Frank Harris. As at The World, he used the by-line "G.B.S." He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright: "I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence".

After using the plot of the aborted 1884 collaboration with Archer to complete Widowers' Houses (it was staged twice in London, in December 1892), Shaw continued writing plays. At first he made slow progress; The Philanderer, written in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage production. Similarly, Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) was written five years before publication and nine years before reaching the stage.[n 13]

Shaw's first box-office success was Arms and the Man (1894), a mock-Ruritanian comedy satirising conventions of love, military honour and class. The press found the play overlong, and accused Shaw of mediocrity,[69] sneering at heroism and patriotism, heartless cleverness, and copying W.S.Gilbert's style.[69][n 14] The public took a different view, and the management of the theatre staged extra matine performances to meet the demand. The play ran from April to July, toured the provinces and was staged in New York. Among the cast of the London production was Florence Farr, with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894, much resented by Jenny Patterson.[74]

The success of Arms and the Man was not immediately replicated. Candida, which presented a young woman making a conventional romantic choice for unconventional reasons, received a single performance in South Shields in 1895; in 1897 a playlet about Napoleon called The Man of Destiny had a single staging at Croydon. In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the West End stage; his biggest success of the decade was in New York in 1897, when Richard Mansfield's production of the historical melodrama The Devil's Disciple earned the author more than 2,000 in royalties.

In January 1893, as a Fabian delegate, Shaw attended the Bradford conference which led to the foundation of the Independent Labour Party. He was sceptical about the new party, and scorned the likelihood that it could switch the allegiance of the working class from sport to politics. He persuaded the conference to adopt resolutions abolishing indirect taxation, and taxing unearned income "to extinction". Back in London, Shaw produced what Margaret Cole, in her Fabian history, terms a "grand philippic" against the minority Liberal administration that had taken power in 1892. To Your Tents, O Israel excoriated the government for ignoring social issues and concentrating solely on Irish Home Rule, a matter Shaw declared of no relevance to socialism.[n 15] In 1894 the Fabian Society received a substantial bequest from a sympathiser, Henry Hunt HutchinsonHolroyd mentions 10,000. Webb, who chaired the board of trustees appointed to supervise the legacy, proposed to use most of it to found a school of economics and politics. Shaw demurred; he thought such a venture was contrary to the specified purpose of the legacy. He was eventually persuaded to support the proposal, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) opened in the summer of 1895.

By the later 1890s Shaw's political activities lessened as he concentrated on making his name as a dramatist. In 1897 he was persuaded to fill an uncontested vacancy for a "vestryman" (parish councillor) in London's St Pancras district. At least initially, Shaw took to his municipal responsibilities seriously;[n 16] when London government was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, he was elected to the newly formed borough council.

In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down. He was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich Anglo-Irish woman whom he had met through the Webbs. The previous year she had proposed that she and Shaw should marry. He had declined, but when she insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage. The ceremony took place on 1 June 1898, in the register office in Covent Garden. The bride and bridegroom were both aged forty-one. In the view of the biographer and critic St John Ervine, "their life together was entirely felicitous". There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed was never consummated; whether this was wholly at Charlotte's wish, as Shaw liked to suggest, is less widely credited. In the early weeks of the marriage Shaw was much occupied writing his Marxist analysis of Wagner's Ring cycle, published as The Perfect Wagnerite late in 1898. In 1906 the Shaws found a country home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire; they renamed the house "Shaw's Corner", and lived there for the rest of their lives. They retained a London flat in the Adelphi and later at Whitehall Court.[94]

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays.[n 17] The first, John Bull's Other Island, a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by Edward VII, who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was withheld from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, for fear of the affront it might provoke, although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907. Shaw later wrote that William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for... It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland."[98][n 18] Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends; Yeats and Lady Gregory tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after J. M. Synge's death in 1909. Shaw admired other figures in the Irish Literary Revival, including George Russell and James Joyce, and was a close friend of Sen O'Casey, who was inspired to become a playwright after reading John Bull's Other Island.

Man and Superman, completed in 1902, was a success both at the Royal Court in 1905 and in Robert Loraine's New York production in the same year. Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were Major Barbara (1905), depicting the contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the Salvation Army; The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a mostly serious piece about professional ethics; and Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, seen in New York in 1906 and in London the following year.

Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious farce". These plays included Getting Married (premiered 1908), The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny's First Play (1911). Blanco Posnet was banned on religious grounds by the Lord Chamberlain (the official theatre censor in England), and was produced instead in Dublin; it filled the Abbey Theatre to capacity. Fanny's First Play, a comedy about suffragettes, had the longest initial run of any Shaw play622 performances.

Androcles and the Lion (1912), a less heretical study of true and false religious attitudes than Blanco Posnet, ran for eight weeks in September and October 1913. It was followed by one of Shaw's most successful plays, Pygmalion, written in 1912 and staged in Vienna the following year, and in Berlin shortly afterwards. Shaw commented, "It is the custom of the English press when a play of mine is produced, to inform the world that it is not a playthat it is dull, blasphemous, unpopular, and financially unsuccessful.... Hence arose an urgent demand on the part of the managers of Vienna and Berlin that I should have my plays performed by them first." The British production opened in April 1914, starring Sir Herbert Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell as, respectively, a professor of phonetics and a cockney flower-girl. There had earlier been a romantic liaison between Shaw and Campbell that caused Charlotte Shaw considerable concern, but by the time of the London premiere it had ended. The play attracted capacity audiences until July, when Tree insisted on going on holiday, and the production closed. His co-star then toured with the piece in the US.[n 19]

In 1899, when the Boer War began, Shaw wished the Fabians to take a neutral stance on what he deemed, like Home Rule, to be a "non-Socialist" issue. Others, including the future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, wanted unequivocal opposition, and resigned from the society when it followed Shaw. In the Fabians' war manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), Shaw declared that "until the Federation of the World becomes an accomplished fact we must accept the most responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it".[118]

As the new century began, Shaw became increasingly disillusioned by the limited impact of the Fabians on national politics. Thus, although a nominated Fabian delegate, he did not attend the London conference at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street in February 1900, that created the Labour Representation Committeeprecursor of the modern Labour Party. By 1903, when his term as borough councillor expired, he had lost his earlier enthusiasm, writing: "After six years of Borough Councilling I am convinced that the borough councils should be abolished". Nevertheless, in 1904 he stood in the London County Council elections. After an eccentric campaign, which Holroyd characterises as "[making] absolutely certain of not getting in", he was duly defeated. It was Shaw's final foray into electoral politics. Nationally, the 1906 general election produced a huge Liberal majority and an intake of 29 Labour members. Shaw viewed this outcome with scepticism; he had a low opinion of the new prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and saw the Labour members as inconsequential: "I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a body".

In the years after the 1906 election, Shaw felt that the Fabians needed fresh leadership, and saw this in the form of his fellow-writer H. G. Wells, who had joined the society in February 1903. Wells's ideas for reformparticularly his proposals for closer cooperation with the Independent Labour Partyplaced him at odds with the society's "Old Gang", led by Shaw. According to Cole, Wells "had minimal capacity for putting [his ideas] across in public meetings against Shaw's trained and practised virtuosity". In Shaw's view, "the Old Gang did not extinguish Mr Wells, he annihilated himself". Wells resigned from the society in September 1908; Shaw remained a member, but left the executive in April 1911. He later wondered whether the Old Gang should have given way to Wells some years earlier: "God only knows whether the Society had not better have done it". Although less activehe blamed his advancing yearsShaw remained a Fabian.

In 1912 Shaw invested 1,000 for a one-fifth share in the Webbs' new publishing venture, a socialist weekly magazine called The New Statesman, which appeared in April 1913. He became a founding director, publicist, and in due course a contributor, mostly anonymously. He was soon at odds with the magazine's editor, Clifford Sharp, who by 1916 was rejecting his contributions"the only paper in the world that refuses to print anything by me", according to Shaw.

"I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as the dominant military power of the world."

Shaw: Common Sense About the War (1914).

After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw produced his tract Common Sense About the War, which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable. Such a view was anathema in an atmosphere of fervent patriotism, and offended many of Shaw's friends; Ervine records that "[h]is appearance at any public function caused the instant departure of many of those present."

Despite his errant reputation, Shaw's propagandist skills were recognised by the British authorities, and early in 1917 he was invited by Field Marshal Haig to visit the Western Front battlefields. Shaw's 10,000-word report, which emphasised the human aspects of the soldier's life, was well received, and he became less of a lone voice. In April 1917 he joined the national consensus in welcoming America's entry into the war: "a first class moral asset to the common cause against junkerism".

Three short plays by Shaw were premiered during the war. The Inca of Perusalem, written in 1915, encountered problems with the censor for burlesquing not only the enemy but the British military command; it was performed in 1916 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. O'Flaherty V.C., satirising the government's attitude to Irish recruits, was banned in the UK and was presented at a Royal Flying Corps base in Belgium in 1917. Augustus Does His Bit, a genial farce, was granted a licence; it opened at the Royal Court in January 1917.

Shaw had long supported the principle of Irish Home Rule within the British Empire (which he thought should become the British Commonwealth). In April 1916 he wrote scathingly in The New York Times about militant Irish nationalism: "In point of learning nothing and forgetting nothing these fellow-patriots of mine leave the Bourbons nowhere."[138] Total independence, he asserted, was impractical; alliance with a bigger power (preferably England) was essential.[138] The Dublin Easter Rising later that month took him by surprise. After its suppression by British forces, he expressed horror at the summary execution of the rebel leaders, but continued to believe in some form of Anglo-Irish union. In How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), he envisaged a federal arrangement, with national and imperial parliaments. Holroyd records that by this time the separatist party Sinn Fin was in the ascendency, and Shaw's and other moderate schemes were forgotten.

In the postwar period, Shaw despaired of the British government's coercive policies towards Ireland, and joined his fellow-writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in publicly condemning these actions. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 led to the partition of Ireland between north and south, a provision that dismayed Shaw. In 1922 civil war broke out in the south between its pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions, the former of whom had established the Irish Free State. Shaw visited Dublin in August, and met Michael Collins, then head of the Free State's Provisional Government. Shaw was much impressed by Collins, and was saddened when, three days later, the Irish leader was ambushed and killed by anti-treaty forces. In a letter to Collins's sister, Shaw wrote: "I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death". Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual British-Irish nationality in 1934.

Shaw's first major work to appear after the war was Heartbreak House, written in 191617 and performed in 1920. It was produced on Broadway in November, and was coolly received; according to The Times: "Mr Shaw on this occasion has more than usual to say and takes twice as long as usual to say it". After the London premiere in October 1921 The Times concurred with the American critics: "As usual with Mr Shaw, the play is about an hour too long", although containing "much entertainment and some profitable reflection". Ervine in The Observer thought the play brilliant but ponderously acted, except for Edith Evans as Lady Utterword.

Shaw's largest-scale theatrical work was Back to Methuselah, written in 191820 and staged in 1922. Weintraub describes it as "Shaw's attempt to fend off 'the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism'". This cycle of five interrelated plays depicts evolution, and the effects of longevity, from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920 AD.[150] Critics found the five plays strikingly uneven in quality and invention. The original run was brief, and the work has been revived infrequently. Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative powers in the huge span of this "Metabiological Pentateuch". He was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays.

This mood was short-lived. In 1920 Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by Pope Benedict XV; Shaw had long found Joan an interesting historical character, and his view of her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity". He had considered writing a play about her in 1913, and the canonisation prompted him to return to the subject. He wrote Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December. It was enthusiastically received there, and at its London premiere the following March. In Weintraub's phrase, "even the Nobel prize committee could no longer ignore Shaw after Saint Joan". The citation for the literature prize for 1925 praised his work as "...marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty". He accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs".[n 20]

After Saint Joan, it was five years before Shaw wrote a play. From 1924, he spent four years writing what he described as his "magnum opus", a political treatise entitled The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. The book was published in 1928 and sold well.[n 21] At the end of the decade Shaw produced his final Fabian tract, a commentary on the League of Nations. He described the League as "a school for the new international statesmanship as against the old Foreign Office diplomacy", but thought that it had not yet become the "Federation of the World".[164]

Shaw returned to the theatre with what he called "a political extravaganza", The Apple Cart, written in late 1928. It was, in Ervine's view, unexpectedly popular, taking a conservative, monarchist, anti-democratic line that appealed to contemporary audiences. The premiere was in Warsaw in June 1928, and the first British production was two months later, at Sir Barry Jackson's inaugural Malvern Festival. The other eminent creative artist most closely associated with the festival was Sir Edward Elgar, with whom Shaw enjoyed a deep friendship and mutual regard. He described The Apple Cart to Elgar as "a scandalous Aristophanic burlesque of democratic politics, with a brief but shocking sex interlude".

During the 1920s Shaw began to lose faith in the idea that society could be changed through Fabian gradualism, and became increasingly fascinated with dictatorial methods. In 1922 he had welcomed Mussolini's accession to power in Italy, observing that amid the "indiscipline and muddle and Parliamentary deadlock", Mussolini was "the right kind of tyrant". Shaw was prepared to tolerate certain dictatorial excesses; Weintraub in his ODNB biographical sketch comments that Shaw's "flirtation with authoritarian inter-war regimes" took a long time to fade, and Beatrice Webb thought he was "obsessed" about Mussolini.

"We the undersigned are recent visitors to the USSR... We desire to record that we saw nowhere evidence of economic slavery, privation, unemployment and cynical despair of betterment.... Everywhere we saw [a] hopeful and enthusiastic working-class... setting an example of industry and conduct which would greatly enrich us if our systems supplied our workers with any incentive to follow it."

Letter to The Manchester Guardian, 2 March 1933, signed by Shaw and 20 others.

Shaw's enthusiasm for the Soviet Union dated to the early 1920s when he had hailed Lenin as "the one really interesting statesman in Europe". Having turned down several chances to visit, in 1931 he joined a party led by Nancy Astor. The carefully managed trip culminated in a lengthy meeting with Stalin, whom Shaw later described as "a Georgian gentleman" with no malice in him.[172] At a dinner given in his honour, Shaw told the gathering: "I have seen all the 'terrors' and I was terribly pleased by them". In March 1933 Shaw was a co-signatory to a letter in The Manchester Guardian protesting at the continuing misrepresentation of Soviet achievements: "No lie is too fantastic, no slander is too stale... for employment by the more reckless elements of the British press."

Shaw's admiration for Mussolini and Stalin demonstrated his growing belief that dictatorship was the only viable political arrangement. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January 1933, Shaw described Hitler as "a very remarkable man, a very able man", and professed himself proud to be the only writer in England who was "scrupulously polite and just to Hitler".[n 22] His principal admiration was for Stalin, whose regime he championed uncritically throughout the decade. Shaw saw the 1939 MolotovRibbentrop Pact as a triumph for Stalin who, he said, now had Hitler under his thumb.

Shaw's first play of the decade was Too True to be Good, written in 1931 and premiered in Boston in February 1932. The reception was unenthusiastic. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times commenting that Shaw had "yielded to the impulse to write without having a subject", judged the play a "rambling and indifferently tedious conversation". The correspondent of The New York Herald Tribune said that most of the play was "discourse, unbelievably long lectures" and that although the audience enjoyed the play it was bewildered by it.

During the decade Shaw travelled widely and frequently. Most of his journeys were with Charlotte; she enjoyed voyages on ocean liners, and he found peace to write during the long spells at sea. Shaw met an enthusiastic welcome in South Africa in 1932, despite his strong remarks about the racial divisions of the country. In December 1932 the couple embarked on a round-the-world cruise. In March 1933 they arrived at San Francisco, to begin Shaw's first visit to the US. He had earlier refused to go to "that awful country, that uncivilized place", "unfit to govern itself... illiberal, superstitious, crude, violent, anarchic and arbitrary". He visited Hollywood, with which he was unimpressed, and New York, where he lectured to a capacity audience in the Metropolitan Opera House. Harried by the intrusive attentions of the press, Shaw was glad when his ship sailed from New York harbour. New Zealand, which he and Charlotte visited the following year, struck him as "the best country I've been in"; he urged its people to be more confident and loosen their dependence on trade with Britain.[184] He used the weeks at sea to complete two playsThe Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and The Six of Calaisand begin work on a third, The Millionairess.

Despite his contempt for Hollywood and its aesthetic values, Shaw was enthusiastic about cinema, and in the middle of the decade wrote screenplays for prospective film versions of Pygmalion and Saint Joan. The latter was never made, but Shaw entrusted the rights to the former to the unknown Gabriel Pascal, who produced it at Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw was determined that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film, but was powerless to prevent it from winning one Academy Award ("Oscar"); he described his award for "best-written screenplay" as an insult, coming from such a source.[n 23] He became the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. In a 1993 study of the Oscars, Anthony Holden observes that Pygmalion was soon spoken of as having "lifted movie-making from illiteracy to literacy".

Shaw's final plays of the 1930s were Cymbeline Refinished (1936), Geneva (1936) and In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939). The first, a fantasy reworking of Shakespeare, made little impression, but the second, a satire on European dictators, attracted more notice, much of it unfavourable.[193] In particular, Shaw's parody of Hitler as "Herr Battler" was considered mild, almost sympathetic. The third play, an historical conversation piece first seen at Malvern, ran briefly in London in May 1940. James Agate commented that the play contained nothing to which even the most conservative audiences could take exception, and though it was long and lacking in dramatic action only "witless and idle" theatregoers would object. After their first runs none of the three plays were seen again in the West End during Shaw's lifetime.[195]

Towards the end of the decade, both Shaws began to suffer ill health. Charlotte was increasingly incapacitated by Paget's disease of bone, and he developed pernicious anaemia. His treatment, involving injections of concentrated animal liver, was successful, but this breach of his vegetarian creed distressed him and brought down condemnation from militant vegetarians.[196]

Although Shaw's works since The Apple Cart had been received without great enthusiasm, his earlier plays were revived in the West End throughout the Second World War, starring such actors as Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat. In 1944 nine Shaw plays were staged in London, including Arms and the Man with Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton in the leading roles. Two touring companies took his plays all round Britain. The revival in his popularity did not tempt Shaw to write a new play, and he concentrated on prolific journalism. A second Shaw film produced by Pascal, Major Barbara (1941), was less successful both artistically and commercially than Pygmalion, partly because of Pascal's insistence on directing, to which he was unsuited.

"The rest of Shaw's life was quiet and solitary. The loss of his wife was more profoundly felt than he had ever imagined any loss could be: for he prided himself on a stoical fortitude in all loss and misfortune."

St John Ervine on Shaw, 1959

Following the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 and the rapid conquest of Poland, Shaw was accused of defeatism when, in a New Statesman article, he declared the war over and demanded a peace conference. Nevertheless, when he became convinced that a negotiated peace was impossible, he publicly urged the neutral United States to join the fight. The London blitz of 194041 led the Shaws, both in their mid-eighties, to live full-time at Ayot St Lawrence. Even there they were not immune from enemy air raids, and stayed on occasion with Nancy Astor at her country house, Cliveden. In 1943, the worst of the London bombing over, the Shaws moved back to Whitehall Court, where medical help for Charlotte was more easily arranged. Her condition deteriorated, and she died in September.

Shaw's final political treatise, Everybody's Political What's What, was published in 1944. Holroyd describes this as "a rambling narrative... that repeats ideas he had given better elsewhere and then repeats itself". The book sold well85,000 copies by the end of the year. After Hitler's suicide in May 1945, Shaw approved of the formal condolences offered by the Irish Taoiseach, amon de Valera, at the German embassy in Dublin. Shaw disapproved of the postwar trials of the defeated German leaders, as an act of self-righteousness: "We are all potential criminals".

Pascal was given a third opportunity to film Shaw's work with Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). It cost three times its original budget and was rated "the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema". The film was poorly received by British critics, although American reviews were friendlier. Shaw thought its lavishness nullified the drama, and he considered the film "a poor imitation of Cecil B. de Mille".

In 1946, the year of Shaw's ninetieth birthday, he accepted the freedom of Dublin and became the first honorary freeman of the borough of St Pancras, London. In the same year the government asked Shaw informally whether he would accept the Order of Merit. He declined, believing that an author's merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history.[n 24] 1946 saw the publication, as The Crime of Imprisonment, of the preface Shaw had written 20 years previously to a study of prison conditions. It was widely praised; a reviewer in the American Journal of Public Health considered it essential reading for any student of the American criminal justice system.

Shaw continued to write into his nineties. His last plays were Buoyant Billions (1947), his final full-length work; Farfetched Fables (1948) a set of six short plays revisiting several of his earlier themes such as evolution; a comic play for puppets, Shakes versus Shav (1949), a ten-minute piece in which Shakespeare and Shaw trade insults; and Why She Would Not (1950), which Shaw described as "a little comedy", written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday.

During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of ninety-four of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November 1950. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.

Shaw published a collected edition of his plays in 1934, comprising forty-two works. He wrote a further twelve in the remaining sixteen years of his life, mostly one-act pieces. Including eight earlier plays that he chose to omit from his published works, the total is sixty-two.[n 25]

Full-length plays

Adaptation

Short play

Shaw's first three full-length plays dealt with social issues. He later grouped them as "Plays Unpleasant". Widower's Houses (1892) concerns the landlords of slum properties, and introduces the first of Shaw's New Womena recurring feature of later plays. The Philanderer (1893) develops the theme of the New Woman, draws on Ibsen, and has elements of Shaw's personal relationships, the character of Julia being based on Jenny Patterson. In a 2003 study Judith Evans describes Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) as "undoubtedly the most challenging" of the three Plays Unpleasant, taking Mrs Warren's professionprostitute and, later, brothel-owneras a metaphor for a prostituted society.

Shaw followed the first trilogy with a second, published as "Plays Pleasant". Arms and the Man (1894) conceals beneath a mock-Ruritanian comic romance a Fabian parable contrasting impractical idealism with pragmatic socialism. The central theme of Candida (1894) is a woman's choice between two men; the play contrasts the outlook and aspirations of a Christian Socialist and a poetic idealist. The third of the Pleasant group, You Never Can Tell (1896), portrays social mobility, and the gap between generations, particularly in how they approach social relations in general and mating in particular.

The "Three Plays for Puritans"comprising The Devil's Disciple (1896), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) and Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1899)all centre on questions of empire and imperialism, a major topic of political discourse in the 1890s. The three are set, respectively, in 1770s America, Ancient Egypt, and 1890s Morocco.[223] The Gadfly, an adaptation of the popular novel by Ethel Voynich, was unfinished and unperformed. The Man of Destiny (1895) is a short curtain raiser about Napoleon.[225]

Full-length plays

Short plays

Shaw's major plays of the first decade of the twentieth century address individual social, political or ethical issues. Man and Superman (1902) stands apart from the others in both its subject and its treatment, giving Shaw's interpretation of creative evolution in a combination of drama and associated printed text. The Admirable Bashville (1901), a blank verse dramatisation of Shaw's novel Cashel Byron's Profession, focuses on the imperial relationship between Britain and Africa. John Bull's Other Island (1904), comically depicting the prevailing relationship between Britain and Ireland, was popular at the time but fell out of the general repertoire in later years. Major Barbara (1905) presents ethical questions in an unconventional way, confounding expectations that in the depiction of an armaments manufacturer on the one hand and the Salvation Army on the other the moral high ground must invariably be held by the latter. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a play about medical ethics and moral choices in allocating scarce treatment, was described by Shaw as a tragedy. With a reputation for presenting characters who did not resemble real flesh and blood, he was challenged by Archer to present an on-stage death, and here did so, with a deathbed scene for the anti-hero.

Getting Married (1908) and Misalliance (1909)the latter seen by Judith Evans as a companion piece to the formerare both in what Shaw called his "disquisitionary" vein, with the emphasis on discussion of ideas rather than on dramatic events or vivid characterisation.[234] Shaw wrote seven short plays during the decade; they are all comedies, ranging from the deliberately absurd Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction (1905) to the satirical Press Cuttings (1909).[235]

Fulllength plays

Short plays

In the decade from 1910 to the aftermath of the First World War Shaw wrote four full-length plays, the third and fourth of which are among his most frequently staged works.[236] Fanny's First Play (1911) continues his earlier examinations of middle-class British society from a Fabian viewpoint, with additional touches of melodrama and an epilogue in which theatre critics discuss the play. Androcles and the Lion (1912), which Shaw began writing as a play for children, became a study of the nature of religion and how to put Christian precepts into practice. Pygmalion (1912) is a Shavian study of language and speech and their importance in society and in personal relationships. To correct the impression left by the original performers that the play portrayed a romantic relationship between the two main characters Shaw rewrote the ending to make it clear that the heroine will marry another, minor character.[238][n 26] Shaw's only full-length play from the war years is Heartbreak House (1917), which in his words depicts "cultured, leisured Europe before the war" drifting towards disaster. Shaw named Shakespeare (King Lear) and Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) as important influences on the piece, and critics have found elements drawing on Congreve (The Way of the World) and Ibsen (The Master Builder).

The short plays range from genial historical drama in The Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Great Catherine (1910 and 1913) to a study of polygamy in Overruled; three satirical works about the war (The Inca of Perusalem, O'Flaherty V.C. and Augustus Does His Bit, 191516); a piece that Shaw called "utter nonsense" (The Music Cure, 1914) and a brief sketch about a "Bolshevik empress" (Annajanska, 1917).

Full length plays

Short plays

Saint Joan (1923) drew widespread praise both for Shaw and for Sybil Thorndike, for whom he wrote the title role and who created the part in Britain.[243] In the view of the commentator Nicholas Grene, Shaw's Joan, a "no-nonsense mystic, Protestant and nationalist before her time" is among the 20th century's classic leading female roles. The Apple Cart (1929) was Shaw's last popular success. He gave both that play and its successor, Too True to Be Good (1931), the subtitle "A political extravaganza", although the two works differ greatly in their themes; the first presents the politics of a nation (with a brief royal love-scene as an interlude) and the second, in Judith Evans's words, "is concerned with the social mores of the individual, and is nebulous." Shaw's plays of the 1930s were written in the shadow of worsening national and international political events. Once again, with On the Rocks (1933) and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934), a political comedy with a clear plot was followed by an introspective drama. The first play portrays a British prime minister considering, but finally rejecting, the establishment of a dictatorship; the second is concerned with polygamy and eugenics and ends with the Day of Judgement.

The Millionairess (1934) is a farcical depiction of the commercial and social affairs of a successful businesswoman. Geneva (1936) lampoons the feebleness of the League of Nations compared with the dictators of Europe. In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939), described by Weintraub as a warm, discursive high comedy, also depicts authoritarianism, but less satirically than Geneva. As in earlier decades, the shorter plays were generally comedies, some historical and others addressing various political and social preoccupations of the author. Ervine writes of Shaw's later work that although it was still "astonishingly vigorous and vivacious" it showed unmistakable signs of his age. "The best of his work in this period, however, was full of wisdom and the beauty of mind often displayed by old men who keep their wits about them."

Shaw's collected musical criticism, published in three volumes, runs to more than 2,700 pages.[247] It covers the British musical scene from 1876 to 1950, but the core of the collection dates from his six years as music critic of The Star and The World in the late 1880s and early 1890s. In his view music criticism should be interesting to everyone rather than just the musical lite, and he wrote for the non-specialist, avoiding technical jargon"Mesopotamian words like 'the dominant of D major'".[n 27] He was fiercely partisan in his columns, promoting the music of Wagner and decrying that of Brahms and those British composers such as Stanford and Parry whom he saw as Brahmsian.[66][249] He campaigned against the prevailing fashion for performances of Handel oratorios with huge amateur choirs and inflated orchestration, calling for "a chorus of twenty capable artists".[250] He railed against opera productions unrealistically staged or sung in languages the audience did not speak.[251]

In Shaw's view, the London theatres of the 1890s presented too many revivals of old plays and not enough new work. He campaigned against "melodrama, sentimentality, stereotypes and worn-out conventions". As a music critic he had frequently been able to concentrate on analysing new works, but in the theatre he was often obliged to fall back on discussing how various performers tackled well-known plays. In a study of Shaw's work as a theatre critic, E. J. West writes that Shaw "ceaselessly compared and contrasted artists in interpretation and in technique". Shaw contributed more than 150 articles as theatre critic for The Saturday Review, in which he assessed more than 212 productions. He championed Ibsen's plays when many theatregoers regarded them as outrageous, and his 1891 book Quintessence of Ibsenism remained a classic throughout the twentieth century. Of contemporary dramatists writing for the West End stage he rated Oscar Wilde above the rest: "...our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre". Shaw's collected criticisms were published as Our Theatres in the Nineties in 1932.

Shaw maintained a provocative and frequently self-contradictory attitude to Shakespeare (whose name he insisted on spelling "Shakespear"). Many found him difficult to take seriously on the subject; Duff Cooper observed that by attacking Shakespeare, "it is Shaw who appears a ridiculous pigmy shaking his fist at a mountain." Shaw was, nevertheless, a knowledgeable Shakespearian, and in an article in which he wrote, "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his," he also said, "But I am bound to add that I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespear. He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more". Shaw had two regular targets for his more extreme comments about Shakespeare: undiscriminating "Bardolaters", and actors and directors who presented insensitively cut texts in over-elaborate productions.[259][n 28] He was continually drawn back to Shakespeare, and wrote three plays with Shakespearean themes: The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Cymbeline Refinished and Shakes versus Shav. In a 2001 analysis of Shaw's Shakespearian criticisms, Robert Pierce concludes that Shaw, who was no academic, saw Shakespeare's playslike all theatrefrom an author's practical point of view: "Shaw helps us to get away from the Romantics' picture of Shakespeare as a titanic genius, one whose art cannot be analyzed or connected with the mundane considerations of theatrical conditions and profit and loss, or with a specific staging and cast of actors."

Shaw's political and social commentaries were published variously in Fabian tracts, in essays, in two full-length books, in innumerable newspaper and journal articles and in prefaces to his plays. The majority of Shaw's Fabian tracts were published anonymously, representing the voice of the society rather than of Shaw, although the society's secretary Edward Pease later confirmed Shaw's authorship. According to Holroyd, the business of the early Fabians, mainly under the influence of Shaw, was to "alter history by rewriting it". Shaw's talent as a pamphleteer was put to immediate use in the production of the society's manifestoafter which, says Holroyd, he was never again so succinct.

After the turn of the twentieth century, Shaw increasingly propagated his ideas through the medium of his plays. An early critic, writing in 1904, observed that Shaw's dramas provided "a pleasant means" of proselytising his socialism, adding that "Mr Shaw's views are to be sought especially in the prefaces to his plays". After loosening his ties with the Fabian movement in 1911, Shaw's writings were more personal and often provocative; his response to the furore following the issue of Common Sense About the War in 1914, was to prepare a sequel, More Common Sense About the War. In this, he denounced the pacifist line espoused by Ramsay MacDonald and other socialist leaders, and proclaimed his readiness to shoot all pacifists rather than cede them power and influence. On the advice of Beatrice Webb, this pamphlet remained unpublished.

The Intelligent Woman's Guide, Shaw's main political treatise of the 1920s, attracted both admiration and criticism. MacDonald considered it the world's most important book since the Bible; Harold Laski thought its arguments outdated and lacking in concern for individual freedoms.[n 29] Shaw's increasing flirtation with dictatorial methods is evident in many of his subsequent pronouncements. A New York Times report dated 10 December 1933 quoted a recent Fabian Society lecture in which Shaw had praised Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin: "[T]hey are trying to get something done, [and] are adopting methods by which it is possible to get something done". As late as the Second World War, in Everybody's Political What's What, Shaw blamed the Allies' "abuse" of their 1918 victory for the rise of Hitler, and hoped that, after defeat, the Fhrer would escape retribution "to enjoy a comfortable retirement in Ireland or some other neutral country".[271] These sentiments, according to the Irish philosopher-poet Thomas Duddy, "rendered much of the Shavian outlook pass and contemptible".

"Creative evolution", Shaw's version of the new science of eugenics, became an increasing theme in his political writing after 1900. He introduced his theories in The Revolutionist's Handbook (1903), an appendix to Man and Superman, and developed them further during the 1920s in Back to Methuselah. A 1946 Life magazine article observed that Shaw had "always tended to look at people more as a biologist than as an artist". By 1933, in the preface to On the Rocks, he was writing that "if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it"; critical opinion is divided on whether this was intended as irony.[n 30] In an article in the American magazine Liberty in September 1938, Shaw included the statement: "There are many people in the world who ought to be liquidated". Many commentators assumed that such comments were intended as a joke, although in the worst possible taste. Otherwise, Life magazine concluded, "this silliness can be classed with his more innocent bad guesses".[n 31]

Shaw's fiction-writing was largely confined to the five unsuccessful novels written in the period 18791885. Immaturity (1879) is a semi-autobiographical portrayal of mid-Victorian England, Shaw's "own David Copperfield" according to Weintraub. The Irrational Knot (1880) is a critique of conventional marriage, in which Weintraub finds the characterisations lifeless, "hardly more than animated theories". Shaw was pleased with his third novel, Love Among the Artists (1881), feeling that it marked a turning point in his development as a thinker, although he had no more success with it than with its predecessors. Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) is, says Weintraub, an indictment of society which anticipates Shaw's first full-length play, Mrs Warren's Profession. Shaw later explained that he had intended An Unsocial Socialist as the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism. Gareth Griffith, in a study of Shaw's political thought, sees the novel as an interesting record of conditions, both in society at large and in the nascent socialist movement of the 1880s.

Shaw's only subsequent fiction of any substance was his 1932 novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, written during a visit to South Africa in 1932. The eponymous girl, intelligent, inquisitive, and converted to Christianity by insubstantial missionary teaching, sets out to find God, on a journey that after many adventures and encounters, leads her to a secular conclusion. The story, on publication, offended some Christians and was banned in Ireland by the Board of Censors.

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The 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack was the food poisoning of 751individuals in The Dalles, Oregon, through the deliberate contamination of salad bars at ten local restaurants with Salmonella. A leading group of followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known as Osho) had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections.[2] The incident was the first and single largest bioterrorist attack in United States history.[3][4] The attack is one of only two confirmed terrorist uses of biological weapons to harm humans since 1945, the other being the 2001 anthrax attacks across the USA.[5]

Having previously gained political control of Antelope, Oregon, Rajneesh's followers, who were based in nearby Rajneeshpuram, sought election to two of the three seats on the Wasco County Circuit Court that were up for election in November 1984. Fearing they would not gain enough votes, some Rajneeshpuram officials decided to incapacitate voters in The Dalles, the largest population center in Wasco County. The chosen biological agent was Salmonella enterica Typhimurium, which was first delivered through glasses of water to two County Commissioners and then, on a larger scale, at salad bars and in salad dressing.

As a result of the attack, 751 people contracted salmonellosis, 45of whom were hospitalized, but none died. Although an initial investigation by the Oregon Public Health Division and the Centers for Disease Control did not rule out deliberate contamination, the agents and contamination were only confirmed a year later. On February 28, 1985, Congressman James H. Weaver gave a speech in the United States House of Representatives in which he "accused the Rajneeshees of sprinkling Salmonella culture on salad bar ingredients in eight restaurants".[6]

At a press conference in September 1985, Rajneesh accused several of his followers of participation in this and other crimes, including an aborted plan in 1985 to assassinate a United States Attorney, and he asked State and Federal authorities to investigate.[7] Oregon Attorney General David B. Frohnmayer set up an Interagency Task Force, composed of Oregon State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and executed search warrants in Rajneeshpuram. A sample of bacteria matching the contaminant that had sickened the town residents was found in a Rajneeshpuram medical laboratory. Two leading Rajneeshpuram officials were convicted on charges of attempted murder and served 29months of 20-year sentences in a minimum-security federal prison.

Contents

Several thousand of Rajneesh's followers had moved onto the "Big Muddy Ranch" in rural Wasco County in 1981, where they later incorporated as a city called Rajneeshpuram.[8][9] They had taken political control of the small nearby town of Antelope, Oregon (population 75), the name of which they changed to "Rajneesh".[10] The group had started on friendly terms with the local population, but relations soon degraded because of land use conflicts and the commune's dramatic expansion.[10]

After being denied building permits for Rajneeshpuram, the commune leadership sought to gain political control over the rest of the county by influencing the November 1984 county election.[9] Their goal was to win two of three seats on the Wasco County Circuit Court, as well as the sheriff's office.[2] Their attempts to influence the election included the "Share-a-Home" program, in which they transported thousands of homeless people to Rajneeshpuram and attempted to register them to vote to inflate the constituency of voters for the group's candidates.[11][12] The Wasco county clerk countered this attempt by enforcing a regulation that required all new voters to submit their qualifications when registering to vote.[13]

The commune leadership planned to sicken and incapacitate voters in The Dalles, where most of the voters resided, to sway the election.[14] Approximately twelve people were involved in the plots to employ biological agents, and at least eleven were involved planning them. No more than four appear to have been involved in development at the Rajneeshpuram medical laboratory; not all of those were necessarily aware of the objectives of their work. At least eight individuals helped spread the bacteria.[11]

The main planners of the attack included Sheela Silverman (Ma Anand Sheela), Rajneesh's chief lieutenant, and Diane Yvonne Onang (Ma Anand Puja), a nurse practitioner and secretary-treasurer of the Rajneesh Medical Corporation.[11][15] They purchased Salmonella bacteria from a medical supply company in Seattle, Washington, and staff cultured it in labs within the commune.[11] They contaminated the produce at the salad bars as a "trial run".[12][16] The group also tried to introduce pathogens into The Dalles' water system.[11] If successful, they planned to use the same techniques closer to Election Day. They did not carry out the second part of the plan. The commune decided to boycott the election when it became clear that those brought in through the "Share-a-Home" program would not be allowed to vote.[12]

Two visiting Wasco County commissioners were infected via glasses of water containing Salmonella bacteria during a visit to Rajneeshpuram on August 29, 1984. Both men fell ill and one was hospitalized. Afterward, members of Sheela's team spread Salmonella on produce in grocery stores and on doorknobs and urinal handles in the county courthouse, but these actions did not produce the desired effects.[5] In September and October 1984, they contaminated the salad bars of 10 local restaurants with Salmonella, infecting 751people.[17] Forty-five people received hospital treatment; all survived.[18]

The primary delivery tactic involved one member concealing a plastic bag containing a light-brown liquid with the Salmonella bacteria (referred to by the perpetrators as "salsa"[15]), and either spreading it over the food at a salad bar, or pouring it into salad dressing.[19] By September 24, 1984, more than 150people were violently ill. By the end of September, 751cases of acute gastroenteritis were documented; lab testing determined that all of the victims were infected with Salmonella enterica Typhimurium.[20] Symptoms included diarrhea, fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, headaches, abdominal pain, and bloody stools.[17] Victims ranged in age from an infant, born two days after his mother's infection and initially given a five percent chance of survival,[12] to an 87-year-old.[8]

Local residents suspected that Rajneesh's followers were behind the poisonings. They turned out in droves on election day to prevent the cult from winning any county positions, thus rendering the plot unsuccessful.[2] The Rajneeshees eventually withdrew their candidate from the November 1984 ballot.[19] Only 239 of the commune's 7,000residents voted; most were not US citizens and could not vote.[21] The outbreak cost local restaurants hundreds of thousands of dollars and health officials shut down the salad bars of the affected establishments.[2] Some residents feared further attacks and stayed at home.[22] One resident said: "People were so horrified and scared. People wouldn't go out, they wouldn't go out alone. People were becoming prisoners."[8]

Officials and investigators from a number of different state and federal agencies investigated the outbreak.[14] Dr. Michael Skeels, Director of the Oregon State Public Health Laboratory at the time, said that the incident provoked such a large public health investigation because "it was the largest food-related outbreak in the U.S. in 1984".[20] The investigation identified the bacteria as Salmonella enterica Typhimurium and initially concluded that the outbreak had been due to food handlers' poor personal hygiene. Workers preparing food at the affected restaurants had fallen ill before most patrons had.[15][23][24]

Oregon Democratic Congressman James H. Weaver continued to investigate because he believed that the officials' conclusion did not adequately explain the facts.[12] He contacted physicians at the CDC and other agencies and urged them to investigate Rajneeshpuram.[6][12] According to Lewis F. Carter's book Charisma and Control in Rajneeshpuram, "many treated his concern" as paranoid or as an example of "Rajneeshee bashing".[12] On February 28, 1985, Weaver gave a speech at the United States House of Representatives in which he accused the Rajneeshees of contaminating salad bar ingredients in eight restaurants.[6][25] As events later showed, Weaver had presented a well-reasoned, if only circumstantial, case; these circumstantial elements were confirmed by evidence found after investigators gained access to Rajneeshpuram several months later.[12]

Months later, starting on September 16, 1985, Rajneesh, who had recently emerged from a four-year period of public silence and self-imposed isolation (although he had continued to meet with his assistant) at the commune,[15][26] convened press conferences: he stated that Sheela and 19 other commune leaders, including Puja, had left Rajneeshpuram over the weekend and gone to Europe.[7][26] He said that he had received information from commune residents that Sheela and her team had committed a number of serious crimes.[9][26] Calling them a "gang of fascists", he said they had tried to poison his doctor and Rajneesh's female companion, as well as the Jefferson County district attorney and the water system in The Dalles. He said that he believed they had poisoned a county commissioner and Judge William Hulse, and that they may have been responsible for the salmonellosis outbreak in The Dalles.[9] He invited state and federal law enforcement officials to the Ranch to investigate.[15] His allegations were initially greeted with skepticism by outside observers.[26]

Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer established a task force among the Wasco County Sheriff's office, the Oregon State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the National Guard that set up headquarters on the Ranch to investigate the allegations. They obtained search warrants and subpoenas; 50 investigators entered the Ranch on October 2, 1985. Dr. Skeels found glass vials containing Salmonella "bactrol disks" in the laboratory of a Rajneeshpuram medical clinic. Analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Atlanta confirmed that the bacteria at the Rajneesh laboratory were an exact match to those that sickened individuals who had eaten at local restaurants.[15]

The investigation also revealed prior experimentation at Rajneeshpuram with poisons, chemicals and bacteria, in 1984 and 1985.[15] Dr. Skeels described the scene at the Rajneesh laboratory as "a bacteriological freezer-dryer for large-scale production" of microbes.[20] Investigators found a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, and literature on the manufacture and usage of explosives and military bio-warfare.[20] Investigators believed that the commune had previously carried out similar attacks in Salem, Portland, and other cities in Oregon.[15] According to court testimony, the plotters boasted that they had attacked a nursing home and a salad bar at the Mid-Columbia Medical Center, but no such attempts were ever proven in court.[15] As a result of the bioterrorism investigation, law enforcement officials discovered that there had been an aborted plot by Rajneeshees to murder Charles Turner, a former United States Attorney for Oregon.[27]

The mayor of Rajneeshpuram, David Berry Knapp (known as Swami Krishna Deva or KD), turned state's evidence and gave an account of his knowledge of the Salmonella attack to the FBI. He claimed that Sheela said "she had talked with [Rajneesh] about the plot to decrease voter turnout in The Dalles by making people sick. Sheela said that [Rajneesh] commented that it was best not to hurt people, but if a few died not to worry."[11] In Miller's Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, this statement is attributed to Sheela.[15] According to KD's testimony, she played doubters a tape of Rajneesh's muffled voice saying, "if it was necessary to do things to preserve [his] vision, then do it," and interpreted this to mean that murder in his name was fine, telling doubters "not to worry" if a few people had to die.[15] The investigation uncovered a September 25, 1984, invoice from the American Type Culture Collection of microbes, showing an order received by the Rajneeshpuram laboratory for Salmonella typhi, the bacterium that causes the life-threatening illness typhoid fever.[15][28]

According to a 1994 study published in the journal Sociology of Religion, "[m]ost sannyasins indicated that they believed that [Rajneesh] knew about Ma Anand Sheela's illegal activities."[29] Frances FitzGerald writes in Cities on a Hill that most of Rajneesh's followers "believed [him] incapable of doing, or willing, violence against another person", and that almost all thought the responsibility for the criminality was Sheela's according to FitzGerald, the followers believed the guru had not known anything about it.[9] Carus writes in Toxic Terror that, "There is no way to know to what extent [Rajneesh] participated in actual decision-making. His followers believed he was involved in every important decision that Sheela made, but those allegations were never proven."[30] Rajneesh insisted that Sheela, who he said was his only source of information during his period of isolation, used her position to impose "a fascist state" on the commune.[26] He acknowledged that the key to her actions was his silence.[26]

Rajneesh left Oregon by plane on October 27, 1985, and was arrested when he landed in Charlotte, North Carolina, and charged with 35 counts of deliberate violations of immigration laws.[31][32][33] As part of a plea bargain arrangement, he pleaded guilty to two counts of making false statements to immigration officials.[12][19][32] He received a ten-year suspended sentence and a fine of US$400,000, and was deported and barred from reentering the United States for a period of five years.[12][33][34] He was never prosecuted for crimes related to the Salmonella attack.[12][19]

Sheela and Puja were arrested in West Germany on October 28, 1985.[12] After protracted negotiations between the two governments, they were extradited to the United States, reaching Portland on February 6, 1986.[12] They were charged with attempting to murder Rajneesh's personal physician, first-degree assault for poisoning Judge William Hulse, second-degree assault for poisoning The Dalles Commissioner Raymond Matthews, and product tampering for the poisonings in The Dalles, as well as wiretapping and immigration offenses.[5][12] The U.S. Attorney's office handled the prosecution of the poisoning cases related to the 10 restaurants, and the Oregon Attorney General's office prosecuted the poisoning cases of Commissioner Matthews and Judge Hulse.[32]

On July 22, 1986, both women entered Alford pleas for the Salmonella attack and the other charges, and received sentences ranging from three to twenty years, to be served concurrently. Sheela received 20 years for the attempted murder of Rajneesh's physician, twenty years for first-degree assault in the poisoning of Judge Hulse, ten years for second-degree assault in the poisoning of Commissioner Matthews, four and a half years for her role in the attack, four and a half years for the wiretapping conspiracy, and five years' probation for immigration fraud; Puja received fifteen, fifteen, seven and a half, and four and a half years, respectively, for her role in the first four of these crimes, as well as three years' probation for the wiretapping conspiracy.[5][12][32] Both Sheela and Puja were released on parole early for good behavior, after serving twenty-nine months of their sentences in a minimum-security federal prison.[5][12][35][36] Sheela's Green Card was revoked; she moved to Switzerland. She remarried there and went on to run two nursing homes in Switzerland.[37]

The Rajneeshees committed the most significant crimes of their kind in the history of the United States ... The largest single incident of fraudulent marriages, the most massive scheme of wiretapping and bugging, and the largest mass poisoning.

Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer

The Oregonian ran a 20-part series on Rajneesh's movement, beginning in June 1985, which included an investigation into the Salmonella incident. As a result of a follow-up investigation, The Oregonian learned that Leslie L. Zaitz, one of their investigative journalists, had been placed as number three on a top-ten hit list by Sheela's group.[14] Then-Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer commented on the poisoning incident and other acts perpetrated by the group, stating: "The Rajneeshees committed the most significant crimes of their kind in the history of the United States ... The largest single incident of fraudulent marriages, the most massive scheme of wiretapping and bugging, and the largest mass poisoning."[8][38] Looking back on the incident, Skeels stated, "We lost our innocence over this ... We really learned to be more suspicious ... The first significant biological attack on a U.S. community was not carried out by foreign terrorists smuggled into New York, but by legal residents of a U.S. community. The next time it happens it could be with more lethal agents ... We in public health are really not ready to deal with that."[20]

Milton Leitenberg noted in the 2005 work Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat, "there is apparently no other 'terrorist' group that is known to have successfully cultured any pathogen."[39] Federal and state investigators requested that details of the incident not be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for 12 years, for they feared a description of the events could spark copycat crimes, and JAMA complied.[20] No repeat attacks or hoaxes subsequently occurred, and a detailed account of the incident and investigation was published in JAMA in 1997.[13][40][41] A 1999 empirical analysis in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases published by the CDC described six motivational factors associated with bioterrorism, including: charismatic leadership, no outside constituency, apocalyptic ideology, loner or splinter group, sense of paranoia and grandiosity, and defensive aggression.[42] According to the article, the "Rajneesh Cult" satisfied all motivational factors except for an "apocalyptic ideology".[42] An analysis in the book Cults, Religion and Violence disputes the link to charismatic leadership, pointing out that in this and other cases, it was organizational lieutenants who played a pivotal role in the initiation of violence. Arguing for a contextual rather than decisive view of charisma, the authors state that the attribution of outcomes to the personality of a single individual, even a charismatic leader, usually camouflages a far more complex field of social relationships.[43]

The media revisited the incident during the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States.[44][45][46][47] The 2001 publication of Judith Miller's Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, which contained an analysis and detailed description of the events, also brought discussion of the incident back into the news.[48][49][50] Residents of The Dalles commented that they have an understanding of how bioterrorism can occur in the United States.[2] The incident had spread fear in the community, and drained the local economy.[2] All but one of the restaurants affected went out of business.[51] In 2005, the Oregon State Land Board agreed to sell 480 acres (1.9km2) of Wasco County, including Rajneeshpuram, to the Colorado-based youth ministry Young Life.[52][53] On February 18, 2005, Court TV aired an episode of Forensic Files about the incident, entitled: "'Bio-Attack' Oregon Cult Poisonings".[54] The salmonellosis outbreak was also discussed in the media within the context of the 2006 North American E. coli outbreak.[55][56][57]

The book Emerging Infectious Diseases: Trends and Issues cites the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack, along with the Aum Shinrikyo group's attempts to use anthrax and other agents, as exceptions to the belief "that only foreign-state supported groups have the resources to execute a credible bioterrorism event".[58] According to Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945, these are the only two confirmed uses of biological weapons for terrorist purposes to harm humans.[5] The incident was the single largest bioterrorist attack in United States history.[3][59][60] In the chapter titled: "Influencing An Election: America's First Modern Bioterrorist Attack" in his 2006 book Terrorism on American Soil: A Concise History of Plots and Perpetrators from the Famous to the Forgotten, author Joseph T. McCann concludes: "In every respect, the Salmonella attack carried out by the cult members was a major bioterrorist attack that fortunately failed to achieve its ultimate goal and resulted in no fatalities."[19]

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1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack - Wikipedia

In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching is a 1949 book by Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky which recounts his meeting and subsequent association with George Gurdjieff. It is widely regarded as the most comprehensive account of Gurdjieff's system of thought ever published.[citation needed] It is regarded as "fundamental textbook" by many modern followers of Gurdjieff's teachings, who often use it as a means of introducing new students to Gurdjieff's system of self-development.[citation needed]

The book is basically the author's recollection of his first meeting and subsequent association with George Gurdjieff and the teaching that Gurdjieff imparted to him; a teaching which still exists today in various forms and which Ouspensky would himself teach to various groups from 19211947. Throughout the book, Ouspensky never refers to Gurdjieff directly, only using the single initial "G.", but it is common knowledge that this "G." was Gurdjieff, who taught Ouspensky an ancient esoteric system of self-development commonly known as the Fourth Way.

The book begins with Ouspensky returning home to St. Petersburg from his recent excursion to the East, where he journeyed "in search of the miraculous", as he put it. He soon meets a mysterious man, a certain "G.", who has all the answers for which Ouspensky has been arduously searching all his life. He immediately joins Gurdjieff's esoteric school, and begins learning a certain system of self-development which originated in the East, allegedly during the most remote antiquity, possibly millennia before recorded history.

Ouspensky recounts his trials learning this new system, which he later refers to as the Fourth Way, often recollecting entire lectures, or parts of lectures, which Gurdjieff gave to his disciples in St. Petersburg and Moscow from 19151917. He describes many of his experiences, particularly concerning the "art of self-remembering", and he recounts some of the methods and various exercises which comprised Gurdjieff's system.

The book concludes with his experiences during the Bolshevik Revolution and his and Gurdjieff's eventual escape to the West, where they continued to teach Gurdjieff's system to many followers until their respective deaths in 1947 and 1949. The latter part of the book also describes the author's feelings and motives behind his eventual decision to teach the system independently, not under the direct supervision of his teacher, Gurdjieff, which he formally announced to his students in London in early 1924.

The book was published posthumously in 1949 by Ouspensky's students, two years after his death. Ouspensky originally titled the book simply Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, reflecting his view that Gurdjieff's system had to be "assembled" by the student himself, as well as his view that much of the original system was probably lost. It was also an oblique reference to a book by the well-known Theosophist and friend of Ouspensky, G.R.S. Mead called Fragments of a Faith Forgotten. Mead's book was a collection of fragments of an almost forgotten religion: Hermetism. Ouspensky recognized this as one of Gurdjieff's sources and used the title as an oblique reference. However, the publisher insisted on adding the prefix In Search of The Miraculous, which became the more commonly known shortened name for the book.

Originally published at the time of Gurdjieff's death and authorized by Gurdjieff himself, it is considered one of the best expositions of the structure of Gurdjieff's ideas and is often used as a means of teaching Gurdjieff's system, although Ouspensky himself never endorsed its use in such a broad manner. Nevertheless, this book is by far the most quoted by current disciples of Gurdjieff as they attempt to teach his system to new students, and Gurdjieff himself even had some of his students read parts of the book as part of their studies.

The 2001 edition has a foreword by writer Marianne Williamson, in which she notes the book's reputation as being a classic, or even a primer, in the teaching of esoteric principles and ideas. The 2004 facsimile edition of the first edition is identical in every way apart from a few modifications.

"In Search of the Miraculoous - ISBN-13: 978-1874250760 August 2010 - identical copy of first hardback edition. Paul H. Crompton Ltd.

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Bill Murray was bitten by the groundhog twice during shooting. Murray had to have anti rabies injections, because the bites were so severe. According to Director Harold Ramis, most of the time, when he tried to explain a scene to Bill Murray, Murray would interrupt and ask, "Just tell me - good Phil or bad Phil?" Bill Murray was offered a spit bucket for the diner scene where he gorges himself on pastries, but he refused. The angel food cake, in particular, caused him to feel sick soon afterward. On the DVD, Harold Ramis states that the original idea was for him to live February 2nd for about ten thousand years. Later, he says that Phil probably lived the same day for about ten years. A breakdown of this day count and Ramis' thoughts can be found here: youtu.be/swJ-kNdtrdQ Harold Ramis directed the kids in the snowball fights to hit Bill Murray as hard as they could. Murray responded by throwing snowballs back as hard as he could. Harold Ramis originally wanted Tom Hanks for the lead role, but decided against it, saying that Hanks was "too nice".

All the clocks in the diner are stopped, mirroring Phil's predicament.

The scene where Phil picks up the alarm clock and slams it onto the floor didn't go as planned. Bill slammed down the clock, but it barely broke, so the crew bashed it with a hammer to give it the really smashed look. The clock actually continued playing the song like in the movie.

There are exactly 38 days depicted in this film, either partially, or in full.

When Phil takes the elderly man to the hospital, and talks to the nurse, a boy with a broken leg can be seen in the background. This is the same boy who falls out of a tree later on in the film, only this time, Phil catches him.

Chosen to be preserved by the National Film Registry in 2007.

Since the film's release, the town of Punxsutawney has now become a major tourist attraction.

A family of groundhogs was raised for the production.

The groundhog ceremony is depicted as occurring in the center of town. Gobbler's Knob, where the ceremony takes place in real-life, is a rural, wooded area, about two miles outside of Punxsutawney.

Unlike the scenes for the bed and breakfast, the scenes at the piano teacher's house were filmed inside the actual house, in the front room as it appears in the film.

The Swedish title of this movie translates as "Monday the entire week". The movie, however, does not specify what day of the week it is supposed to be, and Groundhog Day in 1993 was actually on a Tuesday.

In the 1880s, some friends in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania went into the woods on Candlemas Day to look for groundhogs. This outing became a tradition, and a local newspaper editor nicknamed the seekers "the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club." Starting in 1887, the search became an official event centered on a groundhog called Punxsutawney Phil. A ceremony still takes place every year.

Ranked #8 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Fantasy" in June 2008.

Premiere voted this movie as one of "The 50 Greatest Comedies Of All Time" in 2006.

In one scene, Connors throws himself from the bell tower of a high building. This building is actually an opera house in Woodstock, Illinois. Local legend has it that a ghost of a young girl haunts the building since a girl once fell off of the balcony section inside the opera house and died.

The "clocks" restaurant in Woodstock, Illinois, is now a Starbucks.

The store "Lloyd's", always seen in the background in the scenes where Phil encounters Ned Ryerson, tried to sue the production for several thousand dollars for lost business. They were unsuccessful.

The German title of the movie is "Und tglich grt das Murmeltier", which can be translated as "The groundhog greets every day". The title has been adapted in Germany as a humorous proverb, which is often used when something is frequently repeated, especially annoying or awkward things.

The house that was used for the piano teacher's house, is less than a block away from the house used for the bed and breakfast. Though not visible in the film, it is actually located on the street that Phil sees directly proceeding from his room window, just a few houses down on the left-hand side.

The ice sculptures featured in the movie (called Winged Victory) were carved by Randy Rupert, a.k.a. The Chainsaw Wizard. Randy is actually a Punxsutawney resident, and has a shop downtown. He can be found in the city park every Groundhog Day carving and selling his wooden sculptures.

The interior scenes of the Cherry Street bed and breakfast were not filmed inside the actual house. The only times the crew entered the house at all, were to turn on lamps for the proper lighting effects needed for the exterior shots.

Among Phil's books in the coffee shop are "Treasury of the Theatre: From Agamemnon to A Month in the Country" by John Gassner (Simon & Schuster, 1964), and "Johann Strauss: Father and Son, a Century of Light Music" by H.E. Jacob (Greystone Press, 1939). The classical piano piece that draws his attention in the same scene is Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major, K. 545.

Came in at number 4 in the BBC Culture 100 best comedies of all time.

The second time Phil counts down to go on the air (after the groundhog sees his shadow), when he gets to "1" he holds up his middle finger, rather than his pointer.

Included among the American Film Institute's 2000 list of the Top 100 Funniest American Movies.

During a diner scene, a bumper sticker for "The Spirit" can be seen over Phil's shoulder. This is the name of the newspaper in Punxsutawney.

The end credits read "Filmed in Panavision", which is the requirement for films using anamorphic lenses, rather than "Filmed with Panavision Cameras and Lenses", for films that use spherical lenses.

The red Cadillac in the "no tomorrow" driving scene is a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado convertible with a non-stock grille. It is a front-wheel drive car, as can clearly be seen in the burnout at the start of the train track sequence. The Eldorado was equipped with rear-wheel drive from 1953 to 1966, then front-wheel drive from 1967 through the end of production in 2003.

Debbie and Fred's last names are given briefly as "Kleiser".

The Tip Top Cafe, where many indoor scenes took place, was a set created for the film, but it became an actual restaurant, the Tip Top Bistro, following the movie's success. Later, it became a coffee and Italian ice cream shop, and after that a fried chicken outlet.

In the German restaurant scene, when the waitress behind Phil is walking away from a customer she just served, she touches the customer on the shoulder and leaves some beer suds there. The second time there, she does the same thing, but no suds are visible.

Before the "Ned's corner" scene you can see a sign for Woodstock Jewelers, giving away the name of the town substituting for Punxsutawney.

Groundhog Day is February 2, which written in numeric form is a repeated number (2/2), while the number 2 is also used to refer to doing something again (e.g. "Take 2").

At the end of the alley scene in which Phil has given up trying to save the old homeless man, he looks upward and is clearly about to say something. The line was apparently cut for reasons unknown.

The trivia items below may give away important plot points.

In the final shot, Phil carries Rita over the gate and then climbs over it. This is because the gate was actually frozen shut.

Rita slaps Phil ten times during the course of the film.

The end party scene where everyone thanks Phil, was originally supposed to take place at Fred and Debbie's wedding, but it was changed for time constraints.

The old man is the only one to die and stay dead. Phil, the groundhog, and the old man are the only ones in the loop known to have died. The fate of the cops chasing Phil on the railroad tracks is not shown, but since there was no crash as the train went by, it's likely they got off in time.

In the narrative behind why Phil changes, and why he helps the people in Punxsutawney. Phil begins to understand why he is stuck in the twenty-four hour loop of February the Second, and he realizes that he must change and become a better person, and he uses his knowledge of the day's events to better himself, and the lives of the townspeople.

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Groundhog Day (1993) - Trivia - IMDb

This residential experiential learning event will present both the contextual underpinning of the Wisdom practice movement as well as a thorough presentation and practice of specific leadership skills for leading Wisdom practice groups. While we will begin with a suggestion of what human Wisdom development might be in this current age and how the Wisdom movement directly addresses this present human challenge, this training will then move directly into the practical demands and realities of contemplative practice and Wisdom group leadership. Not only will we catalogue some of the current expressions of Wisdom groups (e.g., chanting groups, Gospel Thomas groups, book study groups, and, of course, Wisdom Schools), but we will also present, demonstrate, and practice some of the specific group leadership skills that will be demanded in each of these groups. Besides setting forth a unique perspective of the Wisdom post-holder as group leader and delving into some of energetic realities subtly present in this work, this training will also suggest a marriage between energetic group leadership and more traditional group dynamics theory.

Because there is sequential unfolding to this training and to the acquisition of deeper understandings and skills, participants will be expected to attend the whole workshop. A follow-up component in which participants can receive support and supervision will also be made available.

This training will be led by Bill Redfield, Lois Barton, and Deborah Welsh.

The Rev. William C. Redfield is an ordained Episcopal priest and a licensed clinical social worker. Although he was ordained in 1976, he spent the first half of his professional career as a group, family, and individual therapist in Maine. Later Bill served Trinity Episcopal Church in Fayetteville for nearly twenty years. During this time he brought his passion for new forms of Wisdom spirituality and established Wisdom House as an outreach spiritual ministry in the greater community. Having retired from parish work over four years ago, Bill is now engaged in full time Wisdom work mainly in the Northeast.

Sister Lois Barton, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, holds basic and advanced certificates from the Spiritual Direction Mentoring Program of the Spiritual Renewal Center in Syracuse, NY, and a Masters Certificate in Pastoral Ministry from the Loyola Institute for Ministry Extension Program of Loyola University, New Orleans. Sister Lois is an experienced teacher, spiritual director, and group leader. Along with Bill, Lois has a long-established practice of Centering Prayer and also has been an active student of Cynthia Bourgeault for the past eleven years. She is the program director of The Sophia Center in Binghamton, NY.

Deborah Welsh, Ed.D., a Wisdom Leader and creator of Wisdom of the Body, has worked with Bill Redfield and Lois Barton co-leading Wisdom Schools since 2010. She is a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist, Mental Health Counselor, and Board Certified Dance Movement Therapist, specializing in dance and movement as sacred. Her underpinnings are in modern and improvisational dance, the psychology of C.G. Jung, yoga, and exercise physiology.

Cost: All are welcome at Hallelujah Farm. We are grateful for your support in the amount you can afford. As a guideline, the suggested contribution for this retreat is $550, which includes a $50 deposit.

Venue: Guests receive hospitality from Sandy & Roger Daly of beautiful Hallelujah Farm. Accommodations are in shared double rooms. Single rooms may be available upon request.

Information & Registration: Contact Laura Ruth at laurampruth@gmail.com. In order to hold your place, the following deposit is requested: $50 due by April 1, 2018.

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Events Northeast Wisdom

Gurdjieffs Institute

Gurdjieff transitions from searching to teaching just after the time spent with the Sarmoung Brotherhood in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Northern Afghanistan. In 1912, Gurdjieff leaves Tashkent for Moscow where he begins to recruit candidates for the Institute.He experiments with different forms and emphases, to find the necessary cell of people and theappropriateform of expression. Much of this period is recorded in In Search of the Miraculousby Peter Ouspensky.

Gurdjieff establishes groups in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As the Russian Revolution breaks out, he is forced back down into the Caucasuswith an inner circle of students.During this period, he forms the core of his Russian disciples: Sophia Gregiorovitch, the De Hartmans, Dr. Stjernval and the De Salzmanns.In Moscow, Gurdjieff meets Peter Ouspensky, a scholar, traveller and journalist with an established reputation in the field of esotericism. Gurdjieff naturally hopes to use Ouspenskys influence in order to expand his own, and Ouspensky, in turn, realizes that Gurdjieff is in possession of the very esoteric knowledge that he himself had been long searching for.

Social order begins to collapse in Russia. In 1917, Gurdjieff works intensively with a small group of people, in Essentuki, Tuapse, Sochi, Alexandropol, Rostov-on-the-Don, Ekterinodar, and Tiflis. Gurdjieffs experimental spirit causes difficulties for Ouspensky, who feels that, while he had formerly been able to gain much from Gurdjieff, he is now losing his grip on his teaching. The character of the future Institute is probably coming into being, as well as Ouspenskys refusal to be part of it.

In the meantime, the white armies of Denikin are beaten back. The unsympathetic Bolsheviks and the Anarchists of Stenko take possession of most of Russia. Mr. Gurdjieff decides to relocate in Constantinople. Ouspensky goes north to reconnect with the members in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Gurdjieff takes the others on an incredible journey across the CaucasusMountains to Constantinople. And then in Constantinople, he finally opens The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.

Nevertheless, after a determined attempt, the decision is made to relocate in Europe. Peter Ouspensky moves to London, where he has journalistic connections. George Gurdjieff travels first to Berlin, then London, then Paris, and finally settles in Fontainbleau just south of Paris.

It is here that the western disciples of Gurdjieff come from 1921 to 1923.Gurdjieff, a native of south central Asia, is amongst people of a totally different tradition and world view, people whose culture bore the imprint of the Italian Renaissance.The Europeans respond enthusiasticallyfar more actively than the Asiansbut without the sense of the starting point in the work and lacking a firm foundation. It proves a dangerous combination. Gurdjieff continues to rapidly experiment and a passionate, unforgettable drama develops, but the cracks begin to emerge.

Aware of this, Ouspensky dissociates himself from Gurdjieffs work and continues independently in London.Gurdjieff is involved in a severe car accident that forces him to close the Institute. His physical health will never fully recover. What he cannot achieve in practice he now vows to achieve in theory: to leave mankind with a written legacy of what he has understood, and with enough of a circle of students to carry that legacy forward into the future. In Beelzebubs Tales he encodes the material of the early stages of creation and of the true role and place of humanity in the project of the Absolute.

Beelzebubs Tales, Gurdjieffs magnum opus, speaks of time and the struggle against entropy and dispersion. The Absolute created a macrocosm to neutralise entropy by generating consciousness out of worlds created in time. He accepted the limitation of the Sacred Heropass. The book speaks of transformation and the function of the Holy Planet Purgatory. It places the micro-cosmos man in the context of the macro-cosmos by painting a large scale picture of the Work: Self remembering is sacred not only for man, but for a whole ascending ray of creation dependent on generating new life.

The book itself is written in a style deliberately difficult to follow. Gurdjieff admittedly buries the bones of his message deep, far from the reach of most readers.In retrospect, the value ofBeelzebubs Talesis arguable. Gurdjieffs close disciples naturally deem it as their Bible, but seventy-five years after its publication, the book falls short of leaving the imprint its author had predicted.

In 1935, Gurdjieff moves to an apartment in Paris on Rue des Colonels Reynard, where the last stage of his teaching is to follow. He comes to realize that he is not the vehicle for the new order as he originally anticipated. He focuses on his followers, that they might carry his message on to the next generation. He carefully sees the completion of his literary works, and warns his students that, despite his intentions, he will be forced to leave them in a fine mess.

Afterdisassociatingwith Gurdjieff, Ouspensky establishes a small group of students in London. He keeps an eye on his Teacher in Fontainbleau, receiving occasional news by students who maintain contact with both parties. Ouspensky has given up trying to work directly with Gurdjieff, but he does not want to compete with any further effort that Mr. Gurdjieff might make to continue or develop the Institute.

Ouspensky knows thatGurdjieffhas the essential knowledge, and that what he needs is a connection with the ultimate source of that knowledge. He does not take this ultimate source to be human beings, but a higher influence (or human beings only inasmuch as they represent this higher influence). He tries to achieve this re-connection to the source, not by seeking out the Sarmoung, but by bringing the work of his group to the highest level possible, hoping that would attract the source.

Ouspensky transforms the aim for realising the specific project of the Institute possibly given from the Sarmoung Brotherhood to the aim of connecting mankind to the purposes of higher influences through the creation of a conscious school. It may be that higher influences were alligned with the Sarmoung and that they worked through the Sarmoung and Mr.Gurdjiefftogether, but Ouspensky states his aim in a very pure way and connects it very directly to his commitment to his own group.

Gurdjieffs Institute does not regenerate, but the shoot put out to America lives at least partly because of the efforts and ability of Orage. A group develops in New York, which, after the War and the death of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, will join with the Gurdjieff Foundation. Orage serves as an important agent for this shoot, but is openly confounded by Gurdjieff, perhaps due to a failure on both sides. As Ouspensky later says, Orage forgot (left out) a lot. At the same time, Gurdjieff, who still had hopes for him, made it impossible for him to understand.

Ouspensky meanwhile, sees Europe crumbling into another period of chaos. He witnesses the rise of Fascism and Communism. He sees the loss of the western order of civilisations in the last generation and predicts the inevitable war. He has known the golden moment of Gurdjieffs vision, the presentation of the whole plan of the work.After seven years of watching and of working in London with 40 or 50 chosen people, Ouspensky choses to expand his work.

His student John Bennett asks him What about your relation to Mr. Gurdjieff as your teacher?

I waited for all these years (before expanding the work in London) because I wanted to see what Mr.Gurdjieffwould do. His work has not given the results he hoped for. I am still as certain as ever that there is a Great Source from which our System has come. Mr. Gurdjieff must have had a contact with that Source, but I do not believe that it was a complete contact. Something is missing, and he has not been able to find it. If we cannot find it through him, then our only hope is to have a direct contact with the Source Our only hope is that the Source will seek us out. That is why I am giving these lectures in London.

Ouspensky saw that what was missing was not more hidden wisdom, not further journeys to the east, not new techniques but commitment, compassion, and direct assistance from the Source from the unified understanding that exists in the cosmos above the cosmos of man.Ouspensky now seeks to re-establish the link to higher school. He visits New York, and returns to London a changed man, according to his student Rodney Collin. Collin later narrates the last chapter of Ouspenskys life as miraculous; that he had become what he had taught for so long. Furthermore, the student senses a hint of that higher school his teacher was seeking out: a presence as much greater than Ouspensky as Ouspensky was greater than us.

Yet the flame goes out in London. There is no successor in London or in Paris only sincere retainers of the tradition.Both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky lived through the first world war and the Bolshevik Revolution. They saw the onset of the depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe. The had both considered that higher influences might be launching an ark for the preservation of the seed elements of civilisation. Bothrealized, by the time they died that their role was not this. And yet their roles do feed into something else.

Early one morning, shortly before his death, Ouspensky suddenly said: One must do everything one can and then just cry to He did not finish, just made one big gesture upwards. Rodney Collin, Theory of Conscious Harmony p.53.

Rodney Collin picks up Ouspenskys aim and refines it by adding the dimension of school. He connects this to the idea of a civilisation. On March 27, 1950 Rodney Collin writes to one of his students:

In light of a certain big achievement, big plan, one has to disappear. Ones personal self, with which one lives nearly the whole time, is too small to have any relation to that. So it has to disappear, if one is to understand. The more it disappears, the more can be understood. This may be very painful for a time. Later, it is quite the reverse; and it is the return, the interference of the personal self which becomes painful, and its absence happiness.

Peter Ouspensky has been, for Rodney Collin, the living example of this particularly in the last months of his life.Ouspenskys teaching, therefore, remains alive in Rodney Collin, who migrates to Mexico to begin again, and once again attempts the experiment in which his two great predecessors failed. Collin hopes that Mexico would be the beginning of the new civilisational order. Like his teacher, he strives to connect with the Hidden Hierarchy, the inner circle of mankind. Like Ouspensky, he sees them as outside of time and space.

But in the end, Rodney Collin reverts to embrace an existing form, joining the Catholic Church. He dies shortly thereafter, falling off the bell tower of a church in Cuzco, Peru. He leaves a rich legacy of teaching experience and understanding in his books; The Theory of Eternal Life, the Theory of Celestial Influence, and (posthumously) The Theory of Conscious Harmony.

There are certainly more shoots that spring from the Gurdjieff trunk, but these exceed the scope of this site. Suffice it to say that the above brief historical overview outlines the progression of the Greater Ark of Ancient Wisdom. This Ark is twofold: a physical form of a vessel and metaphysical contents. Gurdjieff and his successors seemingly failed in creating the former, yet they were successful in conveying the contents to a new age.

These contents inevitably live on, for they originate from beyond time and space. That source, to which Gurdjieff tapped in the end of the 19th century and which he brought westwards, was never subject to time. It hasnt aged since, nor is it any older that its manifestation in any previous age. That spark is the true legacy of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.

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Gurdjieff Teaching | Gurdjieff Becoming Conscious

Reader Approved

Three Parts:Getting in the Right PositionPracticing the BasicsEasing into a RoutineCommunity Q&A

Meditation can be an invaluable means to de-stress. If you're feeling under pressure, experimenting with meditation can help. Zazen is a type of meditation unique to Zen Buddhism. It involves focusing on the breath and remaining in the present moment. To begin practicing Zen meditation, find a comfortable place and position. Try short sessions where you focus on your breath. With time, develop a routine that works for you. Meditation can be difficult at first, as it takes practice to clear the mind, but you'll eventually find a meditation routine that works for you.

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With Zen mediation, will I experience stillness, in which my mind will not wander anymore?

wikiHow Contributor

Your mind will always naturally wander during meditation, even when you become very experienced. It is not so important to keep your mind from initially wandering; what matters more is being able to catch yourself and regain your focus.

Where can I go to experience Zen Buddhism?

wikiHow Contributor

Some major cities have Zen Centers. Check your local listings for such places, and visit them to see what they have to offer. Otherwise, it is perfectly fine to sit alone and meditate anywhere you find your mind can be most clear.

Can I lie down in a bed and meditate?

wikiHow Contributor

Yes, but you are more likely to fall asleep.

Is it okay to play Zen music?

wikiHow Contributor

It's not required, but there is no "rule" against it. The point of meditation is to clear the mind of distracting thoughts -- if music helps you to do so there is no harm in it.

Is it okay to lean back against a wall while meditating?

wikiHow Contributor

Yes. But try to sit with your back straight. If a cushion on the floor is too difficult, then you can use a chair. It helps the mind to settle and keep awake and clear, and helps the breathing (which should be through the stomach in a relaxed manner). Leaning against a wall contracts the body, making the mind tend to become more heavy and cluttered.

I live in a hostel. How is it possible to meditate in a such crowded and noisy place?

wikiHow Contributor

Get yourself some noise-cancelling headphones. Either wear them silently or play some zen type music or nature sounds like the sea through them. Close your eyes, and put an eye mask on, and focus on your breathing. You will hear nothing outside you and you will see nothing and you will be set to meditate.

Will Zen Meditation help someone who's in prison?

wikiHow Contributor

TM is used in some prisons to help prisoners cope with being behind bars, so Zen Meditation could do the same.

How long and how many times should I do this? Should it be done on an empty stomach?

wikiHow Contributor

How often one meditates is based on preference, though at least once a day for any length of time is preferable. Eating before or after is fine so long as it doesn't interfere with your meditation.

Can I sit in a chair?

wikiHow Contributor

Yes, just be mindful of your posture and that your back is completely straight.

As a Christian, can I still practice Zazen?

wikiHow Contributor

Yes. Not everyone who meditates does so because they adhere to Buddhism. Many people meditate to cope with stress.

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The Best Way to Begin Zen Meditation (Zazen) - wikiHow

The Study

One out of every three dollars invested abroad in 2013 originated in firms from emerging economies. Yet we still have a limited understanding of the factors driving the impressive rise and patterns of internationalization of emerging market multinationals. Drawing on a survey of 713 firms from emerging countries, New Voices in Investment: A Survey of Investors from Emerging Countries sheds light on the characteristics, motivations, strategies, and needs of emerging-market investors.

In contrast to previous surveys of foreign investors, the sample of the Potential Investor Survey includes not only investors, but also firms that considered investing and decided not to, and companies that never considered establishing a foreign presence. This novel survey design reveals differences in incentives and obstacles faced by investors, potential investors, and non-investors. This distinction matters enormously, particularly in identifying binding constraints on foreign investment among those that never managed to carry out the cross-border investment.

There are significant differences among investors and noninvestors. Investors are significantly more dependent on international trade than noninvestors. Indeed, the greater the proportion of earnings that a firm derives from international trade, the more likely it will be to consider investing abroad. Moreover, firms that are publicly listed, owned by domestic capital, and are larger in terms of their labor force are more likely to invest in developing countries.

Emerging market investors exhibit a strong regional bias. While some analysts have stressed the greater geographical dispersion of the recent wave of outward FDI flows from emerging economies, we find that firms in our sample invest more heavily in neighboring countries, where they face lower informational costs and cultural barriers. This regional concentration is stronger for investment in the services sector. Yet, there is cross-country heterogeneity. Firms from India appear to be more globalized than their counterparts from Brazil, South Africa, and Korea, investing more heavily in East Asia and Europe than in the South Asian region

Outward FDI from emerging economies is primarily market and efficiency seeking. For almost 70% of investors surveyed, accessing new markets was the main motivation for investing abroad. Another 20% of respondents invested abroad to lower production costs. Only 5% of investors were driven by the availability of natural resources. The interest of emerging market multilaterals in taking advantage of opportunities for market and business expansion in developing countries is also evident when analyzing the factors that influence their location decisions. Almost 36 percent of investors selected the size of the domestic and regional markets as the top factor influencing their choice of an investment destination. For 30 percent of the firms surveyed, the presence of a variety of potential business counterparts was the most important location factor. A sizeable proportion of respondents (12 percent) worried primarily about the cost of labor.

Emerging markets firms confront a trade-off between market size and market familiarity. The clear regional concentration that emerges from our data suggests that firms face binding costs of investing in distant, culturally dissimilar markets, particularly those in the services sector. Our findings show that firms are more likely to invest in countries that share borders, and have a common colonial history and language.

International economic agreements facilitate cross-border investments. By contributing to regulatory clarity and stability, bilateral investment treaties partly offset the costs associated with investing in faraway and/or unfamiliar markets. Trade agreements, in turn, increase the perceived attractiveness of a host country by providing firms with opportunities to access new markets and reduce the costs of trade.

Political factors constitute binding constraints that deter some emerging-market firms from investing in developing markets. Far from being immune to political risk and cultural uncertainty in host markets, those firms that are more averse to these conditions seem to self-select out of foreign investment. Investors, in turn, value political stability and transparency more than corruption control and fair elections in the host country.

National investment promotion agencies play only a marginal role in raising awareness of investment opportunities in developing countries. Nevertheless, these agencies appear to be a widely used and useful resource for investors once they have made the decision to enter a specific market. In line with previous research, our findings show that investment promotion agency services tend to be more valuable for smaller and less productive firms, for which access to information is more costly.

Our findings suggest that developing countries can increase their attractiveness to investors from emerging and newly emerged economies through a series of policy measures, including:

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New Voices in Investment: A Survey of Investors From ...