May 9, 1980

James Webb (January 13, 1946 to May 9, 1980) was a Scottish historian who specialized in the modern occult. He also wrote a biography of Gurdjieff, The Harmonious Circle, (1980). Webb was born in Edinburgh and educated at Trinity College. In Webb's The Occult Underground, (1972) also published as The Flight from Reason, (1974) we find this note about Helena Blavatsky in India, being pursued by a zealous disciple, "[whose goal was to]...find the mahatmas or die. Ramaswamier pressed on into Sikkim, carrying only an umbrella. On the road he met a leopard and a wildcat, but these did not deter him. On the second day's journey he achieved the object of his quest."

I am going to quote Joyce Collin-Smith, from an essay on her web site entitled An Appreciation of James Webb. Here we have an interesting picture of Webb from someone who was his friend. And she had a family connection to Gurdjieffian circles: Collin-Smith's brother-in-law, Rodney Collin, had been involved with that sage. She herself was an astrologer. Despite her profession, I found her essay moving and her frankness about her inability to predict Webb's final despair and demise disarming. This is a long quote from copyrighted material. She says about Webb:

...His interest was mainly in the development of ideas underlying the outward trends of life. After graduating, he began to write about the occult and the mysterious, seeking to find the reason behind the semi-esoteric movements that sprouted in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He returned to Cambridge, bought a small house in Portugal Place and a modest boat on the River Cam, was given a research grant, and settled down to write professionally.
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His first important book was FLIGHT FROM REASON, (...1972). In this he described the whole body of occult and mystical thought as "rejected knowledge".... He suggested that throughout the 19th century there was a "discernible opting for rejected knowledge, especially on the part of the artistic, literary and articulate worlds. . . It means a rejection of the Establishment. . . It springs from an inability to accept the bleak findings of the scientific method about man's place in the universe. . . The flight to the Secret Traditions represents an escape from insignificance. . . The whole burden of traditional thought. . . is that man is divine, capable of divinity. . . a re-assertion of man's cosmic relevance. . . Men of action could mobilize. . . political parties, the occultists by virtue of their peculiar temperament, could manufacture nations out of dreams. . ."

He then published THE OCCULT ESTABLISHMENT, (1976), and began to contribute to the Scotsman and Encounter. His work was also used in Man, Myth and Magic, the Encyclopaedia of the Unexplained, and by B.B.C. Radio.

His magnum Opus, THE HARMONIOUS CIRCLE, ... was nearly eight years in the making and was in the London bookshops... at the time of his death in May 1980..... The rag, tag and bobtail of the Work is still to be found in splinter groups and sects all over Europe and America. James Webb searched them all out painstakingly, charmed his way into getting access to a great deal of unpublished material, made many friends, and then set to to analyse what he had acquired in the way of knowledge.
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It appears to me that there was a great similarity between both the inner purposes and the outer life of James Webb and Rodney Collin, whose main book THE THEORY OF CELESTIAL INFLUENCE is his only true monument. Both belonged to that stream of men who want knowledge so deeply and so desperately that in the end no price seems too high to pay for it. Both drove themselves to the limit of endurance in steady application to their self-imposed tasks of writing what they knew, or understood, of the nature of life. Both ultimately entered states of complete exhaustion during which there were experiences of altered states of consciousness. And after the main work was done, both seemed to run down as towards an inevitable end. Life was terminated in both cases by choice, before a normal span of time had been completed. Rodney fell from a cathedral tower in Peru. Jamie loaded his sporting gun, at his home in Dumfriesshire, on the afternoon of 9th May 1980, and placed it to his head.

I have to assume that Webb's misconception about being able to find Work secrets in written pages, had nothing to do, really, with his sad end.