G.I. Gurdjieff, founder of the esoteric movement known as “The Fourth Way,” has long confounded his observers, pupils, and scholars of his life and work. This paper explores how Gurdjieff’s performative ambiguity in public self-presentations has contributed to the sense of mystery surrounding his identity and motivations as a spiritual teacher. To examine Gurdjieff’s performativity in the context of one of its most formative historical cases, my work considers his often-overlooked visit to America in 1924, when he and twenty-three of his pupils arrived from France to perform “demonstrations” of sacred dances, music, and “tricks, half-tricks, and real supernatural phenomena” for audiences in New York City, Boston, and Chicago. Revisiting primary sources from the 1924 tour alongside historical studies on religion, Orientalism, popular science, and stage magic in early twentieth-century America provides evidence to suggest that Gurdjieff’s mysterious persona was a product of his own self-fashioning, an identity that he developed as a means of inviting skepticism and debate. This analysis suggests we may reconceive Gurdjieff’s public performativity as ritualized mystery-making, constituting a provocative invitation to engage in Fourth Way praxis.

“Religious Dynamics of Secrecy in Cold War American Life,” explores the role religion has played in conceptualizations, imaginations, and rituals of secrecy in twentieth-century American history. I examine these articulations of secrecy and religion in two case studies from the 1950s and mid-1970s, which highlight how Americans have recruited the language and conceptual schema of religion to convey the gravity and internal logic of secrecy, as well as to negotiate the limits of its acceptability in American democracy. In so doing, I demonstrate how secrecy is not only a matter for religion, but also a matter of religion. My first case study addresses the entanglement of secrecy and religion in Cold War constructions of “brainwashing.” I take as my starting point the influential representation of brainwashing found in Richard Condon’s classic 1959 novel, The Manchurian Candidate. I then trace the history of this icon of Cold War popular culture to its origins in the U.S. intelligence community following the scandalous false confessions of bacteriological warfare issued by American POWs in the Korean War. In addition to traditional historical analysis, I aim to shed new light on the relevance of religion in early Cold War American culture and politics by redeploying the ancient politico-religious category of maleficium as a framework to highlight brainwashing’s early associations with diabolical magic, secret influence, and perceived transgressions of normative gender roles and sexuality. Through these historical and cultural analyses, I situate the history of brainwashing at the nexus of Cold War religion and politics, illuminating the religious significance of fears and fantasies of secret influence in the spheres of domestic life and foreign policy. My second case study examines debates surrounding the expanding national security state through close attention to the 1971-1973 Pentagon Papers trial, in which co-defendants Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo were indicted on espionage charges for conspiring to leak classified documents pertaining to the Vietnam War. Here, I focus on material manifestations of “sacred” national secrets, from official prohibitions against their disclosure to the spectacle of their presentation throughout the course of the trial. In this case, I build on a courtroom reporter’s reflection on the striking significance of an otherwise everyday object—namely, a cardboard box. This, of course, was no ordinary box, but rather a vessel containing the TOP-SECRET documents known colloquially as the “Pentagon Papers.” This reporter’s description rendered this ordinary cardboard box an emblem with religious significance: a “totem of the age of information.” Using this courtroom description as an entry point into a wider analysis of Cold War religion and politics, I demonstrate the analytical import of ascriptions of sacred value to classified information. This material analysis of religion provides a new avenue for re-examining the sacred significance attributed to state secrets, bringing into focus the socio-cultural meanings underpinning and shaping the politics of secrecy in American history. In my concluding epilogue, I address the legacy of these Cold War developments in contemporary American politics in view of recent speculations surrounding the impending rise of a “New Cold War.” As this study will demonstrate, exploring the origins and historical transformations of these Cold War entanglements of secrecy, religion, and politics can provide a new lens onto current manifestations of these entanglements in the press headlines and cultural debates shaping American society today.