679) James Webb

James Charles Napier Webb (1946 – 1980). Scottish historian and biographer. He is remembered primarily for his books The Harmonious Circle, The Occult Underground and The Occult Establishment.
In 1980 his important biography of G. I. Gurdjieff, titled The Harmonious Circle, was published. He spent 8 years researching the book, making contacts with the Gurdjieff community worldwide. The New York Review of Books described Webb's research and knowledge of the subject as "extremely comprehensive" and Mistlberger described the book as "scholarly and occasionally gossipy" with Webb being "unquestionably a sincere researcher" who became "deeply involved in the matter of his subject" while remaining "fundamentally an outsider, an investigative journalist". Tamdgidi wrote that, amongst all the biographers of Gurdjieff, "only Webb claimed to have been independent and outside the circle of Gurdjieff's followers", and in 2004, in Inventors of Gurdjieff, Paul Beekman Taylor described The Harmonious Circle as "the first systematic biographical account by a writer who hadn't known Gurdjieff personally". Webb established that Gurdjieff's writings revealed substantial evidence of familiarity with the languages and cultures of central Asia, but Webb regarded Gurdjieff more as a self-taught innovator than a member of an esoteric Asiatic group, and, although seeing some of its forms having derived from Asia, saw the content of his teachings deriving from western occult traditions.

- "He was red-haired and very Scottish-looking." http://colombo.ca/wp-conte…/uploads/…/05/The-Occult-Webb.pdf

- "The reaction brought up with it from the depth of memory the visual image of a tall, spare young figure eight years back, red hair flaring in the sea wind..." https://www.joycecollinsmith.co.uk/…/an-appreciation-of-jam…