Ethel Merston

Who was Ethel Merston?

Ethel Merston was one of G. I. Gurdjieff’s first students at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, at the Prieuré in Fontainebleau-en-Avon, France. Gurdjieff had recently come to the West to introduce an ancient esoteric teaching of spiritual transformation called The Fourth Way. She wrote a memoir based on her diaries giving a keen insight into many of the seminal teachers of her times.

Ethel Merston first met Gurdjieff in London, through P. D. Ouspensky and Dr. Maurice Nicoll, and went to France where she lived and studied with Gurdjieff at the Prieuré from 1922–27. An energetic worker with organizational and administrative abilities, she managed the school in Mr. Gurdjieff’s absences. For some years, as Gurdjieff wrote his magnum opus All and Everything, she was one of the principal translators. Though she left the Institute in 1927, Gurdjieff remained an important influence in her life.

Financially independent, she traveled the world, settling in India in 1934. She chanced to meet again a childhood friend, Maud MacCarthy, who arrived with her husband, the composer John Foulds, and their friend Bill, known as The Boy. She befriended many Western seekers, among them Alain Daniélou and his companion Raymond Burnier, and worked with Daniélou on his book, Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales. She introduced her young Scots friend, Alec Phipps, later Sri Madhava Ashish, to Sri Krishna Prem, who had founded the Mirtola ashram with his guru Sri Yashoda Ma. The French Benedictine monk Père Henri Le Saux became a lifelong friend, grateful for Ethel’s invaluable help at key moments in his quest. She was a friend of Sunyata, whom Ramana Maharshi had said was a “rare born mystic.”