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Views of Claymont Court, the Washingtonian estate in the Shenandoah Valley that became home to John Godolphin Bennett’s Claymont Society for Continuous Education starting in the early 1970s
______________________________________________________________________________________________ From the outset, The Claymont Society was committed to directing people back to Nature and to Craft. My first trip to Claymont coincided with a presentation by Allen Chadwick, an agricultural innovator. Photos of happy Claymont communal farmers appeared in National Geographic magazine. Claymont had a forge and a pottery, organic gardens and farm animals, mostly pigs and chickens. In the fall of 1975, Claymont initiated a program of nine-month courses centered on the teachings of the Russian George Gurdjieff, and one of his English disciples, John Godolphin Bennett. Gurdjieff, who died in 1949, grew up in the age of czars, his original students were drawn from the Russian nobility, and he, like them, expected great deference. His most famous concept is that we are always asleep, behaving like robots. He said that we are in charge of our own evolution and it’s all about attention, attention, attention. He did not place himself in opposition to organized religion but respected only the idea of a psychological core of truth in religion, admitting its concepts to illustrate his own ideas. He is said to have struck most as a strange but charismatic. John Bennett had a rather ordinary relationship as a student of Gurdjieff until he decided to go on a further search for Truth. Gurdjieff died just as they parted ways, and Bennett travelled around India and other areas he considered sacred, looking for connections to Gurdjieff’s teaching. He speculated extensively on the development and structure of consciousness. He founded a precursor to Claymont in England, called Sherborne House. He suddenly died just as the first course at Claymont, his American experiment, opened, leaving the direction to a protégé, Pierre Elliot from France. I was on the fourth such course that started in September, 1978. Pierre spoke of a self-sufficient community of 200 families. The closest that came to reality was just around the time of my fourth course. A number of factors contributed to the optimism of Claymont at that moment. E F Schmacher’s Small Is Beautiful was having a great implact. Resurgent interest in arts and crafts. Communal living. Kubrick’s 2001. Three-Mile Island. Jonestown. |
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