Pamela Travers met Gurdjieff in 1938, while the first edition of Mary Poppins was published in 1934 [6]. The equally famous Mary Poppins Comes Back followed in 1935 [7]. Although Travers may have heard about Gurdjieff in the British esoteric milieu before their personal meeting, this is far from being probable and any influence by Gurdjieff is more likely to be found in the following Mary Poppins books (particularly Mary Poppins Opens the Door, 1944 and Mary Poppins in the Park, 1952) [8]. Travers, of course, is more clearly influenced by Gurdjieff in her non-fiction works About the Sleeping Beauty (1975) and What the Bee Knows (1989) [9], and in her non-Mary Poppins fictional work Friend Monkey (1971) [10]. All scholars of Gurdjieff are familiar with the entry on the Master authored by Pamela Travers for Richard Cavendish' encyclopedia Man, Myth & Magic (1970) [11], and with the subsequent fascinating booklet George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1973) [12]. Apart from placing Gurdjieff's birth date in 1877 (rather than in the more probable 1866) [13], Travers' work still maintains the taste of a genuine Gurdjieffian experience, and is a good introduction to the Fourth Way for beginners. The perennial popularity of Mary Poppins, thus, could become an opportunity to explore Travers' other works and her relations with Gurdjieff.
This is not, however, the only possibility. Although any influence of Gurdjieff is extremely unlikely for the first two books of the Mary Poppins saga, the situation could be different for Mary Poppins in the Park, published in 1952. On the other hand, one could apply to Mary Poppins the theory that Max Weber suggested for capitalism. Although early modern capitalism, in Italy and elsewhere, could obviously not be "protestant" or "puritan" many decades before Martin Luther and John Calvin, Weber argued that capitalism had from its very beginning some significant "elective affinities" with puritan protestantism. In time, these "elective affinities" (a concept Weber borrowed from Goethe, who had used it in a very different context) would have revealed themselves and forged an alliance between capitalism and puritanism [14]. I argue that Mary Poppins had, from the beginning, an "elective affinity" with Gurdjieff's thought. This was, of course, not entirely casual. Travers, from 1925 on, had been introduced to Theosophical thought and to literary figures familiar with the Theosophical Society, including George Russell and William Butler Yeats. The latter was, of course, also one of the leaders of the Golden Dawn [15]. Although many authors have insisted on Gurdjieff's uniqueness, a recent study by Paul Johnson -- controversial but useful -- insists on what he had in common with Theosophy and a larger western esoteric tradition [16]. The correspondence between Travers and Staffan Bergsten, when the latter was preparing his book Mary Poppins and Myth (1978) [17], is particularly interesting. Travers insists that Mary Poppins is not only a children's book but the conscious creation of a myth. One could wonder whether Travers purposely led Bergsten away from the Gurdjieff track, since the Master is never mentioned in Mary Poppins and Myth. Bergsten, however, at least insists on what he calls the "mythical method" of Mary Poppins....