David Hall introduced me to the ideas of Gurdjieff.

I edited a magazine
called Azoth, before I moved to London. David was a reader and we
started a correspondence. In the end, that resulted in he, Jan Bailey
and myself co-editing a far bigger and more successful publication,
SOTHiS magazine. At that time, I was a member of Kenneth Grants
OTO and after Jan and I moved to London, David and I met very often.
David was very widely read and had a collection of books to be envied
ranging from many first editions of Aleister Crowleys books to an
extensive collection of books written by Gurdjieff, by JG Bennett, by
Ouspensky, by Maurice Nicholl and others. He also interested himself in
a number of traditions he performed the Russian Orthodox Prayer of
the Heart for a full nine months as his magical record for admission to
Kenneth Grants OTO. Kenneth said to me after hed received the diary
that it was one of the most complete and conscientious diaries hed
ever read. The application wasnt proceeded with, however.
Later, David was to join a Naqshbandi Sufi group and still later, under
the pseudonym Ibn al-Rawandi, wrote Islamic Mysticism: A Secular
Perspective (Prometheus Books, 2000). In his later years he became
interested in humanism and wrote articles for the New Humanist http://newhumanist.org.uk/184/david-hall
David had managed to find a book written by Gurdjieff called Life is
Real, Only then When I Am, a difficult volume to get in those days, and
very early on in our many conversations over many years he
suggested that Crowleys concept of the True Will had quite some
resonance with Gurdjieffian ideas.
Crowley and Gurdjieff met, it appears, in 1926. James Moores
biography Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth (Element Books, 1991)
has this account: Scuttling between Paris and Tunis to shake off his
creditors and find new ones, Crowley closed in on the Priur from his
Fontainebleau hotel, Au Cadran Bleu. How he actually gained entre is
a mystery; Gurdjieffians who had previously met him (Orage, Pinder
and Stanley Nott) would never have sponsored him. Nott felt
discomforted when:
to my surprise he appeared there... and was given tea in the
salon. The children were there, and he said to one of the boys
something about his son whom he was teaching to be a devil. Gurdjieff
got up and spoke to the boy, who thereupon took no further notice of
Crowley.
Moore said Gurdjieff showed Crowley off the premises, calling him
filthy and dirty inside, forbidding him to ever appear again. Of
course Beelzebub and the Beast had it in common that they both

identified with the denizens of Hell. They were both tarred with
scandal, too, by the yellow press. Both, in some senses, seem to have
invited it, but those were different times and even divorce was a
scandal in the UK until the mid 60s.
Kenneth Grant and myself both read the typescript of Beelzebub and
the Beast both of us were very impressed by the contents. David
sent the manuscript off to several people, including Robert Anton
Wilson. Wilson appears to have incorporated many of Davids ideas in
some of his work without credit and to Davids evident
disappointment.
Being introduced to the ideas of Gurdjieff has meant, and still means, a
great deal to my life, and I have David Hall to thank for this. His insight
into the concept of the Thelemic True Will as essentially being the
essence, the fourth, still has resonance for me. I came to be involved in
the Kaula Nath traditions of India after our SOTHiS days were over
central to this is the concept of svecchacharya the path of doing
ones will, and a far cry from doing what your personality wants.
Despite Davids humanist stance in his later years, he was still clearly
interested in deeper topics right up until his death in 2007. He had
embarked on a series of paintings of the major arcane of the Tarot. In
truth, he was something of a craftsman. He created an entire set of
Golden Dawn regalia, including an Enokhian double altar and tablets.
When he died, he was buried, with his mother in a cemetery in St
Albans just across the road from where he had lived all his life. On the
headstone is carved this simple line from Liber Al: Every man and
every woman is a star.