Beelzebub’s Tales
I’ve decided to do some book reviews as a lame attempt to fill up post-space while waiting during the Muse’s increasingly prolonged absences and, of course, to feebly try to drum up some Amazon affiliate action so I can start making inroads into my languishing Wish List.
With that in mind I thought I’d start with a suitably obscure ‘review’ of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson
Beelzebub’s Tales is not perhaps the best introduction to Gurdjieff’s ‘teaching’ such as it is, but it is nevertheless the work that places him firmly in what may be termed the ‘esoteric tradition’. There are other books which perform a similar function, notably Ouspenky’s Fragments.. but these were in no case sanctioned by Gurdjieff himself (although he reportedly wholeheartedly approved of Ouspensky’s record) and Beelzebub represents Gurdjieff’s own unique attempt to define his paradigm for posterity.
The stated aim of Beelzebub is to ‘destroy mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything in the world.’. The immediate method to this end would appear to be the highly unusual grammatical structure of the book itself, a formulation which seems to irritate most effectively the academic mind - Ouspensky claimed it ‘stuck in his throat’ - but on deeper analysis it is the subject matter itself that proves most disturbing. Not because of any contravening of established convention (although with Gurdjieff this is never a completely absent factor) but more in that the book, if one perserveres with it, actually does in some way result in evoking a feeling of having lost something, both on a personal level and on a wider human one. It is a kind of melancholy that pervades much of the early Gurdjieff work although not, unfortunately, the decaffeinated and sanitised Gurdjieff™ ‘brands’ that are nowadays the only show in town.
Briefly, the thrust of Beelzebub is not so much a ‘new revelation’ as such as a reformulation of existing esoteric tradition. Humans are seen as being ‘asleep’, that is to say cut off from objective reality and operating on a mechanical level in accordance with arbitrarily conditioned prejudices and bias. This conditioning is constraining to such a degree that people may be said to be devoid of personal willpower and as a further consequence utilise only a miniscule percentage of their actual capabilities and fail invariably to realise their full human potential.
This human condition as outlined by Beelzebub is not the result of ‘sin’ or a ‘devil’ (Beelzebub is here a sympathetic character in exile for a youthful foolishness and not the archetypal instigator of evil as know from the Judeo-Christian tradition) but rather comes about as the result of a divine command for a specific and limited purpose albeit with unfortunate consequences. But in any event, there is a way out: through constant effort, conscious suffering and the striving to ‘remember oneself’ under the direction of one who has ‘already travelled the road’ the individual may free themselves from this regrettable state of affairs.
In this schemata men such as Jesus, Buddha, Moses or Muhammad (as well as countless others) are in reality men who have overcome this ‘sleep’ and achieved liberation from the mechanical nature. Their activities centred around passing on this knowledge to their select groups of disciples but the presence of the ‘awakened’ master was (and is) absolutely necessary. In the absence of such a master, the ‘teachings’ deteriorated after the putative founder’s death and became the religions we know today. Repositories of certain unperceived knowledge in some cases but at the very least mainly serving as structures for the perpetuation of sleep and mechanical behaviour, far removed from the teachings of the men whose names they bear. Interestingly this contention is confirmed by the fate of the Gurdjieff teaching since his death in 1949.
Unfortunately, today many Gurdjieff groups resemble nothing so much as a church (albeit of a rather creepy variety) and the concept of the ‘living teacher’ is anathema to many of these assemblages who are in the main content to merely parrot the official Gurdjieff canon and mechanically go through the motions of the Gurdjieff exercises as they know and understand them. But that is a fish of a different colour.
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