Beelzebub has reached the point in his narrative designed to educate his grandson, Hassein, about the strange three-brained humans who inhabit Earth, where he describes his first actual visit to that planet. We recall that Beelzebub, who was guilty of some, as yet, unexplained cock-up, was in exile, along with many other members of his tribe, on the planet Mars. The story he comes out with at this point is very strange and is obviously designed to be interpreted on several levels, so I’ll start with the sequence of events, as outlined by Beelzebub to Hassein, and then try to derive some sort of sense from them. Here goes:
A young member of Beelzebub’s tribe-in-exile had taken up residence on Earth. Having already existed there for 350 ‘Martian years’ this being was resident in the city of Samlios, the capital of the continent of Atlantis, and seat of its king, one Appolis. At this stage of human development, the organ kundabuffer, which had dampened down humanity’s aspirations to spiritual development, had been removed, but its residual effects were still being felt and those effects were starting to become entrenched in many individuals as behavioural traits. One such trait was an extreme reluctance to voluntarily perform any duty when ordered by a superior. People could be ‘persuaded’ to do their bit for society but only under threat of punishment. This reticence on many of his subjects’ part meant that King Appolis had to resort to all manner of cunning means to inveigle his subjects into doing their fair share of work and paying their fair share of taxes. It was a convoluted system and yet it somehow worked as even the laziest and stingiest of the king’s subjects had a grudging respect for the energy Appolis poured into the wily artifice that enabled him to extract from them the desired money and labour. But the king’s ever more intricate machinations began to seem unjust to Beelzebub’s kinsman and upset him, so he approached Appolis and offered him a wager that he could put in place an alternative system that would achieve the same results for the treasury and the state. The king accepted – with the proviso that any shortfall in income to the royal exchequer caused by the new system would have to be made good by Beelzebub’s tribesman – and the agreement was signed in blood by both parties. The new system failed spectacularly: people refused to pay taxes, even took money back out of the state, and Beelzebub’s kinsman was forced to first of all deplete his own resources to make good the deficit; then the resources of his own kind also on Earth; and finally even the resources of members of his tribe on Mars. That was when Beelzebub stepped in. At the subsequent meeting between Beelzebub and Appolis, the king blamed himself for allowing Beelzebub’s kinsman to take on a task for which, although he was capable of ‘higher reasoning’ than Appolis, he did not have the king’s experience. Beelzebub, however, because his kinsman had committed to the wager by signing in blood, took it upon himself to find a solution. Wishing to protect the king, and reasoning that a return to the previous system – that is, a mandatory tax and labour contribution from everyone – would provoke serious civil strife, Beelzebub decided, for the duration of the inevitable social upheaval, to replace all the king’s administrators with his own tribes-people, and make it known that it was the country’s administrators, and not the king, who were responsible for the crisis. The inevitable revolution ensued with a concomitant destruction of knowledge and property, and the deaths of many of those human individuals who had actually managed to start on the path to spiritual betterment. Eventually, it all died down, King Appolis’ human administrators gradually replaced Beelzebub’s people again, and the city and citizens of Samlios settled back into the same old system they’d lived under before the wager was agreed.
Well, what to make of all this? First of all, I’d better note that nowhere in the narrative does Gurdjieff detail what alternative measures Beelzebub’s kinsman actually took to replace the incumbent system; which infers, I suppose, that the symbolism or allegory being employed here is conceptual, or overarching, in nature. And I’m going to have to pass over, for now, the whole discussion of the nature of Atlantis itself, and whether Gurdjieff was capitalising on the, to him, recent popularity of Theosophists like Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant and their interpretation of the fabled island. To me, at this juncture in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, Gurdjieff is using Atlantis as a kind of ‘vanilla’ state in which he can set up various scenarios to get his message across without having to muddy the waters by setting them in a known historical context.
It’s a strange section, this one, and one in which I think I detect various parallels. Firstly, Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, makes sure the king is protected. There are any number of ancient texts – far too many to bother with here – in which the merits of various types of government are discussed, but the three major options are monarchy (the rule of one), oligarchy (the rule of a few), and democracy (the rule of the people). Some ancient writers, like Cicero and Seneca, saw government structure as reflecting the rules of Nature; for instance, Seneca, in De Clementia, likened the Roman state under Nero to a bee colony with the Emperor as king bee (the Romans didn’t know it was actually a queen) whose safety and protection was essential to the smooth running of the hive as a whole. Without him, the hive would disintegrate and fracture.
Then there’s that whole thing about duty – dharma, Pflicht, call it what you want – where, basically, everything in a fully cohesive system has to make a contribution for the whole to work. Duty derives two rewards: the material benefit for getting something useful done, and the spiritual, or psychic, pay-off for playing your part towards a wider goal.
Thirdly, there’s the consideration that Gurdjieff wasn’t all about a fast-track to spiritual bliss. He was definitely not a member of the ‘enlightenment in 24 hours’ brigade. For him, balance was very important.
So, when I take those three things into consideration, I think I kind of see what Gurdjieff”s getting at here. It’s early in the book, so we can’t expect an all dancing-all singing metaphor for the path to full spiritual development, but what I think is happening is this:
We need to see the governmental structure of Atlantis as a human being. The king is the soul (for want of a better word), the administrators are the higher thinking functions, and the people are the lower functions. In order for the whole organism to ‘work’, the soul requires that the lower functions provide fuel and locomotion (taxes, labour), but very often emotions/passions (the knock on effects of the organ kundabuffer) get in the way of providing these services that are for the good of the whole, and the lower functions have to be ‘persuaded’, through all sorts of enticements or threats, to tow the line. This system works, in that it keeps the machinery on the road, but it is exhausting and requires constant adjustment. There must be a better way, and the higher thinking functions (in the form of Beelzebub’s kinsman) think they know what it is. What that better way is, is not explained at this stage of the book (it would over-complicate matters this early on, so it doesn’t need to be) and the higher thinking functions attempt to change the system but – and this is the crucial point – without the involvement or direction of the soul. This causes havoc. Everything becomes totally disjointed. The lower functions no longer provide the fuel for the upkeep of the whole, so the higher functions attempt to compensate by providing their own fuel which is, unfortunately, limited. A good parallel would be the closeted academic who thinks that he or she is performing a service of self-betterment by burying him- or herself in books to improve the mind while neglecting to eat. It can’t last; the whole organism suffers.
Gurdjieff then goes on to explain how Beelzebub rectifies the situation: the old system wasn’t perfect, but it was better than the one which replaced it. Something has to shift so that the status quo can be replaced. In this instance, it’s the ‘sacrifice’ of the higher functions. Beelzebub’s ‘higher-reasoning’ kinsmen are sacrificed in place of the ‘lower’ human administrators of King Appolis. Finally, after all the upheaval, the old system reasserts itself and normal – if not perfect – service is resumed.
This then, as I see it, is an illustration, a parable even, of how NOT to proceed along the path of spiritual development, and it is very much in keeping with Gurdjieff’s wider teachings; that is, be practical! don’t let an attempt to over-accelerate your spiritual development mess you up to the extent that you become physically (or psychically) unbalanced. It’s all a bit like that anecdote I relayed in a previous installment, where Gurdjieff came across a disciple blissfully unaware that he was surrounded by dough over-flowing from a bread-making machine because he was too preoccupied with the higher-function past time of ‘remembering himself’. Gurdjieff gave him a good kick up the backside and a lecture on the proper balance in life.
There is probably a whole lot more in this passage – especially where Beelzebub’s kinsman lets emotions (rather than Reason) control his actions, and the bit about the power in the blood signing – and also some parallels with the recent revolutions in Europe, but I’d better call it a day for now.
The next episode will discuss a rather weird passage all about the relativity of time.
