Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
In the last episode, a very powerful one, we learned how Beelzebub, a higher three-brained being, was sent to Earth for the second time by some sort of Cosmic-Balance Overseer Committee to try to stop mankind mindlessly massacring untold millions of harmless and innocent animals in the name of sacrifice to their made-up gods. The wholesale slaughter, they said, was not only contrary to the intent of the Universal Creator, but was adversely affecting the finely tuned cosmic balance of the physical space around the planet Earth. Beelzebub, if we recall, managed to reverse the trend in the region of Tikliamesh – roughly equivalent to modern day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – by indoctrinating a local, one Abdil, who, before being murdered for his beliefs, managed to convince many of his countrymen that the practice of animal sacrifice was a sin against the very universe itself.
This next section of the work describes how Beelzebub, after taking Abdil’s body back to Mars for burial, returned to Earth for the third time. He was still pursuing his mission to put a lid on animal sacrifice, and this time he descended to the area called Maralpleicie and its main city, Gob. Maralpleicie was then a large centre of population but is now covered by the Gobi desert. The area was known for its fabrics and ‘precious ornaments’.
But before Beelzebub gets into the main meat of this narration about this third descent to Earth, he tells his grandson, Hassein, a strange little story about how the continent of Asia came to be populated in the first place. I’m going to mention it, here, because it will be immediately apparent that the stupidity exercised by the people in the story, is alive and well and rampant in our 21st Century world (as it was in the early 20th Century, for whose people Gurdjieff originally intended the parable):
Even before Atlantis sank beneath the waves, begins Beelzebub, a normal three-brained earthling from that ill-fated continent put it about that the powdered horn of an animal called a ‘Pirmiral’ – some kind of deer that still exists apparently – could be ingested to cure all illnesses. Now where have we heard all that old bunkum before? The creatures were, of course, subsequently hunted to extinction on Atlantis, so the hunters had to look elsewhere for their prey and left for other lands, taking their families with them. Several of these groups ended up on the continent of Ashhark, later called Asia. They eventually arrived at the area around what would become Gob, and found it so fertile and productive that they stayed and multiplied.
As a quick aside at this point, we find fruit described as these humans’ principal ‘first being-food’ which is meant, or so I suppose, that it was the principal food for the ‘first’ or physical body. That – almost throwaway – line predicts a topic that comes up in far greater detail later in the work; that is, the different types of ‘food’ required to nourish the three ‘types’ of body, to which we have, for our purposes at this stage of the work, given the names ‘physical’, ‘astral’, and ‘soul/spirit’. The ‘food’ necessary for the upkeep and development of each type of body is, of course, very different – but more of that later in the book. For now, it’s important to note that the three types of ‘body’ are not the same as the three ‘brains’ or ‘centres’ – let’s call them the mechanical, the emotional, and the intellectual – that are created in every three-brained being at birth, and which must be brought into harmony for that human to begin ‘coating’ themselves with the ‘higher’ body types; the astral and the soul/spirit.
Anyway, back to Beelzebub’s story. By a massive coincidence, he tells Hassein, a member of a very learnéd Atlantean sect called the Astrosovers had already migrated to that same area of what would become Gob. He’d gone there because the Astrosovers on Atlantis had – by closely observing nature – worked out that ‘something very serious had to happen in nature’, but, unable to discern exactly what, had sent their members out far and wide to see if they could find out anything more. Their brief was to examine not only what was happening in Nature on the Earth, but also note whatever was happening in the heavens. While this particular Astrosover was seeking answers, the predicted catastrophe struck and Atlantis sank beneath the waves, with the result he could never return home and so was stranded in Maralpleicie.
Now if that’s not a lesson for our rubbish-obsessed, climate mangled, Covid-19 ridden planet, then I don’t know what is. We’ve stopped reading the Earth; we’ve stopped reading Nature; we’ve stopped reading the stars. Everything – absolutely everything – is interconnected, and you can only mess with the fabric of being for so long before something breaks. Gurdjieff knew that back in the early part of the last century and, through his words in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, he issued a warning. The Earth, Nature, the heavens, all of them are there to be read and understood – we need to interpret the signs. Species are becoming extinct, the ice-caps are melting, wild-fires rage, and the sea is full of plastic. The message – the warning – is clear and we have to heed it before we wreck the whole damned thing. And if you think that Nature doesn’t notice what we do, then take a look at what happened in places like the UK in the years immediately following World Wars I and II. The normal ratio of humans being born between men and women temporarily changed to re balance the huge amount of male lives lost during the conflicts. There is no doubt that Nature is aware of us and what we do at a species level. Mess Her/Him/It about at your peril!
Right, rant over, and back to the text: Time went by, says, Beelzebub, and the inhabitants of the place that was to become Gob in Maralpleicie, waxed and waned in their spiritual development; sometimes moving forwards, and sometimes back, but they grew in number and eventually instituted an hereditary kingship with a line descended from that first, marooned Astrosover.
Long before Beelzebub rocked up on his third visit to Earth, one Konuzion had been King of Gob. Now, Beelzebub had done his homework, and discovered that this Konuzion had had to deal with a nationwide addiction to what is obviously the opium poppy (although Beelzebub says the plant was then called Gulgulian). Konuzion’s subjects were getting absolutely blitzed from chewing poppy seeds from the ripened plant and, in their away-with-the-fairies state, were hallucinating like crazy, with the result that crime, violence, and all manner of lawlessness was rampant.
After discovering the source of the problem, and realising that the drug totally messed with any kind of internal emotional or intellectual balance, Konuzion sent out trusted subjects to impose fines and punishment in an attempt to stamp out the practice. When this didn’t work (when does it ever when it comes to recreational drugs?) the king increased the level of punishment for chewing the seeds and instigated a kind of Big Brother surveillance system to help keep an eye on who was transgressing. It got to the point where the king, himself, would personally examine the miscreants; but that only piqued the curiosity of everyone else, who, wanting to know what all the fuss was about, started taking the drug themselves (oh my, we humans are just so predictable, aren’t we?). And so the number of drug-chewers continued to rise, both in Gob itself and, increasingly, in its provinces. Gurdjieff, in relating this story through the mouth of Beelzebub, is, of course, criticising his own times, and even has Beelzebub tell Hassein exactly that. But the same behaviour – ‘Oh, that’s been made illegal, I wonder why, let’s try it’ – is just as prevalent today as it was in Gurdjieff’s (or even the ‘fictitious’ Konuzion’s) time.
So Konuzion, realising at last that his authoritarian measures to stamp out the drug-fueled lawlessness were absolutely pointless, did what Abdil, Beelzebub’s now murdered friend from his previous descent to Earth, had done. He went into retreat, neither ate nor drank, and meditated for 18 days on what to do next. Abdil, of course, had only locked himself away for a couple of days to work out what he needed to do, and then only after Beelzebub had read him the riot act about the absurdity and impiety of animal sacrifice; so Konuzion is a kind of step up. He’d come to the necessity for reflection and introspection all by himself. His ‘solution’ to the problem, when it came, while ingenious, would be by no means perfect – in fact, it would cause all sorts of knock-on headaches for Beelzebub – but, I think what Gurdjieff is implying here is that at least Konuzion, like Abdil before him, was seeking to apply Reason (with a capital R) by locking himself away from his other senses (by fasting and meditation) to get himself out of a tight spot. In a bizarre kind of parallel, Konuzion was attempting to ‘break out’ of his habitual, institutionalised thinking (the draconian application of law and punishment) in the same way he needed to make his subjects ‘break out’ of their drug habits. With first Abdil (with his problems of an animal sacrifice fixated population) and now Konuzion (with his problems of a drug-messed population with altered psyches), we seem to be moving up into ever more complex metaphors for how badly the human machine can get broken when its centres or ‘brains’ are not working in synch.
So here’s what Konuzion came up with to solve the rampant opium addiction: he invented a religion. According to Beelzebub, at that time in history, Konuzion’s subjects were totally unaware of the existence of any heavenly body but the Earth, and thought that the stars were nothing more than a pattern on a black veil. So Konuzion made it known that, on a large island far away, lived a certain ‘Mr. God’ who had attached physical bodies to souls (Konuzion’s subjects) so that they were both able to survive in their own particular physical environment and be able to serve ‘Mr. God’ and the other souls who had been taken to his island. When Konuzion’s subjects ‘died’, he said, they were released from their physical shackles and their souls were transported to ‘Mr. God’s’ island where, depending on how dutifully each soul had behaved when encased in flesh, they would be assigned an appropriate further existence. If the soul had been ‘good’ it was allowed to remain on ‘Mr. God’s’ island; but if it had been ‘bad’; that is, had existed only to satisfy the desires of its flesh, it was shunted off to a neighbouring, smaller island. And just in case his subjects were wondering how such a faraway being could keep tabs on their behaviour, Konuzion invented a grade of invisible ‘spirits’ who wandered around with caps of invisibility (very Harry Potter) and either dobbed in errant subjects immediately or stored it up to snitch on them on a so-called ‘Day of Judgement’. Also, just in case any quick-thinking subjects were thinking of legging it out of Gob so they wouldn’t be reported on, Konuzion told everyone that the entire world, not just Gob and Maralpleicie, was a preparation room for ‘Mr. God’s’ island.
The island itself was called Paradise and was filled with rivers of milk and honey and, for some reason, lots and lots of available lovely young women. There were clothes, jewels and delicious foods, as well as what, equally bizarrely, sounds like heaps of readily available opium and hashish. If you’re thinking there’s a bit of a paradox there, you’re not alone. How does it work that ‘bad’ people get kicked off Paradise if they’ve spent their physical lives satisfying their bodily lusts, but ‘good’ people, who have abstained from all the goodies when alive, are allowed to fully indulge themselves when dead? It’s a bit like telling a tea-totaller that, when they die, they can drink themselves silly. Now, if that all sounds rather silly, well, it’s meant to. Gurdjieff, in telling us about Konuzion’s invented religion, is satirising the ridiculous logic of most world religions – both past and present – and demonstrating them to be rather poorly thought out attempts by authority to regulate public behaviour and keep order. Unfortunately, most humans don’t stop to think just how poorly thought out most religious doctrine is.
And as for the poor buggers who dared to gratify themselves while alive, well they were dispatched to the smaller island called ‘Hell’ with all the attendant horrors and torments that place name conjures up.
Just as an aside, here, it was one of my favourite authors – either Terry Pratchett or Robert Rankin – who, on the subject of ‘Hell’, said they could never get their head around it for the simple reason that the numbers just didn’t seem to add up. It’s just not fair, they said, that any kind of sensible god would condemn somebody to an eternity of torment when they’d only been given 70 odd years to live a good life and had to get it right first time.
So, Beelzebub finishes relating to Hassein the story of King Konuzion and his attempt to stem the opium frenzy in Gob by inventing a religion which he’d hoped would act as a kind of crowd control, and now gets around to describing what happened when Beelzebub himself arrived in the city some considerable time after those events.
By the time of Beelzebub’s arrival, a derivative of Konuzion’s religion was in full swing and holding the population in thrall. There are quite a few almost ‘throw-away’ lines in this particular passage of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson and one of them comes at the point where Beelzebub describes the phenomenon of physical death (the long ago one of Konuzion in this example) as the sacred ‘Rascooarno’. There is a hint, right there, that death, just like birth, is a critical component in the cosmic energy-exchange process, as it serves, again like birth, as an energy separator or refiner, only this time in reverse – but more of that later in the work.
Everyone in Maralpleicie, says Beelzebub upon his arrival there, believed totally in Konuzion’s made-up religion. Although animal sacrifice (for the eradication or, at least, mitigation of which, Beelzebub had been sent to Earth) was nowhere near as bad here as it had been in Tikliamesh, he still needed to find out what was going on, and so, just like in his previous visit, Beezebub’s first action was to haunt the bazaars and chai-shops and attempt to find another Abdil who could tell him what he needed to know and maybe help him achieve his goal.
Beelzebub soon teamed up with a chai-shop owner – although not on such close terms as he had with Abdil – and, after two months, formulated a plan which he put into action. And Beelzebub’s solution to the problem of animal sacrifice in Maralpleicie, was an absolute gem. The chai-shop was one of the largest in Gob, so Beelzebub put it about, through the gossip of the proprietor, that the ‘spirits in invisible caps’ who wandered the Earth taking notes on humans’ behaviour and dobbing them in to ‘Mr. God’ were none other than the very animals that were being destroyed for food and sacrifice. Brilliant! Ingenious! Rather than kill them, said Beelzebub, humans should be treating the animals with kindness and pleading with them not to snitch on their little misdemeanors to ‘Mr. God’.
Inspired by the chai-shop owner’s repentance of his own misdeeds to these animals/spirits, the message spread initially through the other chai-shops of the city and then seeped into the so-called ‘holy’ places. Gurdjieff, by the way, is quite unequivocal when he says that the information that forms the basis for the creation of a ‘holy’ place on Earth is spread by liars. He doesn’t have much time for orthodox religion, does old Gurdjieff – which should be readily apparent to anyone reading these sections of his work which, through parable, highlight the utter absurdity of the premises on which so many religions are based. In fact, Gurdjieff has Beelzebub state at this juncture that the inhabitants of Earth are totally prone to lying – both consciously and unconsciously – about just about anything. We lie consciously, he says, to obtain some material advantage; and unconsciously when we succumb to ‘hysteria’. There! We’ve been told!
The be-kind-to-animals/spirits movement spread and was soon so successful that people went too far and started to revere animals, and even to worship them. Cart drivers were hauled from their vehicles and oxen set free, the best food was thrown to dogs and strays, and choice morsels were cast into the local sea for the fish. Random animal sounds – barks, brays, whatever – were the signal for people to fall to their knees and start calling upon their gods – and they became mortally offended if anybody laughed at them for doing so. So, here, too, Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is spotlighting the utter ludicrousness of human thought where it comes to religion. It is as if some massive, impermeable curtain comes down between reason and belief, and mankind lurches from one absurd belief system to the equally as ridiculous next.
Despite the scathing narrative, though, Gurdjieff does take care to let his readers know that, although he, through Beelzebub, considers the tenets of orthodox religion a ridiculous fiction, he considers it morally reprehensible to ever denigrate another’s beliefs, no matter how unfounded in Reason they may sound. If you think somebody’s beliefs are founded in old tosh, he is saying, seek to persuade otherwise gently: through Reason, and not ridicule, insult, or violence. And I’d just like to add that that applies right across the board; to everything, not just to religion. It all comes down to respect. Respect other people whatever you think of their personal beliefs. There is always some reason why people believe in something or behave in a certain way. Learn to understand your fellow humans – I promise you it’ll make life a lot easier.
The tone of the passage shifts slightly at this point as Gurdjieff broadens out the discussion from religion to include the behaviour of humans in wider society. In a way he is having a crack at the phenomenon of celebrity (a very topical subject now in the first quarter of the 21st Century). His contention is that the more absurdly we comport ourselves, the more outlandishly we promote ourselves, the more ‘stupid, mean, and insolent’ the ‘tricks’ we play, then the more we become noticed and the more our personal fame will spread. Now, in my book, that’s not a one-size-fits-all criticism – there are, after all, some very modest, brilliant people who care deeply for humanity and prefer to stay out of the limelight – but this modern world of ours is certainly becoming one where the superficiality of transient celebrity carries a lot of weight.
Anyway, Beelzebub’s trip to Maralpleicie was a total success, even to the extent that any persons caught attempting animal sacrifice were, themselves, dealt with severely. The passage concludes with Beelzebub, mission accomplished, setting off on a little road trip that would eventually lead him on his first visit to Pearl Land – modern day India.
I guess that, apart from a couple of threads that are beginning to crop up over and over again – such as the need to practise Reason (with a capital R) and some esoteric hints that the whole multiversal shebang is, as the Quantum physicists are beginning to work out, one massive machine for the transformation and exchange of energy in and out of various states (an exchange in which life, all life, plays an integral part) – the message in this passage is fairly obvious: we behave, for the most part, like sheep. Gurdjieff has singled out religion as the best example to show that humans are willing to believe any old tosh if the package promises them something at the end over which they, themselves, have little or no control – e.g. eternal life and bliss. But there are countless others: political doctrines, miraculous cures, ponzi schemes, and con-artistry of every description, to name but a few. But what Beelzebub shows, is that by the application of a little Reason, dogmatic thinking can be derailed and redirected. What he accomplished in Gob, with his ruse of suggesting that the invisible spirits were, in actuality, the sacrificial animals, was manage to derail a preset way of thinking, and that, I think, is the main lesson we need to take out of this passage: Sometimes it takes a piece of new energy, in the form of another way of looking at things, or even the suggestion of another person, to jolt us out of potentially destructive thought patterns. Don’t just blindly do . . . stop and think!
I feel I’ve ranted on enough for now, so I’ll leave it here and hope to see you in the next episode when Beelzebub travels, for the first time, to India.
