Part of the Casswiki article series Books
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man is the first volume of the All and Everything trilogy written by G. I. Gurdjieff, first published in 1950. The All and Everything trilogy also includes Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963) and Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’ (1974).
This is Gurdjieff’s magnum opus, the first of his series on All and Everything.
Gurdjieff himself says that it should be read three times, first as if reading the newspaper, next as if reading aloud and only then with the goal of understanding. Once for the mechanical part of thinking, once for the moving center, once for “being mentation”.
Beelzebub’s Tales is on the surface a narrative of a long voyage on a spaceship, where Beelzebub, rebel angel become elder statesman, discourses on his observations of Earth humanity for the edification of his grandson.
It has been speculated that Beelzebub’s Tales were a sort of karmic autobiography of Gurdjieff himself. As to the grandson, this seems to indicate a message sent to the future. The generations born from 1940 onwards would in fact be Gurdjieff’s figurative grandchildren, at least in potential.
Gurdjieff himself was very conscious of a need to create a certain kernel of consciousness in humanity, to be formed in the relatively near future. He most likely was aware of some cosmic window of opportunity, i.e. the Wave of the Cassiopaeans, for which this was a needed preparation. Gurdjieff’s initial plan seemed to have been forming a worldwide network of schools, transmitting the teaching via a living tradition. Probably due to both his near fatal accident in 1924 and to disappointment with his students, he turned to writing instead, sending a message in a bottle into the present time.
The book’s main thrust is the destruction of the myth that man is a conscious being and in charge of his destiny. Amidst this, Beelzebub’s Tales speaks of esoteric principles but it is not a structured textbook nor is it a course curriculum. For such, Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous and Mouravieff’s Gnosis “Gnosis (book trilogy)”) series are much more accessible and structured.
Why Gurdjieff wrote as he did may not always be clear. We do know that he spent a long time on the work, including one full rewrite. If something is as it is, it is because he intended it so. While writing, he had the book regularly read aloud to his students and if something was too clear, he “buried the dog deeper”, as he himself put it. So one must work through the shocks to human vanity and Gurdjieff’s circuitous expression and often humorous style to glimpse deeper principles.
From the author’s introduction:[1]
In any case, instead of the conventional preface I shall begin quite simply with a Warning. Beginning with a Warning will be very judicious of me, if only because it will not contradict any of my principles, either organic, psychic, or even “willful”, and will at the same time be quite honest-of course, honest in the objective sense, because both I myself and all others who know me well, expect with indubitable certainty that owing to my writings there will entirely disappear in the majority of readers, immediately and not gradually, as must sooner or later, with time, occur to all people, all the wealth they have, which was either handed down to them by inheritance or obtained by their own labor, in the form of quieting notions evoking only naïve dreams, and also beautiful representations of their lives at present as well as of their prospects in the future.
Beelzebub was aimed “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 existing in the world.”
Excerpt from Chapter 48 entitled “From the Author”:[2]
To possess the right to the name of “man,” one must be one.
And to be such, one must first of all, with an indefatigable persistence and an unquenchable impulse of desire, issuing from all the separate independent parts constituting one’s entire common presence, that is to say, with a desire issuing simultaneously from thought, feeling, and organic instinct, work on an all-round knowledge of oneself—at the same time struggling unceasingly with one’s subjective weaknesses—and then afterwards, taking one’s stand upon the results thus obtained by one’s consciousness alone, concerning the defects in one’s established subjectivity as well as the elucidated means for the possibility of combating them, strive for their eradication without mercy towards oneself.
Speaking frankly, and wholly without partiality, contemporary man as we know him is nothing more nor less than merely a clockwork mechanism, though of a very complex construction.
About his mechanicality, a man must without fail think deeply from every aspect and with an entire absence of partiality and well understand it, in order fully to appreciate what significance that mechanicality and all its involved consequences and results may have both for his own further life as well as for the justification of the sense and aim of his arising and existence.
For one who desires to study human mechanicality in general and to make it clear to himself, the very best object of study is he himself with his own mechanicality; and to study this practically and to understand it sensibly, with all one’s being, and not “psychopathically,” that is, with only one part of one’s entire presence, is possible only as a result of correctly conducted self-observation.
And as regards this possibility of correctly conducting self observation and conducting it without the risk of incurring the maleficent consequences which have more than once been observed from people’s attempts to do this without proper knowledge, it is necessary that the warning must be given—in order to avoid the possibility of excessive zeal—that our experience, based on the vast exact information we have, has shown that this is not so simple a thing as at first glance it may appear. This is why we make the study of the mechanicality of contemporary man the groundwork of a correctly conducted self-observation.
Before beginning to study this mechanicality and all the principles for a correctly conducted self- observation, a man in the first place must decide, once and forever, that he will be sincere with himself unconditionally, will shut his eyes to nothing, shun no results wherever they may lead him, be afraid of no inferences, and be limited by no previous, self-imposed limits; and secondly, in order that the elucidation of these principles may be properly perceived and transubstantiated in the followers of this new teaching, it is necessary to establish a corresponding form of “language,” since we find the established form of language quite unsuitable for such elucidations.
As regards the first condition, it is necessary now at the very outset to give warning that a man unaccustomed to think and act along lines corresponding to the principles of self-observation must have great courage to accept sincerely the inferences obtained and not to lose heart; and submitting to them, to continue those principles further with the crescendo of persistence, obligatorily requisite for this.
These inferences may, as is said, “upset” all the convictions and beliefs previously deep-rooted in a man, as well as also the whole order of his ordinary mentation; and, in that event, he might be robbed, perhaps forever, of all the pleasant as is said “values dear to his heart,” which have hitherto made up his calm and serene life.
Thanks to correctly conducted self-observation, a man will from the first days clearly grasp and indubitably establish his complete powerlessness and helplessness in the face of literally everything around him.
With the whole of his being he will be convinced that everything governs him, everything directs him. He neither governs nor directs anything at all. He is attracted and repelled not only by everything animate which has in itself the capacity to influence the arising of some or other association in him, but even by entirely inert and inanimate things.
Without any self-imagination or self-calming—impulses which have become inseparable from contemporary men—he will cognize that his whole life is nothing but a blind reacting to the said attractions and repulsions.
He will clearly see how his what are called world-outlooks, views, character, taste, and so on are molded—in short, how his individuality was formed and under what influences its details are liable to change. And as regards the second indispensable condition, that is, the establishment of a correct language; this is necessary because our still recently established language which has procured, so to say, “rights-of-citizenship,” and in which we speak, convey our knowledge and notions to others, and write books, has, in our opinion already become such as to be now quite worthless for any more or less exact exchange of opinions.
The words of which our contemporary language consists, convey, owing to the arbitrary thought people put into them, indefinite and relative notions, and are therefore perceived by average people “elastically.”
In obtaining just this abnormality in the life of man, a part was played in our opinion, by always that same established abnormal system of education of the rising generation. And it played a part because, based, as we have already said, chiefly on compelling the young to “learn by rote” as many words as possible differentiated one from the other only by the impression received from their consonance and not by the real pith of the meaning put into them, this system of education has resulted in the gradual loss in people of the capacity to ponder and reflect upon what they are talking about and upon what is being said to them.