Beelzebub
Beelzebub
So anyone who has talked to me for more than three beers in the last several months has probably heard me extolling the greatness of George Gurdjieff (G from here on), and in particular his “magnum opus” “Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson”.
On a recent trip to a place where Powell’s Books exists, I bought a copy of this book (which is 1100+ pages long) that had been unbound and rebound in 4 spiral bound bits of up to 300 pages each. This format makes it much easier to read, but does not change the content. G is rather wordy, and is contemporary to Crowley, but at least Crowley started out writing in English. The original text was written in a combination of Armenian, Greek and Russian. One translated phrase that comes up a lot: “the strangeness of the psyche of the three-brained beings on that planet which has taken your fancy”.
It took me a long-ass time to read this book. I tried three different occasions: the first time i made it 300+ pages before i bogged down, the second time i made it to page 700 or so, and I finaly finished it about 4 years ago (starting from page 1 each time). I have been looking for a long time for someone to read it start to finish so i would have someone to read it with. At this time, there are two people in my life attempting the feat. I’m on page 98 of my rereading it. This time, it is not an imposing very difficult book, but rather like getting to know an old friend after a long absence.
G wrote this book as a response to his teachings being warped beyond recognition in his absence (think christianity or maybe even thelema for similar effects). While G does not forbid “changing not the form of a letter”, he makes it very difficult read this without making one’s own conclusions. He avoids using common words like “love”, but favors making up words that convey his meaning unambiuguously. An example is the word “heptaparaparshinokh”, which a loose understanding could be analogized as “7 fold division”, and more funamentally refers to the science of octaves.
The story is about Beelzebub, who in his youth was involved in the creation of all and everything, but had the fire of youth, and the limited understanding to think he knoew better than Our Endless Creator about how the universe should work. For his crimes, he was banished to an obscure system called “Ors” in which there is a third planet that has all kinds of problems stemming from a wayward comet colliding wiht the planet and creating a natural satellite (known as “Moon” to its natives) and all the troubles ensuing from the archangels trying to fix it.
There are a lot of amazing things in this book. For instance, while it was written in the 1940s, it made the outrageous claim that our planet has more than one moon (can anyone tell me how many natural satellites we know of? According to current science, the incorrect answer is “1”).
Anyways, I’m just short of 100 pages, and i’m enjoying the heck out of this. It’s not a normal part of the thelemic reading list, but has a lot of good things to recommend it. I’ve recently heard of a book called “the anthropologist from Mars” and I suspect that that author was at least tangentially inspired by G.
i open the floor for discussion of this, “esoteric Christianity”, and anything else you might think is related….