The three most central characters in all of Beelzebub’s Tales are ENDLESSNESS, Ashiata, and Beelzebub.  The way in which these characters develop as Gurdjieff’s narrative unfolds implies meanings that can be taken from multiple levels, including metaphysical, religious, psychological, and even anatomical.

As Religious Myths

First, we take them religiously.  ENDLESSNESS represents God, creator of the Universe.  Beelzebub represents Devil, opposing God through his revolt.  Ashiata, interestingly, came to replace Jesus in Gurdjieff’s early drafts of Beelzebub’s Tales, represents the messianic principle of Redeemer, ultimately reconciling Beelzebub and ENDLESSNESS.

Gurdjieff’s story of God, his young devil attendant, and the divine messenger who helps them get along, rather than being religious, pokes fun at religion.  Contradictions found in the stories of all three of these characters lead away from a literal interpretation.  Some Gurdjieffian’s I have spoken to believe Gurdjieff’s teaching to include God;  ENDLESSNESS existing on a planet may in fact be literal according to them.  Gurdjieff’s aside about human’s view of God as an old man with a beard and a comb in his left pocket (see chapter Purgatory), disparages this view.  We will see further reasons to believe ENDLESSNESS is allegorical when we consider him as an autobiographical allegory for Gurdjieff.   Gurdjieff’s depiction of an “endless God” running out of time (again, see Chapter “Purgatory”), his placement of a devil as the lead protagonist, and a bungling, inept Savior who appears to have a darker side brought out in the character of Lentrohamsanin, all serve to paint a satire of religions and those would be consider themselves “Messengers of Divinity”.

The comic irreverence of Gurdjieff’s caricatures of traditional religious icons forms a critique of Western religions and notions of Sainthood (the “Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash).  It also links up with parallel commentaries on philosophy and psychology.

Metaphysics

One branch of philosophy, metaphysics, deals with first principles such as being, existence, and reality.  Looked at in this sense, ENDLESSNESS, Beelzebub, and Ashiata, introduced in Chapter 2, represent fundamental archetypes.  In Gurdjieff’s metaphysical system, they most obviously represent Active, Passive, and Reconciling, respectively.  Beelzebub embodies the second force, rebelling and resisting.  ENDLESSNESS exemplifies active or dominating, banishing the impetuous young devil.  Ashiata, who mediates between Beelzebub and ENDLESSNESS, symbolizes the ultimate Reconciler.  In Gurdjieff’s system, they embody his Law of Three.

Gurdjieff’s claims about the Law of Three as a universal principle interested many of his students predisposed toward an intellectual form of Esotericism.  Esotericism frequently intimates knowledge of a kind of underlying code, meaningful pattern, or “secret” providing the key to understanding reality.  The implication of a “secret”, undisclosed by an “elect” group of knowledgeable beings, utilizes a psychology of scarcity that some find compelling.  It may also create an imaginary world of self-importance for those who mistakenly feel they personally are already privy to such “secrets.”

Gurdjieff’s Law of Three, understood as a claim about universal patterns found in reality, can be easily associated with popular mathematical sequences and insights such as the Fibonnaci Sequence, fractal patterns, and others.  These fascinating and sensationalized bits taken from mathematics have done heavy lifting for the contemporary occult imagination.  However, as we shall see, Gurdjieff used his Law of Three also in a philosophical sense.  Many have noted similarities to Samkhaya Hindu philosophy with its three Gunas or the Trinity of Christianity.  Later on in this article we will explore how the Law of Three and his use of religious characters allowed him to simultaneously caricature religion and develop a cohesive metaphysics to rival traditional religious conceptions.  Gurdjieff is quoted as saying his whim was to “change people’s conception of God.”

In other articles (“Exoticism in the Works of GI Gurdjieff,” and “Moonshine, Science, and Knowledge”), I have written about Gurdjieff’s conscious use of pseudo-Esotericism in his work with students and as an unsanctioned researcher.  As discussed, his Esotericism’s rich blend of satire and profundity intentionally obscure the boundary between seriousness and comedy, requiring subtlety of thought from the reader.  His “Laws” were not meant to be taken literally.  However, they do have pragmatic uses in how he constructed attention exercises in movements, music, and literature, in the sense that his art works are deeply patterned.  It is clear upon examination that Gurdjieff used numbers and mathematical sequencing to develop his works of Art.  This is not entirely surprising as he consistently claimed in his lectures that Objective Art was constructed mathematically.

In order to understand the Law of Three, and the characters we are considering, in Gurdjieff’s metaphysics, it helps to review a little about how Gurdjieff described forces in early lectures.  Gurdjieff, in talks recorded by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous, describes the three fundamental forces of Active, Passive, and Reconciling as being the fundamental forces generating all experienced phenomena, including external material forces and internal psychological states.  Examples of the three forces externally have been enumerated ad naseum in other Gurdjieffian literature, so I won’t go into many examples.  Briefly, we have  in electricity positive, negative, and neutralizing as a physical example.  In writing we have thesis, antitheses, synthesis.  In biology, male, female, and child.  There are many other possible examples that would appear to “fit” this particular three-fold pattern.

In short, Gurdjieff presented a kind of dialectic between three forces.  Three forces were used to generate the Ray of Creation with its various levels.  His Table of Hydrogens enlarged a sense of the intricacy and lawfulness of interactions between these levels, correlating them with various “worlds” along a spectrum of consciousness.  Gurdjieff described a situation of changing roles and relationships elaborated by force carrying substances.  For instance, a given substance would play the role of Oxygen, carrying the Passive Force in World 3, while at the same time carrying the Active Force in the role of Carbon in the next lower world.  The dynamism and relativity expressed in this paradigm imparted a sense of an alive and moving cosmos, imbued with intelligence; a vast, teeming Universe nonetheless susceptible to mechanical description.

Psychological

What may not have been obvious to those Gurdjieff was teaching at the time, and which becomes clear after prolonged study of his writings, is that diagrams from Gurdjieff’s Russian Period (for a thorough discussion of Gurdjieff’s teaching periods, read Roger Lipsey’s Gurdjieff Reconsidered) were attempts to convey insights into our direct perception of reality.  Gurdjieff, within the limited culture and tools available to him, was already toying with a primitive science of mind and consciousness, exploring the relationship and boundaries between subjective perceptions and objective reality.  He is recorded as often speaking of a “special chemistry” to students.  I suggest he was employing this rather esoteric sounding phrase in a psychological sense.  In the Tales, there is a thread of passages containing references to chemistry or chemical substances. These passages, placed at intervals throughout the text, I suggest imply a science of thought and feeling associations, rather than a literal reference to physical chemistry. This brings out an additional dimension of meaning to what he refers to in his preface as his “hobby of ‘human mentation'”.

Here we arrive at the psychological layer of Gurdjieff’s allegory.  The central idea I want to present is the idea of three forces being used to generate combinations of thought and feeling.  If we take on board, first, the idea of forces being used combinatorially to prompt novel thought and feeling complexes and, second, look at the Tales with that in mind, we find characters who may be interpreted simultaneously from multiple aspects.  Each aspect itself develops an independent theme.  This independent theme, once clearly visualized by the reader, then dovetails with parallel themes engendered by adjacent points of view of one and the same character.  In the coarsest sense, we see the archetypal embodiment of the three forces in the characters ENDLESSNESS, Beelzebub, and Ashiata as principles.  In increasingly subtle or sensitive senses, we will find intra-personal and inter-personal spectrums established by the various perspectives from which these characters may be viewed, as well as the relationships between those perspectives.  These three different characters, by being considered from different angles, prompt a kind of algorithmic and combinatorial play of viewpoints across levels.

To try and make this concrete, first we will begin with establishing how ENDLESSNESS, Beelzebub, and Ashiata Shiemash can all be seen as metaphors symbolizing Gurdjieff, the author, himself.  Then we will swivel, viewing them as representing the reader, who in the pattern of wisdom traditions, we consider to be author’s student.  With these two views in mind for all three characters, we can examine how all these views, when held together, trigger still deeper and increasingly meaningful ideas.

Two Views

Beginning with Beelzebub as representing Gurdjieff.  Why would we look at him this way?  First, he is the mouthpiece of Gurdjieff’s book.  “Beelzebub’s Tales” are very much so “Gurdjieff’s Tales”; all we must do is simply substitute Beelzebub for Gurdjieff.  Gurdjieff chose to wear Beelzebub as a performance costume in order to highlight his devilishness, which comes through very strongly in the playful tone of the book’s preface.  Second, Beelzebub’s journeys in Ors recapitulate much of Gurdjieff’s own life story:  Beelzebub visits Tibet, India, Central Asia, Egypt, Russia, Germany, France, and America, tracing Gurdjieff’s own travels.

Holding Beelzebub aside, let’s now also consider ENDLESSNESS as representing Gurdjieff.  The fundamental inexactitude in the story of ENDLESSNESS reflects Gurdjieff’s dilemma after his car accident: he was running out of time.  The irony is that “ENDLESSNESS”, who should never end, is running out of time as Sun Absolute gradually erodes.  Noticing this, his response is to create a Universe.  Gurdjieff, after his car accident, realized he did not have enough time to accomplish his aim of starting a world wide institute for social and spiritual change, and decided to instead write Beelzebub’s Tales.  Beelzebub’s Tales is a fictional Universe of Gurdjieff’s own making, a kind of “Gurdjieff-Land”, like some odd, quasi-sci-fi, quasi-occult theme park.  This parallel elicits the notion that ENDLESSNESS represents Gurdjieff, and the Universe he creates represents the Universe of Gurdjieff’s teaching instantiated in Beelzebub’s tales.  Beelzebub’s Tales, with its very cosmology of ENDLESSNESS and the Ray of Creation, represents the author “emanating” his literary magnum opus.  Once this thought has been established, many other parallels ensue.  For instance, one could expand on further relationships between the description of the Ray of Creation in the chapter Purgatory and Gurdjieff’s book.  The description of the various worlds and their interrelationship correspond to the levels of meaning contained in the book’s symbolism.

Ashiata as Gurdjieff:  Ashiata’s story of starting an organization that later fails represents the story of Gurdjieff’s attempt to found his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.  Ashiata, as a divine messenger charged with a mission, thematically parallels Gurdjieff’s sense of himself (and his student’s sense of him) as having a mission to impart a teaching to the West.

Considering each of these characters and their stories in turns, we see how each can represent Gurdjieff.  The character’s differing external qualities allow the author to expand upon various aspects of his own life and character, viewed personally and by others around him.  Beelzebub brings out his rebellious and revolutionary stance against contemporary culture as well as his personal travels; ENDLESSNESS and his run-in with Time gives a sense of the shock Gurdjieff felt after working tirelessly right up until his car accident, after which things seemed to increasingly fall apart; Ashiata brings out his role as a kind of spiritual messenger with a fresh teaching for humanity.

The split of Gurdjieff into these three characters gives a view into the parts of himself as well as phases of his life.  Beelzebub is the young Gurdjieff traveling in Asia all the way up until he lands in France.  Ashiata represents Gurdjieff in the period of starting his Institute.  One possible reason the chapters containing the story of Ashiata come after the first five descents of Beelzebub could be the transition of outward role that Gurdjieff was playing as a developing person.  When he was young, he travelled all over Asia in search of hidden knowledge, under the influence of theosophical ideas he got from, among others, Madame Blavatasky.  This would be one reason why the first five flights, which take place in Asia, also contain absurdities about Atlantis, Korkaptilnian thought tapes, and ancient Gobi Desert civilizations:  Gurdjieff in his wanderings was motivated by those false expectations.  What he found destroyed those childish fantasies, but replaced them with the more concrete knowledge he encountered in living Wisdom Traditions in the East.  Once he had learned from those traditions, he was to return to Europe, now as Ashiata, an emissary of the East carrying the Eastern Wisdom, a knowledge of his previous naivety in tow.

After the Ashiata chapters, there is a brief return to the Fifth Flight in the chapter on Art, before starting in on Beelzebub’s Sixth Sojourn, which takes up the bulk of the rest of the remaining two books.  Whole chapters are devoted to countries he travelled in, such as “Russia”, “Germany” (a wee bit more about the Germans), “France”, and “America”.  This time period represents his period of teaching.  Here we find a different Beelzebub, a Beelzebub who has gone through a fundamental shift, represented in the psychic dichotomy explored in the Ashiata/Lentrohamsanin chapters.  The dichotomy of Ashiata and Lentrohamsanin is a thematic parallel of the God-Devil duality found in the dyad ENDLESSNESS-Beelzebub.  The placement of these chapters at this point in Beelzebub’s Descent’s shows it as a kind of psychological turning point for him.  He transitions into being a teacher who has an autonomous inner life but can manifest outwardly for the benefit of his pupils in two guises: either Ashiata or Lentrohamsanin.

We can entertain the idea that Ashiata represents Gurdjieff’s teaching phase as a middle aged adult as well his attempts to found an Institute.  This, as we said, is explored in the last sojourn and other chapters on various countries, all the way up until we are introduced to ENDLESSNESS in the chapter Purgatory.  Here, we find Gurdjieff’s second major transition, represented by the dilemma of ENDLESSNESS regarding Time.  As stated, this is the point when Gurdjieff realized he did not have time or the physical stamina to start the Institute he had dreamed of, and instead decided to produce Beelzebub’s Tales.  The picture of the old-man ENDLESSNESS, with his beard, is similar to the picture given of the old Beelzebub at the beginning of the book: a picture of a tired Gurdjieff who is ready to pass everything on to the Reader, represented by Hassein.

To this point, we have looked at Beelzebub, Ashiata, and ENDLESSNESS as all representing Gurdjieff.  Beelzebub, the hero in the story, represents the arc of Gurdjieff’s whole journey, while Ashiata and ENDLESSNESS represent transformational turning points in his development.  The accumulation of all three in the person of Gurdjieff represents a kind of intra-personal dynamic that gives a great deal of texture to his autobiography.

Next we shift our perspective and consider the three archetypes as symbolizing the reader.

Beelzebub represents the reader in the sense that the reader, through listening about the old devil’s journeys, in a sense travels with him and partakes of his experiences, thereby garnering the same experience him or herself.  This happens in a several sense.  First, in putting together Gurdjieff’s personal story as embedded, the reader acquires depth, learning from Gurdjieff’s triumphs as well as his mistakes.  Second, the reader, in overcoming the various obstacles set by the narrator, develops an attention and being corresponding to that developed by Beelzebub in his travels.

The reader may also be Beelzebub in the sense that the reader is taken on by Gurdjieff much as Beelzebub was taken on by ENDLESSNESS.  As we saw, ENDLESSNESS represents Gurdjieff writing Beelzebub’s Tales, and the readers struggle against the difficulties of Beelzebub’s Tales is symbolized in one sense by Beelzebub’s revolution against ENDLESSNESS.  The reader must reject a literal interpretation of many of the stories, opting for a deeper and more common sense understanding.  In another sense, ENDLESSNESS’ banishment of Beelzebub to Ors where he must go through a series of journeys and learning experiences, which we noted are the learning experiences the reader will undergo, is Gurdjieff’s banishment of the reader by means of a difficult and arduous literary style.  In other words, Gurdjieff, in making the Tales difficult to read, has banished the reader: they must wade through a proverbial hell of red herrings, neologisms, apparent non-sequiturs, and a host of other difficulties.  The reader’s struggle through the Tales recapitulates the struggles towards understanding Gurdjieff himself surmounted.  The process of integrating the book simulates the process of psychological integration Gurdjieff’s Work presented.

Through the correlation of the reader with the revolutionary Beelzebub, we see that Gurdjieff wanted his readership to consist of rebels.  He didn’t want sycophants, but critical thinkers who would see all of the “illogicalities” in the Tales.  (As I’ve said elsewhere, Gurdjieff made inexactitudes, which are illogical by definition, the basis of his Legominism’s alphabet.)

The reader can also be seen in the character of ENDLESSNESS.  What is ENDLESSNESS but a silly image of a false god existing on some figmentary planet in the vast sea of space, all the while thinking himself to be at the center of the entire Universe.  This is the picture of ego:  the sense of self and the concomitant relativizing of the world around one’s own views, opinions and subjective values.  What at the end of the book does Gurdjieff say could possibly rid human beings of ego?  Contemplation of the inevitability of death.  This is portrayed in ENDLESSNESS’ realization of his own death, the inevitability of time eroding his abode (physical body).  The resultant need for the ray of creation represents the transformation of the reader through subsequent levels of development, those levels begin symbolized by the “worlds” in the Ray of Creation.

We see here a parallel in the ray of creation emanating from ENDLESSNESS-the-reader and the ray of creation emanating from ENDLESSNESS-the-author.  Both Rays represent the Tales: one the development of the stories by the author, and the other, the conceptualizing of them by the reader.  Looked at diagramatically, the reader ascends the Ray, while the author’s work descends, going in opposite directions.

Now for Ashiata as the reader.  Ashiata, like ENDLESSNESS, can be viewed sarcastically.  His status as divine messenger represents Gurdjieff’s pupils’ inflated sense of themselves as being on a mission sent from God (Gurdjieff) and also overvaluation of themselves.  This would take a little more explanation, but we can say that the Ashiata/Lentrohamsanin dualism represents the dualism Gurdjieff perceived in the average undeveloped human being.  Gurdjieff noted a contradiction between people’s self image and their actual worth in objective terms.  The SunAbsolute-Ors complex (explored elsewhere) allows us to see Ashiata’s perception that he is on a special mission to a special place to help someone else contrasted with the reality that he has been duped into taking on a situation for which he is not truly prepared.  He has taken on a task which he would not have chosen had he known what it would entail, but which will ultimately lead to an enrichment of his character.  Ashiata, in a futuristic sense, can also be seen as representing a future reader who would decipher Gurdjieff’s writings and attempt to finish what Gurdjieff had failed to complete in his lifetime: the creation of an institute for social and spiritual change.

We got into one of the complex parallelisms above with the comparison of what the Ray of Creation emanating from Holy Sun Absolute means in the context of ENDLESSNESS representing Gurdjieff versus representing the Reader.  For a fuller discussion of this topic, read my future post.