Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson by G.I. Gurdjieff: All and Everything

The Book

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson was the central project of Gurdjieff's later years. He began dictating it in the 1920s (initially in Armenian and Russian, while recovering from a near-fatal car accident in 1924) and continued revising it until shortly before his death in 1949. The book was first published posthumously in 1950.

The frame narrative is science fiction: Beelzebub, an extraterrestrial being of great age and wisdom, has been exiled to our solar system for youthful rebellion against cosmic authority. During a space voyage with his grandson Hassein, he describes the results of his six visits to Earth, where he has observed the bizarre behaviour of "three-brained beings" (humans) over many millennia. Through Beelzebub's observations, Gurdjieff presents his cosmology, his psychology, his critique of human civilisation, and his prescriptions for genuine development.

The book is approximately 1,200 pages in the standard English edition. It is written in deliberately convoluted prose, with sentences that sometimes run for an entire page, technical vocabulary invented by Gurdjieff (Heptaparaparshinokh, Trogoautoegocrat, Iraniranumange), and digressions that can extend for dozens of pages before returning to the main narrative. The difficulty is not accidental. It is the book's primary teaching tool.

Who Was Gurdjieff?

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c. 1866-1949) was born in Alexandropol (now Gyumri, Armenia), near the border between the Russian and Ottoman empires. The details of his early life are obscure and partly mythologised (see Meetings with Remarkable Men for his own account), but the broad outlines are known: he spent years travelling in Central Asia, the Middle East, Egypt, and possibly Tibet and India, studying esoteric traditions, before emerging in Moscow in 1912 with a fully developed system he called "the Fourth Way."

The Fourth Way is distinguished from the three traditional paths of spiritual development: the way of the fakir (mastery of the body), the way of the monk (mastery of the emotions), and the way of the yogi (mastery of the mind). The Fourth Way works on all three simultaneously, in the conditions of ordinary life rather than in monasteries, ashrams, or retreats. It requires no withdrawal from the world but a fundamental change in how one inhabits the world: from mechanical sleep to conscious presence.

Gurdjieff taught through a combination of methods: physical work (the Movements, a system of sacred dances), psychological exercises (self-observation, self-remembering), group dynamics (the deliberate creation of friction to reveal automatic reactions), and oral teaching. Beelzebub's Tales is the written component of this multi-modal teaching, and it is designed to do with the written word what the Movements do with the body: disrupt automatism and force conscious engagement.

Why the Book Is Deliberately Difficult

Gurdjieff stated his aim explicitly: "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." This is not a metaphor. The book is literally designed to demolish the reader's habitual way of processing information.

The methods include:

• Convoluted syntax: Sentences that require sustained attention to parse, preventing the habitual skimming that most reading involves
• Invented terminology: Neologisms that cannot be translated into familiar concepts, forcing the reader to build new cognitive structures rather than mapping the content onto existing ones
• Deliberate digressions: Extended tangents that test the reader's patience and reward it with unexpected connections
• Relentless length: 1,200 pages that cannot be consumed in a weekend, requiring sustained commitment over weeks or months
• Contradictions: Apparent inconsistencies that force the reader to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously rather than settling into a single interpretation

The result is that reading Beelzebub's Tales is itself a form of "work on oneself." The reader who persists develops capacities (sustained attention, tolerance of ambiguity, resistance to automatic pattern-matching) that are precisely the capacities the Fourth Way aims to develop. The book does not merely describe the Work. It is the Work, enacted through the act of reading.

The Character of Beelzebub

Beelzebub is not the Christian devil. He is an extraterrestrial being of immense age, wisdom, and compassion who has been exiled to our solar system (specifically, to the planet Mars) for a youthful act of rebellion against cosmic authority. He has since been pardoned and is returning home when the story begins. During the voyage, he tells his grandson about his observations of Earth's "three-brained beings" (humans).

Beelzebub is Gurdjieff's mouthpiece, but he is more than a narrative device. He represents the perspective of objective consciousness: the view of humanity from above, free from the distortions of identification, ego, and cultural conditioning. Beelzebub sees humans as they actually are, not as they believe themselves to be, and his descriptions are simultaneously compassionate (he genuinely cares about humanity's welfare) and devastating (he does not soften the truth about their condition).

The choice of an extraterrestrial narrator allows Gurdjieff to describe human behaviour with the detachment of an anthropologist studying a foreign culture. Practices that seem normal to humans (war, organised religion, formal education, modern medicine) are described from the outside, revealing their absurdity, their mechanical nature, and their failure to serve the purposes they claim to serve. This defamiliarization effect is one of the book's most powerful tools.

The Organ Kundabuffer

Gurdjieff's most distinctive mythological invention is the organ Kundabuffer, which provides his explanation for humanity's spiritual condition.

According to the story, higher cosmic beings (the "Most Most Holy Sun Absolute" and its agents) needed to stabilize the Earth's moon after a cosmic catastrophe. They required humanity to produce certain psychic energies to feed the Moon's development. But humans, perceiving their true condition (that they were being used as energy-producing machines for cosmic purposes), began committing mass suicide. To prevent this, the higher beings implanted an organ at the base of the human spine (the Kundabuffer) that caused humans to perceive reality upside down: to see the pleasant as unpleasant and the unpleasant as pleasant, to take the illusory for the real, and to believe themselves conscious when they were actually asleep.

The organ was later removed (once the Moon's stabilization was achieved), but its effects persisted: humanity remained unable to perceive reality accurately. The "consequences of the organ Kundabuffer" constitute the entirety of what Gurdjieff calls "human sleep": the mechanical, automatic, self-deceiving condition in which most people live their entire lives.

The Kundabuffer story is not meant to be taken as literal history. It is a myth: a narrative that encodes a psychological truth too large and too uncomfortable to be stated directly. The truth it encodes is: you are not conscious. You believe you are, but that belief is itself a symptom of the unconsciousness. The organ has been removed, but the habit of sleeping has not.

The Law of Three

The first of Gurdjieff's two fundamental cosmic laws: every phenomenon, at every scale, arises from the interaction of three forces:

1. The affirming force (Holy-Affirming): The active, initiating, creative principle
2. The denying force (Holy-Denying): The passive, resisting, opposing principle
3. The reconciling force (Holy-Reconciling): The neutralizing, balancing, integrating principle

Nothing happens from one force alone. The affirming force (desire to change) meets the denying force (resistance to change) and nothing happens until the reconciling force (a new understanding, a teacher, a shock, a crisis) enters and enables the interaction to produce a result.

The Law of Three operates at every level: cosmic (the creation of worlds), organic (the growth of organisms), psychological (the development of consciousness), and social (the dynamics of groups). Understanding it is not merely intellectual but practical: the Fourth Way student learns to identify the three forces in every situation and to work with them consciously rather than being passively affected by them.

The Law of Seven (The Law of Octaves)

The second fundamental law: every process develops through seven stages, corresponding to the seven notes of the musical scale (do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do). Between certain notes (mi-fa and si-do), there are natural "intervals" where the process slows, deviates, or reverses unless additional energy is applied.

This explains a universal human experience: why good intentions fade, why diets fail, why revolutions degenerate, why personal resolutions dissolve. The process begins with energy and enthusiasm (do-re-mi) but hits the first interval (mi-fa) where the original impulse is insufficient to continue. Without a "shock" (an additional influx of energy at the right moment), the process either stops or deflects in a different direction.

The practical implication: sustained development requires conscious effort at specific critical points. You cannot simply start a process and expect it to continue automatically. The Law of Seven guarantees that it will not. At the intervals, conscious intervention is required. This is why the Fourth Way emphasizes "shocks": deliberate disruptions of mechanical patterns that provide the additional energy needed to carry a process through its critical points.

The Ray of Creation

Gurdjieff presents a cosmology in which the universe is organized as a hierarchy of worlds, each level subject to an increasing number of laws:

Humanity, living on Earth (48 laws), is in a relatively low position: heavily constrained, largely mechanical, and far from the freedom of the Absolute (1 law). But the human being has the potential to ascend: through conscious work, the individual can come under fewer laws, achieving progressively greater freedom. This ascent is the purpose of the Fourth Way.

Human Sleep

Gurdjieff's most disturbing teaching, presented relentlessly throughout Beelzebub's Tales, is that human beings are asleep. Not physically asleep (that would be obvious) but psychologically asleep: functioning automatically, reacting mechanically, believing themselves conscious when they are actually running on habit, conditioning, and the residual effects of the Kundabuffer.

The symptoms of sleep include:

• Identification: Losing oneself in every experience, thought, or emotion. Being "taken" by whatever happens
• Internal considering: Constantly monitoring how others perceive you, driven by vanity and fear
• Imagination: Living in mental fantasies rather than perceiving actual reality
• Lying: Not deliberate deception but the automatic, unconscious distortion of reality to match one's self-image
• Multiplicity: Having no unified "I" but many contradictory "I"s, each claiming to be the whole person

The cure for sleep is self-remembering: the deliberate act of being present to oneself while engaged in external activity. This sounds simple. It is almost impossibly difficult. Try it: maintain awareness of yourself (your body, your breathing, your inner state) while simultaneously doing something else (reading, walking, talking). You will discover that self-remembering lasts a few seconds before you "forget" and return to mechanical functioning. This forgetting is sleep.

All and Everything: The Three Series

Beelzebub's Tales is the first of three series constituting Gurdjieff's complete written legacy:

• First Series: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, "An objectively impartial criticism of the life of man." The cosmology, psychology, and merciless critique of human sleep
• Second Series: Meetings with Remarkable Men, "Material for a new creation." Gurdjieff's autobiography, describing the teachers and seekers he encountered in his search for genuine knowledge
• Third Series: Life Is Real Only Then, When "I Am", "Only then when I am." Inner exercises and Gurdjieff's final, most intimate teachings, left incomplete at his death

The three series are designed to be read in order, each building on the previous. The first series destroys: it demolishes the reader's habitual views. The second series prepares: it presents models of genuine seekers. The third series creates: it provides the inner exercises for actual development.

How to Read Beelzebub's Tales

Who Should Read It

Serious students of the Fourth Way who want Gurdjieff's own presentation of his system (rather than Ouspensky's more systematic but less direct account in In Search of the Miraculous).

Readers who have tried and failed to read the book before. The difficulty lessens on subsequent attempts, and the book's rewards increase exponentially after the first 200 pages.

Anyone who suspects that they are not as conscious as they believe. The book is a mirror, and what it reflects is not flattering but is (Gurdjieff insists) accurate.

Not recommended as a first encounter with Gurdjieff. Start with In Search of the Miraculous or Tertium Organum for the ideas in accessible form, then approach Beelzebub when ready for the full experience.

Where to Buy

Buy Beelzebub's Tales (Penguin Compass) on Amazon

Frequently Asked Questions