Brief Notes for All & Everything Conference Seminar on Chapter 14
‘The Beginnings of Perspectives Promising Nothing Very Cheerful’
& story-telling
Wellbeloved, Sophia
Looking at the
tradition or traditions of stories within which Gurdjieff has decided to frame
his narrative enables us, as readers, to place the text outside the confines of
his own teaching theory, and read it in relation to the wider context of its own
cultural, mythological, scriptural and philosophical origins.
Gurdjieff
uses the word beginnings in his title and so we might expect to find some
references to origins or beginnings. In terms of myth those which
explain/explore the beginnings and origins of, for example, creation, the moon,
of man, of the beginnings of agriculture are termed aetiological myths, (from
aetiology the science or philosophy of origins and causes).
The word
perspectives can mean either an optical instrument, microscope or telescope, or
a view as in vista, or a representation of the view, so a means of viewing or a
view. Put together this suggests the origins of views which in ‘promising
nothing very cheerful, we could understand as ‘unpromising views’, maybe
pessimistic views.
Gurdjieff does start this brief chapter with a direct
mention of Atlantis, this myth has its written origin in Plato’s Timaeus and has
retained a place in story-telling ever since. It is an early story which has
itself been the origin of pessimistic views about humanity, civilizations,
catastrophic destruction and uncertain futures, brought about by human as well
as natural causes.
Concerning the loss of Atlantis, which is what
Beelzebub mentions here, its sinking into the sea is likely to be read by a
Gurdjieff reader as a reference to his notion that human conscience has sunk
into the subconscious. Especially as the sea is often a symbol for the inner
deep. But a wider look at the Atlantis myth, as an idealised ‘higher’
civilization which fell due to natural catastrophe, shows it to be within the
pattern for other Falls presented in the Tales. The first disaster came about
due to the comet Kondoor’s collision with earth, this itself was a cause, which
led to the creation of the Moon and Anulios, and to the changes Beelzebub
mentions here in the life span and quality of vibrations of earth beings. Later
in the Tales Beelzebub will return to the Fall of other great centres of
culture, in the past Babylon, in the future Paris.
The notions of
recurring catastrophes, comes down through Western European culture from
Babylonian astrological thinking of around the third century BC and reflects
their ideas about time. They understood that the universe would come to an end
recurringly, one end would be by flood, being the result of a line up of planets
in the sign of Capricorn, and one end by fire being the result of a line up of
planets in the sign of Cancer (these are the solstices, winter and summer).
The flood story is an excellent one to point out how a story can be
interpreted to indicate a change of thinking. In the Biblical Fall Adam and
Eve’s loss of grace and expulsion is the cause and origin of time, (mirrored in
the Tales by the expulsion of time from the Sun Absolute which resulted in the
created universe). The Biblical flood myth ends in God's covenant with Noah that
he will never again send a flood, a Christian interpretation of the story might
see this as a challenge to the Babylonian cyclical thinking about time, when
there will be flood after flood, and that is how it has often been presented by
theologians. However, Hebrew thinking about time was as much cyclical as was the
Babylonian, and in fact the Bible records catastrophe after catastrophe, Fall,
Deluge, Egyptian captivity, division of Israel into Israel and Judah, conquest
by Assyria and Babylon. Gurdjieff's catastrophes, Atlantis included, belong to
the Babylonian tradition of thinking about time in relation to cycles and echo
Biblical catastrophes.
The notion of the end of time belongs to
Millenarianism, in which rather than established ritual adjustments to the
cycles of time there is a large scale apocalyptic crisis, brought about by
revolt against the established order. After divine intervention, unjust enemies
are vanquished, time comes to an end its slavery replaced by the freedom of
eternity. Millenarianism has its own sets of stories, (see the Biblical Books of
Daniel and Revelation, and early Christianity). The hope of a revolution which
will destroy corrupt order and establish a new and better one, has taken many
forms including that of Marxist theory.
Revolts and revolutions are
interventions to disrupt the cyclical flow of time, both sets of thinking could
and did overlap, and both are present in the Tales which tells stories of
revolt, stresses the remembrance of mortality, our ‘end’ and expresses a
recurring but downward spiral and which seems to suggest a final end. In
generalized terms we could understand the adjustments made to accommodate
seasons and other natural cycles as an acceptance of time while Millenarian
revolt is rejection of time.
Beelzebub tells Hassein of the cause or
origin of changes, that is of temporal events. All the causes of change in the
beings' presences occurred after the sinking of Atlantis. The changes they made
themselves were the cause of further changes made by Great Nature. These changes
explain the origins of men on all land masses. This reference to Great Nature,
suggests the Earth as Mother, determined to feed her children the Moon and
Anulios, and connects with stories of the Earth as our Mother, from whom we
come, our origin.
Then Beelzebub explains the causes, heredity,
conception and other factors which mean that the beings exteriors are all alike.
He explains that the differences in colour of skin and formation of hair are
caused by the place of birth and upbringing. Again these are themes of origins
how we came to be similar and how different.
The question of war and why
it exists is another source of stories, here the cause of the capacity for war
is due to a fundamental trait of the general psyche which remains undefined,
this occurs along with egoism, self-love and other abnormal functions of the
psyches, the most terrible being their ‘suggestiblity’ i.e. passive
changeability, being subject to time, to being changed.
Beelzebub starts
with the large cosmic disaster caused by the comet and goes on to outline a
series of resulting disasters for the planet earth, humanity as a whole, and for
the psyches of individual beings. He ends this chapter by giving the causes of
the Tales, these are the interest Hassein has shown in earth beings and also the
need to ‘pass time’. Beelzebub will explain the strange psyche of men via the
tales of his six descents, each of which itself had different causes.
There are other kinds of aetiological myths but they are not represented
here. The origins of the perspectives within which these tales will be told are
myths of catastrophe and multiple Fall, and thus we should not expect anything
‘very cheerful’ to result. As readers we have already learned how time came to
be created, in the subsequent chapters we will learn that time itself causes
change decay and death. In summation this chapter tells us not to hope, that our
prospects are bleak, are as he says ‘nothing very cheerful’.
The Turkic
oral tradition within which Gurdjieff grew up meant that he had at his disposal
a fund of stories commonly known. When a story was told about an event or
person, all the ‘family’ of related facts would also be known, much as when a
story is told about someone in our own family, we can understand it in a way
that a stranger could not.
As Gurdjieff readers we may already feel part
of an exclusive family in that we have some knowledge of his teaching ideas and
can recognise expressions of them in the Tales, but Gurdjieff drew on our common
Western European family of stories and ideas, among them, Babylonian myth,
Biblical stories, Greek myth, and Plato’s writings. If we can not recognise the
references he makes to these origins we shall miss a great deal of the material
that is offered to us.
After he read these notes, Malcolm Mitchell sent
me some comments which amplify what it is we should be missing and I have
included these below:
If we cannot recognise the references Gurdjieff
makes to these origins we shall miss a great deal of the material that is
offered and mistake wider originality, or ‘genius’, as exclusive to Gurdjieff
himself. Reading his material thus blinkeredly, we may well exacerbate fixations
on Gurdjieff's own personality and history/mythology, in unconscious acceptance
and reinforcement of a new 'Gurdjieffian' tradition - whereas Gurdjieff himself
can be seen as consciously re-presenting traditional materials to us. He gives
this 'representation' with the ultimate suggestion (clarified implicitly in the
final chapter of the Tales) to be ourselves 'master' rather than 'slave' of the
material within such traditions - Gurdjieff's own included.
Gurdjieff
offers tools and materials to use to free ourselves, to grow, to clear out the
old to make room for something new, something real. Such specialist tools and
materials can inevitably, to some degree, be used for purposes other than those
intended for them - as perhaps to build ivory towers or fashion emperor's
clothes. Such dangers are naturally part of the price, or 'hazard', of their
great essential potential. To appreciate this as a functional dynamic, we must
not forget but always try see afresh what Beelzebub/the Tales is intended to
destroy; and in seeing the workings of this in our own psyche, grasp a key
factor in why Beelzebub is thus 'The Devil' to us.
References
For information about ancient astrology I am indebted to:
Campion,
Nicholas, The Great Year, Astrology, Millenarianism and History in the Western
Tradition. London: Arkana, 1994
this is ‘an examination of the mythical
roots of a series of ideas and beliefs about the nature of time and its
relationship to history’ (Campion, p. 4).
and I recommend the following
edition of the Timaeus, which has an introduction, and appendix on Atlantis by
Desmond Lee who also did the translation.
Plato,
The Timaeus and Critias. London: Penguin Classics, 1977.
Malcolm
Mitchell is the author of The
Hog’s Wholey Wash: A Complete Allegorical Manual on Consciousness and Cosmos.
London & Bath: Ashgrove, 2002