/lit/ - Literature

>>20585194
“Beelzebub’s Tales” also plays into this. In fact, it’s referred to in the aforementioned Ernest Scott’s “The People of the Secret,” which I was going to get to next. Scott gives a fascinating analysis around some of the names and plot devices in “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson,” as well as explicating more about the fabled Sarmoun Brotherhood.

In fact, there’s a whole chapter about it, chapter eight, “Gurdjieff and the Inner Circle of Humanity.” Since the entire explication is rather lengthy for a thread (and this thread is already wordy enough), I’ll try to condense it to the most interesting, salient passages:

>Since the early 1950s, a great deal of hitherto unknown material has become available, and in the nature of things this cannot have happened by accident. If it has leaked, it is because those in charge have decided to “leak” it.

>Separately, the various hints amount to little. Taken together, they suggest, for the first time, the nature of the organization, long suspected but never identified, which is concerned with injecting developmental possibilities into the historical process at certain critical points.

>On the basis of internal evidence, it may be legitimate to suggest that this organization is the expression of one of the Centres inferred by J. G. Bennett [a student of Gurdjieff’s] as directing the evolution of the whole human race ...

>To glimpse the steps by which the first hints of this have passed into the public domain and to guess at the possible purpose of such action, it will be necessary to go back to last century and to the little Caucasian town of Alexandropol.

>There in 1872 was born George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, certainly one of the most remarkable figures ever to appear in the West.

>The Caucasus region has been a mixing bowl of cultures for thousands of years. European, Slavonic, Turkish, Roman, Mongol, Persian and even more ancient cultures have flooded into this area and then receded, each leaving some contribution. It was into this fusion of influences that Gurdjieff was born.

>His family were Greeks who had emigrated from Caesarea in the 16th century. His father was a bard whose recitations preserved legends of remote antiquity, including Assyrian and Sumerian traditions.

>It was these that probably first suggested to Gurdjieff the idea of some hidden influence that linked all the generations of men in some way ordinarily unsuspected.

>Later he discovered that the archaeological recovery and translation of ancient cuneiform inscriptions endorsed in minutest detail the account of ancient history preserved in his father’s poems. In other words, there exists an unsuspected oral transmission of history as accurate and at least as enduring as any orthodox historical record.

I was looking through the archive for what people have been saying about Gurdjieff recently, and saw a thread I missed with someone asking if anyone had read this and what they got from it. I actually have, several times years ago, and still feel it’s worth re-reading soon after I finish the books I already have at hand.

If anyone is interested, it might be an interesting discussion to have. Very obscure, rare book with lots of interesting facets to it. An underrated unconventional masterpiece of philosophy and mysticism.

Has anyone here actually read it?