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Gurdjieff, Astrology & Beelzebub's Tales

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To find a structure in the Tales is an achievement in itself! Gurdjieff's main literary work is difficult to read, to study and to understand. Ideas that help in the process are more than welcome. Dr. Wellbeloved not only finds a structure - she also points towards new ways for further studies of the book.
This book is not aimed at attempts to interpret Gurdjieff's message, but instead aims at keeping alive questions on the meanings and interpretations of what he actually meant. In her view the Tales are open to a wealth of meanings that are there to be discovered and experienced by the reader.
We are warned against a literal understanding of the Tales: "If Gurdjieff's text is taken as literally true, then there really was a space ship in the sky over New York in 1921, containing Beelzebub, Hassein and Ahoon".

Dr. Wellbeloved draws attention to another important aspect of the Tales: its kinship with the Turkic oral tradition. Originally the Tales were read aloud. Special music was composed for the readings; at each reading Gurdjieff observed the reactions of the listeners and made changes to his texts.
But why would this be important? Is it not OK if I just read it just the way I am used to reading books? Well, to follow Gurdjieff's own advice you should do just that, but not stop there. You should after your first 'mechanized' reading read it 'as if aloud to another person' and only after that you should try to 'fathom the gist of my writings'.
The advantages of the oral tradition over just reading a book are that the stories are made alive while you are in the middle of them. In other words you have a different experience, which most likely touches not only your intellect, but also your emotions. Gurdjieff used to ask 'what does it make you feel', not what does it mean.

Dr. Wellbeloved's recent book 'Gurdjieff; The Key Concepts' was inviting for further studies of his ideas. Her new book points out new ways of approaching the Tales and it is an important book for those people who want to study Gurdjieff's writings!

I am very impressed that the author, Sophia Wellbeloved, found an astrological structure and/or code to Gurdjieff's classic book. The book has been read for decades and she seems to be the first to find and show this pattern to the teachings. She also does not try to force fit any chapters or passages into this structure, but presents the "lawful inexactitudes" of how this pattern fits over the text. She makes a very good case that there is an astrological pattern to the text and has enough documentation, to me, to over prove her case. Her scholarship, too, is balanced. She shows what Gurdjieff may have drawn from other authors or at least a mileau of ideas that Gurdjieff had access to and could draw from. I like that she places Gurdjieff's activities within a well researched time line. This helps to clarify a lot of things, because Gurdjieff's writings were developed over a long period of time, often written and rewritten, especially Beelzebub's Tales. I found her book and John Bennett's TALKS ON BEEZEBUB'S TALES the most useful to get inside the book and get some of the messages that it has to offer. She analyzes the Gurdjieff's book from a stylistic view, too, and gives a sense of how and why Gurdjieff wrote as he did. All in all, I think she found a very important key to unlock Gurdjieff's book, all allows the smaller messages inside the text to fit into a larger order for the first time.

Since it is adapted from an academic thesis the tone is a little dry, but this woman has cracked a huge part of the Gurdjieff code for the first time. If you are at all interested in the Gurdjieff legacy, you must see this. Amazing. Good illustrations, too.

Sophia Wellbeloved and I share a deep mutual interest in Gurdjieff's, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. We have both participated in several of the All and Everything conferences held at Bognor Regis, and which are characterized by the participants as meetings of the "Companions of the Book." In the forward to Dr. Wellbeloved's book, Professor Wallace Martin points out that readers of Beelzebub's Tales react in one of two ways. Sophia and I are certainly in that category of readers who see it as "a book of revelation and a mystery, a masterpiece that evokes stunned astonishment."

Over the years serious students of Gurdjieff's book have attempted to unravel it in many different ways. Some have seen it in terms of numerological correspondences, some as related to the Tarot or Kabbalah, others have taken it to be a hermetically coded document, still others simply try to peel away the onion of layer upon layer of meaning. By examing the book in terms of correspondences with the twelve signs of the zodiac, Dr. Wellbeloved may have hit upon an important key to unraveling Gurdjieff's book.

I am no astrologer, not even an amateur one. But I think that students of Astrology who are willing to study Gurdjieff, Astrology & Beezebub's Tales, will be well repaid for the effort. In the same way that the horizon of students of Beelzebub's Tales is broadened by Dr. Wellbveloved's book, so the horizon of students of Astrology will be broadened by being exposed to the astrological implications of Beelzebub's Tales that are exposed in this fine book.